We are having a discussion at Talk Polywell and as usual things are getting interesting.
Commenter hanelyp says in part:
As for the value of religion, a successful religion embraces memes that promote survival and expansion of the people. Religions embracing memes contrary to survival adapt or die. Protestant Christianity, so influential in the US for many years, is an amazing success judged by the prosperity of the people who followed it. And now that the US is turning away from those values, it and the world that so greatly prospered by indirect blessings are facing a very great spot of “bad luck”.
Here is what I had to say (revised and extended):
Well not exactly. But it is close. The memes that the US prospered under were:
1. Small limited government
2. Government functions handled as locally as possible
3. Leave people to their own devices
4. Individual morality is an individual concern
5. Harming yourself may be a sin – it is not a government concern
6. Only crime (directly harming others) is a government concern
We now of course have government on the Catholic model.
1. Top down
2. Sin is a government concern
3. The individual must be controlled for the greater good – it takes a village – actually it takes a nation
The Catholic model is socialism. The Protestant model is liberty. In a sense we are all Catholics now.
The youth are rejecting religion for that very reason. The Catholic model is stifling. It is an end to progress. I suppose that is why the Catholic strain calls itself “progressive” these days. NewSpeak.
Here is where the Republicans go wrong as recounted in a comment from a post entitled College Republicans latest to issue warnings for party’s future.
rossj503
The thing is that I have friends that are on all sides of the spectrum politically. I am a fairly conservative person. The GOP has caught themselves in a trap of using social issues to bolster their numbers. If Republicans would get out of the social issue morality game, more and more people would align themselves with Republicans. But that seems really difficult for them to do.
I think the tendency to socialism and top down control is the reason that Catholics were so distrusted in our early history. The people of those generations knew socialism when they saw it.
All humans have a common morality. That morality is anti-force and anti-fraud. And of course tort law for negligence. But that is about it.
We used to put up with quite a bit of inconvenience for the sake of liberty.
So what have we gotten with all these laws against sin? We have lost considerable liberty. We are well on the way to a police state. And sin is as prevalent as ever. A net loss.
I’d say we are due for a Reformation. The Libertarians Are Coming.
Update: 14 December 2013 0158z
I’m not the only one that thinks the Catholics have a problem with liberty.
Comments
10 responses to “We Have Picked The Wrong Religion”
And Mikey Huckaboobie just quit his gig at Fox to run for presidente. Hackjob represents absolutely every effing thing I hate about Repugnicans – a big government socialist religious whack job. I hope he gets slam dunked in the primaries.
Do you know why there is a southern babtiste and southern methodist church as well as babtiste and methodist church ;but no southern catholic church ?
Because it’s one unified papist Roman church instead of a lot of more or less independent protestant churches, you drooling leftist fool. Do you know what the term “dissenting protestant” means? BTW, do you know that there are 4 popes in the world, and can you name their denominations?
It’s not merely Catholicism versus Protestantism. The founding principles of the country were those of the Anglo-Saxons specifically. America was a WASP country. The rot began when the Germans were allowed in, and then the Irish. hbd chick has a lot of posts on Anglo-Saxon culture versus other cultures. She’s worth a read.
http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/
I’m halfway through The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought(2002) by Jerry Muller. The overriding theme in the chapters on Voltaire and Adam Smith is that citizens in a market economy are socialized to be law abiding, productive citizens primarily because they have to work to survive, and working forces them to be sociable. You generally can’t keep a job if you’re a dick or a criminal. So, if government handouts reduce the need to work to survive, we’ll end up with more dicks and criminals.
bob,
I think you’ve got some idealized Anglo-Saxon culture in mind, not the actual Puritan and Cavalier cultures that landed in America. Progressivism and Slavery were their respective ideals, and Progressivism still is today for the New England-derived culture of the Northeast and Pacific Northwest.
Meanwhile, it’s the Germans and Scots-Irish that stand for the old Republican values…
The reason we don’t have a southern catholic church is that it was strong enough to oppose slavery. The southern babtiste and methodist churchs were formed in the south to support slavery when the babtiste and methodist churches said slavery was evil!
“Anglo-Saxons specifically. America was a WASP country.”
In England the viking north is more socialist than the anglo-saxon south. There does seem to be some correlation here.
I think the reason catholic immigrants weren’t trusted is because they were perceived as having a first loyalty to the pope. Hatred of papists runs deep in the English working class even now. (John Derbyshire has written about his leftist father’s attitude towards Catholics)It’s nothing unique to the USA. I don’t think objection to centralized government is a particularly protestant characteristic. Prots were able to come up with such wonderful ideas as prohibition and war on (some) drugs.