Thank you for an enjoyable debate. I think the comments and the tone have been respectful and important, valid points raised on all sides. This experience has reaffirmed my faith that people of different points of view, even on those subjects held most dear, can be exchanged in a civil, respectful manner.

Be well.

Sure, humans can discern the natural law; but, what inspires that desire? The natural human inclination is to dominate and destroy. Rare is the man who searched for truth before Truth entered space-time. Look at Confucius (Kung Fu Tze), Aristotle or Lao Tzu, they were on to something but like all human efforts it cannot be fulfilled.

The state’s responsibility is to act negatively, as lucidly pointed out above. Government is not supposed to provide health care, housing, sex-change operations or even food. Government, properly designed, is to curtail the will to power of any group, faction or individual including the state itself. This effort will ultimately always fail because we cannot be perfected in this world.

Religious freedom is the fundamental freedom – all others, including the right to life are based on the free choice of humans to respond to God. The real question isn’t should the state protect religious freedom – that is self-evident, it must. The real question is what is religion? Without the answer to what religion is, then we cannot expect the state to protect our free choice as regards ‘religion’.

Religion, properly defined, is the justice we owe to God. Only the Catholic faith has a claim to the fullness of truth. Of course, as Catholics we are free to obey God or rebel. We just must be aware that there are consequences. Those consequences are ours to chose and not for the state to determine. Yet the state must provide the environment of choice, which requires adherence to the truth. Our freedom is not license it is the freedom from coercion save when we seek to coerce another. We are free to do what we ought, not what we want.

The ultimate penalty for abuse of the freedom of religion is imprisonment for eternity – a dark self-imposed isolation. The good news is Jesus came to set the captives free.

America has her Masonic/Jacobin/Enlightenment stain and a rich, vibrant Christian tradition. Does she need to be Catholic? No. But America must be Christian. She has to be Christian to be America even if no Christians live here. No other religion, no other philosophy or ethos can promote authentic human freedom.

Our free, Christian nation has her best days ahead of her, we just have to overcome this relativist chaos right now and then again and again and again until we ultimately fail – and then we win.

Our Lady of America, ora pro nobis.

“Muses of Pieria who give glory through song, come hither, tell of Zeus your father and chant his praise. Through him mortal men are famed or un-famed, sung or unsung alike, as great Zeus wills. For easily he makes strong, and easily he brings the strong man low; easily he humbles the proud and raises the obscure, and easily he straightens the crooked and blasts the proud, — Zeus who thunders aloft and has his dwelling most high.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theogony

Hesiod put into writing the religious traditions of the Greeks that attributed all morality as a gift from the Gods. It is certainly true that later philosophers were troubled by Gods in some of the Greek fables who acted in an immoral fashion, but that did not negate the Greek belief that the Gods had granted to man morality, and that the Gods punished mortals who failed to observe the laws of morality.

To cite one example, the gods of Ancient Greece or Rome were hardly moral exemplars, and the philosophers rather than the priests devoted themselves to exploring moral philosophy. Of course, I think in the end, that explorations of morality and experiences of the numinous eventually have to cross paths, but I’m not sure that’s always how it’s worked historically.

I agree that discussion and compromise between opposing view points is the essence of democracy — however I think it’s pretty self evidence that the disagreements one can successfully compromise between have to be within a certain minimum range in order for the process to work. If disagreements are too extreme, the basis for democracy breaks down because any possible compromise will be seen as utterly unacceptable by some portion of the population.

Imagine that 40% of our population demanded the right to stone women who got pregnant out of wedlock. Meanwhile, 55% believes this would be murder. Some 5% is for some reason able to hold themselves above teh debate.

If the 40% is truly set on enforcing their beliefs about stoning, indeed believes it will destroy their way of life and make life not worth living if they’re not allowed to stone women who get pregnant out of wedlock, what you’re going to have is a breakdown in civil order and a lot of violence. There’s simply not a way to address that kind of disagreement via the sort of compromise and give-and-take which we use to settle disputes like whether we should subsidize corn production, or whether we should have government health care.

That’s what I’m talking about here.

True, but the church failed to enforce the law within its own ranks, holding itself above the law. Do you not see the contradiction that impends here?

Um, no.

You’re consistently missing two key points:

1) The Church does not claim that it sets morality arbitrarily the way that a legislature passes regulations. Rather, it claims to have received from God and passed on to humanity a set of immutable laws formed by God. This isn’t a common law situation where one can claim that failure to enforce is a ceding of control.

2) You’re also not clearly accounting for what happened here. If the Church had been going around preaching, “Bugging little boys is absolutely wrong. However, if a priest does it, it should not be treated as a crime and he should be allowed to continue,” you would at least have a point that Church teaching was incoherant. Rather, you had the Church clearing teaching that something was wrong, but in some dioceses the bishops were ignoring claims that some of their priests were committing acts which were both crimes and grave sins. It is, unfortunately, all too common that those who are in some form of authority misuse it to their advantage. For instance, I know several police officers who completely ignore speed limits in their personal driving, and then routinely get off when pulled over by flashing their badges. Nonetheless, the fact that cops rarely write other cops tickets does not mean that the speed limits don’t exist. It just means that people in authority often abuse it.

Indeed, in the case of the scandals, one might actually take the opposite lesson: the fact that a coverup occurred underlines that the Church is correct in stating that the moral law against molestation is a “natural law”, one written in the hearts of man and understandable even without revelation.