...I would say that it's not *merely* that "soft Christian left does not appear to understand", but that they *will not* understand.
What the soft Christian left does not appear to understand is that whenever the offering plate is passed, and the collection officer is wielding a firearm and has big, block letters on his jacket, and looks at you meaningfully, the results, however remunerative, are not what you seem to be claiming. The large offering would not be an instance of Christian love, compassion, tenderness, thoughtfulness for the poor, or any of that glow-in-your-heart talk.
Statist redistribution depends upon coercion and violence, pure and simple. It is not love, it is not compassion, and it cannot be supported by appeals to all the Christian happy words. Put the guns away, and then let’s talk about Christian concern for the poor.
...
The left needs to stop its love affair with bossing people around, making people do things, fining them if they don’t, putting them in prison if they resist, and raiding their houses with SWAT teams if someone in authority suspected something. As Charles Krauthammer once put it memorably, liberals don’t care what you do, so long as it is mandatory.
...
Wilson's last paragraph touches upon a fundamental difference in attitude and approach between conservatives/rightists and leftists:
* the conservative attitude is "if it's not forbidden, it's permissible"
* the leftist attitude is "if it's not mandatory, it's forbidden"
5 comments:
Ilion,
If you're so enamored of anarchy, why not move to Lebanon or Somalia? They have it in spades over there.
Sure, "government" may be abusive at times, but it sure beats the alternative! In the absence of (an occasionally coercive) government, what you're left with is a neo-Darwinian fantasy of the strong lording it over the weak, and the survival of the fittest.
"If you're so enamored of anarchy ..."
What is it with you leftists and your intellectual dishonesty? *You* are so intellectually dishonest that one could be forgiven for suspecting that you're yet another sock-puppet (*) of that atheistic fellow that a certain fool likes to believe "played" me.
(*) That Victor Reppert vouches for knowing you in person, could just mean that that fellow may be your sock-puppet.
Sock Puppet? Not me... (funny thing, the gnus over on Loftus's Debunking site accused me of the same thing, because I defended a literal reading of Matthew).
But I've become pretty near certain that "im-skeptical" over on VR's site is one. I put him on my "Do Not Respond" list a while back, but recently backslid. But the latest so-called discussions between him and me have convinced me to put him back on it.
"Sock Puppet? Not me... "
Of course not. But my point is that when it comes to politics, you "reason" in the same manner that 'atheists' do with respect to God, and mankind's relationship to him; that DarwinDefenders do with respect to "evolution"; that Freudians do with respect to human nature; that Marxists do with respect to, well, anything.
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"If you're so enamored of anarchy, why not move to Lebanon or Somalia? They have it in spades over there."
If you're so enamored of statist-totalitarianism, why don't you go back to Europe, whence your recent ancestors came? They have it in spades over there ... and much more to come in the near future.
"Sure, "government" may be abusive at times, ..."
Human (*) government is *always* coercive; human nature ensures that human government wll "be abusive at [most] times".
"... but it sure beats the alternative!"
The fase dichotomy you people like to present is that the only options available are:
1) total government -- totalitarianism
2) totally no government
(*) We expect that when Christ rules mankind, his government will not be built on coercive violence.
"In the absence of (an occasionally coercive) government, what you're left with is a neo-Darwinian fantasy of the strong lording it over the weak, and the survival of the fittest."
But that "neo-Darwinian fantasy of the strong lording it over the weak" is *exactly* what we have now and what you want more of ... the only difference between what you do advocate and what you falsely claim that I advocate is that with your politics, ultimately, there will be no survival.
I discovered yesterday that, sometime in the past two weeks, someone had tried to kick-in my basement door. I know it's within two weeks since that's the last time I'd opened that door. I suppose it was one of the local "vibrant youffs" who have recently moved into (i.e. invaded) my neighborhood (*), since surely an adult would have realized that he was making progress.
Now, *clearly* these presumptive kids are "poor" and "underprivileged" … and deserve my stuff. After all, I’m just an “old white male” who has what little bit he has because he earned it and didn’t give it to someone “more deserving”.
The *only* difference between those presumptive kids and you is that you have organized with like-minded leftists to use State coercion and violence-unto-death to take what is mine – and murder me if I resist – to give to the “more deserving”, while they have realized it’s more fun, and potentially more profitable to themselves, to cut out the middleman.
(*) perhaps the same kids, now slightly older, who had encircled me and lobbed rocks at me a couple of years ago, and whom a neighbor whose property fronts on the street (mine does not) had told me he had witnessed chasing down and stoning a white kid simply walking down the public sidewalk (in their defence, he *was* a red-head), chanting, "You can't be here, this is Nigger Street" ... and whom the cops who responded to his (the neighbor's) call high-fived after getting the actual victim out of eye-sight.
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