- EverVigilant.net - "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." - John Philpot Curran
Bojidar Marinov, who took part in the forming of the Libertarian movement in his native Bulgaria, explains why he could not be a libertarian without Christ:
When a dear friend of mine shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with me, he knew nothing of my intellectual struggles. There was one thing that caught my attention that night when he talked to me about his faith: "You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free." And then Jesus adds: "And if the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed."
There was the solution to my problem! I was blind to search for an impersonal Truth, an inexorable, merciless entity that holds the universe in an iron grip. And I was blind to search for Freedom that was focused on myself so much that would make the rest of the world irrelevant -- and make me irrelevant in the process. Truth was possible to know only if it was itself a Person; and Freedom was possible to have only if it was itself a Person. That Person couldn't be a mere man -- or I would be in slavery. He must be a god, or rather, God, the Creator of the Universe. And if the Bible was true, then my problems had one reason: I was a stranger to God, and thus I was a stranger to Freedom, Ethics, and Justice. I had to come back to Him, through the redemption He provided in Jesus Christ. Only then I had...everything.
If He was the Creator, He was the Truth. Knowing Him, I would know the Truth. He was Freedom too: He created my very nature and He knew what I should do to be in harmony with my real nature. And He was Justice for He gave me the rules for a just society that has liberty and justice for all. What all the philosophers wanted but couldn't find, He had it, and He was it.
Therefore I couldn't be a libertarian without Christ. I tried, and it was impossible -- philosophically and ethically. It was self-contradictory, it was against the very nature of things, and it was believing in a set of assumptions that had no discernible connection with reality or with each other. Only in Christ I had them all brought together in a coherent whole. And only in Christ did it make sense to be willing to die for your freedom -- without Him death was the ultimate judge of things, and slavery was preferable to facing death. "Give me liberty or give me death" was folly in a world without Christ -- but now it is divine wisdom in Him.
It used to be that in order for a crime to have been committed one person had to willfully violate another person's right to life, liberty, or property. In other words, harm had to have been intended as well as inflicted.
Today, however, a crime is merely an action that violates any one or more of the countless arbitrary rules and regulations implemented by the state, regardless of whether or not the action in question actually brings harm to anyone. This was seen most recently in the case of Daryl Fleck, a Crookston man whose drunken driving conviction was upheld by the Minnesota State Supreme Court.
You may think you have the right to raise your children as you see fit, but you don't. Your children are property of the state, as this recent story demonstrates:
A Montgomery County couple has been arrested on child endangerment charges for failing to register their children with the school district as they were home-schooled, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office said Monday.
Richard Cressy, 47, and Margie Cressy, 41, both of the town of Glen, never registered their four children or their home-schooling curriculum with the local school district, said the Sheriff's Office.
The Superintendent of the Fonda-Fultonville Central School District, Richard Hoffman, confirmed the four children, ranging in age from 8 to 14, had not been registered with the school district for the last seven years.
"From what I can gather, it sounds like there was education going on, so I don't know if they really slipped through the cracks," Hoffman said, "[but] they didn't fulfill their legal responsibility to file with the school district to be home-schooled."
Just business as usual in this once-free nation.
The problem with compulsory education laws, like most laws in this country, is that they force otherwise law-abiding citizens into the position of having to take action in order to prevent themselves from becoming criminals. There was once a time when it had to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that one intended harm when committing a particular act. Today, that isn't good enough.
Those in government love such laws because they no longer have to prove motive. The mere act itself is criminal. The end result is that you are considered a criminal if you do not first seek the state's permission for what was once accepted as a God-given right.
