It’s always so very precious , so very entertaining to see atheists and other leftists who don’t believe there is a God, other than Obama, trying to translate the Bible for us. Of late such mistranslations have been offered in support of the idea that we should be allowing Syrian invaders to masquerade as refugees.
And once again we have the specter of Obama preaching to us about what we are as Americans.
When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.
It’s clear that Mr Obama has no idea of the American ideal, or if he does he’d just as soon as didn’t exist or we didn’t remember it. In any event, I destroyed the majority of his comments yesterday [1] with the help of Andrew McCarthy. But let’s examine the “its not American” nonsense.
What are these people calling for? Justice, or so they claim, among other things. The trouble is, what is their brand of justice rooted in?
Ravi Zacharias raises an intriguing question on this point ….can anyone he says, cry for justice, without knowing the justifiable source for all law?
I do not propose to get into a religious discussion here, but it seems sensible to approach this also from the standpoint of what that source is not.
One need not be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to figure out that as an issuer and an enforcer of law in the pursuit of justice, man has invariably been an abject failure. This is particularly true where men in government have been unfettered by restraints of some kind…. Be they constitutional, or the threat of revolution. Which of course is why our founders fought to limit the power of government. Our entire Constitution is written for the express purpose of placing limits on government. The founders saw firsthand what happens when government is not better restricted in its actions, and went to great lengths to make sure that our government was so restricted.
But, if government is restricted, then we must assume that the founders held that there was a higher power than government. A power that superseded government. I submit to you that it was that understanding that informed everything that they did, everything that they wrote, everything that they felt, as regards our founding documents. They understood that there was a force that transcended government.
If there is an objective moral law, then must we not assume that there is an objective moral law giver? Given the history of humanity, we cannot assume that all that objective moral law is given by man himself. Indeed, given man’s record of immorality, and immoral laws, quite the opposite. For example, let’s remember Martin Luther King reminding us that everything that Hitler did was legal. It all had the force of law behind it. Immoral law, but law. Of course, history provides us with a plethora of other examples of immoral laws, but given recent discussions that seems the loudest example. So the idea of man being the objective moral law giver, is washed away.
What, then? What is the source of objective moral law? What is the source of the laws of nature if you will? Certainly, the founders had differing views on that. But the idea that they all operated from and indeed our culture as a whole operated from for most of its existence, is that there is force of some kind that transcends the laws of man.
That understanding that there is a force, whatever you call it, that transcends the laws of man was deeply embedded in the psyche of the common American even prior to the time when those ideas were codified in our founding documents, or, I contend that they would never have been so written… and certainly would not have been adopted. It is that which gave us the system of government, the culture, the country that is the most respectful of individual rights of any on the planet, in all of human history.
I submit to you that we as a nation and as a culture are in trouble to the precise degree that we have intentionally walked away from that understanding both as a culture and as a nation. Certainly, the cause of individual rights is not well served by doing so.
We now have someone in the White House for example who does not operate without understanding. And can anyone, with any sense whatsoever tell us that his actions over the last several years have made America stronger, or done anything to protect the freedom of the individual? I will dare to call his actions unAmerican. And, I’ll leave it at that.