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This Month's Scripture Verse:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
2 Timothy 3:1-5

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Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For September 26, 2018

Sept 25

To Joseph Sundee and his blogpost that tries to show a strong tie between free markets and free press as he denounces the interest some have in democratic socialism. This appeared in the Acton blog

There might be a strong correlation between economic freedom and press freedom, but correlations do not imply cause and effect. And we might ask whether press freedom only measures infringements exercised by government, not by financial elites. This is true since most of our major news outlets are owned by financial elites.

Sundee's article reduces freedom to individual liberty forgetting that democracy is an exercise in social freedom. Thus to try to limit democracy in order to enhance the liberties of business is to say to the people that they can't make rules that control how business interacts in society. Thus to argue for free markets against government regulations in a government that is a working democracy is to attempt to limit what the rest of society can say to business. It is a limiting of social freedom and subjugates the rest of society to business. And at this point, we should note that society is a pie in which business is merely a slice and not vice-versa.

Since the Acton blog is a religious blog, we should remind it that Church history tells us multiple tragic stories of when the Church supports those with wealth and power. Those stories include what happened to the Church when it supported wealth and power in the pre-revolutionary times of France, Russia, and Spain. And we could include Chilé in as different way since its revolution saw a democratically elected leader overthrown and replaced with a brutal, military dictator who ushered in free markets. We should also note that the economic freedom enjoyed by Ayn Rand's family took place under the dictatorship of the Tsars. And that the Provisional Government that replaced the Tsars in the February, 1917 Russian Revolution was controlled by the Capitalists who insisted on continuing Russia's involvement in WW I despite the disastrous consequences that it brought to the people. So bad were those consequences that it welcomed Lenin's hijacking of the Russian Revolution.


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To Rev Ben Johnson and his blogpost that attempts to portray a the fully  autonomous individual with what is opposite from his “Christian” understanding of America’s Constitutionalism and its reliance on natural law. This appeared in the Acton blog.

My impression from reading about the Homo Economist is that he is a person who promotes the free markets of neoliberal capitalism. We should note that, along with Bolshevism, neoliberal Capitalism relies on the strengthening of a federal government that shows less and less interest in the concerns of those who live outside the circle of financial elites. On the other hand, there is that Johnson's reference to 'ordered liberty' and an unsupported assertion that The Constitution depended on natural law.

Those last two references give the appearance to support a conservative vanguardism. And that vanguardism, if it is defined by the blogposts, that appears in the Acton blog would give almost free reign to businesses despite any objection from society while it mandates that a Christian interpretation of natural law would deny equality in society to the LGBT community. Why the latter? It is said that acceptance of the sexual revolution clashes with religious liberty. Where does that clash occur? It occurs when laws demand that Christians treat those from the LGBT community as equals in the market place and  in society. Here we should note that many religiously conservative Christians, especially in the South, were dragged kicking and screaming into accepting the basic tenets of the Civil Rights Movement.

So perhaps Homo Economists and making the federal government stronger for emerging vanguards are conditionally positively related rather than existing as polar opposites. After all, the history of neoliberal capitalism shows a tendency to rely on oppressive government actions to protect its venture. The first 9/11, the one that occurred in Chilé serves as one of several examples.

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To Paul Krause and his blogpost that claims that real humanism comes from Catholic anthropology. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative.

It seems to me that if any one group wants to claim credit for being the original source or key contributor to real humanism, then that group must not only use logical deduction to prove its point, it must also use induction. That is it must include a history of actions that could be defined as humanistic while showing a minimal or non-existent list of actions that would be defined as opposing humanism.

It is the neglect of using induction to prove that real humanism is heavily dependent on the Church regardless of the branch (Orthodox, Roman, Protestant). The history of the Church is filled with a lust for power and possessions. It shows that the Church has sided with wealth and power and participated in exploiting, sometimes brutally, the vulnerable way too many times. It shows how the Church has condoned colonialism as it used it to spread its influence and domination.

Today's Post Modernism is, in large part, due to the failure of the Church in promoting true humanism in its actions. And the Church should not feel alone, Post Modernism also faults Modernism with its dependence on science and reason for the same failure. This is why Post Modernism has rejected the metanarratives of both Pre Modernism, where faith is the rule, and Modernism, where reason is the rule. And though Post Modernism is wrong in rejecting the metanarrative of faith, its observations about the failures of faith to bring real humanism into the world are on target.

The lesson here is that we can't use deduction to come to conclusions that the use of induction cannot support. The Bible has a parallel to such logic: 'faith without works is dead.'






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