Thou Shall Not Lie To Oneself

I haven't posted for quite a while, and that's because my use for this blog as an outlet for for my thoughts on temporal controversies has largely passed.  I can thank a growing self-discipline for that.

But in light of recent discussions arising within my chosen Christian denomination, the United Methodist Church, I have felt a need to express some more, but only a little.  This will be a short read.

The subject is the recent ruling of the supreme court on something they've decided to call "marriage".  I put that in quotes because definitions of the term varies significantly from person to person, and what a word means makes all the difference in the world as to how one should treat any policy regarding something called by that word.

e.g. If I were the owner and operator of a ski resort and I had some slopes singled out for use by snow-boarders, the understood definition of the word "snow-board" would be critical.  If the intent was to pick out places ideally suited for snow-boarding and to keep skiers and snow-boarders from interfering with each other, it would be important that skiers not think that their skis are snow-boards.  Otherwise the posted signs would be ineffective at guiding them to the slopes best suited for their enjoyment.

So if due to reaching some point in the evolution of the language, a large number of people started to call skis snow-boards, I would have to make some changes at my resort.  If after myself and other winter sports people unsuccessfully tried to stop the drift in the language, we would all have to do something else.  We would have to find a new word for "snow-board".

We'd have to do this because all of our guide signs, pamphlets, and instructional materials that refer to snow-boarding refer to something critically different than the popular definition of that word refers to.

Getting back to "marriage" in the church, a careful search of biblical references to marriage will show that they simply and obviously do not refer to the popular contemporary definition of that term.  The fight to preserve the traditional definition has been lost, but no big deal.  When a word's meaning changes we simply start to use it differently.  There is no sound reason to change policies because of it.

Our missionaries have come across cultures and languages where words don't translate well for our purposes.  Some African language's words for things like kill, eat, and have sex are too similar for us to translate some passages in the Bible as literally into their language as the NASV does into English.  So we don't do it so literally.  Nor do we start to teach that the Lord's supper is a time to kill or have an orgy.  So it boggles my mind that anyone could look at the recent Supreme Court ruling as if it should in some way change how the church deals with "marriage".

It also bothers me that many confuse the definition of marriage that is relevant to the Bible's references with a moral statement or judgement.  The Bible refers to the union of a man and a woman because it refers to the union of a man and woman, no other reason.  In the same way that Jesus sometimes addressed Peter, not because He was thinking less of anyone else at the moment, but because He was addressing who he was addressing.

Thus to suggest that the "traditional definition of marriage" is some how out of step with our times is nonsense.  Not nonsense for any actual Biblical reason, but nonsense for purely logical and rational reasons.  We perform wedding ceremonies in the church because the Bible speaks of the union between a man and woman as having a positive role in a Christian community, and that's it.  If the Bible made as much of a fuss about intimate friendships, we'd have ceremonies for that as well, but it doesn't and we don't.

If some church decides it wants to do such a thing, that would be another issue, which I wont discuss here, but if the church should ever consider performing wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples (i.e. one possible example of intimate friends) we would need to change the words we use so as not to confuse people about the church's teachings on "marriage".

In conclusion on that point, we need a new word now.

Now for the moral question.

The moral question is logically independent from the marriage question.  If someone was hoping that homosexuality would become not a sin just by changing the definition of a word, that's not a very rational hope.

The real issue of all sexual sins is context.  All sexual activity between two people who are not married to each other is sin.  It's an area of sin almost all people at some point in their lives struggle with.  So we cannot disregard Biblical references to homosexual behavior as sinful as if it's some relic of the past.  For if we did we would have to logically condone all sex outside of marriage.  And this is no slippery slope argument.  If homosexual activity is okay outside of marriage, then what would make it special as opposed to others?  Does the absence of risk of pregnancy some how make all the difference?  Then what about birth control?  There is no need to complicate this.  Sex outside of marriage is sin and we're not moving from that position.

Now the question as to whether same-sex couples could escape a life of potential sin in this area by becoming married, that's another question, but not one that can be settled by fiddling with the definition of words.  "Marriage" in the Bible is not the "marriage" the supreme court just ruled on.  Their actions don't call upon us to change policies, just for us to find a new word.

BTW

The point of my title for this.  Perhaps if we're actually going to consider re-composing the Bible, we should add an 11th commandment, "Thou shalt not lie to oneself", or perhaps in a more modern translation, "do not deny reason". 

State Of The Union In Two Words -- It Stinks

92,898,000 Americans of working age are not working.  That's the highest that number has ever been in our nation's history and even accounting for our general population being higher than its ever been, the proportion is at levels not seen since the great stagflation of the 70's or the great depression of the 30's.  

