Tractatus

The Tao and Nontheistic Morality

I usually refrain from using this space except when I have quite a bit to say about a subject. But I have been ruminating some on the idea of a transcendent order, and so I'd like to do some public ruminating as well. So this will ramble some and I make no pretense towards a cogent thesis.

It started, as so many conversation these days do, with a Facebook comment exchange. The first instance caught me off guard. The post was about an elderly gentleman who gently approaches women approaching an abortion clinic. He does not moralize, condemn, or criticize. He simply talks to them about their situation and the decision they have to face. He believes that life is precious, and by all accounts he is genuinely concerned that these (usually young) women are about to make a decision that could haunt them forever. I was caught off guard that anyone would find this man problematic. If I try really hard, I can understand that the clinic might want to find a way to prevent him from interfering with their "business" - the self-interest of any entity, corporate or otherwise, is generally what will preserve it. But this Facebook interlocutor referred to this old man derisively, and suggested that what he was doing was actually reprehensible. The conversation developed from there, and eventually this interlocutor was forced to admit that there was no reason why I was not free to terminate his life, except for the fact that I might not like the legal consequences. But he could, of course, offer no basis for the legal rule itself. The worldview he adopts is purely functional materialism, in which there are no transcendent morals. I can only admire his intellectual honesty: he was willing to take his view to the logical conclusion that there is no moral problem with me sticking a knife in his ribs.

Most people are unwilling to concede this as a result of their worldview. As a student of philosophy, I have been a witness to the convoluted ethical systems designed to preserve the essential elements of basic morality without needing to invole transcendence. My contention is that even this fellow, though playing brave, is at his core unwilling to part with certain central ethical tenets. He does not need to be convinced that it is immoral to take an infant from his mother and use the baby as kindling for a fire.

C. S. Lewis uses this premise - that men generally resort to some standard - in his delightful and dense work The Abolition of Man. He calls the overarching tradition of morality the "Tao" - shorthand he adapts from his study of Eastern religions. The idea is that individual moral principles develop out of the transcendent moral standard. The individual tenets of morality are the branches of the tree, and they are dependent on the tree itself for their existence.

This notion is implicated in the writings of the modern "declinists" (Mark Steyn and others) who remind us that a civilization can only live on its accumulated cultural capital for so long. Eventually, that capital is spent and we are left with nothign but a list of protected groups and a menu of empty platitudes from which to choose. Similarly, I think, the branches can only survive so long without the tree.

I find it cute and mildly amusing - but at the same time, despairing - when atheistic (right or left) writers posit their code of basic morality as a substitute for traditional morality. Look here, they seem to be saying, we can develop a perfectly serviceable system of ethical behavior without needing to invoke some invisible deity who never shows himself. But the exercise is self-defeating. Why are these serviceable ethics? Because they preserve the species? Why is the species worth preserving? Even in vapid leftist productions like the movie 2012, the suggestion is that the species needs to demonstrate it is worth saving. (Battlestar Galactica makes a slightly more convincing showing on this point. For one, they explicitly address it when facing murky ethical dilemmas; they also include the theme of God or gods or a transcendent universe or something.) But the assumption is that showing that we are virtuous in some inviolable way is the criterion by which we decide whether the species is worthy of survival. But why? On the assumption of Darwinian evolution, the virtuous species should be concerned only with its own preservation, regardless of how many or whatever members of that species need to die. Or even avoiding biological theories of origins, what makes humanity worth saving, if Don Cheadle can't convince Dick Cheney to let the masses on to the Ark?

There is no answer. To implicate a more current example, why should we think severe income disparity is a problem? To what greater principle can we appeal that the concentration of resources should be evenly divided? Is that somehow a transcendent principle on its own? The absurdity of that response is clear on its face.

Eventually we come back to humanity's only problem: replacing God with something that isn't God. Every proposition is dependent on some other proposition except one: I Am that I Am. If we attempt to replace the only non-dependent fact/force/entity with something that is dependent, we don't even have a house of cards - we have a pile of cards, and we can pick some and use them, but we know all along we're just pretenders. If God is the lawgiver, we substitute some other law. If God is our hope of salvation, we devise our own strategies. If God imports ultimate meaning to all existence, we will build a culture build on distracting ourselves from this unavoidalbe truth.

This post was prompted by this unsupported and unsupportable list of commandments by the prominent libertarian Penn Jillette. They all seem like generally reasonable propositions. But why do they seem reasonable? What is it that we rational animals instinctively compare it to that makes us think they are sensible? And if we can't anwer that, then surely we cannot answer why they matter at all. We might as well negate all of them and call that our list of commandments.

God is the rightful holder of first place in all things, prime mover, ultimate meaning, sovereign, redeemer, creator. The world's problems, as commentators are wont to discuss, are all attributable to the human heart. And every defect of the human heart stems from this one central root of sin: that we make not-God to be God.

Nature and the New Man

The Controversy

During a small and informal Bible study today, a question arose out of Romans 7, specifically from verses 15-20:

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

The dispute was about the "sin nature" and whether it is displaced by the regenerative act, or remains alongside the "new man." A fellow 1L named Aron picked up on another student's reference to the above passage and raised the issue of whether the sin nature remains. The conversation sort of degenerated into quibbling about the number and types of matter involved in composing a person, and what specifically was damaged in and by the Fall. We will leave aside these discussions, either for another day or for the end of this post.

