The opening of John C. Wright’s latest column in the Theist vs. Atheist series debate at EveryJoe:
“The question for this week is whether religion is good or bad for politics.
“The wording of the question is charmingly misleading, akin to asking whether economic theory is good or bad for politics, without bothering to distinguish between the economic theory of the free market, which produced the industrial revolution, versus the economic theory of Stalinist Marxism, which produced the Ukraine famine, the gulags, and the endless fear and bloodshed of the Cold War.
“Politics is the study of how to organize the laws and customs of the state to preserve the common good, maintain the social order, deter crime and win wars, and promote virtue among the citizens and subjects.
“Reading the ancient and the modern literature on the topic, one soon realizes that every writer from Plato to Marx and beyond sees the sole mechanism of political control to be the abolition of liberty, with one glaring exception.
“This exception is so obvious that only an intellectual would somehow contrive to overlook it.
“Only in Christian commonwealths and kingdoms can the study of how to organize the state to achieve the common good and promote virtue be subordinated to how to preserve liberty. This is what politics properly so called is, and all that it is …” [Read more here.]
Here are the links to other columns in the series.