Posts Tagged ‘democracy’

” … the streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets” George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

We Americans have an unfortunate penchant for abbreviations. Who else would shorten a two-letter word like “at” to the symbol @?  I can type “at” quicker than @; so, at least for me, it is not an efficient symbol. While such foibles can be seen as endearing peccadillos, our simplistic political sloganeering and labeling is misleading and has contributed significantly to the divisions in America and the increasingly violent political action, such as has been seen at Berkeley and murderously at Charlottesville. Read the rest of this entry »

The advantage of such a distressing election year is that it gives us the opportunity for serious reflection.  Realizing that our political system has reached a crisis point, we need to step back from the so-called debates over single issues and examine fundamental political questions.  In this essay I propose to define the nature of government and then demonstrate the necessary consequences of that nature to political liberty. Read the rest of this entry »

            I was surprised to learn that Martin Sheen and Jack Nicholson are both pro-life. Read the rest of this entry »

My last post was inspired by the following quotation from G. K. Chesterton.  “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”  I reflected on how we criticize sins in others that we aren’t susceptible to but excuse those which we are more inclined to commit.  I also pointed out how strongly Jesus condemned this kind of self-justifying personal hypocrisy. 

This time I’d like to look at the issue of institutional hypocrisy or the way in which political “liberals” and “conservatives” often agree on evils but find different ones excusable.  Read the rest of this entry »