Missing the Mark with Religion, Part 1
Modern Liberalism
By Steve Farrell

Editor’s note:  This is reprinted with permission from www.NewsMax.com. 

One of the most controversial and confusing of all issues for many is, just what is the proper role of religion and morality in public life?

In search of the right answer, today, we are compelled to conclude that there "is a famine in the land," with nearly all sides of the debate muddled up to their necks in poor history, poor politics, poor reasoning, and all too often, poor religion, having nothing better to offer than a multifaceted deliberation where few seem to know where religion and morality are appropriately involved in public life and in political circles and where they are not.

The unspoken consensus, though none dare say it, is this: “It is right to inject religion and morality into political debate and public policy just so long as the moral slant parallels my moral view of the universe, and it is wrong if it does not.”

Modern Liberalism is just such an example of such hypocrisy.

Favoring the relative ethics of Humanism and Socialism sprinkled “creatively” with Judeo-Christian teachings, Modern Liberalism's cardinal dogma is that "the ends justify the means," or to put it ever so bluntly: "anything goes," including any extreme imaginable, just so long as the political goals of the revolution are served thereby.

Thus, it is a “flexible,” “relativistic” creed, which turns a blind eye to any dilemma of conscience that a constant round of moral contradictions ought to evoke, one which deliberately fights against all religious involvement in public life, while aggressively campaigning for an ever broader interpretation of just what IS public. That's troublesome, isn't it?

Yet, and who dares point this out, the creed and its ideological high priests applaud any decidedly liberal minister of religion, campaign to insure that the most notorious among them are glorified with Noble Peace Prizes and public statues, see to it that their holy lives and hallelujah teachings are mandated for inclusion in public school curriculums and textbooks, and insist that their heaven-cloaked social and political agenda be set up as the “beau ideal” at every “cultural awareness” seminar, every equal opportunity briefing, every leadership training class for public employees in the country. There's no end to hearing their hallowed names in the halls of congresses either. They are the new generation of Saints, the only Saints for which men and women may reverently bow the knee, the only Saints for which men and women must bow the knee, if they know what's good for them.

Recognizing the religious nature of most human beings as a fact, this creed publicly denounces religious faith as mere speculation, as the so-called “opiate of the masses,” even as it employs every tool of religious manipulation imaginable, the most popular being "the parade of victims tactic," which plays upon the moral sensitivities common to all men, hoping to create a link in their minds between the Biblical invitation to "love thy neighbor as thy self" and the Marxian mandate to "rob from the rich to give to the poor."

Further, while this creed has banned our forefathers' Judeo-Christian based teachings from the classroom, it has often mandated the teaching of the religious traditions of indigenous peoples in those same classrooms, especially when their traditions view property and natural resources in terms of collective ownership.

No wonder!

The truth is Modern Liberalism does not oppose moral law; no, not at all. Rather it haughtily believes that it has a fresher, higher, smarter moral perspective than that contrived by the rough and puerile rabble. Thus, the advocates of this creed feel compelled to share it, to order it, to mandate it. And with the power of the state behind them they have met with great success in decreeing their religion throughout the land.

Among this creed's leading precepts we find more than a few moral peculiarities:

1. Unborn babies do not possess the inalienable right to life, but fungi, fruit flies and convicted murderers do.
2. Ranchers and farmers do not have the right to control, develop and utilize their private property as they think best, but rodents, predators and desert tortoises do.
3. Business owners who have put their blood, sweat, tears and a great deal of financial risk into engendering an enterprise, do not possess the right to creatively manage their employees as per their best interest, but distant bureaucrats who have never produced a single product for the public to enjoy, who have never created a single job, and who have nothing to risk do.
4. Religious fundamentalists, heterosexuals, capitalists and middle class European males do not have the moral right to be treated equally before the law, but hedonists, gays, socialists and minorities of every other stripe do.
5. Gun manufacturers, gun dealers and parents who legally produce, sell, or own private firearms do not have the right to leniency and protection before the law for crimes committed with those weapons by others (thanks to the principle of collective guilt that Modern Liberalism borrowed from Fascism and Communism), (1) but criminals who choose to misuse those same weapons do.
6. The children of industrious and intelligent parents who have labored a lifetime to provide property, finances, employment and education for their family members do not have the right to be eligible upon their parents’ death to inherit what is rightfully theirs, but unrelated children of indolent and ignorant parents do. (2)
7. Finally, because this creed defends the utilitarian moral position that the good of the group and the rights of the group always exceed the good of the individual and the rights of the individual — except when the curators of this creed say they do not — no business or businessman has the right to decide its own social responsibility, no school or school teacher has the right to declare its own curriculum, no parent has the right to exercise his or her moral duty as he or she sees fit — but the state does. It is the state which must be fully trusted, fully the dictator of every fine point of moral conduct (except, mind you, deviant conduct. which must be protected at ALL costs as an unalienable right), insuring that the state and hedonistic pleasures are fully worshipped, and that free enterprise, freedom of speech, traditional family values, and freedom of religion are crushed.

That is, traditional Christians and Jews, traditional families, and add to that list traditional capitalists, do not have the right to do business as they please, to speak freely as they please, to worship as they please, but Humanists, Statists, Communists, and all of their friends (including — of recent note — Islamic revolutionaries) do.

This is the ideology of Modern Liberalism — what some call dysfunctional morality and others call Statism. It is the religion most closely associated with one of our top two political parties, and the fact that roughly fifty percent of all Americans worship before this alter of state, begging for free food, unjust privileges and endless moral accommodations, stands as a sad testimony of the pathetic state of religion, morality, and education in the United States today.

Contact Steve

NewsMax pundit Steve Farrell is associate professor of political economy at George Wythe College, editor of the Liberty Letters (please visit www.libertyletters.blogspot.com) and the author of the inspirational novel "Dark Rose" (available at Amazon.com).

Footnotes

1. William Z. Foster, founder of the Communist Party USA, in Toward Soviet America, on pgs. 321-322, explains, "Capitalism blames crime upon the individual, instead of upon the bad social conditions which produce it. Hence its treatment of crime is essentially one of punishment. … Socialist criminology on the other hand, attacks the bad social conditions [that is, the capitalist system, to include: the ‘greedy' private corporation, the ‘divisive' Church, the ‘ignorant' home and private school, etc., each of whom are truly the guilty parties, being instruments of the guilty system)." The answer to all this, he says, especially in more advanced Capitalist countries like the United States, is "establishing government control" over everything, in a step by step, systematic persecution and prosecution of everything private, along with other methods – not to exclude agitation and violence.

2. Via inheritance taxes and forced wealth redistribution.