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Edited on Sun Apr-02-06 05:31 PM by KCabotDullesMarxIII
anarchy, ensued by personal, social and national anomie and breakdown.
When a society lacks a common set of beliefs, principles and standards, inevitably granted our innate defectibility, there is no commonly agreed basis for what constitutes personal responsibility. The legal system does not begin to provide a substitute.
However, the spiralling cost of government that this leads to - particularly in the US, where it is most evident, despite the high numbers of regular churchgoers, thanks to the diabolical governing class you have inherited, specifically as represented by the military-industrial complex, State Department and Pentagon - absolutely dwarfs what a welfare state on the best possible Scandinavian model would cost the taxpayer.
The Roman Catholic Church's Social Doctrine states unequivocally that Capital was made for Man, not the other way round. The Quaker economist, EF Schumacher, implicitly concurred with this in his book, Small is Beautiful, and explained the implications of this in terms of job-creation, both domestic and abroad, in terms of allocation of IMF funds, etc. When it doesn't go straight into the coffers of despots for the purchase of armaments and the "servicing" of Swiss bank accounts, it is used for the purchase of capital plant requiring fewer and fewer operatives. With the possible exception of the Swiss bank accounts, (though perhaps not currently in the US), I would think that what holds good for the aforesaid misuse of public funds by despots in the Third World, applies no less to the political hydra that governs the West.
Ironically, it was your General Douglas MacArthur and a wonderful American business consultant by the name of W. Edwards Deming, who set Japan on the road to their enormous economic success. I think the multiple of the maximum remuneration of any CEO in relation to an entry-level employee was not to be more than 12! I could be wrong, but whatever it was, it was tiny compared even to what we were paying our CEOs in the fifties. Now, in America, it’s something like 1400 times, I believe. And our rogues and vagabonds have been trying their hardest to emulate yours.
Deming assured the Japanese that indeed they could be innovative, while they were insisting that they could only copy. Among the awesomely insightful precepts he taught them, was that co-operation between employees within the company would serve them better than competition between them. But he knew it was something he couldn’t take home, as intra-company co-operation was and is so inimical to the ethos of US industry and commerce.
I read a letter in a Questions and Answers column in the Daily Mail the other day by a man who had worked for a while in a large Japanese manufacturing company, who was puzzled that he'd never seen the CEO. He asked about it one lunch time, and everyone roared with laughter. He felt embarrassed and thought they must have thought him a crawler. "This is Japan, not England", they said. The CEO was apparently the unassuming guy with the overalls and tool belt who sat next to him most meal times. He'd often made sure he'd got propery fed, etc, and he'd been puzzled that other quite lowly workers would come up to him and ask if they could borrow his car on Sunday, to which he usually consented. Yet this outrageously "commie" ethos had, it seems been introduced by MacArthur because of the outrageously feudal manner of their predecessors, who had also of course been very instrumental in stoking up Japan's imperial ambitions. Remember the principle of Communism, certainly in its most extreme form, was practised by the early Christians alluded to in the Epistles.
After WWII, a welfare state was gradually built up, with free education, skills training via apprenticeships and sandwich course at technical colleges, as well as free, academic and professional training up to the highest levels; a free National Health Service, full employment and council housing for young people who could not afford to buy. Affordable rented accommodation was also widely available.
Now, there is no atheist creed that states that these kinds of socially beneficial, national undertakings are desirable, but the right-wing, who were really Christians (albeit with some odd ideas about money and the Second Commandment) were wrong-footed by the largely atheist Socialists, since they could cite the Christian Gospel in support of their policies. It didn’t help the former that they had quite like Hitler and Mussolini pre-war, and left it rather late to confront the fascists of both countries. Even after the war, they seemed more than happy for Franco to remain in place. He provided wonderful “stability”, you know, to a troubled country (!!!). Then of course there was Portugal’s Salazar. Anyway, I digress.
Gradually, our left-wing politicians, who with very few exceptions, are all essentially right wing by nature, since they have a worldly intelligence and desire to climb the pecking order, were.. well… not so much wrong-footed by their right-wing rivals as turned by them, so that we ended up with a Labour party full of atheists, who under the aegis of Blair, have perpetrated policies Thatcher would not have dared to put forward.
Worse, the old Tory grandees who, post WWII at least, retained a genuine, if paternalistic Christian faith, somewhat eccentrically laced with cupidity, soon saw the direction in which the party was going, once Thatcher had come to power, and wanting no part of it, left it. As a result, we have been left with a rump Tory party of rogues and vagabonds who do not even have the sense to realise that, in even the most nominal democracy, it is necessary to throw a few bones to the rabble. In short, de facto atheists on both sides.
Furthering the dearest wishes of Thatcher and Major, Blair has enriched the richest section of society and the largest corporations, at the massive expense of the social and physical infrastructure of the country: the mass of the people. Now many people in their twenties and thirties, at managerial level, seem too thick to realise any of this, and probably think they’re doing quite well.
Pursuant to cheapskate government policy (the masses can go to hell), everything, including the police and the legal system, is massively under-funded, and lawlessness of every kind abounds unchecked, as never before, in my memory as a 65-year old. The fact is that poverty breeds lawlessness and violence, and when it ensues from the grand larceny from the have-nots by the haves, extreme lawlessness and extreme violence; which we now have.
Material you see and hear on the box before the watershed, would have been inconceivable in earlier decades. The same with the daily papers. People who don’t understand, or claim they don’t understand, the need for a degree of censorship of sexual matter in the media, defy belief. Now, it’s not uncommon to read of barely pubertal boys raping and sodomising pre-pubertal classmates of both sexes. It didn’t used to happen.
But not everyone who claims to be an atheist is an atheist, any more than everyone who claims to be Christian, is a Christian, however feeble. However, formal Christian teaching is needed, if the Christian grace, (however, unconscious and unacknowledged) of the good atheist, is to pass down through succeeding generations. I would think they are, themselves, preponderantly heirs of Christian education whether in the home or at school.
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