I mistakenly believed Aron was going down the route of perfectionism or other theologies that argue that man is capable of moral perfection in thought and deed, and in this life. I reflexively took the position that we remain with our sin natures, as evidenced by the continuing presence of sin in our lives. I apologize for my misunderstanding, and emphatically reverse my position. It will be useful to consider a few things in reaching this conclusion.

The Scriptures on the New Man

The Bible teaches throughout that the essence of salvation is the unilateral action of God in imparting to us a new nature.

Our old nature is death. Paul calls us "dead in our trespasses" (Eph 2:5) and "dead in our sins" under the law (Col 2:13). God promised Adam and Eve that on the day they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would surely die. Our old nature is rebellion and self-worship, or at least not-God-worship. We are, in our hearts, idolaters. We are hopelessly enslaved to sin because of our natures. Our Lord Himself reveals this slavery in no uncertain terms in His discourse in John 8:31-57, culminating in His dramatic declaration of His deity. Paul reinforces the point in Romans 6, pointing out the mutually exclusive masters especially in verses 16 and 20. The moment that our first parents sinned in the garden, our natures were torn from the benevolent mastery of our God and shackled to the cruel master of self-worship. This, in my considerably modest opinion, is what it means to be spiritually dead.

I have been developing a general thesis in my mind for some time regarding the use of the word ζωὴ for spiritual life and the word βίος for physical life. It seems that once the ζωὴ ended in the garden, the dependent βίος followed as a matter of course. Likewise, in order for our βίος to be properly restored, God embarked on a program to resurrect the ζωὴ.

So our old natures were spiritual death, which is separation from God, which is enslavement to sin and takes the form of worship of self.

My amateur ramblings aside, we know that the wages of sin are death (Romans 6:23) and in so defeating death Jesus took away sin's power. Sin has become a toothless enemy in the face of the accomplishment of the cross, our adversary unable to wield his only weapon: "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil" (Hebrews 2:14). So the manner by which God undertook to destroy our enemy was to join is in our humble estate, emptying Himself of glory, discarding His divine perogative, and subjecting Himself to the apex of humility, death at the hands of an unworthy rabble and usurpers to His true authority (huamns generally, the Jews in the ecclesiastical realm, and the Romans in the civil realm).

One of the early memory verses in the Topical Memory System is Galatians 2:20, "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." This verse is certainly under the umbrella of "the mystery of the faith" (1 Timothy 3:16). It invites deep reflection on what John Owen called "The Death of Death in the Death of Christ"- the profound and central triumph of the Cross.

And so we arrive at the most profound of all the mysteries: that by His death, Christ has brought us in to participate in the eternally-ancient covenant relationship that is the Trinity. This is nowhere more profoundly and terrifyingly declared than by Jesus on the night before His death: I in them and you in me (John 17:23). In destroying death, He fulfilled the prophecy "When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive" (Eph 4:8, quoting Psalm 68:18).

Bringing it back to our discussion of natures, the Lord also fulfilled the prophesy of Ezekiel: "And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh." (Ezekiel 36:26). This is what Jesus meant when He told Nicodemus that he had to be born from above. Regeneration is from God, from start to finish, and the means - the only means - by which God accomplishes this plan of redemption is by giving man a new nature to replace the old.

So we can say with Paul that we put off the old man (Eph 4:22), and most blessedly with Peter that we have been made partakers of the divine nature! (2 Peter 1:4).

One can and likely will go on for all eternity about the beauties of this mystery. Suffice it to say that without a transplant of the old nature, there is no salvation.

As a final note, we encounter a semantical problem when discussing natures. As we usually mean it in these contexts, nature means "heart" as Ezekiel meant it. We mean our basic allegiances, or that to which our will is bound, to paraphrase Luther. When our wills are bound to sin, we are essentially sinful. When our wills are freed from sin and bound to God, we are essentially holy. This, of course, is just another way of expressing the mystery above, but it helps clarify the terms.

The term "dual nature" has historically conjured the question of the nature of Jesus Christ. The Arian heresy treated Jesus as a mere man, Nestorians argued that His two natures were always separate so He was kind of like a machine with two processors (or something), and various other heresies denied one or other aspect of the God-Man formulation. Historic Christianity, that is to say, accepted orthodox belief (at least from Chalcedon), has always taught that Jesus Christ was completely human, completely divine, and one person. This is a mystery that is as profound as the incarnation, but it is essential to the atonement.

So I propose the term "nature" be reserved for our humanness, and instead we talk about being reborn or regenerated as a new man or new self. This is both clearer and tracks better with the language of Scripture.

Whither Sin?

This presents a rather obvious question: why do believers still sin? It is this question which has led many genuine believers and heartfelt evangelicals to conclude that we must struggle with dual and competing natures until this life should end. But this is the answer based on man's reasoning and not on the Scriptures. So what does God say about this subject?

John tells us in his first epistle that everyone still sins, that the man who claims he has no sin makes both himself and God a liar. This is a rather dangerous perdicament in which to find oneself, and so we should proceed with great care.

