Morality and politics

Something hit me today. We have been feed the theory that democracy is virtuous, as if virtue springs from democracy. However, looking at the Palestinians, for example, they vote for terrorist organizations to represent them. What other choice would a people make who send their children out into the streets to "martyre" themselves.

In short, if you have wicked people vote the results will not be pleasing.

Again, the question must be asked, how does one instill virtue into a society? Democracy is clearly not the answer in and of itself. In fact, the opposite may be aruged. If a people are desperately wicked, what they need is despotism to contain them.

 

The church has allowed the government to gag its influence through tax policy. The church needs to get back into the game.

 

Arguably, the church is at fault for letting the morality of a nation to go to pot in general, but I hear ya.

 

The last time the church "got into the game," people died.

 

How exactly, did the church let morality go to pot?

 

We wouldn't be refering to ancient history now would we? Seems like this country did very well with it.

 

Not ancient history. The entire structuring era of what we know today.

Of course, even today Christians advocate ripping apart other nations for thought crime.

 

Theocracy has an ugly track record. That is what happens when the state speaks from the pulpit. What I'm advocating is that the church focus on revival and changing the hearts of men. It is the only way to better the virtue of society.

Keep in mind that the church once forbade people from reading the Bible. For if they did, their eyes would be open and they would have cast off their oppressors. Then came Martin Luther.

 

What Christians are advocating ripping apart other nations for thought crime?

 

The entirety of the Republican foreign policy?

I should have clarified, though. There are a lot of good Christians. I was raised by some and regularly attend church with a whole group of them.

 

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you. There's just five Christians for every one of you that disagree and think the way you make a society more moral and Christ-like is through the iron fist of the law.

 

In response to Montra’s original post, I happen to like Madison and his quote there quite a bit, and am a virtue ethicist - albeit of a different flavor than was Mr. Franklin.

Expanding government is not an indication of moral decay in society. Rather, decaying morality in society leads to decaying functional excellence in government. A democracy is rule by the many in the interests of all, aristocracy rule of the best few in the interests of all, and monarchy rule of one in the interests of all. By way of contrast, an ochlocracy is rule by the many in their own interests, oligarchy the rule of few in the interests of the few, and tyranny is the self-interested rule of one. I would argue a constitutional republic only endures until folks’ vigilance in insisting their government serve the general public as a whole slips to such an extent that their government betrays that ambition. For better or worse, I reckon our system has long been at least partially perverted from the intentions of its designers. Neither the People nor their representatives are angels, after all.

To address your concern about the size of government, I think what we see nowadays is disagreement over what roles state must take on in our daily lives to compensate for the fact that human beings are not perfectly moral by nature. Disagreements on this subject are controversial and complicated greatly because - as noted earlier in the thread - perceptions of morality are subjective as opposed to being based on a set of natural laws or edicts from a magical dude floating high in the sky. On a national level, mainstream perceptions of right and wrong are socially constructed and the laws of the land (though at times in a much-delayed fashion) will usually reflect the beliefs and values dominant in ones country... or at least that is what I reckon is true in countries where folks are free to enjoy a broad array of individual rights and liberties.

Incidentally, I would contend that the degree to which one is secular or religious has no real bearing on their degrees of interest in or motivation to be moral. What you seem to be doing is looking at how the government today relates to values and social mores from our nation centuries ago, when it might instead be more reasonable for you to look at the government in how it relates to the values and social mores of people who live here now. Wickedness, just like righteousness, is in the eye of the beholder so I would urge you to redirect your attention toward the core two questions of politics: “Who should get what?” and as a follow-up, “Why?” If you can get everyone to answer those in serious depth the only hurdle left for you to jump in making the government moral would be to convince people that your answers to those questions are (i.e. your outlook on morality is) the best.

Since the first part is quite unlikely and the second nearly impossible (not to mention it is undesirable, in my humble opinion; what's the point of having freedom if folks all want to think and act alike?), I figure it would be best to just allow perceptions of right and wrong to evolve over time from one generation to the next. Have a government in place flexible enough to adapt to and satisfy the people’s demands. Perhaps one of the reasons our constitutional republic is so long-lived is because it can be adjusted to suit our needs instead of resisting those adjustments and thereby eventually necessitating a violent, revolutionary flurry of tumultuous changes. One way or another, changes to cultures are inevitable. The best we can really hope for is to influence their courses.

As for public schools, wouldn’t we all be better off if young people were taught in the ways of critical thinking and encouraged to find their own answers to moral questions? The alternative of having different political factions vying to deliberately indoctrinate future generations is something that honestly makes me feel very uncomfortable.

