Sunday, March 07, 2010

The Majority Is No Guide At All

Wendy McElroy reposts a short essay penned by R.C. Hoiles back in 1956.  The title of Hoiles’ essay is The Most Harmful Error Most Honest People Make.  The meat of this short essay.

From a religious standpoint, it is attempting to serve two masters. It is a violation of the First Commandment, ‘Thou shall have no other Gods but me.’ The most common method is worshiping the divinity of the State, representing the majority. This attempt to serve two masters or have two standards of right and wrong—one for the individual and one for the group—is undoubtedly a result of individuals using as a guide what their contemporary environment regards as right, just and proper. They use this as a guide rather than eternal principles, eternal moral law that never changes with time or place to determine right from wrong. So the individual who intends to be guided by what is currently regarded as right by the majority has, in reality, no guide at all. The individual who is guided by moral law that never changes has a guide. He does not get into moral trouble. He does not injure his fellow-man. He was goodwill in his heart. He does not enter into any collusion to promote his own interest at the expense of another. he does not try to benefit one by injuring another. (bold by ed.)

Choose your guide wisely.

Posted by John Venlet on 03/07 at 11:19 AM
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A Non-proselytizing Note on Faith

The Trooper’s Girl has a post up titled Taildraggers, Spears & Kilts, which somehow ended up including the following thought, though the post itself actually is meant to draw you to a 2:35 viddie of a small plane in flight, with an experienced pilot at the controls.  The thought which is the impetous for my post.

What’s that? Indigenous people have always known God. They do not - GOD does not - need anyone to tell anyone else how to believe. Nor even if they ought to believe. I assure you there are times when I am quite certain that He simply cannot Be. But that is the course of faith and I think it is supposed to wend its way like a stream in a forest - you never see it, whole. You can lose it, backtrack, turn your back on it when a raging river sings a siren song…and you can pollute it. In the end, it is just you and that faith. Nothing else crosses that limitless sky. So why concern yourself with others? It becomes…sullied. Still, some people do feel that need and I try to look on it with a kind of patient regret.

Amen.

Oh, The Trooper’s Girl also has a new love.

Posted by John Venlet on 03/07 at 09:29 AM
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Soiled Detentions

John McCain and Joe Lieberman have introduced a bill into Congress under the title Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.

The bill is, I guess, meant to act as a wedgie deterrent threat to individuals who may be considering stepping onto an airplane with a bomb in their underpants, and to other such diaper clad, nonsense spouting individual belligerents nursing grudges against the United States.

The problem with the bill, as Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic points out in a piece titled A Detention Bill You Ought to Read More Carefully, is the language of the bill, as it currently stands, would allow it to be equally utilized against United States citizens and actual terrorists alike.

According to the summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.

(There is no distinction between U.S. persons—visa holders or citizens—and non-U.S. persons.)

Be careful out there.

Linked via The Independent Institute.

Posted by John Venlet on 03/07 at 08:55 AM
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