There is a degree to which the Bible gives us indications that persistent and unaddressed sin is a sign of unbelief. Allow me to disclaim here that I do not think it is the general busienss of Christians to assess the veracity of the beliefs of others. It is, however, the gospel business of the gospel church to see that members are in the faith and that false-converts or the merely confused are addressed. So we see in 1 John 2 vv19-26 that the later actions of some expose them as unbelievers all along. This squarely defeats the charge of some that "falling away" of once-professing believers indicates that salvation is tenuous and can be lost. God forbid - Salvation is of the Lord, and God never fails!

But we are given great hope. We will struggle with the remnants of our sinful flesh so long as we inhabit these bodies. Indeed, this is the great promise of the glory we are to experience in new bodies (Phil 3:20-21, cf Job 19:25). But the Lord has sent us His paraclete, the Holy Spirit, to aid us in all things Spiritual, to intercede for us in prayer, and to guide is and enable us with the grace that comes only from God. God also promises us that "No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it." (1 Cor 10:13)

For brevity's sake, I will leave off addressing the rest of the aspects of dealing with sin in this life. It will have to be sufficient for this post that the Scriptures tell us we are not free from sin in this life, and they tell us this unequivocally. The application is to appeal to the Spirit, to God, to root out this sin and to conform you to the likeness of His Son, which He has promised to do (see Romans 8:29ff and others). You can always rely on God to keep His promises.

Conclusion

So we see in the Scriptures that we are given a new heart (or that we are reborn) in God's magnificent program of working out our redemption in history. We also know that this is the basis for our complete justification, that in putting on Christ we have put off the old, and that it is on His merit alone that we can approach God and commune with Him.

We also know that we are not free of sin in this life. It is preposterous to assume that man has two natures and that we are some kind of superintending intelligence presiding over conflicting tendencies. We have but one nature, human, and our hearts, our basic allegiances, can either be to He who deserves it, or it can lie in not-Him. There is no third way.

The Word Became Flesh: Advent and Evangelism

I was raised in the American evangelical tradition, in Baptist churches in New Jersey. These are the sorts of churches that would be non-denominational in other parts of the country. They are independent but not fundamentalist, preaching from the Scriptures and baptizing confessing believers. I don't know if they were members of any convention, but they were certainly not under the governing authority of any other body.

The traditions of my family are also decidedly non-liturgical. The idea of a sacred calendar or a catechism seemed foreign and even vaguely Romish to me. Reciting creeds and chanting in unison was done on occasion, but more an exercise of congregational unity and instruction than a matter of ritual or liturgy. After all, ritual is Pharasaic: perhaps beautiful, perhaps useful in some ways, but ultimately legalistic and contrary to a gospel of freedom.

A Gospel of Grace - I would not have used the term three years ago except perhaps at random. Since my complete giving over to Reformed soteriology (or Calvinism, as it is commonly called), I have had occasion to participate in some forms of worship that I would have previously considered questionable. I have recited parts of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, joined in congregational readings from the Book of Common Prayer, and even meditated on the Heidelberg and Belgic Confessions.

I am still not a member of a formal liturgical denomination. But recently, among Presbyterians, I was struck by the concept of "Advent" (and by extension the concept of a "sacred year" that runs in tandem with the calendar we consult daily). The season of Advent is one of expectation; as R.C. Sproul describes in his thoughts on Christmas, history was so pregnant with this moment of the incarnation that it could not have been a moment sooner or a moment later.

So this is the season of expectation, of reflection that God the Son was preparing to lay aside his glory and come to earth to walk among mortals - as one of them! I have remarked on the scandal with which John confronts his readers when he declares simply "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us". The image we want to have is that of pure, ethereal spirit, like clear and burning light, suddenly being mired in the basest of elements, the creaturely, secreting, digesting, procreating flesh.

If you'll indulge me, these are the words to a song by the Christian group Downhere. I think they pose the question well:

How many kings, stepped down from their thrones?
How many lords have abandoned their homes?
How many greats have become the least for me?
How many Gods have poured out their hearts
To romance a world that has torn all apart?
How many fathers gave up their sons for me?
Only one did that for me

This is the season of expectation of this miracle. The recalcitrant question, of course, is: why?

There are books on the subject, so I just want to address a few points of "why". Probably the most rehearsed answer is "love", citing John 3:16. This is legitimate, of course; the Scriptures are unambiguous that it was the Love of a God Who is Love that motivated Him to partake in this glorious and gruesome redemption. But this is not a complete answer to the question "why". The problem with the incompleteness of this answer is that it has left open the door to what I consider misunderstandings of the nature of the redemption.

A recent news story about a Times Square jumbotron ad got my attention on this subject.  

The American Bible Society shares my awe about the Deity choosing to mire Himself in His creation, and they even capitalize on the season of Advent in prompting us to reflect on the impending arrival of our God-Man Redeemer. And so their message, "God came near because you were worth the trip" is even more starkly misplaced. Am I being a grinch about this, over-analyzing what was meant to be an exposure for the Gospel in perhaps the nation's busiest intersection?