Does this kind of make sense, am I starting to babble incoherently here, or? What do you think? My apologies for not keeping up with all of the posts in this thread by the way, but they actually seem to be posted by ya’ll faster than I can write mine!

 

But there are no set morals. They vary from person to person.
For example, many Christians find gay marriage to be immoral, but many other people do not. This is not a problem for sensible people, but there are many extremists, in the far right who want to force their morals on everyone else by banning gay marriage.

 

Decent post.

I think you and I and many others are searching for the same thing and cannot find it. The end of how easy it is to commit gov. fraud. Wicked people will commit gov. fraud any chance they can.

This is why I wait for a candidate that will attack gov. fraud and not everyone recieving gov. assistance. My daughter has CP and she gets some gov. assistance, Romney will be attacking her along with the blind, the deaf etc..

Republicans simply need to learn how to focus on the problems, not Obama.

Obama said in Colorado he is attacking gov assistance fraud and Romney never mentioned it. THIS IS THE THING MOST REPUBLICANS HATE AND ROMNEY NEVER MENTIONED IT!!!

I always hear, "We love what we do for your daughter, but it's those lazy people who fake disabilities getting government money, MY MONEY, that make me mad" and only Obama took on the subject.

Learning yet people?

 

just feel these days that saying those two words together is an oxymoron, their is no morality when it comes to politics, its all about ME (the politicians), they do not care about the country only getting reelected, if a politician does care about the country he will never win, you must appeal to your base and the base has been taken over by extremest on both sides. Gary Johnson for president 2012

 

Just Republican foreign policy? It seems to me that Obama went into Libya all by his lonesome and even violated the War Powers Act when he did it. The excuse was that it was not really a war. LOL. Then we were told that the US was only suppose to prohibit Libyan planes from flying around and the next thing you know we were just bombing the crap out of them.

Interestingly, the people in Libya enjoyed one of the highest standards of living than anyone else in the surrounding area, yet Gaddafi just had to go apparently.

In addtion, Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan and the democrats voted to go into Iraq, right before they turned on "W". So as you can see, this has NOTHING to do with the GOP and has everything to do with the size and scope of the US federal government. The way I see it, the federal government is so big and powerful that they now try not to micromanage the lives of the citizens of the US as well as the lives of people in other countries. It is truly a beast.

As far as Christians supporting military intervention, you are correct, I have heard many support it. At least they don't claim to not support it and then change their tune once Obama get into office, so give credit where credit is due.

 

Not so. The Golden Rule applies to all, "Do unto others as you would have them do to you". Do you deny this to be a universal morality? This is why murder is outlawed as well as theft in every civil society on the planet.

As you point out, there are some differences here. It is my thought that the state need not even be involved in marriage. Why should it? Why should the state have anything to do with a sexual union or have a say in it? If the state were not involved, then they would be forced to actually do their job, which is to balance budgets. Speaking of which, when is the last time the government even passed a budget?

 

So how did you feel about Obamacare being passed? Here we have legislators being bribed to vote for the legislation via such things as the cornhusker kickback and Louisana Purchase etc. Then you had a Republican elected to replace Kennedy for the Senate seat, which caused the legislation to be in jeapardy because he promised to vote against it and ran on that platform. So to evade the will of the people, they used Reconciliation to bypass the Constitutional vote in the Senate. This caused them to vote on something that they could not even read. Of course, this entire legislation was sold to the American people as something that was not a tax. However, the Supreme Court saw that the mandate was not Constitutional, so they reworded the legislation as being a tax which is tantamount to Judicial activism. They did this despite polls showing that most Americans did not approve of the legislation.

Given the following scenerio, do the powers that be really favor democracy? What sort of government do we have now?

 

Would you say that we are all guided by the Golden Rule? Yes or no?

I can tell by your post that you are not a person of faith. Therefore, morality is a man made construct and relative. It would have to be I suppose. Therefore, it could be argued that killing Jews could have been the new moral norm had the Nazi's conquered the world. I submit that the only way for people to accept this in Germany was for them to first dehumanize their opponent. Therefore, the Jew was not human but really mere vermin. Would such mental gymnastics continue to hold water? I submit no, it would not. As we can see in the US, slavery was seen as OK once the slaves were to be equivalent to beasts of burden, like cattle. However, as we saw these mental gymnastics only held water for a short time. In the end, the truth will drown out the rationilation, for rationalization is a mere quick fix to attempt to live with yourself why you violate your internal consceince that screams you are violating the Golden rule. That is why I believe aboriton to be on the chopping blocks. The unborn are human, not a fetus.

