By Kelly O'Connell ——Bio and Archives--December 30, 2013
Cover Story | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
Why freedom is necessary Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the illdeputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join and unite in one general and brotherly search after truth, could we but forego this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men.Regarding Freedom of Religion, it was John Locke who helped augur in liberty, when he wrote A Letter on Toleration. Locke, arguably the most influential philosopher of the modern age, was also perhaps the most influential thinker for the Founders. For example, Thomas Jefferson liberally quoted Locke in his masterwork, the Declaration of Independence. Locke writes,
For, there being but one truth, one way to heaven; what hopes is there that more men would be led into it, if they had no other rule to follow but the religion of the court, and were put under a necessity to quit the light of their own reason, to oppose the dictates of their own consciences, and blindly to resign up themselves to the will of their governors, and to the religion which either ignorance, ambition, or superstition had chanced to establish in the countries where they were born? ...Truth seldom has received, and I fear never will receive, much assistance from the power of great men, to whom she is but rarely known, and more rarely welcome. She is not taught by laws, nor has she any need of force to procure her entrance into the minds of men. Errours indeed prevail by the assistance of foreign and borrowed succours. But if truth makes not her way into the understanding by her own light, she will be but the weaker for any borrowed force violence can add to her.It is ironic that Marx's Communist Manifesto is now plying for the American soul, as we once almost exclusively self-identified in Biblical terms; the Bible being America's DNA. According to Sacvan Bercovitch, in his The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Puritanism is at the heart of our identity. The exemplar American was early set out as John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. America is the "city on the hill," and the Puritans "conceived of the American paradise as the fulfillment of scripture prophecy." Preeminent early American minister Cotton Mather wrote his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), proclaiming: "I WRITE the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, flying from the Deprivation of Europe, to the American Strand." Bercovitch cites Cotton Mather's biography of Winthrop, "Nehemias Americanus." Here is the opening section of Mather's work:
Nehemias Americanus THE LIFE OF JOHN WINTHROP, ESQ., GOVERNOR OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COLONY. Quicungue venti erunt, Ars nostra certe non aberit. -Cicero. 1. LET Greece boast of her patient Lycurgus, the lawgiver, by whom diligence, temperance, fortitude and wit were made the fashions of a therefore long-lasting and renowned commonwealth: let Rome tell of her devout Numa, the lawgiver, by whom the most famous commonwealth saw peace triumphing over extinguished war and cruel plunders; and murders giving place to the more mollifying exercises of his religion. Our New-England shall tell and boast of her WINTHROP, a lawgiver as patient as Lycurgus, but not admitting any of his criminal disorders; as devout as Numa, but not liable to any of his heathenish madnesses; a governour in whom the excellencies of Christianity made a most improving addition unto the virtues, wherein even without those he would have made a parallel for the great men of Greece, or of Rome, which the pen of a Plutarch has eternized.
President Obama has emulated Lenin in striving to increase state control over such "commanding heights" of our economy as energy, health care, finance, and education, with smaller forays into food, transportation and undoubtedly others. Besides mimicking some of Lenin's policy strategies, Obama also has adopted Karl Marx's strategies for gradually socializing an economy.
Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and Nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence: this essence dominates him and he worships it. The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world.Sadly, the impact of Marx's ideas on every front has been unmitigated disaster. Western youths and credulous souls are permanently despoiled of the ability to think critically by downloading Marxism into their DNA. This explains why so many smug journalists, doctrinaire academics, hectoring politicians, and angry entertainers voice the simplistic doctrines of Marxism, like so many mindless lambs, running their legs while bleating in their sleep. The effect on societies by Marxism has been nothing short of catastrophic. Between ruined economies, and hassled residents never given the chance to experience God-given freedoms, are the extraordinary statistics of murder by government. According to U of Hawaii's Prof Rummel, between communist Russia and China, 138,000,000 innocent persons were murdered. But, setting aside Marxism's uncanny penchant for mayhem -- Why would any sane, rational or thinking person want to repeat the failed experiments of the 19th century? While all socialist countries exist in a death-spiral, where GDP growth does not match spending, some claim a nothern exception. But the Brussels Journal trashes this notion, in The Myth of the Scandinavian Model. F. A. Hayek's The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, explains why even the ideas behind socialism are illogical and immoral, "...The dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival. To follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest." Therefore, this style of economics cannot work in the real world. An illustration of another Scandinavian socialist model: Norway's shame: How a nation squandered its oil riches. But we must ask, once again--where does the bizarre and highly destructive theory that Marx has any authority, come from? Only the intellectually lazy and morally indifferent could give credence to such a shallow and counterintuitive ideology. We must set aside Marxism after noting that, in every important way, Marxism represents the failure and dull cupidity of the antiauthoritarian -- the rebel against God's order.
View Comments
Kelly O’Connell is an author and attorney. He was born on the West Coast, raised in Las Vegas, and matriculated from the University of Oregon. After laboring for the Reformed Church in Galway, Ireland, he returned to America and attended law school in Virginia, where he earned a JD and a Master’s degree in Government. He spent a stint working as a researcher and writer of academic articles at a Miami law school, focusing on ancient law and society. He has also been employed as a university Speech & Debate professor. He then returned West and worked as an assistant district attorney. Kelly is now is a private practitioner with a small law practice in New Mexico.