Buckley on Law and Christian Morality
From a CT interview in 1995 by Michael Cromartie:
From this it doesn’t follow that the state should make the law tougher, but rather that the culture needs to be reformed. Modifying the law is only one way, and often not the best, to do that: “...unless we create a virtuous society, it’s not a society that’s going to endure. So the right things should be encouraged and the wrong things discouraged. Today, roughly speaking, there is zero taboo against fornication.”
The whole thing is worth reading, as they say (HT).
Certain things which the market authorizes simply in terms of law are unchristian and ought not to be done. The big issue today has to do with the fidelity of marriages. The tendency now to leave your wife because you have an infatuation with a younger woman of tenderer flesh is an enormous temptation. It’s carnal, and it’s also easy to justify with all the solipsistic reasoning that we hear today. That is about the gravest offense that a human being can commit, to throw away a wife.
From this it doesn’t follow that the state should make the law tougher, but rather that the culture needs to be reformed. Modifying the law is only one way, and often not the best, to do that: “...unless we create a virtuous society, it’s not a society that’s going to endure. So the right things should be encouraged and the wrong things discouraged. Today, roughly speaking, there is zero taboo against fornication.”
The whole thing is worth reading, as they say (HT).
Comments
#1 2008-03-04 01:37 (Reply)
But isnt the “triumph” and “success” and continued “growth” of capitalism based on the fact that via the advertising industry, the former seven deadly sins have been turned into the seven cardinal virtues, and with a categorical imperative too.
Capitalism, especially as it manifests in the USA, as the fruition of “god’s” plan for human kind.
#1.1 2008-03-04 16:01 (Reply)
No, it probably has more to do with the fact that capitalist societies can produce enough wealth to allow a great deal more people to live at a higher standard of living than other economic systems.
That might explain it.