I’ve been keeping up with Mover Mike’s dialogue, at least the two he’s published with the start of this new year. The first article entitled, New Year’s Party Conversation, came down to explaining the difference between a Democracy and Socialism. The following from Mike’s post said it best:
http://www.movermike.com/posts/1167680194.shtml
“In 1944 Friedrich A. Hayek wrote the book The Road to Serfdom. A classic warning against the dangers to freedom inherent in social planning. I have always loved this paragraph:
"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom," he (De Tocqueville) said in 1848; "socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible values to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."”
The second article of Mike’s that fit nicely with the first, “The Elites Stand Naked Before Us!”, where he explained how convenient it is for those in power to decide what truth is by redefining everything on a regular basis.
http://www.movermike.com/posts/1167851039.shtml
“A Sophist was a person who could argue eloquently – and could prove a position whether that position was correct or incorrect. In other words, what mattered was persuasion and not truth. The Sophists were also relativists. They believed that there was no such thing as a universal or absolute truth, valid at all times. According to Protagoras (c.485-c.411 B.C.), "Man is the measure of all things." Everything is relative and there are no values because man, individual man, is the measure of all things. Nothing is good or bad since everything depends on the individual.”
I looked up an article from my files obtained from Meridian Magazine written by Robert Bork, “The State of American Culture and What can be Done about It”, in which he explained how it was possible for the Supreme Court to destroy the meaning of the Constitution through manipulation and interpretation on an ever changing definition of once constant terminology.
http://www.ldsmag.com/ideas/051027americanprint.html
“The Supreme Court is particularly potent because when it speaks in the name of the Constitution, whether it speaks truly or not, as to that issue the democratic process is at an end. That is why so many interest groups that cannot get their cultural agenda through any legislature, appeal to the justices to make up new and previously unimagined rights. And the justices do just that.
The intellectual seeks in various ways... to endow his life with pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity with himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos.... As a consequence, there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful.
The only transcendental alternative after the decline of religion was socialism. Conservatism cannot compete on those terms. If the dream of socialism was equality in all aspects of life, conservatism had no alternative dream, no transcendent principle that can make life significant and meaningful to secular intellectuals. It seeks to see the wisdom and benefits of existing practices and institutions and to think carefully before adopting suggested improvement.”
I would turn to the Scriptures, specifically those found in the Book of Mormon, to simplify the building blocks that at one time were the accepted foundation upon which this country was established; bearing in mind the varied Christian organizations and churches which hold the Book of Mormon in ridicule or contempt, does not alter the information found within as truthful and useful.
In the Book of 2 Nephi, chapter 2 starting in verse 5: http://scriptures.lds.org/en/2_ne/2
“And men are instructed sufficiently that they know good from evil. And the law is given unto men. And by the law no flesh is justified; or, by the law men are cut off. Yea, by the temporal law they were cut off; and also, by the spiritual law they perish from that which is good, and become miserable forever.”
While this verse is intended to explain a relationship with God on eternal platitudes it works well in establishing smaller truths, such as the idea that men are instructed sufficiently that they know good from evil or right from wrong, that they should understand the concept of rewards based on properly following such laws or the opposite, penalties for violating those same laws. Read a little further down in verse 13 of that same chapter and an interesting line of thought is brought to bear:
“And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away.”
I recommend reading the entire chapter, for that matter the entire Book of Mormon to consider the information, weather it is for the good of any man who might endeavor to know those truths which our Father in Heaven has prepared for us from the beginning, or if the information is of no value and should be abandoned as useless.
The Book of Alma, chapter 42 covers the same basic pattern and explains further about the basic concept of eternal principals which govern all mankind. I hesitate to include religious doctrine in what might easily be considered a secular train of thought except that it is my contention that all things which are relevant to the secular can also be explained spiritually, the two being inseparable in the overall scheme of things.
“And also, if there was no law given against sin men would not be afraid to sin. And if there was no law given, if men sinned what could justice do, or mercy either, for they would have no claim upon the creature?”
Once again the verses supplied are part of a wonderful explanation on what has been called the Great Plan of Salvation, that plan in which mankind is supplied with a Savior in order to meet the demands of justice in order to return to the presence of God. Read the entire chapter; I challenge anyone with a knowledge of Christian beliefs as found in the Bible not to agree with each and every idea provided. http://scriptures.lds.org/en/alma/42
I make no apologies for including Latter Day Saint scripture as a foundation for establishing one specific fact; that fact being that in our present day Socialism has become the religion which supplants and removes the original foundation upon which our nation was established, those principles, once generally understood and accepted, have been deemed archaic, too ridiculous to be considered worthy of inclusion in any rational discussion on most any subject, let alone a discussion involving the operation of our country, its political systems or justice as found in the courts.
Robert Bork wrote:
“I will necessarily refer to the Supreme Court because it is both a cause and a symptom of movements in our culture. As John Derbyshire recently put it, "We Americans are heading into a 'crisis of foundations'..... Our judicial elites, with politicians and pundits close behind, are already at work deconstructing our most fundamental institutions -- marriage, the family, religion, equality under the law."
I found the following, also written by Robert Bork, to be illuminating and relevant to our current cultural situation:
“First, that radical individualism is, in moral matters, coming close to nihilism. If each individual defines meaning for himself, there can be no allowable community judgment as to moral truth. This is postmodernism, which has been defined as an uneasy alliance between nihilism and left-wing politics. The public is not allowed the final say on moral truth, but the Olympians are. The result is that the Court-enforced "moral truth" is always to the left of the American center.
Second, the sense of the sacred is becoming a mocked and withered virtue. It is worth recalling what John Stuart Mill wrote.
"In all political societies which have had a durable existence, there has been some fixed point; something which men agreed in holding sacred..... But when the questioning of these fundamental principles is (not an occasional disease but) the habitual condition of the body politic; the state is virtually in a position of civil war; and can never long remain free from it in act or fact.” (emphasis added)
Is it any wonder, with sound statements such as I have provided from his basic character and beliefs, that the liberal left wanted nothing close to a Robert Bork sitting on the Supreme Court? The character assassination of Robert Bork was nothing short of a crucifixion in terms of their desire to totally annihilate his reputation in such a way as to assure his being tossed from consideration to the Supreme Court, much less be listened to in any serious venue on a national issue.
Character assassination is the tool used by secularists to manipulate the course of nearly any discussion by eliminating those who do not bow to their secular god, the god of intellectually superior pundits reared by the book of limited responsibility. Since there are no eternal laws it follows that there is no such thing as eternal consequences, no hope of rewards that cannot exist except in the minds of deluded individuals brainwashed by religious fanatics. They have declared religion a crutch for the weak minded, for surely there is no God, nothing so inexplicable as the Eternities; why even consider information obtained or offered by those who are so gullible.
Lastly, and I promise to end with a quote from Lemuel Calhoon, who wrote an article entitled, “Cultural Suicide”, posted on his site, Hillbilly White Trash.
“Western society, what used to be called Christendom, may be the first great culture in the history of the world to fall not because of invasion, plague, geological or climatic disaster but because of willfully embraced delusion.”
http://hillbillywhitetrash.blogspot.com/2007/01/cultural-suicide.html#links
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