Thursday 27 March 2014

Marriage or Immigration? A litmus test for religious versus secular allegiance

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The Political Right is divided into Religious and Secular - the Religious Right believe that society should be organized primarily on religious grounds with other aspects coordinated to that end; the Secular Right believe that some-other-grounds should be primary (economics, patriarchy, nation, race, efficiency - or whatever).

However, while everybody on the Religious Right is religious; some of the people on the Secular Right are also religious! And often the Secular Right supports religion.

But the Secular Right does not put religion as the highest priority - rather they aim primarily for a certain kind of secular order which yet leaves space for religion (I suppose the US Founding Fathers would be of this type).

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If you are on the Right and are also religious, how do you know which you are - where your primary allegiance lies?

One quick way is to evaluate yourself is reflecting on the two 'hot button' issues of the day for the Right: marriage and immigration.

If your main priority is to protect and support marriage (and the family), then your are on the Religious Right; however, if your priority is immigration control, your are on the Secular Right - even if you are religious.

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For the religious Right, marriage - and by extension the sexual revolution in its many facets - is the primary battleground; for the non-religious, it is immigration and by extension the economy, and in general 'capability'.

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I am assuming that any sane person recognizes without need for explanation that open borders mass immigration is socio-culturally lethal - but if you are still not sure where your first loyalties lie, suppose that you could choose between strong and decisive legislation in one year's time to support marriage (and families, and to roll-back the sexual revolution) with immigration control being delayed - or the opposite.

The answer may tell you whether your priorities for society are primarily religious, or primarily secular.

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The reason this test is enlightening is that the answer depends on your diagnosis of the cause of the problem.

For the Religious Right the problem is 'spiritual warfare': that our society systematically violates common sense, natural law, and the religious perspective of life - and the main assault has therefore been by using sexual 'liberation' to batter-down and invert all other spontaneous and sanctioned forms of sexuality: it is an assault on our core system of evaluation and a violation of the heart. The consequence is endemic insanity - a populace so confused and so demotivated that they are destroying themselves both neglectfully and wilfully. 

But for the Secular Right, the problem is much less existential - much more superficial, simple and straightforward: the problem is wrong policies, introduced by self-interested, power hungry people. Fix the policies and you fix the problems.

So, there is a profound difference between Religious and Secular Right - one believes we are caught up by War in Heaven - the other that it is a matter of Wars between Men; one that the problem is of the soul - the other that it is a problem of incentives.

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Note Added: It might be said about uncontrolled mass immigration that "at least" if we sorted-out that problem, then...

But from a Religious Right perspective we are a psychotic society, and that is why people cannot perceive the obvious lethality of OBMI - thus, we are a society so profoundly damaged in our basic understandings and evaluations that we could not possibly implement any major reform so that it produced net benefit: we would be certain to make matters worse.

How could such evil-intending lunatics as we are now, do anything beneficial without simultaneously wrecking a lot more stuff than we fix?

First begin to cure the madness, only then will good policy have any chance.

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