The main problem with the modern conservative movement is the attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable values of Christianity and Ayn Randian Social Darwinism. It can't be done and the attempt leads to intellectual confusion on the party of millions of social conservatives.
A reasonable argument could be made that these conflicting values can actually lead to a form of mental illness - embracing a "let the poor sink or swim" mentality while calling yourself a "Christian" is a recipe for a sick society.
~A comment by "Soulstranger" at a story lined at Drudge: Liberal, Foulmouthed Preacher Speaks To Fed-up Believers*False dichotomy. And for their part, liberals reject a very simple truth time and time again: it is the painful truth that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. Liberals rightly believe that subsidizing healthcare will lead to more of it. But they ignore the dependence they will necessaily create. Democrats learned this the hard way with welfare reform under Clinton.
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*Lem has a scheduled post on the "foulmouthed preacher" so please save comments on her for that post
16 comments:
I'll be out until 8 PM EST
How much longer are people going to put up with this bullshit?
As long as they can, and then some. Where are the votes to get rid of the new socialist paradigm?
The real problem is that actual liberalism— real, "classical" liberalism— got superseded and co-opted by what used to be called Christian socialism. Many of the values espoused by so-called liberals today are based in 19th and early 20th century Christian ideas of charity and property.
The problem with some strains of so-called American conservatism is that they also subscribe to a variety Christian socialism— that is, the idea of a society structured around and controlled by "Christian" principles.
There is a confusion among most Americans about the proper role of government. Most Americans seem to think of the government as an entity unto itself, one that fills the role that used to be filled by the church: distribution of charity, mandatory tithing, and enforcement of morality. This is the root cause of our sickness and the reason that we are ever-more rapidly losing the last vestiges of the Enlightenment idea of human freedom and entering a Dark Age where another type of "church"— the State— controls and directs the course of our lives, except this time around without even the hope of eternal redemption.
This conservative Christian knows the difference between the inexhaustible resource of the blood of Crist and the very limited resource of the US Treasury.
Liberals try to conflate the two, in a less than intellectually honest way, in order to frustrate concerned calls for control of spending.
The idea that we are bad Christians because we don't think is a good idea to spend nearly a trillion dollars a year above and beyond the trillion we are already taxed is ludicrous.
We are going the extra extra mile already.
I just love these cadets that spring forth from the Academy where these matters are discussed at length and present them anew freshly shined up as if burgeoning private thinky-thoughts emerged from their own minds and now in bright original form.
I lie like a rug, that is flatly, when I said I just love them.
They always did that. The incidents are recorded. For thousands of years.
This coin of which you speak, show it to me.
(Er, uh, this didn't ever come up at the Academy, um, oh well, yeah. Okay, here.)
That bit with the coin and whose image is on it. Rendering here rendering there.
One concerns the material world and the other concerns spiritual truth, one's relationship with God as understood by Jesus.
The two questions do not go together. That is the core of the misunderstanding. And it is the core of all the misunderstanding where the direct instructions in Christianity regarding the kingdom of heaven and the attempt at mirroring that in one's personal life, and conflating all that with Earthly human modes of governing.
Piss on the attempt.
And that's unChristian, innit. Well. There ya go.
I'm not so patient with sophistry as Jesus.
And they didn't stop with that either. No. There are other knotty legalistic type questions that vexed when various laws Roman and Hebrew conflicted, and internal conflicts of Mosaic law.
The foes of Jesus would go out and confront him and try to set him up to say something that entangles him, as this poster is doing here with putting into conflict his cartoon imagining of Christianity with his cartoon imagining of Ayn Rand writing to produce his risible cartoon conflict.
After the gold coin question, they came back with doozy, the oldest such conflict in the Jewish catalog of legalistic conflicts, It is a Sadducees-type question. Nonsense, actually, with no good answer within the law:
“Master, Moses said that if a married man dies and leaves no children then his brother should take the wife. So what happens when a brother does that and then he dies too, and so does the second brother and he also dies and so on down the line of brothers all taking the same wife, all six brothers dying with no children, so that when they get to heaven, after all seven brothers had married the same woman, whose wife will she be up there in heaven? Huh?"
As if.
Everyone knows the question is insincere.
That whole line of questioning is hoary at that point.
copy/paste
“You all do err in asking such questions because you know neither the Scriptures nor the living power of God. You know that the sons of this world can marry and are given in marriage, but you do not seem to understand that they who are accounted worthy to attain the worlds to come, through the resurrection of the righteous, neither marry nor are given in marriage. Those who experience the resurrection from the dead are more like the angels of heaven, and they never die. These resurrected ones are eternally the sons of God; they are the children of light resurrected into the progress of eternal life. And even your Father Moses understood this, for, in connection with his experiences at the burning bush, he heard the Father say, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And so, along with Moses, do I declare that my Father is not the God of the dead but of the living. In him you all do live, reproduce, and possess your mortal existence.”
BLAM!
I watched Nancy Pelosi on a re-air of Charlie Rose today.
Talk about mental illness.
She is in complete and utter denial about the ObamaCare debacle.
The interview is not up on line yet. But if you want to know, aside from Obama, how the democrats seem to have decided to react to the bungling and the exposing of the repeated lying, watch it when it's put up.
You may have to force yourself, but it will be worth it, to find out how bad it may yet get.
When you think things are bad, thank your lucky stars they are not as bad as they will get.
That about sums up the Obama presidency.
There is a confusion among most Americans about the proper role of government. Most Americans seem to think of the government as an entity unto itself, one that fills the role that used to be filled by the church: distribution of charity, mandatory tithing, and enforcement of morality. This is the root cause of our sickness and the reason that we are ever-more rapidly losing the last vestiges of the Enlightenment idea of human freedom and entering a Dark Age where another type of "church"— the State— controls and directs the course of our lives, except this time around without even the hope of eternal redemption.
Damn. That's just beautiful reasoning and writing, Palladian.
What is compassion, anyway?
Is it, one, the addiction of a huge swath of the population to entitlements with the inevitable consequent infantilization of that population?
Or is it, two, the demand that healthy adults carry their own weight?
One is an expression of contempt not compassion. One doesn't even see the objects of its "compassion" as fully human. Why, they can't survive without our support.
Two respects others enough to make the most basic demand of them because they ARE us.
There is no significant figure anywhere in the conservative movement advocating for Ayn Rand's philosophy. There aren't even very many figures in the libertarian movement advocating for it.
There is a confusion among most Americans about the proper role of government.
This.
The very confusion is the real mental illness.
El Pollo, unrelated to this post, the following might answer a question of yours from earlier. Rhazib Khan seems to think this was well done.
How much of your genome do you inherit from a particular grandparent?
They can be reconciled. There is no virtue if you depend on government to make it happen. As for Ayn Rand, you can read her books and get some insights without going all cultist about it.
why = why not?
Here is what I would want to know: why is that a false dichotomy?
Christianity and libertarianism are only irreconcilable if one *defines* charity as "government."
As long as charity is not defined exclusively as government (and it certainly isn't in the New Testament, though it could arguably be claimed so in the Old... but you didn't have taxes past that 10% tithe either so...)there is no problem.
None at all.
phx said...
Here is what I would want to know: why is that a false dichotomy?
Because it fits one referenced definition of false dichotomy. It's not either or simplicity. By analogy, I could posit that modern liberals cannot reconcile Christian values with those of Karl Marx.
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