[I hope youll remember to tune in to *The Coral Ridge Hour]
[Note: While the following is in part a political story, I belief the two writers below share the moral implications for all the nation that the recent Congressional scandal points out. For that, I believe it deserves mention as part of a Sunday Special.]
June 9, 2010 John Hayward HumanEventsDaily@gmail,humanevents.com
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” wrote John Adams. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It’s not hard to appreciate the wisdom of Adams in practical terms. A profoundly immoral people would be an unruly mob. Huge amounts of compulsive, often violent, force would be needed to maintain the most basic order. The American Constitution is among the highest achievements of human enlightenment. It is not a cage designed to hold a nation of brutal savages. If we would live as free people, governed with the minimum possible degree of compulsion, we must strive to deal with each other in a moral way, because we have to trust each other.
How can a moral people suffer the presence of deeply immoral leaders?
Discussion of these matters is often dismissed as the stuffy chattering of moralistic busybodies, but it’s actually a question of cold logic. We live beneath a gigantic government, so huge that it consumes or controls more than half of what America produces. Much of this government is justified in explicitly moral terms. We are always being lectured that everything from government-run health care, to vast subsidies for “alternative energy,” is the “right” or moral thing to do.
That’s one of the reasons it matters when someone like Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York is revealed to be utterly reprehensible – a compulsive liar who betrayed the trust of his wife, beginning not more than a month after they were married, and tried to ruin those who exposed him [On Monday he finally admitted to sending sexually explicit text messages to at least 6 women for years and then lied to colleagues and the public last weekend until forced to confess his lies.]
Even by the Left’s standards of collective ethics and submission to the State, it makes no sense to expect proper moral engineering from deeply immoral people. His sins of betrayal, deception, and negligence are the exact opposite of everything liberals expect us to believe about the demigods they would empower to manage our lives.[bold and italics emphases mine]
Symptoms of an Age-old Problem
By Chuck Colson nationalreviewonline.com http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/269055/symptoms-age-old-problem-chuck-colson June 7, 2011
The world is “a-twitter” over the latest case of a high-profile political figure having a moral failure. In this case, we’re hearing a lot about how the digital age contributes to many of the shameful acts we are witnessing in our culture. But all technology does is to magnify. What we see in this case is the age-old problem of human sin, along with the modern problem of refusing to recognize it and, therefore, restrain it.
The tragedy here is that congressmen, like schoolboys, have bought the modern myth: Life is all about us and our desires, and whatever we want to do is okay as long as we feel good doing it. We’ve lost the restraints of conscience and have abandoned the understanding of right and wrong that has been the foundation of Western ethics.
We are in an ethical mess today, caused by our embracing of relativism and abandoning truth and moral certitude. Nothing less than a total restoration of ethics can save us. People will recklessly pursue their passions as the consequence of what we Christians call “original sin” or “the Fall.” They can only be restrained in two ways: 1) personal integrity coupled with personal responsibility, or 2) the power of the state and the law. The less you have of the former, the more the latter becomes essential.
Freedom cannot be maintained without the cultivation of virtue. Whether it be Mark Sanford or Anthony Weiner or whoever will be the butt of jokes tomorrow, their follies are nothing more than symptoms of a false view of life that we embrace today in America — at our great peril.
— Former special counsel to President Nixon, Chuck Colson is the founder of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview and has just produced a DVD series on ethics called “Doing the Right Thing.”_
today's THOT from MickeysFunnies.com
Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.
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