Thursday, June 24, 2010

Atheism is No Requirement

"...Parenthetically, I am getting tired of the offhanded smearing of religion that has long been endemic to the libertarian movement. Religion is generally dismissed as imbecilic at best, inherently evil at worst.
The greatest and most creative minds in the history of mankind have been deeply and profoundly religious, most of them Christian. It is not necessary to be religious to come to grips with that fact. Speaking in Mr. Water's pragmatic bailiwick, we libertarians will never win the hearts and minds of Americans or of the rest of the world if we persist in wrongly identifying libertarianism with atheism.
If even Stalin couldn't stamp out religion, libertarians are not going to succeed with a few Randian syllogisms."
-Murry N. Rothbard

This just made me chuckle, so I figured it was worth reposting.

3 comments:

Solameanie said...

Probably worth pointing out that atheist leaders like Stalin and Mao were horrible butchers of their own people.

BTW, I see that the "randy" Oriental is back posting again. I finally had to enable comment moderation. The jerks.

RobertDWood said...

They did set new records for brutality, those two.

I don't like comment moderation, so I'm just going to keep deleting nonsense like that when it crops up.

Gino said...

i was forced to go to moderation. i didnt want to.

liberatrian minds know that liberty can only be viable when behavorial responsibilty is part of the mix.
belief is a higher moral authority, religion , God, whatever, can only aid in this respect.
without such, man becomes his own God, and his claim to liberty is only as strong as his ability to defend his own from outside forces. he loses any moral argument of liberty being the birthright blessings of the Higher Power.

at this point, he ceases to be a libertarian and is not much more than an animal acting upon libertine instincts.

and libertarianism is not consistent with libertinism.