From George Orwell
"One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives", from the mildest Liberal to the most
extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man."
Today we'd need to add libertarians and a few others, but still true.
Today we'd need to add libertarians and a few others, but still true.
Actually, that's exactly correct. If everybody's on the same page with what they think God wants, that's easy.
But what about the low protestants who want to have all of our kids taught "bible science?" So, yes, a lot of libertarians go the "man" route, simply for self-defense.
Generally speaking, though, Orwell has a very, very good point. As soon as somebody starts going "man," it's incredibly easy to start imagining a world in which oneself and one's own preoccupations form the center of the cosmos. A solipsism we often see in politics.
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There's a fancy Latin term for what you are doing with this bible science thingy, isn't there? Tu quoque maybe? It's been too long. My experience is the "bible science" is often a response to aggressively anti-religious actions, like the redefining of terms so even the Catholic position on evolution is no longer acceptable. But I don't think its true that it's self defense but instead Orwell was right in the choice and they too choose the other side.
One of the core beliefs of libertarians is the authority of the self. One could probably argue that it is the counterpoint to the Marxist heresies: where they glorify mankind as a society (the idea of the church without Christ), libertarians do so to individuals (Man as Christ). I think that both are incompatible with any belief other than secularism or perhaps a faith so secularized that God is basically the blind watchmaker. One can use the same argument that some Orthodox writers use for Catholics and Protestants: they suggest it's really a question of who gets to be the Pope and make the rules.
At an extreme , the mindset might even be incompatiable with science. Someone had a link to a post on how while the religious right (another falsification as the religious right is really not right wing but moderate to liberal in some aspects) may oppose evolution, the left does not want to deal with the implications of its belief in it. I can't remember where I saw it thro. That's a side effect of browsing while writing abstracts for ANTEC.
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I saw the article you reference, and it was a good one.
The problem remains, when it comes to government: how to handle the fact that sixteen umpty-ump people all seem to loudly disagree on what God's saying? Besides, of course, simply duke it out for eternity or until one side wins. That's fine, so long as one has the ground rules laid out, and it's doing that which is the real trick, and which many libertarians also completely flunk, having never figured out the difference between libertarian and libertine.
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