"A Republic, If You Can Keep It."
Moving toward a secular, legalistic and amoral society is destroying justice.
I've written much about morality and how Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists (separation of church and state), has been wrongly used to strip any vestige of religion from the state and public life.
I've also noted the tie between religion and morality.
And I don’t care how many arguments people may choose to make about America’s founding, it is simply ahistorical and fallacious to pretend that our nation and its founding documents are not based on religious traditions.
Many have pointed out this famous John Adams quote:
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”
Notice that Adams does not mention law anywhere in there.
And there is a reason, because the “law” is a human creation and due to that origin, immediately susceptible to be corrupted. Without moral sensibilities rooted in religious beliefs, the law becomes a tool of power, not a basis for equal application of justice.
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Samuel Kercheval, noted:
“A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.”
I believe there comes a point where "justice" is so corrupt that can no longer be defined in legal terms and must be defined in moral terms.
Within our system of government, the courts were created to assure equal application of the law, but where do we go for redress when the courts supervise dual applications of justice?
There is simply no way a fair and objective person can look at how our government treats the J6 protesters versus how the BLM/ANTIFA protestors/rioters/looters/ arsonists and say that is fair. How about a guy who admits to running down an 18-year-old kid because he thought the kid was ULTRA MAGA and and the Capitol Policeman who shot Ashlii Babbitt? You cannot observe the treatment of illegal aliens compared to legal citizens and determine those are equitable, nor can you justify the Biden administration sending $180,000,000 in aid to foreign farmers while ignoring our own.
Maybe you believe in God, maybe you don’t, but if you argue your system of morality is based on logic and reason, please explain for me why the Trump family is constantly barraged with legal threats and Hunter and James Biden are overlooked. Please explain to me why people are being rounded up for questioning the outcome of an election and yet not a single person has been punished in a meaningful way for “Crossfire Hurricane”, a legitimate and overt coup attempt, nor have the Democrats who tried to corrupt electors and opposed the certification of the 2016 election even been mentioned other than in the conservative media?
Those are only reconcilable in partisan and political terms, not through any examination based on logic, reason, or morality.
I believe any system of governance that relies solely on laws to maintain social order will eventually collapse under its own weight.
When we seek dominion and advantage, we lose respect for others, when we lose sight of the Biblical Ten Commandments and vainly attempt to control the 7 deadly sins of pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth with legalism instead of a moral conscience, we open the door to the progression of the creation of the impossibility of democratic socialism, totalitarianism, and the eventual collapse of society into chaos and anarchy.
There are two types of indicators of activity in a society and its culture – lagging and leading indicators. A lagging indicator is a measure that tells you if you have achieved a goal, a leading indicator tells you if you are likely to achieve it. The former is inherently focused on actions causing a measurable result in the past, the latter on what we need to do to achieve a desired result in the future.
Could it be that the decline in religiosity in the US is a such leading indicator? Are the liberties and freedoms designed for our society being eroded because we are shifting our basis of governance from the internal control of a “moral and religious people” to a reliance on external controls through secular humanism and legalism?
I think there is an argument to be made that it is.
In my opinion – and one that seems to draw validation from centuries of history – liberty was created and is maintained in modern western civilization in direct proportion to the extent of a nation’s reliance on Judeo-Christian values.
If that is true, is it not possible that there is a threshold of religiosity required for the survival of American Republic as well?
One doesn’t have to be a Jew or Christian to recognize that adherence to the principles and values of both religions are the keys to American life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - and the survival of the Republic which guarantees all three.
My thoughts completely. Expressed as I could not.
Now that we have lost it, will we ever get it back?