The problem is that we were patently not "worth" the trip. The Bible tells the story that true Love is making the trip for those who are not worth it. What is this love that God has shown the world? Paul tells us in Romans that God's love is demonstrated by fact that He sent His Son while we were yet sinners, and he is rather unequivocal about the fact that sin makes us worthless enemies of a just and holy God. Jesus, after exhorting His listeners to return evil with good, explains a little further: "But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil."

This "love" that is the answer on every tongue when asked why God came to Earth is a very precious love. It is a love that loves the unworthy. And this is the crux of the problem: Jesus was born, lived, died, and rose not by any means because you were worth it, but rather, to make you worthy! "For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified." Like the centurion in Luke 7, we must be ready to say "Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy..."

I submit that the message of the Gospel is not that a loving God saw the plight of a people with intrinsic worth and "made the trip" to do something about it. Rather, God, according to His good pleasure, loved a fallen and unworthy people and demonstrated it by making some of them worthy.

The video is well-intentioned and correct in that it means to communicate that Jesus Christ came to save sinners, and you, reader, viewer, listener, are a sinner. So in the midst of your walk to Lord and Taylor (or wherever people go as they walk through Times Square) or before you click over to Amazon or NewEgg (for my readers) observe the season of Advent by reflecting on this incomprehensible truth:

God came near even though you were not worth the trip.

Merry Christmas to all.

And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

Koran Burning - Too Much and Not Enough

As a concept, I don't believe in "book burning". The eradication of evil or even merely dangerous ideas is not possible in this way. It is an infantile attempt by hubristic authoritarians to end the uncomfortable opposition of their own ideology. It is usually the equivalent of yelling STFU as loudly as possible, knowing that as long as you are louder and more persistent than your interlocutor, you won't actually be forced to confront their opposition. Attempts to burn, ban, or otherwise banish all existing expressions of a concept or scheme is offensive to my Anglo-American blood, steeped as it is in such things as the Common Law and the American Constitution.

So far, most commentators have been trading on the ambiguity in motivations for burning. A magisterium banning an idea and destroying all written expressions thereof is entirely different from an ecclesium rejecting contrary ideas. Compare, by way of example, the Roman church banning and prohibiting the printing of Luther's works, and Luther casting into the fire the Papal Bull declaring his ideas and himself anathema.

All this to dispel the confusion between book burning a la Fahrenheit 451 and symbolic burning.

As to the response, I wish someone would clearly articulate the "provocation" position so as to draw out the cultural suicide aspect. It is indeed provocative because it draws to light important features of Islamic society that are important. It is they who harbor the sort of ideological intolerance that results in the truly abhorrent form of book burning. (If I have to stop here to explain that I don't mean that all practicing Muslims are violent, just... no, just go read something else.) 

I will say what I have not heard from this pastor in Florida: Islam is a false religion that contradicts the revealed Word of God and denies the person and work of Christ. Therefore, I find whatever their prophet and holy writings teach to be absolute heresy, blasphemous, and indeed anathema. Islam is a cult that leads to destruction.

If an event were to feature Koran burning as part of a larger critique of the anti-Western and anti-Christian message of Islam, I would probably endorse the spectacle. As it stands, I see it as a spectacle qua spectacle that avoids serious criticism of the theological and doctrinal differences between these two major world religions.

As a final note, a small Florida church burning some Korans is probably less a provocation than building an Islamic worship center named after a provocative Muslim figure on the grounds of the greatest success of Islamist action against the West. When that was all abuzz, we were told it was a simply matter of constitutional rights and nothing more. Where is that insistence now?

The double standard is laughable, and it is promulgated in a self-destructive way by cultural lightweights that we elect to office and elevate to prominence on our national media platforms. Given the latest rumor in the news, Imam Rauf may have recognized that he was in "intellectual check", and has consequently appeared to moved his king out of this precarious position.

I seem to have reclaimed this place.

Mens Sana in Corpore Sano

This is perhaps the most complicated policy debate ever. Not having a mind for details or for finance, monetary and fiscal policy tend to bore me and often confuse me. Finance is incredibly complex, what with it being run by a conglomerate of shady right-wing Trotskyite Freemason Rosicrucian Merovingians, but I think healthcare actually beats it by a healthy (heh) margin in terms of complexity. There are a few key points I'd like to draw out from the get-go, and I have no question I will display my ignorance at at least half a dozen points of debate. Here goes.

Staying healthy is in large part a function of taking care of oneself. For millennia, individuals have seen to their own well-being, at times seeking the advice or care of specialists who were advanced in certain crafts. With medicine advanced to its current level, these crafts are highly specialized and the corpus (heh) of knowledge is mastered only by those rightly exalted for their mastery of it. Still, for all that, the vast majority of health is maintained on a personal level, and the most common ailments - tooth decay, the common cold, minor lacerations and contusions - are dealt with by pastes and salves and chicken soup, or rest and waiting. The next tier of problems are addressed in a way that doesn't exactly require 17 years of education and thousands of dollars to treat. Infections need antibiotics. Painful swelling needs anti-inflammatories. Sleeplessness calls for a sedative and perhaps some counseling. I begin to imagine a system far less complex than the one we have concocted for ourselves to address the vast majority of health concerns.

