Side note:  Like most people, I have demands on my time. So when I write what I write may appear to follow no particular pattern. However, I had to come up with following material to satisfy the demands of an email debate with one of my siblings. Family comes first. Nonetheless, when time permits, I will get the next installment of HOMOSEXUALS IN OUR MILITARY online.

The Problem

At one time few would have argued that America strives to based its laws upon its Christian beliefs. Unfortunately, to satisfy perverted demands for tolerance, decades ago academicians enshrouded and blurred what otherwise would be obvious. So now, because we do not understand why the Founders created our system of government or even what they created, we risk losing our liberty to tyrants.

There are no perfect men.  That includes our forebears.  When they did not pass on to us the body of knowledge and traditions that form the culture of America, they fumbled.  So we don’t know how to operate a republic. To protect our liberty, we must go back to school. We must read the Bible, our founding documents, and the literature that the Founders read and wrote.  Then we will understand what we risk losing, and we will know how to protect it.

The Threat

Some men and women have charisma, but they have no honor. Such people learn that they can survive well as parasites. The least dangerous of these people we call con-artists. The most dangerous we call politicians. Like con-artists, politicians promise something for nothing.  They swindle our votes from us with “other people’s money.” What they do is immoral, but they give us their promises under the cover of lofty words that sound highly moral and generous. So if we along with their schemes, we can feel good about ourselves; we can pretend that with our votes we help the old, the poor, children, the disabled, persecuted minorities, and various other victims.

Our Protection

Learning to love God and one’s neighbors is not particularly easy. Yet without the love of God in their hearts, men worship idols, the products of con-artists. Without love for each other, men sacrifice each other to their pride and to idols. Therefore, men have savagely fought and exploited each other throughout history. That is why throughout most of history men have regard slavery as perfectly acceptable.

When we learn to love God and to love our neighbors, we can protect ourselves from the schemes of con-artists, even the most dangerous con-artists, politicians. Subsequent to the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, men began to understand the importance of loving God and their neighbors. With the invention of the printing press, our recent ancestors also had the opportunity to read God’s Word, the Bible. And many sought to put into practice what Christ taught.  Thus, we experienced a renaissance, a small renewal of Eden.

The Limits of Inborn Knowledge

Little knowledge is inborn in man.  So we must learn from the example and teachings of those who go before us. If our parents and teachers do not give us a proper example and instruction, they cripple us. Nonetheless, even an avowed atheist and a refugee from a communist state (Ayn Rand) can understand why each of us wants the right to own property.

Property Rights

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values. (from here; there is more on the same page)

What an atheist lacks is a strong incentive to respect other people’s property. We each approach justice from our own perspective. Because government exists to resolve conflicts between us, its processes must take into account our varying notions of justice. Whether government can be successful depends in large part upon the sanity of our religious beliefs. For example, various types of pagans once constituted a great religion. A pagan who thinks the gods require the sacrifice of human babies probably would not regard the rights of other with quite the same respect as that to which we have become accustomed. Would we agree that human sacrifice is just? At various times, some civilizations have regarded human sacrifice as legal and appropriate. Today the abortion of babies is common, and in some places euthanasia is becoming common. Are these just? How about a government that imposes abortions and euthanasia? Are we so far from that?

Because of their religious beliefs, many Christians do not find themselves comfortable with the beliefs of non-Christians, particularly the various pagans and secularists of our era. Why should we? Because we have differing religious beliefs, we have different ideas about how people should treat each other. Yet because we live in a secularized society, we have trouble explaining this discomfort. Secularists decry any effort to bring religion into politics as religious bigotry. When this happens Christians have every right to calmly reply that secularists have no right to silence them.

What to Expect in Part 2

• How and why politicians pervert our notions about the right private property
• What the Bible suggests about limited government

–Tom Salmon