O
otrrl
Guest
At first glance it would seem that raising the topic of slavery is very out of date, but, in fact, it is always very timely.
The problem is that society in various ways tries to impose the will of a few upon the many, and that any such imposition is always a threat to liberty, one of those three things that the Declaration of Independence says are inalienable (or, unalienable, I can never get that right).
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are very intertwined.
Catholics will or should see the threats to “life” because they are starting to be or already have been very serious – abortion, infanticide, so-called euthanasia. These have been practiced for a long time inn human history.
We see serious threats to liberty, over and above the very threats to life. We should recognize and respond to the new threats to liberty (and obviously religious liberty) in the social media, where the word “viral” took on an entirely new sinister meaning. And, in the area of raw liberty – liberty in general – there is a strong impulse for informal laws of political correctness to be formalized into hate crime legislation. The question being who has the power to define what hate is?
That is what I see as a threat to impose a new form of slavery, where the government seeks the ownership of body, mind, and soul – in a word, slavery all over again. At the outset and in the final analysis, the issue revolves around whether one has the right to choose our form and object of slavery (e.g. Paul or James, servants or slaves of Jesus Christ)) or whether people have no choice at all of servitude to a totalitarian regime, which treats its population as a herd to be managed.
The problem is that society in various ways tries to impose the will of a few upon the many, and that any such imposition is always a threat to liberty, one of those three things that the Declaration of Independence says are inalienable (or, unalienable, I can never get that right).
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are very intertwined.
Catholics will or should see the threats to “life” because they are starting to be or already have been very serious – abortion, infanticide, so-called euthanasia. These have been practiced for a long time inn human history.
We see serious threats to liberty, over and above the very threats to life. We should recognize and respond to the new threats to liberty (and obviously religious liberty) in the social media, where the word “viral” took on an entirely new sinister meaning. And, in the area of raw liberty – liberty in general – there is a strong impulse for informal laws of political correctness to be formalized into hate crime legislation. The question being who has the power to define what hate is?
That is what I see as a threat to impose a new form of slavery, where the government seeks the ownership of body, mind, and soul – in a word, slavery all over again. At the outset and in the final analysis, the issue revolves around whether one has the right to choose our form and object of slavery (e.g. Paul or James, servants or slaves of Jesus Christ)) or whether people have no choice at all of servitude to a totalitarian regime, which treats its population as a herd to be managed.