Your sacred cow is in mortal danger Provoking the herd since 2002 

home

 Let's talk about ..
Be Offended - Be Very Offended Shoot the cow! Shoot the cow!  

S-e-x
Religion
Politics





 You Asked for It!
» Islamic Libertarian?   2005-11-11 18:23 Jamie

It's an oxymoron John. Islamic Libertarian? They wouldn't be Islamic if that were the case. Is it all that surprising that around this world it is visible that totalitarianism today is either a battle between the forces of Marxism and Islam, or a hybrid of the two? In Islamic philosophy Allah is the government and the government is Allah (Allah is like a replacement for Stalin), Allah's Sharia is the way forward. This is vastly and completely different from the variety of ideas that unfolded in Christian nations of Western Europe and North America, the matrices of thought inspired here led to significant historical developments including the Magna Carta, the Enlightenment, and the American Constitution - the latter being arguably the greatest achievement of all Western Christendom.

And Christian Socialist... it is something that is, first, a complete violation of the separation of church and state - their separate roles in society, and second, it is typically advocated the most by modern 'feel good' churches without much history who choose to deceptively stand their church as a candidate for office (I don't need to name names here). Though I'm not a catholic, the largest church in the world, the Roman Catholic Church, developed the social philosophy called subsidiarity (Latin: subsidium), which expresses the view that, wherever practicable, decisions ought to be made by those most affected by the decisions. Put another way: the national government ought only to do what the states cannot; the states only what communities cannot; communities only what families cannot; families only what individuals cannot. This is not to say that this Catholic theory has always favoured a minimalist state like that advocated in Minarchism. But still, the main principle at work in this theory is that "a planned economy ... violates the principle of subsidiarity ..." (The Catholic Encyclopaedia, 1965).

And finally, though it is pointed out that Christian thought processes have molded to modern discoveries that have come about in the Christian heritage nations, 'classical theism' of the church - the fundamentalism of God - has been derived from the secular world: Neo-Platonic Greek Philosophy is responsible for the way traditional Christian theology has been developed. It has also influenced the way Westerners read the Bible and the way Westerners think about who and how God is. These influences crept into the church early as the Greeks were evangelised, and Greek penmanship is what english interpretations of the bible are largely derived from. So most Westerners interpret the Bible fundamentally because of the secular influence of the Neo-Platonic Greek philosophers that influenced the language of the bible. And this thinking is evident in most of the early church fathers, and in Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and Arminius. But keeping this in mind, when some of the language is put in context from translations favoured by the writers, a libertarian free-will is clearly evident about God throughout the evidence presented, and more Biblical than any other view out there today, because it does not have to re-interpret passages according to its theology, it gets its theology from the passages. And the source of these ideas in scripture are at least two-millenia old now, pre-dating the modern founding of the core concept behind libertarianism - free-will - in the Western World by a long shot.