Positive Liberty

At least he did in Book IV, Chapter 20 of Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion.” I am aware of one passage from other commentaries of Calvin’s on Romans 13 which teaches something slightly different. I’ll deal with that later. I’m basing this claim entirely on Calvin’s teachings in Institutes.

His teachings there could not have been clearer. Based on them, the Declaration of Independence is a 100% anti-Calvinist document; that is, if “Calvinism” stopped with Calvin.

Arguably it didn’t. Later “Calvinists” like Samuel Rutherford and Philippe de Mornay, apparently (and for obvious reasons) not satisfied having to live out Calvin’s teachings on submitting to political tyranny, made the most out of Calvin’s idea of “interposition,” and expanded it in the “living” philosophical sense (i.e., “living Calvinism,” “living Constitutionalism,” etc.), such that results could be achieved of which Calvin himself would not have approved.

Though I’m less familiar with their works than I am Calvin’s, they still, like Calvin, stopped short of approving of “revolt.” Rather, if the King violated the law, since “law was King,” we could follow the law not the unlawful actions of a King. That’s what Rutherford taught in Lex Rex. That’s NOT what Calvin taught. And even Rutherford’s more generous (than Calvin’s) teachings do not countenance revolt. Continue Reading »

This Texas Controversy compounded with the years of meticulous study I’ve done on religion & the American Founding got me thinking about what K-12 students should be taught.

The problem is history is complex and there are great complex nuances to the religion & the American Founding issue. Given rational fear of K-12 historical ignorance I conclude we should be concerned they learn 1) raw facts, and 2) narratives both sides should be able to agree on, narratives “experts” like me might find too simple, but K-12 students might not.

Issues such as “was George Washington a Christian?” compounded with “what is the proper definition of Christian and does orthodox Trinitarian doctrine have anything to do with it?” are WAY beyond the call of what K-12 students should be expected to understand. Rather, we should expect them to be able to accurately recite who were the first X Presidents, what dates did they take office, where were they born and so on. Continue Reading »

Feral Genius, Jennifer Abel has an infuriating rant at the Guardian about an Arizona woman who was kicked out of her house for using solar panels and an icebox, running afoul of codes requiring her to have real electricity and a refrigerator.

“We explained to her that the [solar] panels weren’t enough to sustain a quality of life there,” Avondale’s code enforcement manager said.

Well, sure, who better to determine whether your quality of life is sustainable than someone who isn’t you?

Or as Jennifer says,

When you’re worried about someone’s quality of life, adding them to the ranks of the homeless might not be the best way to improve it, but it’s close enough for government work.

Let’s take a look at this latest update to the market vs. government tote board shall we?

• Market: Make it possible for someone to live a comfortable life more frugally.
• Government: Kick someone out of their home for trying to live more frugally.

.

Well, I guess the liberals are right that government can correct the market’s errors.

Check it out here. Money quote:

Brayton called that interpretation “profoundly contrary to the historical record.”

“John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote the Federalist Papers to explain each and every provision of the Constitution to a population that was overwhelmingly Christian and convince them to vote for it. If they could have pointed to biblical sources for those provisions, that would have been a very powerful argument in favor of ratification. Yet not once is the Bible mentioned anywhere in those 85 essays. And not once, according to the notes of those in attendance, was the Bible ever referenced at the constitutional convention in Philadelphia to justify a concept or provision,” according to Brayton.

I’ve been researching the religion of notable Founding Father William Livingston, a signer of the Constitution and former governor of New Jersey. In my last post on the matter, I noted Livingston slammed the Athanasian creed — the quintessential Trinitarian creed which the unitarians of America’s Founding era criticized.

Researching the matter further, I came across Livington’s personal Thirty Nine Articles on religion which again slammed the Athanasian creed (and thereby the Trinity). Those and Livington’s other writings found in the Independent Reflector can be found in this book. Continue Reading »

My co-blogger at Positive Liberty, D.A. Ridgely, was on top of this first.

Here is the New York Times story.

And here is Ed Brayton’s post with links to the Texas Freedom Network’s live blogging.

And here is John Fea’s post.

From the New York Times: Continue Reading »

The conservative bloc of the Texas Board of Education has approved some 160 revisions to the state’s social studies curriculum by a vote of 11 to 4.

As further proof that libertarianism belongs to neither Team Red nor Team Blue, and notwithstanding dubious historical, legal and religious claims the Board has insisted upon, I’m pleased to see there’s some good news in the approved curriculum, too. To wit:

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

Also, the Times reports:

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has been diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

Let’s have a round of applause for the digital age!

