- Patrik Fridén Why is liberal democracy preferable? Monarchy is the only divinely inspired governmental model.
Jon Rowe Patrik Fridén: You are probably right. It's just I am a liberal democrat (small l and d).
Patrik Fridén Jon Rowe Monarchy just didn't reform itself enough and in time to keep the liberal masonic revolutionaries at bay.
It should have become more Meritocratic and Technocratic and less Dynastic.- Jon Rowe Patrik Fridén: If we established the kind of monarchy that you desire, who would the monarch(s) be?
- Patrik Fridén Jon Rowe It's impossible to tell at this moment. There are more factors involved, like who would lead such a revolt against the modern world? Initially it would be the leaders of such a movement that would take the helm, in order to establish the system of succession after their passing. Loyalty and morals somehow needs to be possible to measure as well, with the state-of-the-art scientific methods available. To me it would just be very important that such a regime would have councils of clergy and STEM-scientists as the highest bodies of power to appoint the Monarch. And that the Monarch is Catholic, or at least Christian.
Máire McGoldrick Patrik Fridén Is it? The Israelites were only given a king because they insisted on one, the government given to them by God was judges, not kings, and time and again in the bible the Kinds muck things up.- Patrik Fridén Jon Rowe Trump is very unsuitable for multiple reasons. Also, I am not American, nor am I in favor of continuing that republican experiment.
If such a government comes it would be as the head of a Christian Imperium that spans many Western and Latin countries.
Máire McGoldrick, God's Kingdom is still a Kingdom. Because it is the divine model of government. - Máire McGoldrick Patrik Fridén It is the model for God not for humankind, God is the king and there was and is nothing divine about us setting up kings.
- Patrik Fridén Máire McGoldrick Yet, Jesus came from the line of David...
- Máire McGoldrick Patrik Fridén He did, and he is the King but that doesn't mean that having kinds is the governance that God intended for humans, as I've pointed out they were only appointed because the Israelites wanted to copy all the local groups around them.
- Patrik Fridén Máire McGoldrick And the Temple was not ordained by God, yet Jesus respected it as the House of His Father, even though it was an invention of David.
Your point being?
What makes liberal democracy or republics more godly? They are completely pagan inventions and the masons set them up as carbon copies of the pagan originals, which is why Washington DC is filled with pagan aesthetics.
The only example of democracy in the Bible was when the Jews shouted "Barabbas!" - Máire McGoldrick Patrik Fridén The Temple was ordained by God - which is why it was respected by our Lord but then he became the living temple and the Veil of the Temple was rent asunder showing that God was no longer there - and your point was?
You may be enamoured by kingship, I am not, but please don't try to pretend that kingship is the only form that God has commanded, as I have pointed out the Israelites were NOT given kings until they wanted to copy the nations living around them - it was not God's divine plan for them to have kings. - Patrik Fridén It was David who wanted to build the Temple.
And even if you go by the system of Judges, Prophets and Priests, it was not a republic or a liberal democracy. It was a Theocracy, which I am also in favor of. - Patrik Fridén The first Kings were anointed and appointed by clergy, just like I described how I want it.
- Jon Rowe Patrik if you want an honest opinion from a classically liberal democrat (I'm a libertarian), your case would be stronger if you dropped the freemason part. Yes, of course you can demonstrate a connection between the freemasons and liberal democracy. But anything that ranks of conspiracy theory makes your case appear weaker.
- Patrik Fridén Jon Rowe As a Catholic interested in history, it would be dishonest of me to leave out the Masonic element and hidden hand behind the "enlightenment" and the liberal revolutions. Even the Bolsheviks had that connection.
- Jon Rowe "They are completely pagan inventions and the masons set them up as carbon copies of the pagan originals, which is why Washington DC is filled with pagan aesthetics."
It's true they are pagan inventions. And yes, the architecture of DC is filled with pagan aesthetics. They did not however, set the republics up as "carbon copies" of the originals. There were meaningful differences that accumulated in the 1800 years since antiquity.
There is also the concept of noble paganism. If you are a Catholic, Aristotle's teachings were incorporated into the Church's.
It's true many key Founders were Freemasons. But they were not all Freemasons. And I think the important thing is they saw masonry as benign and consistent with Christianity.
There is little evidence of a nefarious freemasonic conspiracy behind the American founding.
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Facebook Thread on Biblical Forms of Government
The thread comes from a religious discussion group. If Facebook lets you view it, the thread is found here. It's useful, in my opinion, on the issue of Americanism and the universality of liberal democracy (that is the notion that it is the only viable form of government).
