Christians Strike Again and Again and Again

Welcome friends!

I’m curious.  Are you one of those people so enamored of religion you simply cannot or will not recognize its all too obvious dark side?  In your opinion is religion an unequivocally positive word?  Are you perhaps a Christian who thinks people who do bad things in the name of religion simply have the misfortune of subscribing to the wrong religion?  Well, if you are then I’m afraid you may have some explaining to do.  I’m referring to an article I read in the newspaper the other day about an ostensibly Christian church rather ironically named the Word of Life Christian Church in the US state of New York that recently saw six of its parishioners taken into custody for beating a young man to death, inside the church mind you, and nearly managing to do the same to his younger brother.  Did I mention two of the miscreants were the teens’ parents?

Yes, it seems the ever so holy Bruce and Deborah Leonard along with at least four of their fellow church members were holding what police chief Michael Inserra rather euphemistically described as a “counseling session” to address the spiritual state (whatever that might be) of the two young brothers, Lucas (age 19) and Christopher (age 17), and the counseling ended with Lucas dead and Christopher in the hospital... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Libertarianism, Fascism, and a Goat

Welcome friends!

I’m aways amused by any story involving so-called libertarians, those supremely confused and quite possibly deranged extreme economic conservatives who argue all our complicated social and ethical issues can be resolved by an appeal to liberty but who are insufficiently loony tunes to embrace anarchism.  Hey, we all like liberty.  But you know that only gets one so far, right?  One issue of course is what is freedom anyway and how does one get it?  Imagine an anarchy like I don’t know, let’s say Somalia.  Are the people free?  You mean from the rule of law?  Sure.  How about free to walk down the street without their neighbors shooting them in the head with an AK-47?  Probably not.  So are they free or aren’t they?  I don’t know.  Depends what you mean.  Another issue is that in the context of the liberal ethos one’s personal freedom is a perfectly acceptable moral reference when one is talking about behavior that does not impinge in any serious way on anyone else but in situations in which one’s behavior does impinge on other people freedom just isn’t a very helpful concept because both parties have a claim to freedom but only one of them will end up having his or her way.  So how do libertarians convince themselves they can solve everything with an appeal to liberty?  If that’s what they really do I suppose the most likely explanation is they accept certain laws and political institutions and social arrangements and conventions so fully and so unquestioningly they fade into the background and appear to libertarians to disappear altogether so that freedom in a general sense and freedom in the context of a particular legal, economic, and political framework seem to run together.  When libertarians talk about liberty what they’re really talking about is not having to deal with criticisms and potential revisions of the institutions they so adore and would like to remove from the table altogether (the criticisms and potential revisions, not the institutions).  Why not just say something like I accept our current labor market and various other means of distributing economic power and the market system for distributing goods and services based on that economic power and whatever assorted other legal and political institutions one cares to throw in?  What’s liberty got to do with it?  Why the smokescreen?  I don’t know.  I know many conservatives love rhetoric and take a rather pragmatic approach to democracy so it’s tempting to suppose we’re dealing with a sort of bait and switch situation in which they would like to suggest we’re talking about endorsing freedom, which surely most people including especially liberals would wholeheartedly support in the proper context, when we’re really talking about the complicated and potentially dubious ethical proposition that whatever happens under our free marketish economic and legal system is ethical gold.  But who knows?  They might be sincere.  They might just have psychological blinders.  Some of them might think they’re talking about anarchism.  Some of them might be mentally challenged and not thinking clearly.  Hey, I’m just throwing out some possibilities.

Anyway, knowing how I feel about libertarianism in general I’m sure you can appreciate the hearty laugh I got when I read about the Libertarian Party candidate for the US Senate for the great southern swamp we call Florida, a 32-year old lawyer (it figures) named Augustus Sol Invictus (that would be Majestic Unconquered Sun in plain old English, in case you were wondering), who admitted recently that a couple of years ago he killed a goat in some sort of pagan ritual and drank the poor creature’s blood as a way to “give thanks” to the “god of the wilderness.”

Now the bit about sacrificing a goat and drinking its blood is noteworthy enough but the thing that really got my attention was what Adrian Wyllie, the Libertarian Party chairperson for the state of Florida, said when he resigned in opposition to Mr. Invictus’s candidacy, which was that Mr. Invictus is a self-proclaimed fascist who promotes starting a “second civil war.”  Mr. Invictus denied it and claimed he is the victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by Mr. Wyllie, although he did admit white supremacists did indeed support his candidacy.  And when we say white supremacists we are of course referring to Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and people like that.  So there is some point of connection going on there somewhere.

Now assuming Mr. Wyllie is correct and Mr. Invictus does indeed consort with what passes for fascists in this country (not serious Old World political fascists by any stretch of the imagination; in a contemporary American context we’re talking about ignorant rednecks with guns who would like to victimize minorities if only the repressive American police state would get off their backs) one has to wonder what sort of mental gymnastics might lead one to combine liberty and fascism.  Talk about strange bed fellows.  I suppose you know the authentic old time fascists associated an excessive interest in one’s personal liberty with the sort of corrupt and effete scoundrel they imagined would prefer to live in a liberal democracy and they would have wasted no time at all pounding Mr. Invictus to a bloody pulp for even mentioning it.  Ah but there’s the rub!  Like the institutions that make up the “free market” for an economic conservative, if one is a violent bigot and agrees with what one imagines a fascist state might want to do as far as minority relations are concerned then the whole repressive apparatus of the fascist state may well fade into the background leaving only the perception of one’s liberty to finally do what one would have liked to do in the first place.  You know what I mean.  “I’ve wanted to kill that awful minority kid for some time but I can’t because of all those oppressive laws against murder.  My precious personal liberty is being violated.  But under a fascist state I imagine I’ll be able to murder people right and left.  My liberty will be restored!  Oh glorious day.  I’m going to join the Union of Libertarian Fascists right away!”

Maybe I’m just imagining things.  I don’t really know that Mr. Invictus thinks highly of both fascism and libertarianism.  I was only going by what the former chairperson of the Libertarian Party for the state of Florida said and of course he might be making it all up.  Seems a little odd he would but then again pretty much everything having to do with libertarianism seems a little odd to me.  Maybe I’m thinking too much.  It’s not like libertarianism is some sort of serious political philosophy.  Just a bit of fun for people too stupid for the Stupid Party.  Heck, I can’t even make heads or tails of the massive conservative support for that guy with the funny hair and he’s the leading Republican candidate to be President of the US.  That’s mainstream Republicanism right there.  Why in the world would I imagine I could ever make sense of the crackpot libertarian wing of the conservative movement?  Probably best to just have a good laugh and move on to something a little more sensible.

References

Senate candidate in Florida admits drinking goat blood.  BBC.  October 5, 2015.  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34450057.