“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to carry and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
Most of us, I daresay, are thankful for the Bill of Rights. Apart from the Tenth Amendment (‘a truism’, according to the Supreme Court), and perhaps the Ninth Amendment (‘the right to choose an abortion’), we would support emphatically every right listed — except, perhaps, the Second Amendment. In these days of professional military, even the first phrase rings hollow. Is a well regulated militia really necessary to the security of a free State? Manifestly not. Clearly, by its own provisions, the Second Amendment ought to be struck down.
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1. I want a psychology centered on depravity
That is to say, when people look at the human psyche, I want the first thing they recognize to be that it’s broken and destructive. Inversely, when people think about depravity, I want them to recognize that it’s most apparent in the human psyche — our bodies in themselves don’t immediately evoke depravity; what goes on inside our heads that makes us do the things we do with our bodies does. Somewhat tangentially, I also want the church as a whole to find some way to interface its categories of mind, body, and spirit with psychological categories. I want to know how the soul relates to the superego.
Philip Hilton comments,
In Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, the age of drinking, voting, and generally coming into one’s own is 18. In America, the drinking age is 21, even though the voting age is 18. Why the difference? If you are responsible at 18 — responsible enough, apparently, to choose the government, and join the Army (e.g, die) — aren’t you responsible enough to drink?
I am writing this on the assumption that, if I asked the archetypal conservative Christian which he was more primarily, conservative or Christian, he would without hesitation answer that is he primarily a Christian. That means he’s informed by his Bible (and, if he’s a Catholic or a rare species of Protestant, his Church) before he’s informed by his party. My anathema is a reduction ad absurdum. With this religious primacy as my premise, I want to show that this is exactly what a conservative Christian is not doing – putting his Bible first – and that, in fact, “conservative” and “Christian” are irreconcilable.
