The Reformation, while feeding the concept of natural rights (which many see as eventually leading to much of what girds the spirit of the US’s founding fathers), also succored its antithesis. For while natural rights flow from natural law which is a byproduct of the Enlightened view of natural order (part and parcel of the Deist clockworks), it also brought to our shores the narrow minded intolerance of the Puritans, whose a priori view of the universe is still a curse on these shores.

To make matters worse, the unwashed masses confuse the concept of divine authority to engage willy-nilly in any activity they wish, with serious the jurisprudential questions. Of course there is a long history of the abuse of such confusion, as we see in the concept that a king is the annointed of the gods, or even that the individual is the annointed of the gods (in both cases authority flows from Zeus’ head as it were, not as a matter of human construction.)

Modern jurisprudence is not founded upon lighting bolts and plagues; as Professor Hohfeld noted a century ago, it is founded on a matrix of reciprocity – or as early British law put it, there is no right without a remedy.  And so here we have from one perspective the chasm that in part divides ‘Mirka.  On the one hand is a religious conviction which brooks no debate, while on the other we have a communitarian effort at managing all resources to everyone’s benefit.

Photo by Dara Ahrens

The crux of the antagonism, then, is the belief that anyone proposing legal guidelines that are inconsistent with Graham Crackers’ belief in what his deity intended is condemning one and all to unlawful acts in the eyes of that deity, with the likelihood of real time retribution (as in the water is rising because so is the amount of butt-fucking.) And this is where the Puritans enter, Stage Left, not because they were seeking individual religious freedom, but because they were seeking to create Sidney’s republic of saints. [And here we can note the nominal value Steve Salaita could have brought to UICU, the comparison of the “zionism” of the US with that of Israel, however defective his thesis may be.]

There is little to be gained in argumentation here. The ‘godly’ may from time to time deign to suggest that this or that policy is or is not acceptable to their mightiness (it would be difficult to attack Christians here as sole offenders as even Christian are hard put nowadays to agree on what a Christian is, and Christians are not the only ones whose deity is apparently ignoring the admonition of one purported prophet, to render unto temporal authority that which is of the temporal authority, lol) while the ungodly try to juggle the demands of billions of semi-sentient creatures, millions of whom are stomping their feet and screaming, “Me! Mine! More!”