Question Details	Asked By	Asked On
Well, that stopped the clock, but, now for a serious question ...	Erewhon	10/23/05
As a Christian or any kind of believer, "Do you believe that your first duty is to your God or to the President/ruler of your nation, and what do you do if you truly believe that your President/ruler is not doing God's will in something? Who do you choose - God or the President/ruler" Please - no lists of names! The witch hunt is temporarily on hold.
Clarification/Follow-up by Erewhon on 10/24/05 4:06 am: "Politics is based in reality ... " Whose reality? "Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." George Orwell Oh, THATreality! Arristotle frequently compares the politician to a craftsman. The analogy is imprecise because politics, in the strict sense of legislative science, is a form of practical wisdom or prudence, but valid to the extent that the politician produces, operates, and maintains a legal system according to universal principles, but according to whose universal principles? The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is now widely regarded as one of a handful of truly great political philosophers, whose masterwork Leviathan rivals in significance the political writings of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls. Hobbes is famous for his early and elaborate development of what has come to be known as “social contract theory”, the method of justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreement that would be made among suitably situated rational, free, and equal persons. He is infamous for having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute -- undivided and unlimited -- sovereign power. "Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law, and on the basis of a correct conception of the human person.... " Nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and skeptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life. Those who are convinced that they know the truth and firmly adhere to it are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view, since they do not accept that truth is determined by the majority, or that it is subject to variation according to different political trends. But, if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism." (see GW Bush) --John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, 1991, The postulate of the reflection of the ascendancy of democracy on the classical treatises about tyranny in political philosophy -- those of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Cicero, Augustine, and Aquinas -- is that a new form of tyranny is developed in the late twentieth century. This contemporary form is post-classical as well as post-Marxist and post-fascist, albeit with grounding in classical, medieval, and modern theory. The location of modern tyranny is not, as in the classics, in the disordered soul of one or a few members of a ruling body. Rather it is located in the many, in the democratic form of rule itself and how it is understood. The problem, furthermore, is not exactly what we have come to call in the twentieth century "totalitarianism". The reason for this difference is that totalitarianism, though it had roots in will, was, though sometimes even popular, something imposed, a product of aberrant political art and enforced upon on a people contrary to their full understanding and choice. Totalitarianism usually had the connotation of "brainwashing" and coerced consent, of Rousseau's "being forced to be free" (see Iraq). Ironically, democracy in its modern usage has been most often proposed as the best regime, as the one form of rule that would most likely prevent this very tyranny or totalitarianism, but, that this is not always so, is easily seen. As for 'reality' itself, that is a thing of no substance, an imaginary thing, which each person according to their personal perspective grasps as being the truth and insists that each individual's 'reaity' is the reality for the whole world when it cannot be so. That is not 'reality,' that is delusion. You say that I am deluded, and I say that you are deluded. Now what?
Answered By		Answered On
LTgolf		10/23/05
Ronnie I can only answer this by saying,,, I did not think we should have been in Vietnam but when I was called I went. The contious objectors and cowards took another route. There were those that claimed they didnt believe in violence, one of these was Cassious Clay, who made a living beating people half to death. Go figure. Also, the only reason why I listed names befor was because excon want that. Leon

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