Is It Possible To Have Too Much Respect For Law?

[Annie]

This is something I need to think about and how, considering the implications, to address it. Here is the conclusion, the whole article is A MUST READ:

http://www.techcentralstation.com/062705B.html

...A nation that has entrusted its civil life to lawyers and professors has embarked on a course that can have only one destination -- the tyranny of a few over the lives of the many.

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued that those with power had an unlimited right to exercise this power, and observed that they invariably will seek to push this right to the utmost extreme that they can get away with -- anticipating Lord Acton's famous remark about the corrupting effects of absolute power. Yet Spinoza offered a ray of hope. Eventually, he said, those who are exercising unchecked and capricious power will push people too far, whereupon the latter will rise up and, often in a spasm of irrational frenzy, cast out the few who have arrogated to themselves mastery over the fate of the many.

Unless, of course, the many happen to be made up of Americans, who seem to have an unlimited capacity to be pushed around by those who claim to be speaking in the name of the law.

So, yes, it is possible to have too much respect for the law. Indeed, it is tempting to go further and to elicit from this bizarre paradox a more fundamental truth about human societies -- every society ends by being destroyed by too much of whatever good thing it began by thinking it couldn't get enough of. Too much gold for Spain; too much military prowess for Germany; too much empire for England; too much respect for law for us?

 

[gaffer]

Law has become almost a religion of itself in this country. You must worship the law cause the law is all knowing and omnipotent. It has its own priest (lawyers) and high priests (politians).

 

[WeAreLegion]

It is my opinion that all of the laws of man must be looked upon with a discerning eye. One only needs to look to history to see how the laws of man are not necessarily in line with the laws of God. If the two sets of laws do not reconcile, people will be hurt and blood will be shed.