As for the current debate, let's see what we can do.

Health vs. Health Insurance. All sorts of lefties are clamoring about all sorts of rights. Rights ethicists seem to make a business of declaring various things to be rights, and then making arguments for why they are super important, or why they are basic to the human condition. Much of the work they do is critical to improving the condition of the truly impoverished, so I don't knock them as a class of activists (the above-linked professor is one of my philosophical mentors, even if I do break with him in methodology, disposition, and conclusion). However, there is an important distinction between these two things.

So is 'health' a universal human right? Or perhaps we can all be positivists for the sake of argument and be willing to assert it as one. In that case, what defines health? Do we defer to the medical community and DSM-IV type publications and declare that health is the absence or, failing that, management of disease? You see the problems coming down the pike. In a public system, there isn't a potential for abuse, there is an open invitation for it. For some reason, full medical and prescription coverage is a statutory part of the compensation package for all military members. And believe me, in a universally funded community, everyone abuses the system. One time my eyes were puffy so I went to the emergency room, because I could, and because finding my actual primary care provider was an inconvenient process. Prescriptions are free to the , and so long as you can find a prescriber, you can get all the drugs you want. The only thing that keeps this program from being absurdly expensive is the fact that access to almost anything, including healthcare, is at least monitored by the chain of command, and soldiers can't just go at will for anything, and the fact that most of the providers are military, and none-too-sympathetic to outlandish claims (a curious exception exists for mental health claims). So if health is defined by statute and is an entitlement by statute, we are asking for abuse gone rampant.

Is health a right? That has to be a silly thing to say. I can't make that make sense. Health is a construct, or at best a concept, and as I discussed briefly above, consists largely in doing things for yourself. I imagine what people mean by this is that treatment of disease is a right? Perhaps one of my colleagues can straighten out what is meant by this.

Is healthcare a right? I doubt it, but it is certainly something a nation as wealthy as ours could figure a way to provide for even 'the least of these', to use the parlance of Our Savior.

Is health insurance a right? I don't see how. Apparently we've chosen it as the best way to provide ourselves with healthcare, or most of us have. I understand the very wealthy dispense with it altogether and just pay for things they need. Why is that the exception? Prices, of course, are astronomically high. And why is this? Current regulations have nothing to do with it? A topic for another post, to be sure, but worth giving it a mention here.

Rationing. As best I can tell, no one denies that rationing is a necessary part of any healthcare system, or really any economy. The question is one of who gets to do the rationing. My friend the Blackslug presents the view that it is better to have our friendly legally accountable government making these decisions for us rather than the profit-mongers at Aetna and Prudential and their ilk. My liberty argument was rather unpersuasive with the Blackslug, as the impression is that these companies are so incredibly powerful, with such a strong influence in Washington, that there is liberty only in name, and not in any way in fact. De jure liberty, but de facto oppression and tyranny. As the son of a primary care provider, I've heard the stories. I've heard the stories of my mother and her colleagues on the phone badgering insurance companies to pay for this additional test or this specific type of treatment. So the sentiment I get.

I don't necessarily think it's so straightforwardly oppressive, though. For one, if it weren't for current regulations that restricted individuals from choosing their own insurance, but rather mandating employee provision, there would be quite a bit more pressure on these companies to provide a better caliber of coverage. Also, it is unclear how to square the talk of the waste of the current system providing too many unnecessary procedures against the sympathy-mongering of the current system constantly denying claims. One or the other, please. (This is rhetoric the politicians play, I don't accuse serious policy debaters of this fallacy.)

In the end, there is a degree of freedom currently. As a last resort, an individual can resign from his job and find another to change plans. Or an individual can usually decline health insurance and purchase private insurance. Regardless of how it might often shake out, it is currently between an individual, his doctor, and a financier with whom he has a private contract as to whether his request will be financed. Enter the government, and we suddenly have an entity backed by the power of the sword deciding what healthcare I receive. And hence the fears of so many in the 'death panel' crowd.

Simply saying there are going to be death panels either way is not a very convincing counterpoint.

Current Systems. Finally, there have been some comparisons of our current private insurers to two different alternatives. The first is Medicare, and the folks at Heritage have done a fair job of dispelling the alleged advantage of Medicare in terms of cost control. It is beyond me how someone can hear a claim that a government program is more efficient than a private one and not immediately sound all the bells and sirens blaring in their "No Conceivable Way" alert system. Worse, it seems like Medicare is engaging in just the sort of 'ever declining coverage' behavior that critics of the market system like to criticize.

The other comparison is to Canada or Britain. Britain seems to be worse off, as it is more often cited by critics and Canada is more often cited by supporters. But both systems are used by both sides to support their argument. In the end, from what I can tell, they have to be willing to say that providing healthcare to all citizens is worth the trade off in efficiency and cost. And for our side of the aisle, we have to be willing to say that the price of liberty is that some go without, and that their need does not automatically generate an obligation, legal or moral, on anyone else.

My Proposal (well, not mine, but the one I like). Congress needs to deregulate to a large extent, but other than that, I'd like for them to just stop doing whatever it is they are doing. I find the current proposal to be perverse. The federal government is out of hand at this point, and almost every newsworthy actions either administration undertook over the past 2 years has been a severe abrogation of the Constitutional limits. Despite the Supreme Court often having been flat out wrong about what the federal government can and cannot do, it seems that even it and the web it has woven disallows at least the mandate aspect of the current proposal.

