Maggie's Farm

If citizens can't regulate themselves individually the state will regulate them through the heavy hand of the police power. Self governing people can't function without religious based morality. As the intermediating and freely chosen 'little platoons' of family, neighborhood, church and schools are weakened or debased, the coercive power of the state moves in. Statists would prefer to have little to no compettion in it's continuous grab for power. Customs, traditions and morality are cultural characteristics of organic society developed over time with their origins forgotten. The Gramscians, like the Jacobins, say those customs and moral traditions are only aspects of oppressive class interests and must be dstroyed, slowly almost imperceptably over time through a 'slow march through the culture'. It's been happening now for about 50 years with it's mainly unwitting agents in the academy, the media and the courts. The racism of the past was slowly dissolving before the central governmnet moved in as an excuse to debase the power of the states and localities. The black family and culture were certainly stronger before the initiation of 'special interest liberalism' and it's social engineering and redistributionist policies.

Talk to the American founders. Religious based morality, the Judeo-Christian kind, is only one of the 'little platoons' with which traditional culture freely associates. What other basis for morality would you suggest? Humanism, socialism,statism? They are religiopns as well but they contradict the basis for the assumption spelled out in the founding documents regaqrding the source of individual rights, i.e. the Creator.

Providence. Metaphysically speaking, socialism, humanism, statism and collectivism are 'religions'. The object of veneration is material rather than spiritual. All successful societies were bound together by a metaphysical belief system of some kind, spiritual or otherwise. The 'Creator' mentioned was not a metaphor but God. A metaphor for what? The state? The collective? Washington's Farewell Address, the Northwest Ordinances and many other contemporaneous documents speak to the assumptions regarding religious based morality of that generation.

The only question is the source of inviolable rights and whether those rights pre-exist the creation of the state. It changes and limits the nature of the state only if God is recognized as real and the source of fredom. Without God only the concept of the general will or other abstractions are left to justify the state and the exercise of arbitrary power leading to totalitaanism becomes not only posible but likely. It's not a question of the superiority of faith over reason only that the belief in God is the ultimate limitation on both individual and state action or power. Faith and reason are not contradictory but complimentary. Faith based morality allows for mass self-regulation and less reliance on the states power of coercion. I'm as libertarian as the next guy but, practically speaking, some regulation is necessary and I'd rather see that regulation come from below rather than from the central authority and it's monstrous administrative state bureaucracy. The Northwst Ordinances are the best example of the intent and assumption that a self-regulating people need a foundation in traditional morality found in religious belief and practice as part of general education which was to be encouraged.