|
|
|
|
The light turns green
On 25 Nov 2003 18:44:21 -0800, (Purple) wrote,
in part:
Who are these people you rant on about? I have never met any who meet
that description. Being secular does not mean not having standards, it's
just that ours tend to be based more on common sense and sound
reasoning than interpreting a book of inplausibilities and contradictions.
Never mind about being *secular* instead of *religious*. Instead,
let's think in terms of being *liberal* instead of *conservative*.
Do liberals have standards?
Certainly they, like conservatives, think certain things are right,
and other things are wrong.
One of the things high on the list of liberal standards is tolerance.
If someone is very intolerant, it is obvious that he has strict
standards. A hypocrite is someone who doesn't demand of himself what
he demands of others. There is no word, though, for someone who does
it the other way around; thus, if people don't demand anything from
others, then we tend to assume they don't demand it of themselves
either.
Conservatives are more noted than liberals for preaching about the
"obvious" standards: hard work, thrift, honesty, sobriety, and various
forms of responsibility.
Liberals certainly don't reject those values, but they see them as
means rather than ends in themselves. Thus, they expect people to
refrain from adultery, not because God Says Sex Belongs In Marriage,
but because they love their spouses.
There's certainly nothing wrong with being a liberal in that sense. We
work hard because we want to make money; so, when working harder only
helps our employers, and not us, we look around for other
opportunities, or we organize unions. If this horrifies some
conservatives, then we have to wonder if they're advocating hard work
because it is a wise policy for the person doing the hard work, or if
they have another agenda.
The problem is that neither "liberal good, conservative bad" nor
"conservative good, liberal bad" is accurate. Back in 1950, or even
1960, the first may have been a good approximation, but in 1980, it
looked like the second was a good approximation.
You can have good, moderate conservatives - or bad conservatives, who
want to exploit the poor for the sake of the rich.
You can have good, moderate liberals - or bad liberals, whose agenda
is not liberating the downtrodden, but simply promoting fashionable
causes for the sake of their own class interests as members of the
intelligentsia.
You know, the kind that support busing because they can afford to send
their children to private schools, but oppose high enough taxes to
actually fix the ghettos, so that black children from there and white
working-class children really *could* study together in harmony with
incidents of lunch money stolen at knifepoint as unheard of in
integrated schools today as they were in all-white schools fifty years
ago.
Louis Farrakhan is only a mild foretaste of what it means when black
people give up on white liberals to do them any good.
John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html
|