Thoughtful Innuendos

[jackofallgeeks]

I was doing some thinking the other day, spurred by a comment made by my uncle over dinner the other night. We were discussing the Libertarian Right vs. the Religious Right, and why he doesn't like the trend that the Religious Right would have us take -- legislating morality and dictating behavior.

I've been sitting on the fense of this one for a while, sort of. On the one hand, I've been aware that you can't legislate morality, though I can't articulate it any better than "it won't work." But at the same time, older theories on Politics argued for a Government that takes stock of it's people's spiritual health as well -- I cite Plato and Aristotle, lest anyone fear I refer to the Middle Ages' Catholic Church. And so I've been stuck, in a way; why not set laws to dissuade people from doing what's wrong, anyways?

The key point my uncle made was a line he pulled from a book, What's So Great About America? if I recall, and it went to the tune of "true virtue must be freely chosen. To force it on someone robs it of all it's value." It would actually be a disservice, I think, and something of an insult to human nature, to legislate morality (aside from the other point that was made, that is that morality is not easily codifiable enough that we might build a suitable code of laws from it).

This post, from mephron makes a point of how legislating morality could go wrong. We would all have people Be Good and Do Right, surely, but seeing that this is so isn't necessarily the job of Government, I think.

(Not that I expect to hop the fence and turn Pro-Choice, fight for legalized drugs, or have laws against murder repealed. My uncle also made a point that most good laws were those which were set to either protect individual rights or to preserve the interests of society. I am not an anarchist, I would just have morality dictated by something other than the government.)

Comments

On Freedom Of Religion

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

"In God We Trust" is a Religious statement, you can not deny it. You are correct, though, in that it is religiously ambiguous. Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims all (arguably) believe in the same God. This is the God who, it seems, is thought of whenever the word is capitalized. The founding fathers were Christians and so it's not too much of a stretch to say that's who they meant by it.

The problem I have with "'freedom of' equates to 'freedom from'" is that it doesn't. Freedom from oppression means there is no oppression. Freedom from unwarranted search and seizure means there is no unwarranted search and seizure. Freedom of Religion means you are free to believe what you will, and worship what you will, even if you're a godless scientist who believes in nothing superior to the human intellect. That does not mean you will be free from interaction with or exposure to the religions of others; they're just as free as you, and many of the trends in the courts these days come fearfully close to a state-imposed atheism at times -- which is, arguably, it's own religion.

There will always be some set of religions which are accepted, and those which are not. A religion whose worship consisted of abducting and sacrificing middle-aged men to the god Gariz would already be unacceptable in our society. I'm not sure what you consider to be the current list of "real" religions, but it seems to me that Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Mormonism, Scientology, Atheism, Agnosticism, and so on and so forth are all more-or-less accepted in our society. I disagree with a number of them, but that doesn't mean I would prevent you from choosing your belief. Really, I would be hard-pressed to try. Just accept that I have mine, too, and you'll have to deal with it, as well.