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Thread: Civic Virtues as Moral Facts: Recovering the Other Half of Our Founding

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    Civic Virtues as Moral Facts: Recovering the Other Half of Our Founding

    This is a fairly deep and long look at why America is in decline.

    Civic Virtues as Moral Facts: Recovering the Other Half of Our Founding

    Until a half century ago or so, there was a moral consensus, however fraying, that informed and shaped the exercise of freedom in the Western world. The self-determination of human beings, of citizens in self-governing political orders, presupposed a civilized inheritance that allowed free men and women to distinguish, without angst or arduous effort, between liberty and license, good and evil, honorable lives and dissolute and disgraceful ones. Few would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.

    Since this moral consensus could be readily presupposed, Americans (and other free peoples) could – and did – abridge the language of politics to give priority to rights over duties, choice over the content of what was chosen, and the pursuit of happiness over the pursuit of truth and virtue. But this was precisely an abridgement because the other half of the equation was always more or less presupposed. The American Founders, for example, were in no way moral relativists, let alone moral nihilists. Rejecting religious sectarianism and the forceable political imposition of religious truth, they nonetheless appealed to honor, civic virtue, and the “honorable determination” of a free people to govern themselves. Facile relativism or easygoing nihilism, where all “values” are created equal, would have appalled them. The idea that moral judgments are utterly arbitrary, that distinctions between right and wrong, and better and worse ways of life, are wholly subjective, was completely alien to them. Almost all of them spoke of a human “moral sense” without which freedom degenerates into moral anarchy and despotic self-assertion.

    ...All the prominent Founders were fundamentally anti-utopian (even Tom Paine), and had, as Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, an acute sense of human sinfulness and imperfection. They were not the Puritans or Calvinists of old, but neither did they endorse the materialism and reductionism of the radical Enlightenment or its misplaced belief in an ideology of Progress. They still believed that human beings had souls and were much more than matter in motion. They had no trouble rejecting both the theocratic temptation in politics and a relativism that severed the essential connections between truth and liberty, freedom and the pursuit of the good life. Moral subjectivism (“Who’s to say what is right and wrong?”) was wholly alien to their hearts and minds, precisely because they were civilized men and women.

    We now live in a different moral universe, and by no means a better one. Of course, inspired by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and the early civil rights movement, we have made considerable progress in overcoming racial injustice, and the legacy of the great injustice that was chattel slavery. That is all to the good. But an emphasis on inclusiveness, however necessary and legitimate, does not define or exhaust the moral foundations of democracy. Today, even religious believers habitually speak of morality in terms of “values,” a term derived from economics which suggests that something is good because we value or choose it (its modern use was made famous by Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber). Whether people who use that language know that they have succumbed to what C.S. Lewis derided as “the poison of subjectivism” is largely beside the point. As Allan Bloom argued in The Closing of the American Mind over thirty years ago, the language of values, and the language of right and wrong, are by no means the same thing; they ultimately point in different directions. The latter partakes of confidence in the reality of moral facts, the former of thoroughgoing relativism and subjectivism. Language matters, and the language of “values” is, whether we like it or not, the language of moral relativism, even moral subversion. Of course, some thinkers of note use the language of “values” and “disvalues” while dissociating those terms from a framework of moral relativism. But there is peril in that path.

    ...
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    How much of a non-Presbyterian is the PCUSA? Jefferson Davis wanted his Confederacy theory to have a Meta-Confederacy, it was a Confederacy in a Confederacy. Hug a black man. It'll be alright. PCUSA is so non-Presbyterian I don't think that leads toward being Presbyterian. Reagan is trying to tie it all together, making PCUSA and the MLK Jr. holiday, right?

