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Friday, May 31, 2019

Not whether, but *which*

The question is not whether our laws shall be based upon some religious conception or other, but rather, *which* religious conception shall they be based upon? The question is not whether we shall be a theocracy, but rather *what sort* of theocracy shall we be? That is, toward *which* god shall our laws point?

Remember: "There is *always* a god of the system."

Brett Graham Fawcett at American Thinker:
Fear Theocracy? Bad News: All Politics Is Theocratic

The mistake of those panicked commentators [concerning recent mildly restrictive abortion laws] isn't that they think the ban on abortion is a theocratic move. That's more or less true. What they've missed, though, is that all politics is theological, including theirs.

The debate between pro-lifers and pro-choicers (and among different pro-choicers) has to do with when a fetus becomes a baby with moral rights. In other words, when does a bundle of cells become a person?

How you answer this depends on how you define human nature. This is a philosophical question - one of the oldest ones - relating to that branch of philosophy dealing with ultimate reality, metaphysics. It also touches on ethics, the philosophical project dedicated to answering the question: what are human persons supposed to do?

In other words, despite philosophy's reputation for abstraction and irrelevance, we find that all political beliefs are really philosophical beliefs.
"What they've missed, though, is that all politics is theological, including theirs."

They "miss" this deliberately. The secularists (leftists, "liberals", libertarians, etc) oppose "theocracy" only when the laws are based upon true/actual morality, and thus point toward the only God. One has only to look at what is going on in the world today to grasp that all their blather over the past century about "religious neutrality in government" was a head-fake: they were for "religious neutrality in government" only until *they* gained control and could impose *their* religious-and-moral conception upon the rest of us.

"... all politics is theological ..."

Religion and morality and politics are just different ways to ask, and to answer, the same questions: What do we *owe* one another? What may we *require* of one another? What may we *forbid* one another? What may we *compel* one another? And why? That is, what is the basis/grounding for the answers?

"How you answer this depends on how you define [i.e. 'conceive'] human nature."

And how you conceive human nature follows, inescapably, from how you conceive God.


EDIT 2019/06/01: Here is an article by Raymond Ibrahim, linking to an interesting discussion by two Scandinavian women -- “Deep Spiritual Crisis”: Scandinavian Women Expose the West’s Root Problems

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