Too many Americans compare this country to others. It's especially ironic when Christians do it. Proudly hold ourselves out to the world as a standard to pursue while we do many of the things that we criticize others for. Can anyone honestly deny that the political process today is any cleaner than most countries' processes? We criticize China for its police-state tactics while we allow drug cops to smash in someone's door at 2AM over a few joints worth of pot. Violent extremism? Quite obviously to any sane person. How about our much vaunted first amendment which is restricted by speech codes, zones and bills like McCain-Feingold? Don't forget the sneering at the "robotic communist societies" while we allowed officious bureaucrats to micromanage our society.
What we have become is a nation of pharisees. We used to be the tax collector who stood outside the temple and said "Lord, forgive me, for I am a sinner." We were free because we were focused on America, the land of the free. Now, we're the pharisee in the temple talking up ourselves and how we're not scum, oppressed and all that jazz like them. Many, maybe most, Americans' national pride regard the majority of the world the way that Canadians' often regard America. "We're better than you because we're not like you." I can't tell whether that makes our hole in the ground that we've been digging look even deeper or whether it just means that Canada has been digging overtime and is now looking back up at us.
So what if America is better than other countries? Will we not as a nation be held to our own account by God for what we have done? It is not enough to be different by degree. A robber has no moral authority over a murderer. Stop telling the rest of the world to live until we can say that America is genuinely, undeniably an unfettered, free country like what we had when our founders were still alive.
Wow, Mike.
What brought this on?
I'm not arguing with you.
We have become too much like the Pharisees.
Just wondering what triggered it.
Mike (sorry for posting this here, I didn't have an email address for you),
Just saw the comment on my site; sorry SourceForge is giving you problems.
If you still want to join the DGoS lists, post a comment on my site or send a mail to the address attached and I'll add you to the mailing list.
/tma
Roland,
It was reflection about a discussion on another blog. Conservatives, obviously, tend to be the ones who make me start to think along these lines.
Conservative and Fundamental seem to go hand in hand a lot.
When did the letter of the law become more important that the spirit of the law?
Actually, I think it's more about conservatism and just being a controlling ass. A lot of them in my experience aren't even religious. They just want the semblance of goodness without any of the work.
Good points, Mike. The irony of the comparison should not be lost, either.
Yeshua told people (Matt. 23:2) that the "scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat", so therefore, "whatsoever [Moses] bid you observe, [that] observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not."
We have (OK, had...) a Constitution, which rejected "democracy" and instituted a "republican form of government". Today, we ignore both the laws of God, and our own; we wage pre-emptive wars to spread demon-ocracy without even bothering to declare them.
The worst irony, IMO, Mark, is that these are often the same people who preach moral principles and absolutes along with personal responsibility. Yet this is a blatant cop out. It's nothing more than a half-assed way to try to weasle out of admitting that this country is increasingly becoming the very monster that it used to oppose.
See, I think that most Americans don't give foreigners enough credit. They don't have to try to hard to see what's up in our country. We have tons of stuff that they can catch up online with. They see all of these petty restrictions going on, and then juxtapose them with our rhetoric. I think they hate us for our violent hypocrisy. We tell them off, invade them, force them to be like us and condescend to them about how we're free and they're not. Can't blame most of them for despising the Jacksonian populists like the Bush supporters who are always lookin for a fight.
Most Americans' (and most everyone else's) patriotism is simply a self-centered geographical accident. It truly runs no deeper than "America is the best nation in the world because I was born here."
Face it, we're no different than any other people: we're just frogs in water who, because our forefathers were wise, have started on the road to totalitarianism further back than the rest of the developed world. But we're doing our darnedest to catch up.
El Borak,
Reminds me of Homer Simpson: "USA!! USA!! USA!!"
I've noticed that people tend to mistake the trappings of wealth for freedom. It's not until they face very serious confrontations with the government that they actually start to realize what we "whacko libertarians" mean when we talk about things like freedom of association.
"I’ve noticed that people tend to mistake the trappings of wealth for freedom."
Actually, they're happy to forego the latter so long as they can maintain the illusion of the former.
Hey man, good post. El Borak has a good point. Wealth, and the illusion of personal freedom via wealth, has become the new opiate of the masses. On a side tangent, I've been reading a lot about world travel and how to do it cheaply. One author's musings touched on the fact that through packaged vacation advertisement, "keeping up with the Joneses," and the lie of material wealth = happiness, many modern Americans are truly more enslaved to money and time than were our colonial forebearers. We've given up our minds. If we are wealthy and happy, than who cares about "rights" and "freedoms" right? The goverment hardly has to sneak anymore. So much of freedoms are being lost in broad daylight.
Hey Jason! Long time, man. Yeah, we are increasingly enslaved to wealth, but a lot of that comes from our "dishonest weights and measures." Our economy is perpetually stuck in the rut it's in because we went off the gold standard and now it's entirely feasible to create the facade that it can keep working. We pay at least 28% of our wealth in taxes every year. You know as well as I do, that as long as our currency isn't fixed and we're taxed like that, that people will be increasingly greedy with the money they are allowed to keep.