HEY! I Said It First...

From HERE: "But the second and deeper response is Christianity itself, at the core of which is a radical refusal to force anyone to do anything." (Tip o' the hat to Vox for leading me there.)

BUT!

I said this the other day. Well... sort of.

From the comments on this thread HERE:

"What kind of vacuous nonsense is this? "Freedom" is a will-o-wisp, chasing it leads to death - which is why the libertarian philosophy is just as insidious a poison as Marxism." ---- Bill

"No moreso than how God set up salvation according to the Bible.

After all, God gives us the freedom to choose self-destruction all we want." --- Michael Maier

Now...

Mind you, I'm an agnostic. But I still think about this stuffis.

I simply don't get why some Christians think it's their place to force anyone to do anything. If God is willing to let me live or die as I please, wouldn't a Christian trying to force me to do anything be claiming a power that their God doesn't even claim as his?

Just thinking out loud. Some more thoughts from that same link:

"Convinced that the choice is solely between fundamentalism and atheism, the vast majority of believers will then be trapped perforce in the fundamentalist camp. Given the ubiquity of faith, given the absence of any civilization in human history that has been free of it, given the evolutionary and biological inclination toward faith, given the respect that a man even as rational as Einstein paid to the "veneration" of the force beyond all of us, your project is absurdly utopian. And like many utopians, you may, I fear, be making hell on earth more likely.

I say this not as a form of prescience but as a matter of hindsight. Although no genuine human civilization has been built on non-faith, in the last couple of centuries, several experiments in atheist and rationalist government were indeed carried out. You may recall the guillotine - synonymous with the dawn of the rational Enlightenment. Religion was also extirpated by force in the Soviet Union and Communist China; it was coopted by the state in Nazi Germany; in Pol Pot's Cambodia, the record of atheism in contrast with religion is quite clear. Atheism will never occur spontaneously among humans in large numbers. But when it has been imposed by force, it has been one of the most violent, evil and destructive forces in human history. Religion has a bloody past that I do not begin to deny. Fundamentalist atheism's is bloodier."

I think that may be because atheists think humans (and their systems/societies) are perfectible. They ain't.

But because elitist atheists are CONVINCED that theirs is the only right way, they'll go to any extreme to try and force their worldview into existence. (Why else try to get religious instruction of children defined as "abuse"? They cry about intolerant Christians but look at the lawsuits filed by atheists. They're more intolerant than anyone. Except the damn Jews. Reminds me of the "New York, New York" parody I thought up once: "Start killing the Jews... I'm starting today...". Ha! Good times... good times... but I digress.)

You can see this elitist attitude throughout 20th century history. No Communist country could have allowed its population to voluntarily choose whether or not to participate. Too many would have chosen themselves over the group.

But in a free country, citizens are free to form co-ops for themselves. No force needed to make the system work.

Eh. Just some typing out loud here...