Progressive — another word for inhumane communist.
It assumes that we somehow are better than mankind was thousands of years ago. So much does this view pervade our society it becomes necessary to produce a whole library of work to counteract the big lie, and show, not only has mankind not progressed at all, but is fully incapable of it. Civilization has not risen from height to height, but has declined deeper and deeper. Each wave in the cycle is more pedestrian and empty. All it takes is a few years of reading the great works of the past translated from ancient tongues. Even then, you still have to show how the very frame of reference itself as declined, and we hardly understand greatness itself. A fool measures wise people against his folly.
Even the relatively small shift from our nation’s founding on the fervor of the Enlightenment to the current Progressive humanism is painfully obvious to those who bother to look.
By rejecting the existence of natural rights, accordingly, the Progressives consciously repealed this limit: “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” Merriam observed, “but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle…. Each specific question must be decided on its own merits, and each action of the state justified, if at all, by the relative advantages of the proposed line of conduct.” In devising the content of the law, legislators need not worry about respecting the individual’s natural right to rule himself, because “there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way.”
Look where it has brought us:
In other words: when we decide that an American citizen is Guilty of Terrorism, there is no need for a trial, or due process, or even any public presentment of evidence. It suffices that we have concluded this in secret, with no checks or external review. Once we decide that, the death penalty is imposed and we will execute it ourselves. We are literally Judge, Jury and Executioner. And, despite the fact that we have been continuously wrong in our accusations of Terrorism and have even knowingly imprisoned innocent people, you’ll just take our word for it, on blind faith, that the citizen we want to kill is really an Evil Terrorist. Yes, it’s true that you refused to accept that same rationale when the Bush administration used it merely to eavesdrop on or detain American citizens — in fact, you screeched that those less extreme policies were tyranny and a shredding of the Constitution when they did it — but you should nonetheless accept this mentality when we use it to murder your fellow citizens who have never even been charged with any crime.
And that seems to be fine with our political class. All because there are a few hundred people hiding in caves in remote tribal areas who are really, really Scary: who will get you if don’t acquiesce to endless war, the transfer of enormous amounts of money to fight those wars, and the most unlimited and unchecked government powers imaginable. And even when they come right out and say that this is all about nothing more than a few hundred people — many of whom are motivated by the very violence we’re perpetrating — it changes very little. Fear is an extremely potent motivating force, overwhelming all reason and skepticism of power. That’s why political leaders — in all eras and all places — like it and use it so much.
We don’t even know half the time what our so-called Founding Fathers believed half the time. So we have these wild characterizations such as Thomas Paine as a libertarian, when the man wrote proposing the welfare state, social security, population control, etc. He was a socialist, but his ideas were couched in older terms, and the Progressives consider him rather backward. Thus, the Progressive grip on public education taints Paine as a “conservative” and only mentions stuff he said which might sound that way.
Now those things Paine suggested arise from a concern for human welfare, and that is a given. The problem is how you implement that concern, and the measures you take to provide for human life and comfort. You see, the Enlightenment presumes to take it’s ideas from the Classics — Greece, Rome and so forth at their height. If they felt like getting funky, they could add Persian and Egyptian culture, but no one seems to have much of a clue about Hebrew culture or its biblical predecessor. The Enlightenment is a rejection of the Bible and faith to begin with, so any presumption by Christians to embrace the Enlightenment means rejecting the Christ of the Bible.
Folks, ancient man did not have our technology, but it seems that lack is what prevented them from being such shallow fools as we are today. For all our modern assumption this life is all there is, does it not seem odd how life is so much cheaper to self-important government elites? Ancient man felt death was simply the world beyond, but seemed to do a much better job of treasuring life. They thought a battle was a really big thing if so much as a hundred died, but we kill thousands and never bat an eye.
