communication breakdown
If you’ve read more than a couple of my entries, it’s clear that my core principles appear to be contradictory, or at least paradoxical. Namely, I’m a proponent of maximum individual liberty, but I’m not an anarchist; I find the Bible, Jesus, God’s sovereignty et al to be the Truth, but I don’t consider myself a “Christian”, in that I don’t attend any church (only because of it’s current connotation and many that assume that moniker; the same goes for “liberal”).Scott Scheule, (who incidentally has excellent taste in templates) an illustrious and insightful contributor to Catallarchy, recently said: Why maximize freedom? Because I have no idea how you should live your life. Point of fact, I barely have a clue of how to live my life. Scott goes on to point out the difficulty of communicating certain issues in English, because of the heavy dependence upon context.
I'd probably opt for a definition of freedom as being free to use property derived from some sort of Lockean version of natural law without using that property to injure others or their ability to use that property in a similar sense (and that definition is of course circular--live with it). That of course makes the definition less clean--but I don't see any other option.
Nothing is indeterminate. Rather, some questions are just really fucking hard.
The same can also be said for my particular flavor of faith. I feel the need to qualify it because of my minority status…in spite of being a Caucasian American male. Given the actual diversity of thought processes, ideologies and biases (despite an ever increasing desire for conformity), tolerance, reason and open-minded discussion are essential for civilization and progress. Without question, I criticize popular religion and politics generally and modern Christianity and partisanship specifically. My primary motivation for this is to reveal the laziness with which too many of us would rather coast down-hill than think critically about life altering issues. More to the point, the two-headed beast, that is religion and politics, is a voracious consumer of the freedoms of unsuspecting people. Are you in its destructive path? Do you even care?
posted by Robert @ Tuesday, May 10, 2005
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