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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sunny who wrote (14078)	10/27/2003 3:03:00 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793761

The Roman Empire and many other great empires fell by moral decadence and a failure to maintain a stable society by enforcing the laws that protected the society from those with in that found it inconvenient or too restrictive. Yes, and the Red Empire fell from too much command and control and too little freedom. The Bible warns us about following the teachings for "false teachers" who advocate the easy freedom that a lack of moral standards brings. The point I'm trying to make is that we don't have to put moral standards into law to have moral standards. You don't seem to make that distinction. There are various roles in society. Government is one of them. Let the government do what it does best and most appropriately. It's not the government's job to enforce God's rules. When we look to that we become statists of the theocratic persuasion. Statists to the left. Statists to the right. What's a freedom lover to do? The other thing implied in your point is that people won't behave morally without the weight of the law hanging over them. They can and they do. Not everyone and not all the time, but they do. There's much we can do as a society to make that more reliable without getting the government involved. Back to the Constitution. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. So which set of morals does the government enforce? Never mind, I know, the Christian ones, assuming of course that the Christians can come to some consensus. It seems that the Episcopalians are having some problem with that at the moment just within their little sect. In any event, that's a Constitutional no-no. the founding fathers were quite explicit about that. And if it weren't a no-no, surely we wouldn't want to support some Taliban following us around. Imagine the overhead on that one! That would take the whole government budget and then where would we get the money for national defense and stuff like that? If we put all the sinners in prison, who would be left to run the prisons? I say, let the government do it's job, our institutions do their job, and let Saint Peter sort the remainder out later. Our institutions could use some help. But we don't shore them up by looking for the government to take over for them. We shore them up by supporting them. They're much more efficient than the government anyway, certainly than a government big enough to deal with sin as well as crime. And our people could use some help too. We don't shore them up by sending a message that they're incapable of acting morally without the threat of the law. We cut down on government and expect people to act responsibly. Look what happened when the government took over welfare. Institutions were marginalized by the government and individuals responsibility dropped as people acted down to expectations and felt entitled to do so. I thought we had had enough of that stuff. For you are a slave to whatever controls you So you want people to be slaves to the state? I don't think that's what the founders had in mind.