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Waldman: "James Madison Understood Religious Freedom Better than Jefferson Did"
I'm currently slowly making my way through Steven Waldman's new book "Sacred Liberty." I'm enjoying it a lot. But before I write more comprehensively on it, see the following article by Waldman in the National Review entitled, "James Madison Understood Religious Freedom Better than Jefferson Did."
A taste:
A taste:
Madison’s success, politically and philosophically, came in part because he bridged Jefferson’s Enlightenment impulses with the views of the Baptists he got to know in Virginia. As a young man, Madison witnessed a shocking wave of persecution against local Baptists, who in our day might be called Evangelical Christians. (By the time of the revolution, about half of the Baptist ministers had been arrested.) In addition, Madison owed his subsequent election to Congress to the votes of Evangelicals, which he secured by promising them he would advocate for a Bill of Rights that would protect religious freedom.
He imbibed, and agreed with, the Baptist argument that church and state should be separated — not to make America secular but rather to make it religiously vibrant.
In 1819, nearly two decades after the passage of the First Amendment, Madison was asked to assess whether the separation of church and state had worked well. Unsurprisingly, he offered a positive verdict, but the nature of his evidence was revealing. He pointed not to the decline in religious persecution but to the rise in enthusiasm:
On a general comparison of the present & former times, the balance is certainly & vastly on the side of the present, as to the number of religious teachers, the zeal which actuates them, the purity of their lives, and the attendance of the people on their instructions. . . .
The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood & the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the Church from the State.Jefferson, by contrast, focused on the threat that organized religion posed to freedom of thought. Unlike Madison, Jefferson in his writings exhibits a deep hostility to organized religion, both its modern and its ancient varieties. In Jefferson’s view, Christianity was ruined almost from the start. “But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in church and state,” he wrote. The authors of the canonical gospels laid “a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications.” The apostle Paul made matters worse. “Of this band of dupes and imposters, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.”
Saturday, September 14, 2019
Two Articles on Newly Discovered Locke Writing
In the time since I noted John Locke's newly discovered manuscript, I noticed two new articles discussing such. The first one was from The Guardian. And the second from The National Review.
From the first:
And here lies the significance of the newly discovered document. Written some 20 years before A Letter Concerning Toleration, its very title cuts against the grain of much of what we know of his thought.
“If Papists can be supposd to be as good subjects as others,” he writes, “they may be equally tolerated.” This has led many scholars to suggest, like Walmsley, that Locke was “much more tolerant in certain respects than was ever previously supposed”.
That seems doubtful. What the new manuscript shows was that Locke was aware of the arguments for religious freedom being extended to Catholics but in his published work he rejected them. Catholics were not “as good subjects as others” because their beliefs threatened society and so had to be excluded.
And from the second:
Locke died before finishing the letter, but his revolutionary voice is being heard once again. A manuscript titled “Reasons for Tolerating Papists Equally with Others,” written in Locke’s hand in 1667 or 1668, has just been published for the first time, in The Historical Journal of Cambridge University Press. The document challenges the conventional view that Locke shared the anti-Catholicism of his fellow Protestants. Instead, it offers a glimpse into the radical quality of his political liberalism, which so influenced the First Amendment and the American Founding. “If all subjects should be equally countenanced, & imployed by the Prince,” he wrote, “the Papist[s] have an equall title.”
Here was a visionary conception of equal justice for all members of the commonwealth, regardless of religious belief — a principle rejected by every political regime in the world, until 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. “Locke was willing to contemplate the toleration of Catholics in a fashion which others would never countenance, and he did so with startling impartiality,” write independent scholar J. C. Walmsley and Cambridge University fellow Felix Waldman, who discovered the manuscript. “The tone is emollient, and nowhere replicated in Locke’s works.”
They have it half right. The attitude of English Protestants toward Catholicism in Locke’s day was shaped by over a century of religious conflict. To the Protestant mind, the advance of “Popery” and “priestcraft” represented a temporal and spiritual threat: ranks of religious believers loyal to a foreign potentate, blinded by superstition, hungry for arbitrary power, and latent with schemes of papal domination. Protestant sermons routinely identified the pope with the Antichrist. Locke’s career coincided with the Restoration (1660–88), when Catholics were excluded from public office and their rights of religious worship were severely restricted. By the 1660s, the rise of Catholic France under an absolute monarch, Louis XIV, instigated a fresh round of anti-Catholic fervor. In this acrimonious climate, Locke’s plea for political equality for Catholics was remarkably egalitarian.
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