You Cannot Have a Free Society Without a Moral People

Clete

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It seems to me that if we want a society that is both free and civilized, one where we do not have to simply accept things like mass shootings of children by sexually deranged individuals seeking to go out in a blaze of shocking infamy, then we need to fix the foundation. The solution is not complicated. It is a fork with two tines.

First, we must have a moral society. An immoral people cannot be free. That is not a theory; it is a reality. The more individuals abandon internal restraint, the more external control becomes necessary. And with each new layer of control, whether through surveillance, regulation, or enforcement, freedom is diminished. A society cannot remain free unless its citizens choose to do what is right even when they are not being watched. The only alternative to self-government is state control. There is no middle ground.

Second, we must approach criminal justice from a paradigm of deterrence rather than prevention. The modern system attempts to prevent crime by making it difficult or impossible to commit one without being caught. This has led to a culture of surveillance, an endless expansion of procedural law, and a justice system that is more concerned with control than with righteousness. True justice does not come from reducing risk; it comes from instilling fear in those who contemplate evil. The law should not merely manage crime but condemn it. It should impose consequences that reflect the moral gravity of the offense. The point is not to trap the criminal, but to warn him.

The proper system would balance the influence on potential criminals from both of these directions. First, a moral society exerts positive influence on the people in it, including the potential criminal. People choose what is right because it is right, because they have been trained to value righteousness, and because they do not want to bring shame on themselves, their families, or their communities. Second, a deterrent justice system exerts negative pressure where people avoid evil because they fear the cost of doing it. Both are necessary. One without the other will fail. A society without morality collapses into chaos. A society without deterrence collapses into permissiveness. A society without either becomes a playground for monsters as we are experiencing today.

If we want to preserve freedom and maintain order, or to restore those things, we must train people to love what is good and to hate what is evil and we must return to laws that are not just procedural but moral. Until then, we are not preventing collapse, but merely managing it.
 

JudgeRightly

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As Bob Enyart used to say (paraphrased, don't remember his exact quote) :

"You can't make it so that people can't commit crimes. You have to make it so that people WON'T commit crimes."
 

Clete

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As Bob Enyart used to say (paraphrased, don't remember his exact quote) :

"You can't make it so that people can't commit crimes. You have to make it so that people WON'T commit crimes."
To be clear, reasonable measures designed to make it difficult to get away with crime are fine and dandy. If a bank wants to add security measures then they are not only free, but wise to do so and it is not paranoia to put locks between the things you value and the outside world.

The point here is that if criminals are properly punished, then there won't be so much crime going on that such measures get to the insanely onerous levels they've reached in our modern society and if they aren't punished, no amount of such measures will succeed in stopping crime from happening.
 

Idolater

"Matthew 16:18-19" Dispensationalist (Catholic) χρ
To be clear, reasonable measures designed to make it difficult to get away with crime are fine and dandy. If a bank wants to add security measures then they are not only free, but wise to do so and it is not paranoia to put locks between the things you value and the outside world.

The point here is that if criminals are properly punished, then there won't be so much crime going on that such measures get to the insanely onerous levels they've reached in our modern society and if they aren't punished, no amount of such measures will succeed in stopping crime from happening.

But RD's quote is germane. Our government was fine. Our laws were fine. Because everything was made for a Christian polity. Our government and laws are great for Christians. But now our laws and justice system are being overrun by savages.

This isn't the justice system for warriors, that would be courts martial.

Warriors need to be governed by martial law. So long as they're belligerents, they have to be handled separately. We don't really have this per normal, until maximum security prison, but that doesn't come until after the civilian trial in the justice system—which is for civilians, not belligerents.

You don't need martial law once your society is full of Christians. But we're getting to the point where we're going to need a good generation or two of martial law, to get everybody back in line again, which means especially, that whoever you are, you're going to rear your freshly born children to be peaceful people. Because that's currently the root cause of this downward spiral. Kids are being raised to be criminals basically, it's true with Muslims, Blacks, and Trans. They are savages with no regard for good government, set up for Christians. Christians know how to live together, even if we don't agree on everything, we agree that killing babies is wrong and that God made them male and female and also that there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. We know all that, and these criminal children, because they're raised criminally by criminal adjacent parents (if they're not criminals themselves), deny the Biblical principles. So they're unfit to live together with us. We need special rules for them. For us Christians, we know we don't need these rules, these rules are for people who belong in cages. In fact, that's really the purpose of martial law, is to aggressively root out the belligerents, and get them off the streets and lock them in cages, because they do not belong with us, they don't belong with Christians, they are savages.

This is the result of "de-colonization", a Leftist Frankenstein monster.
 

Clete

Truth Smacker
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But RD's quote is germane. Our government was fine. Our laws were fine. Because everything was made for a Christian polity. Our government and laws are great for Christians. But now our laws and justice system are being overrun by savages.

This isn't the justice system for warriors, that would be courts martial.

Warriors need to be governed by martial law. So long as they're belligerents, they have to be handled separately. We don't really have this per normal, until maximum security prison, but that doesn't come until after the civilian trial in the justice system—which is for civilians, not belligerents.

You don't need martial law once your society is full of Christians. But we're getting to the point where we're going to need a good generation or two of martial law, to get everybody back in line again, which means especially, that whoever you are, you're going to rear your freshly born children to be peaceful people. Because that's currently the root cause of this downward spiral. Kids are being raised to be criminals basically, it's true with Muslims, Blacks, and Trans. They are savages with no regard for good government, set up for Christians. Christians know how to live together, even if we don't agree on everything, we agree that killing babies is wrong and that God made them male and female and also that there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. We know all that, and these criminal children, because they're raised criminally by criminal adjacent parents (if they're not criminals themselves), deny the Biblical principles. So they're unfit to live together with us. We need special rules for them. For us Christians, we know we don't need these rules, these rules are for people who belong in cages. In fact, that's really the purpose of martial law, is to aggressively root out the belligerents, and get them off the streets and lock them in cages, because they do not belong with us, they don't belong with Christians, they are savages.

This is the result of "de-colonization", a Leftist Frankenstein monster.
You aren't going to find a criminal justice system that works better than the fully complete one that God recorded in scripture. It makes no difference who the people under it are or what they believe or whether they're good, evil or indifferent. The fact that it functions just as well regardless of the religious piety of the population is a major reason one can know that what it is enforcing is objectively real justice.

P.S. When I say, "it makes no difference who the people are under it", I mean that it makes no difference as far as the law is concerned. It certainly does make a difference to the society, but the point is that the law, so long as it is enforced, would still have its intended effect whether the people under it are righteous or not. And if the desire is to have maximal legal effectiveness, the solution is not "martial law" or anything else other than just law, which is what we have recorded for us in scripture.
 
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