Alan: The kind of idealism that believes the world's problems can be solved by religion alone is as unhinged those fundamentalists who pray over the dead bodies of loved ones believing their prayers will be answered. In both instance, the real outcome is putrescence.
***
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” Trappist monk, Fr. Thomas Merton
More Merton Quotes
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/04/merton-best-imposed-as-norm-becomes.html
***
More Merton Quotes
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/04/merton-best-imposed-as-norm-becomes.html
***
Conservative activist Jesse Graston on Tuesday told a crowd outside the South Carolina Statehouse that the Affordable Care Act should be nullified and replaced by charity from churches.
“This is not just about a rally,” Graston, the South Carolina Coordinator of the John Birch Society, said. “This is a recruitment meeting, and I’m calling on all of you to answer the call, that the tyranny of our day has come. What will you say to your children 20 years from now when they ask you, ‘Where were you, dad, mom, when America fell — or prevailed?’”
Republican lawmakers in South Carolina are pushing legislation that seeks to block the implementation of Obamacare in that state. The South Carolina Freedom of Health Care Protection Act was passed in the state’s House of Representatives last year.
Graston said South Carolina was “leading the resistance against the abomination of the Affordable Care Act.”
Graston noted there was also going to be a pro-Obamacare rally at the South Carolina Statehouse. He said both conservatives and liberals wanted affordable health care, but differed on how to achieve that goal.
“They think it’s the duty of others to help them take care of the poor,” he remarked. “We believe that we shouldn’t take from others to help take care of the poor or to help ourself, but we follow Christ’s example.”
“He did not steal from his disciples to feed the hungry,” Graston continued. “No, he gave of his own substance to those that were in need, and I believe that as we’re saying no to the encroachments of the federal government, that we will have to stand up and the churches must take their place to take care of the needy. I’m asking as we push the government out of the way that we need to fill that vacuum and begin to see those that around us and take that initiative ourself.”
Watch video, uploaded to YouTube by Evan Mulch - http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/16/john-birch-society-activist-nullify-obamacare-and-rely-on-churches-for-health-care/