    It would presume so much lack of zealotry to counter any act of zealots. Sons and Daughters of that bonnie Scotland know a wee bit of problems here. Presbyterianism starts with John Knox far back in 1560. Scotland led the English Church writing Westminster Confession or Puritan Pilgrims to America unable to withstand English Episcopacy. Scotland planted most the Churches in the world today.
    1. PC(USA) presumes no racial separations in Church planting Ever again, Belhar Confession. Total Unity of peoples in Jesus. Question as if, there were no Nations would the Church put them all together? Assuredly ahistorical that the Church wrote down I find a place native habits and establish its Church and the Westminster Confession 'though the lingua franca of Greek is the language of the New Testament, to be translated into every vulgar language so that they may have hope', how did the Greeks do it? How are they today? There's an Armenian Church and Greek Church and a Byzantine Government when they first put the first Books of the Bible compendium together decided at the Council of Nicaea and with the Nicene Creed forming the first 700 years of Nicene Christianity. They have Orthodox Christianity today and the Church goes with peoples and there's an Orthodox Church of America in every ethnicity , heritage, tradition of services. Perhaps there was an inkling of progress in this Belhar pronouncement, but they shove Ignorant media from PC(USA) of what they advertise as Belhar , say blacks shoulder-to-shoulder with Koreans, or whites and blacks confidently together, dangerous poses even, ignorance, you live in a big world, don't you?


    General Andrew Jackson was ulster-Scottish at birth and its his character. And as Presbyterian, thanks the lights that Reformed our Governance. He cited only one characteristic which flows between savages in the indian removal act and us that they do not mingle and interfere with the powers of the States here, a civilized Christian character. What the red man doesn't share with the Christian and the Republic of 12 Million.

    The Declaration of Independence invokes not only “Nature’s God” but also God as Creator, Providence, and Supreme Judge. Westminster Confession 1648 1st line "although the light of nature and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men unexcusable;" Its a SMALL world THERE, John Witherspoon wrote this with others as Minister of Congressional Congress, its a Creed of Faith that Declaration of Independence, Presbyterian.

    2. Westminster Confession set next to the Belhar (which isn't a universal Presbyterian document whatsoever).
    3.
    They were not the Puritans or Calvinists of old, but neither did they endorse the materialism and reductionism of the radical Enlightenment or its misplaced belief in an ideology of Progress. They still believed that human beings had souls and were much more than matter in motion. Implicit intimidation by PCUSA and PC in America means there won't be a Calvinist "Puritan Pilgrim Presbyterian Church" whatsoever or any restoration to the Scottish Church in America, or reduced logical faith in Korean Church in America.
    4. I can't get to 95...
    5. I said I'm heading the opposite way from Presbyterianism when you head toward PC(USA) Constitutions, oaths, Christmas, popular chorales and not the Psalms, women Ministers, unholy marriages, Scotland doesn't join them on everything they're doing.
    Pacifism , humanist marriages, Assuming the Church History, "Where they Make History". That's the motto in Seoul Korea's Yonsei University, "Where they Make History", Northern and Southern Presbyterians and Scottish Presbyterians and Canadian Presbyterians worked in forming a native racial church of sons and daughters of Korea.
    6. The Church of Mexico excommunicated the Church PCUSA. PCUSA isn't recognized as part of the Presbyterian body, or the Reformed body.

    Conclusively, America has a large blindspot now to the "irreconcilable truths" of religions non-syncretic and religions that never were. I will never accept that Presbyterians were the religious leaders of Continental Congress, that Puritan Pilgrims escaped the Episcopacy and Catholic practices that aren't Reformed, that Britain Highlights our Heritage to Ourselves about the nature of our independence that way, anti-Catholic. I won't accept an equality of Muslims in marital status to hold 4 wives, with heads held high. I won't accept a Pope striding down the aisles of Congress today , thunderous applause in the Same Capacity, the Same Capacity discussed. A Catholic Nation is anti-Presbyterian and so PC(USA) wrote Out of the universal Westminster Confession the "Pope is the Anti-Christ of the Bible". I won't accept that a snuffed religion is reducing in a century 8 million, 4 million, 1.3 million elderly and reducing and leaving. I accept the traditional form of Leagues, Protestant Leagues and League and Covenants and the defense of the territory of North Ireland's homerule and the Ulster League and Covenant.

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