A commenter named “Rap” — who apparently has Christian Nationalist sympathies — left the following comment at Positive Liberty:

Here’s a thought, why not let the founders speak for them selves? Why should one “expert” or another edit what they actually said? Oh, I know…because it doesn’t fit in the elitist progressive agenda. After all they know more about the founders than the founders did of themselves. For example George Washington said to his mother after a big battle at fort Necessity and a new appointment:”The God to whom you commended me, madam, when I set out upon a more perlious errand, defended me from harm, and I trust He will do so now. Do not you?” Oops! The ACLU is going to be all over him! Wait…he’s dead. So I guess they will just keep hiding what he and the other founders said from our children!

I responded, yes by all means, let the Founders speak for themselves. Not phony “experts” like David Barton or Peter Marshall. Or this commenter him or herself. The quotation s/he tried to pass is nowhere to be found in Washington’s official writings. Continue Reading »

I finally made my way over to the David Library in Washington’s Crossing (not too far from where I live). I think one reason why I haven’t been spending more time there is so much of what I am looking for is available online.

If you are looking for newish stuff, then copyright law prevents complete free access. However, given the late 18th, early 19th Century is “public domain,” the originals from that period are freely available.

For instance, at the library I found a letter from William Livingston, Governor of New Jersey (1776–1790) during the American Revolutionary War and a signer of the United States Constitution, where he seems to deny the Trinity to the very orthodox Jediah Morse. Continue Reading »

Okay, I probably shouldn’t join in with the crowd that attaches President Obama’s name to any and every noun/adjective, but his name just lends itself to it so well. Anyway…

Obama has plans to pressure companies with government contracts to increase wages. According to the New York Times article about 25% of Americans work for such companies, and Obama sees this as a means of lifting American incomes.

My first thought was that this was very much like Hoover encouraging companies to keep wages and prices up during the Depression, and Tabarrok’s first criticism is right along that point.

At a time of 10% unemployment when real wages need to fall this is bad business cycle policy.*

But he has another, more serious, concern as well.

I am more worried, however, about the long term consequences of creating a dual labor market in which insiders with government or government-connected jobs are highly paid and secure while outsiders face high unemployment rates, low wages and part-time work without a career path…

Moreover, once an economy is in the insider-outsider equilibrium it’s very difficult to get out because insiders fear that they will lose their privileges with a deregulated labor market and outsiders focus their political energy not on deregulating the labor market but on becoming insiders… Many European economies found themselves stuck in the insider-outsider equilibrium and as a result unemployment levels in places like France and Italy hovered at 9% or more for decades.

Officially, President Obama has a Council of Economic Advisers, which at this point sounds about as influential as a Council of Ethical Advisers would have been for Uncle Joe Stalin.

*Brad DeLong disagrees with this point, arguing that instead demand needs to rise. Of course cost and demand are pretty closely related, eh?

The culprits are Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, Dan Kennedy, assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, and David Limbaugh, writer, author, attorney, and brother of Rush.

First, at CPAC, Pawlenty declared: Continue Reading »

At American Creation, Tom Van Dyke has a post that features a letter of WILLIAM E. CHANNING, Minister of the Church of Christ in Federal Street, Boston (one of the most notable American Unitarians of that era) to TO THE REV. SAMUEL C. THACHER, circa 1815.

The perennial question is whether “unitarianism” (the name of the theology) or “Unitarianism” (the name of the Churches) qualifies as “Christianity” as it claimed it did.

From Rev. Channing’s letter, what it isn’t: Continue Reading »

During America’s Founding era, and today, “Christianity” and “Deism” didn’t have univocal meanings, part of what makes the “Christian Nation” debate tough but interesting.

A friend emailed arguing for a broader definition of “Deism.” Indeed, scholars have used terms like “warm Deism,” or “Providential Deism” to describe the religion of Washington, Franklin, etc.

Thomas Jefferson, from what little he wrote on Deism, seemed to endorse a very broad understanding of Deism, that is belief in one God. He wrote of the “Deism” of the Jews.

In an 1803 letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Jefferson wrote: Continue Reading »

At American Creation, Tom Van Dyke asks them. Of them:

—And the old standby, What is “Christian?” Can you be “Christian” if you believe the Bible is the direct Word of God? If you believe Jesus is the Messiah, although not the Second Person of the Holy Trinity?
—And who decides the answer to this question? Trinitarian clergy? Theologians? Sociologists? Historians?

—Was there a God of the Founding?
—Was His name Providence?
—Is this “theism,” or is “theism” just a slippery term for what is the uniquely monotheistic, providential Creator-God who endowed men with certain unalienable rights, one who is unmistakably “Judeo-Christian,” at least compared to all of man’s other gods?
—What might Judeo-Christian mean? Anything? Everybody seems to know what it means, so does that mean anything?

