The title of a great piece The Religious Left's Moral Fallacy by Eugene Slaven over at the American Thinker reminded of an observation I posted on my first message board in 2000:
The very existence of an unconstitutional Religious Left is the moral fallacy. Unconstitutional because it survives on tax dollars in direct violation of the First Amendment. A moral fallacy because the Religious Left uses the public purse to subjugate every other religions moral principals to the tax collectors morality.
Slavens entire piece is well-worth reading. Here are a few excerpts on a theme that brightened the coming Christmas season for me:
Self-defined liberals in the private sector were so busy defending against the Religious Right they never saw the Religious Left sneaking up on them. Flanders
The very existence of an unconstitutional Religious Left is the moral fallacy. Unconstitutional because it survives on tax dollars in direct violation of the First Amendment. A moral fallacy because the Religious Left uses the public purse to subjugate every other religions moral principals to the tax collectors morality.
Slavens entire piece is well-worth reading. Here are a few excerpts on a theme that brightened the coming Christmas season for me:
. . . at no point in the Bible does Jesus advocate for a coercive government that confiscates wealth from some citizens to give to others.
Jesus was a moral philosopher, not a political philosopher. He preached what the moral individual ought to do and how individuals ought to treat one another. That is decidedly different from advocating a political system in which the government determines what portion of their incomes individuals must forfeit to the state.
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. . . the government coercing individuals to act "morally." This is a perversion of the very essence of morality.
An action is moral only if the individual, endowed with the gift of free will, chooses to act morally. If you strip the individual of choice, forcing him to give up his income to a cause the state decides is moral, it cannot be said that the individual has acted morally.
Moral action via coercion is a paradox. Only voluntary action can be deemed moral or immoral.
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. . . they're talking about government force, not voluntary cooperation among individuals. The former is statism; the latter is the cornerstone of a free society.
. . . confusing voluntary charitable action with state coercion,
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. . . even if you believe that forcing an individual to be "charitable" at the point of a gun is consistent with Christian theology or general principles of morality (it isn't), the inevitable outcome of state coercion will be not a more charitable and prosperous society, but a more economically depressed and despotic one.
December 8, 2013
The Religious Left's Moral Fallacy
By Eugene Slaven
Articles: The Religious Left's Moral Fallacy