It is a sad but easily discerned path that led us to the point here an A.D. 2009, just over 200 years since the miracle of the inception of the American Republic, where the Congress of the United States thinks it has the authority to regulate health, and not too many people in the opposition dare to question the limits of their own power. Much better to score points now without tying your own hands in the future, the better to enrich yourselves, no? Perhaps.

I try to draw this distinction often. There is a difference between policies with which you disagree (tariffs, for instance) and those that are actually illegitimate acts of a government (where to begin? Gun free schools act?). Healthcare falls into this category. I think these proposals are bad ideas, but they are also not supposed to the stomping grounds of the federal government.

What can states do? A lot more, having the general police power reserved to them. Two Heritage Foundation scholars support the universal plan administered in Mitt Romney's Massachusetts. Perhaps these 'laboratories of democracy' can come up with universal insurance plans that provide insurance to the underprivileged, retain liberty for the regularly-privileged, and drive down overall costs. Perhaps they can, and if one state wants to go insane socialist with their plan, so be it. The citizens of that state should fight it, but so long as they don't violate any individual liberties of the U.S. Constitution or their state constitution, then they can have fun with it. I won't live there, but it's a matter for their polity, not me or the federal government.

Best of all, if one system works, other states will adopt it. And leaders at the national level can leverage these other states to adopt it. Insurance companies are sure to benefit by roping all 15 billion uninsured Americans into the insurance system, so they will likely leverage any plan that is of a similar. Several of the Several States should get in to the act now if they are interested in their own sovereignty, a concern I am sure Massachusetts did not have in mind. And for those on the left who are actually driven by compassion (I suspect it is a very small number), this is a practical approach towards insuring more people that doesn't involve some scary gargantuan federal program.

Can all problems be solved by Federalism? Why yes, yes they can!

Crime, hate, Jews, etc.

This recent murder at the Holocaust museum has brought up a number of issues about right-wingery, Jewry, hatery, and free speechification. In some liberty deficient states, like Canada and Britain, there is a notion of certain kinds of ideological speech being so inexorably linked to violence and deviance that they must be outlawed for the public good. We need to examine that notion in so many ways that I anticipate this might be another long post.

First things first. The First Amendment clearly ties the hands of the U.S. Congress from embracing any such notion. Even if there was a 100% correlation between a certain kind of speech and a certain kind of action, it would be outside the scope of the U.S. Congress. We - that is, Constitutionalists - like police power type acts to be handled by the several States. We cannot point out too often how shameful it is that the government's hands had to be specifically tied in such a way, when the Constitution itself was supposed to be a document of enumerated powers. It is beyond shameful that despite the explicit restriction, the Congress still makes laws in clear violation of these amendments, which themselves were redundancies to an already enumerated government. In any case, the U.S. Congress has no place making laws about speech at all. Let's leave alone the unconstitutional campaign laws that our good friend McCain thought were either more important than the Constitution or outside its scope. The First Amendment, abused and ignored as it may be, has come to represent a general notion of freedom of speech in the West. So let's agree that the states have the authority to regulate certain kinds of speech and the Congress does not, for sake of argument (since I think even the states might be out of line, and some leftists might think the Congress does indeed have such a power.)

At this point, we have to say that in order to restrict individual freedom of speech, we have to demonstrate a prevailing community interest or a clear threat of harm. Are there certain ideological frameworks that make meet these criteria? The answer may well be yes, though I will leave this alone for now and say that there maybe conditions under which a state can do so.

The real question here for me is whether American conservatism, or the American right, has such an ideology. I cannot see in any way how it follows from anything I believe and cherish, and I am one of the most conservative people I know. The pillars of the American right are these: anti-statism, individual liberty, the efficacy of private markets, and American exceptionalism (that is best summed up by the notion "the best hope for any kind of peace is a strong America). Let's keep the architectural example going. The foundation of the American right is made of several different stones, going back to Edmund Burke. One of these stones is where the term conservative derives, a reaction to the rationalist or revolutionary frame of mind, and a reliance on tradition. Another stone, perhaps the cornerstone of the foundation of the American right, is the philosophy of the founders as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, a limited government of enumerated powers, a voluntary association of sovereign states that surrender their foreign policy and monetary powers for mutual benefit. And key to this, the mortar for the bricks or the bond for the concrete, is that only a virtuous people can be so governed.Mixed into the building is some agrarianism (a la Jefferson or a la the early 20th century folks), some anti-war defense only stones (think Ron Paul). This entire edifice has traditionally been broken down into the foreign policy, economic, and moral wings. This is perhaps a fair division, but when so divided one must keep in mind that they share some pillars in common and much of the same foundation.

