Tuesday, July 08, 2008
On America
Read this, for there is enough in it that all of you will applaud, and all of you will be annoyed:
For all its flaws and fecklessness, America remains in the eyes of its people an attempt to order a nation according to divine law rather than human custom, such that all who wish to live under divine law may abandon their ethnicity and make themselves Americans. The rights of Americans are held to be inalienable precisely because they are a grant from God, not the consensus of the sociologists or the shifting custom of a particular historical period. Ridiculous as this appears to the secular world, it is embraced by Americans as fervently as it was during the Founding. Even worse for the secularists, it has raised a following in the hundreds of millions in the Global South among people who also would rather be ruled by the divine law that holds their dignity to be sacred, than by the inherited tyranny of traditional society.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Jul 08, 07:39:00 AM:
This is excellent - I had not heard of this columnist before but his analysis is thoughtful and thought-provoking.
An important correction though: Americans don't believe that their rights are unalienable - the Declaration of Independence clearly states that all men are endowed with unalienable rights. To the extent that this piece relies on that erroneous point of view, it furthers a perception that Americans believe that they alone are special by divine right rather than that they have simply capitalized on the self-evident truth that all men are capable of great achievement in a free society.
Also, I followed the link in the complete article to the author's 2/26/08 discussion of the women in BHO's life and how they define him. This comes very close to stating the vague unease I (and perhaps others) have felt about this candidacy and this candidate.
Thanks TH
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Tue Jul 08, 09:26:00 AM:
Too much religion. This fellow doesn't really seem to understand America the way he wants you to think that he does.
For instance, "Those who love America and seek to emulate her, including hundreds of millions of new Christians in the Global South, well understand her uniqueness."
So Christian converts must love America?
I didn't find this to be sound thinking.
