- Joined
- Aug 26, 2020
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- 117
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Look at it this way. As Christianity has faded in this country more laws have become necessary to control the conduct of our citizenry as they are incapable of controlling their own conduct. I read--somewhere--that 100,000 new laws are voted on each year at the various levels of government which are aimed at nothing more than controlling our behavior.
Our police forces have been militarized and this was before the rash or riots we've all witnessed over the course of the last year.
The desire is to return to a more moral, safe and wholesome time when even neighbors weren't a threat to each other. Christianity provides that.
More laws are not strictly due to lower morals of the people. For one thing, the world is getting more complicated more quickly than ever before. Technological innovation requires legislation. Additionally, going from an agrarian economy to a manufacturing economy (and later a service-based economy) created a lot of socioeconomic changes in general society. The change of life for most people in the gilded age couldn’t really persist without the government also adapting with the times. I would argue that if America transitioned from a society where almost everyone built their own house, grew their own food, and worked for their own livelihood to a society where you worked for a company and paid companies to build your house and provide your food and there wasn’t a huge change in laws, the U.S. government would be more inefficient and removed from the needs of the people.
I do agree with you about the militarization of the police. But in my own perspective, I see all these additional laws and militarized police not as the government dictating morality, but the government dictating order. I don’t view governments as moral institutions: merely ones of order. The status quo is generally defended, even if it’s understood at least some people are suffering under it or that the government is doing someone immoral, it will continue for as long as it maintains order in society. If enough people are agitated, only then might policy change.
I also totally agree with the desire to have a moral and safe public, and I can understand how a Christian society can create something like that. What I don’t understand is how a government is able to create a Christian society. Isn’t it the Holy Spirit that makes an individual a Christian? I’m also not sure that this ideal society ever actually existed in history. Can we even definitively point to the perfect year, or is it just nostalgia? I just can’t see where in the past we can find utopia, so I prefer to look to the future.
Also, am I missing something? It seems like you had a lot more post than I'm seeing right now.
Post 172, I think.