Coby, A society of no faith is doomed. They will demand goodies from their leaders who, lacking the faith to say no, gladly indulge the populace in exchange for the votes that keep them in power. They know full well that the price will have to be paid on some future leader's watch. But at least it won't be paid on theirs. Whether the issue is Social Security, socialized medicine, rent control or making married couples pay more in taxes then if they were single. Too many will see only the immediate benefits. We have been indoctrinated with the propaganda of compassion. Feeling peoples pain sounds noble. In reality it serves the need of those who seek to benefit now by making future generations pay the price later.
Not surprisingly, only one group of Americans is consistently resisting this massive cultural change in our values. America's religious conservatives. They possess the faith to forego short term snake oil fixes in order to ensure the long term fiscal and social health of our society. They possess the spiritual muscle to attack the malevolence at its root, which is the secular tendency to ignore the invisible. Its no wonder Adam Smith and most of the other fathers of modern economics were God-worshipping Christians. And its no wonder that Keynes and other big-spending fathers of economic modernism were atheists. Secular liberals today fail to grasp that earlier generations effectively balanced the needs of the present with those of the future, they balanced the visible with the still-invisible. They did so in their families, and they did so in public policy. They tended to set policies that recognized the impact over the entire complex fabric of society. Faith allowed Americans to act wisely and we were rewarded for it. We could afford a religiously neutral government because everyone knew that the governors were the servants of the governed, rather that the reverse. As long as the governed had faith in God, the governors would obey the imperatives of faith.
But over the last 35 years our government has not liked this situation very much. Understanding that the wisdom and power of the governed was derived from Christian faith, they set about diminishing that faith in order to make the governed the slaves of the governors. A government's options are severely limited if its citizens are religious, so religion must go. A nation made up of citizens with deep religious faith will never allow its government to plunder tomorrow to pay for today.
Those of us who believe in freedom. whether libertarians, Agnostics or atheists, have no option but to pray for the health of Christianity in America. No other group possesses both the faith and the numbers sufficient to hold back the ever-encroaching, sometimes sinister power of the state.
Michael
p.s. I'm out of here. See ya at Rambi |
