Question Title | Posted By | Question Date |
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Politics, Theocracy and religion (2) | Jonas | Friday, January 9, 2009 |
Question: Bro can you examine my train of thought: |
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Question Answered by Bro. Ignatius Mary, OLSM
Dear Jonas: Sorry for the delay in responding. Well, Jonas, your thinking is deeply flawed and contradictory. To begin with Free Will is a gift that God has given us that is suppose to give us the freedom to choose and love Him. But, this gift also allows a person the capacity to choose against God, to reject Him, and to sin. Thus, this capacity gives us the ability, not the right, to choose whatever he likes to do with himself regardless of whether or not it harms others. A person can choose to murder, rape, steal, torture, slander, etc. all of which harms others. You state a person can "choose whatever he likes to do with himself as long as it doesn't affect the rights of his neighbour; notwithstanding the fact that the particular action is moral or immoral." If something is immoral it automatically harms others. Anything that harms others affects and effects the rights of his neighbor. So, before we get out of the first paragraph we have fatal flaws in your thinking. You end the paragraph with, "Individuals should take greater responsibility for the actions and decisions that they make." This is true, but free will gives the person the ability to choose otherwise. To posit this true statement is to apply morality, which is to apply God's economy, which is what God intended with his Gift. In terms of Euthanasia you make a wrong presumption. Euthanasia is not always performed at the consent of the person. Most often it is doctors and/or family members who make this decision for the person (who is unconscious or otherwise not able to express their intent. So-called "Living Wills" do not resolve this problem since all that establishes is the person's view at the time he enacted the document. Has he changed his mind? Perhaps, but the doctors and/or family makes the decision for him. While is this true for all end-of-life statements including those asking to be removed from extraordinary measures to be allowed to die naturally, at least this is a request to be allowed to die naturally. A document that says "kill me" is not acceptable. Euthanasia is killing a person unnaturally, a deliberate act of killing. We normally call this murder. Your thinking about the role of government to not intrude upon personal decisions is also deeply flawed. Society and nations have a moral obligation under God to promote, support, and facilitate through its laws and powers the dignity of the human person. This is Church teaching. The Catholic Catechism states:
As I have already written before there is no such thing as a separation of Church and State. Our morality (whether evolved in Church or not) is inseparable from our political activities. In fact, politics is the expression of our moral values. The only question is "What are our moral values?" You say, "A government’s role is to protect the people’s individual human rights, protect private property and "blindly" enforce the law." Well, the Church, who speaks for God, says that government as a obligation to promote and protect human dignity and God's purpose for government trump man's definitions. That protection of human dignity is to protect and respect life at all levels. There are moral issues that cannot be compromised if society is to be healthy. While it may not be appropriate to make fornication illegal, the protection of life is absolute and must be protected by government. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness was the clarion call of our experiment. Nothing else is possible without life. While an individual may want to die by euthanasia or suicide, the society cannot promote their desires because it depreciates the dignity of all men. The government has an obligation to legislate against these evil behaviors for the good of the individual and of society. The same is true about marriage. Marriage is a sacred estate established by God and is the foundation of society. For government to allow homosexual marriage this does violence not only to the sacredness of marriage, but undermines the foundation of family and of society, which leads to the fall of society. This has happened before in ancient Rome. Homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual perversions was a major factor in the demise of Rome. Frankly, Jonas, you need to stop reading Libertarian literature and start reading the Catechism. Your Faith must be the springboard for all else. Politics must be filtered through the Catholic Worldview. Libertarianism as a whole is inconsistent with a Christian worldview. I might add, what I said before, that radical individualism is a characteristic of Satanism. God's economy is not radical individualism, but is a communitarianism, and no, that is not communism or socialism, it is family, a paterfamilias (meaning father head of the family). God Bless,
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