So whence the link of right-wingery to this sort of anti-semitism, etc.? Of course, there are the skinhead types. I don't exactly know what they believe, but I'm pretty sure it isn't all that close to what I believe, which is described in the previous paragraph. The American right is markedly pro-Israel, and much of that sentiment is based on an underlying affinity for the Jewish race, believing them to have been much abused and persecuted, and believing the land of Israel to be rightfully theirs. So I don't say that the American left is anti-semitic (which would be racist: thanks to Professor Susan Sheridan for helping me draw this out), but that the right is often criticized for being perhaps blindedly pro-Israel. The skinhead crowd is usually called right-wing. (I don't want to get into spectrum-building here, but I have another thesis that we have implicitly been using a European spectrum that is inappropriate for the American establishment.) So if we want to call the neo-Nazi types "right wing" then I suppose I see how this is linked to the right.

But none of this has anything to do with any of the things that the standard-bearers of conservatism say or do on a regular basis. You have the tax-mongers who constantly harangue us about the burdens of taxation. There are the moralizers who talk about the culture of death and moral equivocation. The Constitutionalists and rule-of-law types preach against abrogations of process such as in the recent restructuring of auto companies. Some pundits just rail against incompetent actions, which is fine as far as it goes.

I don't see how either the foundations, pillars, politics, policies, or rhetoric of American conservatism has anything to do with antisemitism, let alone murder. My understanding is that this fellow wasn't too keen on Christianity, or America, either. And the American right as a caricature is all about these two things.

There is a strain of ideology that seems, well, off the reservation. I have tremendous respect for Representative Ron Paul, but he seems to attract this type in droves. There is some murky area that seems to have an affinity for the right (regardless of our distaste for them). It stems from libertarianism, which contains conceptually all the seeds of this odd, and by no means prominent, strain of ideology. For evidence of the disparity between the conservative movement and these other types, see Russell Kirk's essay on the topic of libertarianism, or Bill Buckley's rejection of the John Birch Society.

I do want to fairly consider this question, so readers, I ask you to provide me with some fair ways in which conservatism has been mis-described, or perhaps elements of it that are missing from my description of it that can help me make sense of the punditocracy's insistence that opposing Obama has something to do with shooting a random guy at the holocaust museum.

Religious Freedom and Truth (or, Liberty and Equivocation; or, Volition and Righteousness)

I was at the gym today here on the FOB, and remembered seeing an article about Dallas Theological Seminary in a Texas magazine (Texas Monthly or Texas Weekly, I will check next time I am there). I had started to read the article before, and it seemed to give the school and its founding theology a fair shake, so I decided to finish the article.

Now, DTS was founded by Lewis Chaffer, whose brand of premillenial dispensationalism (in the tradition of Scofield) is never received indifferently. All true Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ is the only Savior (the Scriptures are clear on this point), but premillenial dispensationalism hold to a dramatic eschatology in which Christians are bodily raptured into the air, massive catastrophes are rained down on the Earth, and the anti-Christ rises to power in the midst of the turmoil. Once he rises to power, he will force the nations to choose between him and Jesus (and possibly any other religion), with death as the punishment for the dissenters.

It is hard to imagine such a situation arising in our nation. The author of the article reflects this sentiment, claiming that with the two choices presented in such stark contrast, that freedom of religion seems to go out the window. She is ironically ironic (because she doesn't know she's being ironic). She thinks it is the eschatology of the dispensationalist system that is contrary to religious freedom, but in fact it will in that day be the human servants of Satan who will not abide Christianity. Even as the thugs of the left continue to tear away at our Constitutional order in favor of their oligarchic superstate, there is no foreseeable end to freedom of conscience here in the United States (though hate crimes legislation and the debacle in Canada with Ezra Levant are unsettling).

This is a key misunderstanding in our day. The fact that citizens of this nation are free to choose does not mean that there is not a right choice. Put another way, religious freedom does not presuppose relativism, or nihilism. We are free to choose because it is not the place of the laws of men to dictate to us how we will worship God (or so our Founders believed); it is not the case that we are free to choose because there is no good way to figure out which answer is right, so the government should stay out of it. What this proposition brings to light is the disturbing remains of rationalism, which has degraded into a yearning for a technocratic dictatorship a la 1984. An underlying assumption is that one any question where science or reason can get to a final answer, the issue of the freedom of choice is null and moot, because there is only one choice. This of course is a fundamental misunderstanding of belief formation in general and the mechanisms of science in particular.

To me, it represents a hidden axiom of the left: that progress will mean greater state control until such time as the state solves all questions and problems. This is their Utopia; this is our nightmare. This is in some ways like the argument that since some Christians have done terrible things, Christianity must be invalid. The left often employs this backwards thinking in other arenas, where they equivocate based on their relativism. How can we declare ourselves to be better than other nations? By what arrogant right do you dare say the West has made more positive contributions to free societies?

Religious freedom, or moral freedom in general, does not mean that there is no truth. Even presented with the very presence of truth, Adam still choose deception and sin. He was free to choose, he had real volition in the garden, but he chose the unrighteous path. Our liberties do not exist by virtue of the lack of objective truth; men are free to believe how they will, not free from being presented with evidence to the contrary.

Would an omniscient government be able to legitimately deny your freedom of belief? This is the exit question for any readers I might have. Is the epistemic limitation of man at least partially behind our insistence on these liberties?