Continue Reading »

Check out her latest Huffington Post entry here.

A taste:

On October 25, 2008, I attended a presentation given by Barton. After his presentation, I approached him and gave him a copy of my book, Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History, a book debunking many of his lies, as well as those of a number of his fellow revisionists.

On January 16, 2009, I became the subject of a segment on Barton’s WallBuilders LIVE! radio show, in which he lied about me, my book, and our encounter at his presentation.

Rather than just write about the lies Barton told about me on his show, I decided to make a little video with iMovie, something I’ve never tried to do before. I ended up getting a bit carried away, making a video that’s over an hour long, but once I got started, I wanted to address not just the lies Barton told about me on his show, but also the lies he told in the presentation I attended. Continue Reading »

Check it out here.

A taste:

Conservative Christian authors such as David Barton, Peter Marshall Jr., and Tim LaHaye contend that most of the founders were devout Christians who sought to establish a Christian nation. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore in “The Godless Constitution” and Brooke Allen in “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers” counter that very few founders were orthodox Christians. They and others often generalize from famous founders, such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine, to argue that most founders were deists who wanted strict separation of church and state.

The truth lies between these two positions. Continue Reading »

According to a class action complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Lower Merion School District issued laptop computers equipped with webcams on a one to one basis to all high school students. Unbeknown to students or their families, the school district had and used:

… the capability to remotely activate the embedded webcam at any time the school district wished to intercept images from that webcam of anyone or anything appearing in front of the camera at the time of the activation.

On November 11, 2009, Plaintiffs were for the first time informed of the above-mentioned capability and practice by the School District when … an Assistant Principal at Harriton High School informed minor Plaintiff that the school was of the belief that minor Plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor Plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the School District.

[Emphasis added.]

This is, of course, only one side of the story. If, however, the plaintiff’s allegations are true, this outrage constitutes perhaps the most egregious recent example of the incipient police state America is increasingly becoming.

Indeed, the fact that this school official, that any public school official would think it permissible to surveil student’s homes — where, if any reader has any doubt whatsoever, both the student and other family members unquestionably have a reasonable expectation of privacy — and, further, to think the practice is so unobjectionable that he would freely admit to photographing allegedly “improper behavior in [the student's] home” to attempt to discipline that student for conduct inside his home is simply breathtaking.

How many other school systems across the country, I wonder, are engaged this very minute in the very same practice?

And since, presumably, they are surveilling minors whose laptops could well be sitting open in their bedrooms as they dress or undress, etc., how many of these school officials could and should be charged with criminal possession of child pornography?

(H/T to Boing Boing.)

Check out Dr. John Fea’s reaction to David Barton’s appearance on the Mike Huckabee show. Dr. Fea writes: Continue Reading »

Thomas Frank has a column with the Wall Street Journal. In one of his recent editorials, Frank suggested that antigovernment forces have eroded trust in government. Therefore, our real problems, economic and otherwise, are due to this lack of trust in the beneficent power of the bureaucracy.

Bruised by the backlash, President Barack Obama came before the nation last month to address the problem. “We face a deficit of trust,” Mr. Obama observed in his State of the Union address, “deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years.”

But what will the president do to assuage those doubts? In his speech, he mentioned a crackdown on earmarks, implementing government transparency measures, and banning lobbyists from his administration’s high positions. They are all good and necessary reforms, of course. But one suspects they will do little to allay the grandiose fears of the broader antigovernment set.

Having identified the alleged problem, Frank set forth an extraordinarily audacious solution… Continue Reading »

University of Colorado history professor Paul Harvey gives his thoughts on the recent New York Times article about the Texas schoolbook controversy (his post kindly links to one of my posts).

A taste:

… Shorto covers the strategy of the Houston dentist Don McLeroy and other board members who are seeking “transformational change outside of the public gaze,” meaning that the real war will be conducted in private with textbook publishers who have to take these general standards and condense them down into textbook bite-sized chunks.

Their model is based on their previous assault on the state educational science standards — failing to get in their intelligent design theories, they managed to get textbooks to incorporate language about the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution as a possible “inroads to creationism.” In their view, there has been a secularist conspiracy among experts to suppress “truth” in both science and history. Evidently, biology and history professors are united in an alliance to lead schoolchildren down the path of destruction, while the Texas activists seek “an uncovering of truths that have been suppressed.” (My blog co-editor Randall Stephen’s forthcoming book The Annointed: America’s Evangelical Experts discusses the history of this idea, and the creation of an entirely separate evangelical intellectual universe, with great skill).