Mamamontezz's Mental Rumpus Room

Just My Rant Today

While perusing through my Nephews blog the other day, he had a post asking why Kerry could tout his faith in one instance and forgo the tenents of that faith in some matters of public policy. That is an interesting discussion, but what struck me was one of the comments to that post....

z"Faith shouldn't guide anything in our system. Separation of church and state. Seperation of one mans beliefs, from another."

I believe that this shows one of the problems that we are experiencing in our political life today, namely that an underlying core of faith that all of our greatest leaders have had in the past has been replaced with a pandering to an evershifting popular "PC" set of non-judgemental values; a belief that there are no absolutes, there is no black and white; just a vast expanse of grey.

Ask anyone who makes such a statement just where in the Constitution it says that faith and government can not co-exist...there is only the provision that the government can not force one religion over, or to the exclusion of, any other on we the people. Religion was always meant to be part of our public life, indeed it was belived by our Founding Fathers that only men of good moral faith were capable making our form of government workable. Without that moral core, the government becomes our master, and not our servant.

Our rights do not come from the largess of the government, they come from a higher power. We allow our government that power needed to guarentee that those individual rights will not be trampled upon by a ruthless majority in the transient interests of the moment. Without a moral code and a belief in some higher authority, those rights become meaningless.

This lack of a moral core has led to the "politics of the moment"...what works for now, without regard to the eventual result that always comes from unintended consequences.

Do NOT misinterpret this to mean that I believe that a litmus test of belonging to a certain,or any,religion is necessary to serve in government. That is not my intent. I do believe that a person can be have a moral code without belonging to any formal religion, what IS important though, is that a person seeking to be a representative of the people HAVE a moral code...a set of core beliefs of right and wrong, irrespective of whatever is the popular political fad of the moment. This lack of a moral core seems to be all too common today.

You may ask "how do we determine if a would be office seeker is a moral person"?

Membership in a church/synagog/mosque is not necessarily indicative...I would say that it behooves all of us as responsible citizens to do our homework and check out a candidates past record in his dealings with others to determine if he or she is worthy of the public trust.

It isn't easy and we must allways be wary of false slurs put out by the opposition...don't take ANY statement at face value, do the homework and check out the facts surrounding any questionable incidents.

It does take work..it takes real thought, and yes, it takes some education of how our system of government, and how our economy, works. Our schools have been co-opted to be little more than indoctrination centers, they no longer teach basic civics and economics, all in the cause of the latest social theory that happens to be hot at the moment. There IS such a thing as right and wrong, good and evil; but these concepts have been lost in a morass of situational ethics and feel good non-judgmental instruction designed to raise self-esteem of the students.

Patriotism? I remember saying the pledge of alliegiance every morning before class. Not PC anymore however...

The "Golden Rule"? Heavens NO! that smacks of religion, can't have THAT!

"Geography"? Thats been replaced with "social studies"...and woe to any teacher that might suggest that the problems experienced by any other country just MIGHT be the result of a socialistic,despotic or rigid theocratic regime ruling said country...All cultures are equally valid, you know. If their results are less than satisfactory, you may rest assured that ,somehow, the United States will be found as the root cause of the problem, either by commission or ommission.

We have lost something precious, and our nation can not stand as the bulwark of freedom unless we can find it again. We must all try to transcend partisan politics and find that inner moral core; that sense that right is right and wrong is wrong, or we will not last as a free people.

I certainly don't presume to know all the answers, I don't think one single person does, it takes a dialogue and discourse among all of us to arrive at a concensus, and hopefully that common core of faith will re-emerge to be a beacon to the truth.
Every right carries a responsiblity, we have become a people that clamors for our rights, but attempting to shirk our responsiblities. This is not a situation that can be sustained. If we do not take back those responsiblities soon, we will no longer have those rights.

ADDEND:

One of the commenters on this post made a comment that read, in part:

"However, confusing moral faith with religious faith is a problem in our country. I do not believe in organized religion and I have a hard time believing in any god."

I felt that I had to reply to this to clarify just what I feel:

I tried to make that point in the post Rob...I'm not confusing a moral faith with a religious one.
Of the two, a moral faith is the more important, but I think that as you grow older, you'll find that a religious faith tends to encourage and strengthen a moral faith.

A morality system "from on high" tends to be stronger than a human system of "because I want it to be so", because it isn't beset by the doubts inherant in any human system. All religions boil down to the same basic tenants, it doesn't matter whether your Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or even Buddist or Moslem, only the forms are different, the basic message is the same.

I don't believe that religious faith is a problem in our country at all; the fact that we can each believe as we wish is the greatest strength that we have. It's freedom FROM religion that we need to fear, because in the end, every human based system breaks down to "I believe this way because I choose to", and with no higher authority, all it takes is one strong willed individual to form a cult of personality to lead us down a road to destruction. Look at history and you'll see it in Germany, Russia, China,Japan, and every other truly evil regime.

I come from a Catholic background, but have not practiced in my faith for most of my life, I do find myself returning to it as I grow older, but I hardly consider myself as a staunch religionist. Maybe it's a function of growing older and facing one's own mortality. A return to the familiar to make sense of the experiences of life.

For many years,I too,didn't believe in any god, but the older I get, the more I find myself believing in some sort of a higher power...otherwise, all existence seems pointless; even if there is no god, higher power, or whatever you want to call it, I think there is a human need to believe; if for no other reason than to try to make some sense out of what we call life.

Our minds are so constructed as to try to make some sense of order in the scheme of things, with a beginning, a middle, and an end; hopefully with a rebirth to follow the end. Religion is merely the way we express this need for order.

The Islamofacists have replaced the "true word" of Allah with a human system,just using the forms of Islam as a framework, but replacing a human judgement on the "word", and we can all see the results.

So that's my clarification on what I feel, I hope I didn't muddy the waters even further....

Who's next on the soapbox?

Posted by Delftsman3 at October 26, 2004 01:16 AM