Liberty and Revolution

The evolutionary view of history, certainly inspired by Hegel's work, would have us believe that humanity is progressing toward a paradise of limitless possibilities. The rapid advances in technology during the time drove many into the open arms of this progressivism, leading simple peasants and great philosophers alike down this wide path with all its promise of Heaven here on Earth. This is so prima facie noble and so sinister on its inside that it can only be described as Luciferian. We owe our current troubles in good measure to the irrational 'rationalism' epitomized in the French Revolution, and the whirlwind of these progressive theories in the 19th century.

The men who stood against George III shared a different view of history, untainted by Marxist and Darwinian worldviews. They understood that tyranny was the natural state of affairs, and that all political orders tended towards them. They spoke of the blood of patriots and tyrants as the necessary sacrifice: the blood not only of the oppressors, but of the men who would set their children free. (We have a tendency to equate 'tyrant' and 'monarch', but the two are not coextensive.) They saw then what has happened since. In the name of all manner of goods, chief among them 'security' and 'equality', liberty will be trampled under foot.

We must remember that it was acts of parliament that robbed the colonists of their industry. It was only when the King, in acting as the executive of state, became an insufferable tyrant that the men of the day shrugged off their chains. Most of them would likely have died happy subjects of the British crown had it prosecuted its sacred duty. When Congress punishes your industry, it is the President who must exact this punishment against you. We must also not allow executive agencies such as the IRS be separated from the President! They are the King's sword arm, and where are their agents? They monitor every dollar you earn and every dollar you spend. They take to you to court, they come to your office, they come to your home.

We face in our day another battle in the same war. As the King asserts authority over an ever-larger aspect of the polity, he sets an ever smaller portion of producers against a mass of parasites that are created and maintained in their parasitic state by the agency of the government. This is a self-defeating proposition, but unfortunately there may be no one left at the end of it to enjoy the death of tyranny.

The zeal of the revolution caught the enemies of liberty aghast. They were few then, and our founders determined to entrench their victories by creating a government that simply lacked the requisite strength to oppress its people. At the end of this process, though, they saw that the parapets of the Constitution were only as good as the people they sheltered, that an uninformed, amoral population would use the chapel as a brothel and desecrate the temple with such trash as relativism and pragmatism.

The Civil War saw a defeat for liberty and an expansion of the King's host, declaring emphatically that Washington ruled the several states. The 1930s began a new chapter in this battle, one best described by dystopian writers like Orwell, Rand, and Hawkes. In this chapter, whose opening sshot was really President Wilson's abominable income tax, our own leaders openly sought the end of liberty under the guise of fairness, and under the expediency of crisis. By deceiving a complacent population with lazy minds, they were able to pervert the very idea of compassion into an excuse for pillage.

Our enemies have affected a brilliant victory by hijacking our formative years. We are all taught that 'bad government' is the kind in which the people have no voice, never mind if the people have no decent thoughts among the lot of them. They teach that 'rights' are ethereal and abstract things to be dispensed by laws, and that such things as property and wealth are not the proper object of political reverence, never mind that it was for the rights of these things that our ancestors risked and gave their lives. We have to take back our paradigms, fight back against the notion that human rights are somehow opposed to or different from property rights. By teaching us this nonsense, and inundating us with false history about 'right wing' fascism, outright lying about the ideologies that have led to oppression, murder, and war, and then confirming it by their control (now diminishing) of the national conversation, they have taken away many of our weapons. Our arsenal is depleted.

The world will naturally tend toward tyranny, and so far no political order has been able to forestall the necessary revolution to correct it. The enemies of tyranny realize that they need only a few more generations of victories, and the battle will be won until He comes again: George Orwell's boot on the throat is a very possible reality.Will the U.S. Constitution stand the strain of battle? I, for one, doubt it, as legal theories conspire to undermine it and Supreme Court justices refer to authorities outside of it, and the people dilute it for their own ends.

What is to be done? Of course, we must honor our ancestors and partake of this distasteful war.

The States must push back. The Several States must declare their sovereignty as States, surrendering only those particular powers as declared by the Constitution.

The courts must push back: every jurist and every judge must interpret laws within the scope of the Constitution. If the document does not allow the Federal government to act, it will be crucial for judges to denounce the legislation.

Business must push back. Instead of blindly placing a label on their product because some underpaid pseudo-scientist so orders, they should either refuse, or place another disclaimer above the government mandated label: "The federal government has violated the bounds of the U.S. Constitution and requires us to publish the following words. We do so against our will against the armed force of the U.S. government:" and then follow with the words. Businesses have to start refusing to produce under the terms of others.

The people, finally, must push back: we must brook no abrogation of our liberty, and we must call such abrogations what they are. Seizing one citizen's assets to distribute them to another citizen is an illegitimate abuse of power the likes of which has started wars, and this is as serious an insult!

Liberty is the only proper incitement of Revolution. If that is the call to arms, count me among the ranks of the Continental Army.

Un-American?

Where is a good old Un-American Activities Committee when you need it? Of course, Congress shouldn't be involved in inquisitions or hearing of private citizens in the first place, but there should be some kind of social animus against this monstrosity.

Yes, it is un-American for the government to tell private citizens how much money they deserve. It makes me angry and a little nauseous. Is there any way back from this path we are on, short of violent revolution?