Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Friday, August 14, 2009 3:26:48 PM
'The surest way to lose the very basic and maybe first definition of ethics -- obligations beyond the law -- is to treat ethics as only a branch of the law rather than a separate realm above it. Which is why the phrase, "ethics law" is something of an oxymoron. Just because something is legal doesn't make it right.’ –Paul Greenberg
Mr. GreenBerg is getting at the root cause of the moral rot that displays itself in the culture. One place we see it in politics is the death of the statesman. Faith and freedom are rooted in the self-revealed God who gives man truth about himself and the world we live in and the laws that govern it. What happens when men profess their disdain for the absolute? Form and freedom are exchanged for lawlessness and tyranny.
We now live in a secularized society based on law that has no fixed base, but is relative to what is arbitrarily determined to be sociologically good for society. Those who hold this position call it sociological law.
“Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes.”-former Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Frederick Vinson (1890-1953)
As sociological law has moved away from the original base of the Creator giving ‘inalienable rights’, it is inevitable that there is a move away from the Constitution as written; inalienable rights are replaced by the new rights derived from sociological law.
Secularism militates against both religious liberty and against personal freedoms because secularism does not recognize the existence of a ‘higher law’ and it tends toward a pragmatic public policy unrestrained from constitutional safeguards. The reason for the constitutional checks and balances is lost because the secular view of men in power over other men is one of tyranny, rather than service.
The concept of reality assumed by radical naturalism could never have produced the form and freedom in the American culture and other Reformation cultures. But now it has arrogantly supplanted the historic Christian consensus that provided the foundations on which liberty and prosperity was built. Those who disdain our heritage should look at the fruits of secularism.
It is impossible to mold a natural ethic strong enough to maintain moral restraint and social order without the support of supernatural consolations, hopes and fears. If rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder. [Will Durant, edited]
[credits to Francis Schaeffer, Christian Manifesto]