Unemployment numbers which look good currently are completely unrepresentative of reality since a huge number of unemployed are not counted as unemployed because it's assumed they no longer wish to work. This is based on how long they've been unemployed and how many job applications are being submitted. This is like assuming many of the victims of a famine have stopped wanting to eat since they no longer go out looking for food.

Many stock analysts believe that stocks are generally over-valued thanks largely to the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing.

Real-estate is said to have an optimistic outlook, but the reason frequently given for this should be disconcerting.  Most of the foreclosure related bargains have been bought up.  That's the reason given.  The thinking is that those bargain properties wont be competing with and bringing down the prices anymore.  But the question as to who is going to buy property at higher rates remains largely unanswered, and that should hamper optimism more than it is amongst real-estate industry people.

One must remember that people who's careers and lives are invested in a given market can only remain pessimistic about it for so long before they're changing professions.

The taunting insensitive bow on this wretched economy is the average household income which has dropped considerably since the crash of 08, and the new jobs are predominantly much lower paying than the ones they're trying to replace.  The word "trying" is appropriate since job growth is still not running ahead of growth in the potential workforce.

So any politician who boasts about the economy at this point is at best cruel and it's probably best not to use the words that would describe them at worst.

Yes America, the state of the union, it stinks.

Reactionary Liberalism

Why Modern Liberals Are Counter-revolutionaries

I almost hate using the word “enemies” to describe fellow citizens, especially considering many of which would be willing to lay their lives on the line for our country. Many of them are patriots, but I am not saying they are the enemies of the United States. What I'm about to lay out rather suggests they are enemies of the cause that gave birth to the country. Many of them love this country as much as I do but they also believe her founders and their ideas are losing relevance to today.

Are those ideas still just as relevant today as then? Are they still worth our efforts, our passion, our commitment even unto death? Or, have realities of the present day forced us into a context where this nation's purpose can no longer be the same as it was at its founding?

 

Does the revolution still matter?

This is an important logical point. Before I demonstrate that the modern liberal is a counter-revolutionary, I must first establish that the revolution hasn't lost relevance to our current times and the context of these times. Being a counter-revolutionary to a past and irrelevant revolution wouldn't matter much, but if that revolution is still relevant and even ongoing, then it matters a great deal.

That first point is easily enough satisfied subjectively. It can be safely said that millions of people here in the United States and around the world believe the cause of individual liberty still needs fought for and continues to be fought for to this day. The American Revolution did not end with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, it did not culminate with the establishment of the United States government in 1789, and it did not achieve total victory even within the sovereign borders of the United States. As many of the founders acknowledged, they only started the struggle, the struggle to maximize individual liberty within the minimum confines of government necessary to protect us from major threats both within and without.

I could just simply have said that as in the case with any cause, that we believe it is relevant makes it so, but instead I thought it important to more fully express that sentiment. Suffice it to say, whether modern liberalism is a counter-revolutionary movement does matter.

Now to the business of making the case that it is. In order for me to demonstrate this I must first show what the founders sought to achieve, and then show that modern liberalism is set against it.

 

The founders intent.

It is argued that the founders were not of one mind and thus there is no such thing as any deep common cause or original intent to be drawn from what they wrote. This argument is clever but depends on getting a logical fallacy past us. Just because a group of people, by necessity of the legacy of the Tower of Babel, can never have exactly the same understanding of even the things they came together to agree on, doesn't mean the meaning of their agreement is nebulous or elusive. If that attempted logical fallacy were valid then we could freely disregard all laws and contracts, or at the very least be able to “reinterpret” them to mean whatever was convenient to us and our causes. I know that equally fallacious cousins of this argument are used by certain schools of history in order to bang all the square pegs historical evidence gives them into the round holes of their pet theories, but a crowd jumping off a bridge doesn't make it right, or lend it credibility for that matter. There is some degree of common cause and original intent to be credibly drawn from what the founders wrote. Unless they were a bunch of irrational blitherers there would have to be. So lets see what some of that was.

Now even most of those who buy into the above sort of kluging, designed to facilitate peg pounding, will at least accept this much about what the founders were after. They highly valued what they considered to be three fundamental rights, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. They'd even be likely to grant that, “the pursuit of happiness” largely involves the right to own and control property. Further still these three fundamental rights are all inseparable from each other. Not that the modern liberal believes that, but that their scholars would likely grant the framers of the constitution believed this for the most part. To do otherwise would be to take a departure from the facts of history even too radical for peg pounders.

Now to take these pieces of my case they'll grant me and put them together with some stuff I definitely need to source. The right to property and the inseparable nature of this with individual liberty caused James Madison, often called the father of the constitution, to worry.  He pondered a point we seem to be approaching today where all possible private land will become owned and most citizens will be unable to buy any in their lifetime (emphasis added by me).