 

The Constitution and the Bible can be taken in different ways. You can either use it as a weapon when it seems to defend your position and then glibly ignore it and say it needs "interpreted" another way when it seemingly opposes their position, or it can be used to help curb selfish ambition.

When you say that the goal posts are constantly being moved via morality being in the eye of the beholder, what you have done is unwittingly doomed us all to despotism.

Using your relative notion of morality being nonexistent, except for the eye of the beholder, who should get what and why? Then once you have explained your secular morality, tell us why this should trump the morality of someone who is of a faith?

 

This is exactly why government should be limited. All laws have a component of morality, so if you expand government what you have done is unwittingly imposed more morality upon the populace whether it be secular morality or otherwise. The laws should be as simple as possible and should only concenr themselves with direct attacks on your person. So when the mob moves to take away property of another, the answer should be a resounding no!! In addition, such matters as gay marriage should not even be discussed. Why should it be the role of government to give a thumbs up or down on marriage?

 

But you already have political factions voting to indoctrinate our young people whether it be from secularists or those of faith. There is no way around this.

What troubles me most, however, is what should probably trouble you the most which is morality. Ignore it, and society becomes amoral. If you observe it, then upon what should it be based? I say it should be the Golden Rule. What say you?

Make no mistake, morality and discipline are vital components of ones education, otherwise you are empowering a group of amoral citizens. So to ignore morality is still taking a stand on morality. Being a secular humanist, I suspect it would be easier just to ignore morality altogether, until it comes to social issues such as government mandated health care or prevent religious indoctrination in our schools. Then we all of a sudden have a need for morality.

 

My outlook on Obamacare itself is aspects of its passage were corrupt, some of the regulations put into place beneficial, and that on the whole we still have a sub-par system for allocating health care related goods and services relative to other countries in the West - regardless of whether one is inclined to favor reforms focused on private or public sector solutions. At the same time, however, I reckon representatives in office ought to serve as trustees - voting their own convictions and fully harnessing their past experiences to make wise choices - rather than delegates or politicos, so I honestly do not at all care if the decisions leaders make are in alignment with popular demand so long as people can vote those leaders out of office come election day if they strongly believe their representatives ought to be replaced.

It regards to the question about what kind of government we have, I think we have a constitutional republic but that representative democracy here has become tainted with ochlocratic and oligarchic influences. For instance, it is corrupt when the middle class wants its tax rates to stay steady or be reduced while hiking the rates for upper-income earners if people are not genuinely motivated by the desire to serve the interests of all (which I think if oten the case, especially when an attitude of class struggle gets involved or leaders use populist rhetoric. Likewise, when social conservatives oppose the expansion of rights for certain minorities they are at times putting their own interests ahead of those of the public at large. This is nothing new. Think of it as being related to the concept of “tyranny of the majority.”

The oligarchic perversion is perhaps more obvious to common folk. It is contributed to whenever a party or special interest group, career-minded politician or bureaucrat, etc. narrows their focus down on self-gain or winning rather than what is best for society. I live in Montana and, although I usually vote for Democrats in state and local elections for lack of a left-wing alternative, believe both Senators Baucus and Tester have in the course of their respective terms engaged in underhanded political maneuvers - whether they realize it or not - to achieve political aims which set a bad precedent for how decisions should be made in Washington. In local campaign offices it is not entirely unknown for laws to be bent by some folks, mind you, under the rationale of their ends justifying the means. Where self-interest and privilege meet this kind of corruption is bound to emerge to one extent or another and, even if the actions which ensue are well-intentioned, it is still in my mind a betrayal of the moral principles I associate with excellent governance.

Mind you, I don’t think these problems are especially bad today. In part, perhaps the emergence of modern technology in the mass media has simply made it easier for people to see with their own eyes what goes on. Nonetheless, it is something to be concerned by, and I reckon it is important to consider options for reform.

 

Here you have it ladies and gents, the progressive humanism that is destroying America.

 

Obamacare is helping to keep me unemployed in the only field where I have over 20 successful years of experience, so of course I hope it goes away... ASAP.

Obama has done NOTHING to help me get a job and done seemingly everything he could to make our families life more difficult since we are not minority, gay, crimalien or dependent on the government for our income... although we get closer and closer by the day to applying for food stamps, food bank and other government handouts.

We recently tried to take advantage of one of Obama's crowning jewels during his first 4 years, mortgage payment reduction... but found that since we do not have a standard mortgage on our only home, we do not qualify. So, his policy once again left us in the middle class out of his bailouts.