"These (people without property) will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case, the rights of property & the public liberty, will not be secure in their hands: or which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence & ambition, in which case there will be equal danger on the other side,"

Have-nots being banded together to threaten rights of property or otherwise being used by the very rich to serve their greedy ambitions? Does this not sound like the world described by modern liberals today? But what seems to be their solution to the crisis? They propose a powerful central government mandated by a majority to redistribute the wealth of a few to the many. In Madison's words, “ the rights of property & the public liberty, will not be secure in their hands”. Modern liberalism seems to see it as a choice between two evils, tyranny by government or tyranny by wealthy private interests.

[modern liberalism is not a solution at all but a surrender to collective rule, the sure enemy of individual liberty]

They don't see another way, other than the possibility that with the right sort of indoctrination a collective could actually rule with respect for individual dignity. Here they ignore some of the most sound advice of the founders. That being that a government ruled by a majority or any collective's interests will by its very nature, inevitably attack life, liberty, and property.

Madison wrote to Jefferson in 1788,

"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents."

Madison takes it a step further in this quote, describing a completely unrestrained democracy in Federalist No. 10 (emphasis again added by me), "A pure democracy ... can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party... Hence it is that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

Thus from the point of view of at least the founder described as the father of the constitution, the one who by his own telling, never missed a meeting in the process of the constitution being worked out, the solution offered by modern liberalism is not a solution at all but a surrender to collective rule, the sure enemy of individual liberty.

Now they're water carriers in the towers of academia insist that the reduction of individual liberty, greater and greater government intervention in property ownership and wealth distribution, and even life is the inevitable direction of things in a world ever more crowded and still possessed of finite resources. The founders definition of individual liberty can't be relevant in a world where only a few can own land and thus ones liberty must only exist to the extent that governments can manage to allow it while still assuring subsistence for all.One could say, using their reasoning, Europe is the way it is because it had to face the reality of finite resources centuries before the United States did, and the United States really doesn't have a choice but to become more like Europe. In essence, via the demographics of population growth, it already has.

Thus I can understand their feeling justified in doing what they're doing to this nation, but then I never thought modern liberal collectivists realized that much of what they do is evil. Like almost all other collectives that have practiced evil in history, they believe they're actions to be both good and rational. I dare not list actual examples since all of the collectives ever proven to be evil have since come to be seen as wittingly so, their members all the willing participants in evil. It seems an unfortunate sociological defense mechanism that we look at any large group of evil-doers and refuse to consider that given the right context of despair, peer pressure, and/or bad information we ourselves could become involved in such things.

Now that I've explained what some of the despair, peer pressure, and bad information was that led to the existence of modern liberalism, that being perceived lack of opportunity for property, academic peg pounders, and lots of mutual enabling, allow me to show the way forward with the American Revolution they don't see and James Madison apparently failed to anticipate.

It's simple really, at least from our modern perspective. Wealth is property, not just land, and a well restrained government can do relatively little to abridge individual liberty. The mechanism is already in place for us to look after and modify as necessary the restraints on our government. It's the amendment process of the constitution. Whenever the government disregards the intent of it being minimal in power and scope, or powerful private institutions claim power over the unwilling, and normal political and legal processes fail to remedy these threats to individual liberty, it demands we attempt to amend the constitution. That is our last resort before revolution. If we pass on both of these, amending or revolution, we will by default have selected another option, surrender. And whether it is government or corporations that oppress us, it is essentially the same enemy that defeats us, collectivism.

You see the American Revolution, the one still ongoing, is about individual liberty and dignity, and our enemy is collectivism for it inevitably sets out to minimize the individual.Modern liberalism is just the collectivism of the day, little different from liberty's perspective than absolute monarchies, fascism, communism, and despotism. Modern liberalism sounds nicer and more enlightened to us, and certainly seems that way to its subscribers, but where it counts to the current subscribers of the American Revolution it is still the revolution's enemy, perhaps the greatest counter-revolution in human history. It is a matter of course that it must not just be beaten in elections from time to time, it must be destroyed. This is done by revealing its inconsistencies with our nation's foundations and goals, marginalizing it, and adding sufficient amendments to the constitution as to remove any tools it could use to advance its agenda should it or any other collectivist movement ever gain sway in all branches of government again.

I for one grow impatient with fellow travelers who are satisfied with hitting one of these fronts at a time. The political pendulum is swinging our way from a recent liberal apex. We are gaining the momentum. In the years to come we need to put as many restrictions on governmental power in place as is both possible and within reason. We also need to start challenging the peg pounding status quo in academia. We will be fools if we mistake our current momentum for a constant trend. Like our founders, we must recognize that the forces of counter-revolution will inevitably be back and as the founders did in 1791 with the Bill of Rights, we should place into the constitution restraints to keep counter-revolutionaries from undoing the republic. The iron will soon be hot and then for liberty's sake we must strike, for all we are worth.