Liberalism

North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.  What a society chooses to call itself is not necessarily what it really is.  Liberalism is an example of this.  The word "Liberalism" is based on "liberty" but in fact Liberalism has nothing to do with liberty.  The idea that Liberalism is based on liberty comes from Liberals themselves and unfortunately even many opponents of Liberalism accept this idea.  Liberalism is the broad term that I am using to cover all of the Left.  (Note that this is the American sense of the word and in other countries the word may have a different meaning.)  I consider Liberalism to be a religion in the same sense as Christianity and Islam, and like all large religions, it has sects which include communism, socialism, secular humanism, progressivism, feminism, atheism, Liberal Christianity, and Reform Judaism.  Some Liberal sects allow more freedom than others.  If you look at the list of Liberal sects, some are clearly not very freedom-oriented.

Freedom itself is a tricky concept.  One issue is the distinction between rights and regulations which Liberals regularly blur for their own benefit.  A right is something that you are free to do, that the government will not punish you for, while a regulation is something that the government compels you to do.  So the "rights" for equality are actually all regulations compelling people to treat each other equally.  Liberalism places high value on certain types of equality, and that's fine.  The problem is that Liberalism lies when it describes its regulations that compel people to abide by its values as "rights".  The purpose of this lie is to portray Liberals as being pro-freedom and then condemn everyone else for legislating morality.  This is hypocrisy and Liberalism is really no different from any other religion in that it has its own values which it seeks to impose through regulation.  And of course we all know that in economics, Liberals generally don't support freedom at all.

Even accepting the proper distinction between rights and regulations, the idea of freedom is still not so clear.  As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said, "My freedom to move my fist must be limited by the proximity of your chin."  When almost any moral issue is discussed in terms of freedom, you can be sure that this is being done to avoid the real issue.  As an example, I will discuss adultery.  This is defined in the Bible as sex with another man's wife.  Liberals will claim that adultery is a private issue between consenting adults and the government has no business being involved.  This is a lie on many levels.  First of all, Liberals dictate the terms of marriage and divorce and do not give couples the freedom to marry under a private contract of their own choosing.  Such a contract could well punish adultery.  Second, virtually all civilized rising cultures allowed the harmed husband to take revenge.  Usually the husband was permitted to kill the guilty man and to throw the wife out with nothing.  This was the case in early America and in Ancient Athens.  The Liberals prevent this through government regulation, not allowing the husband to take revenge.  This is anti-freedom.  The Liberals will say that the freedom to murder isn't a legitimate freedom.  Most would agree that to murder in self defense is fine.  Who is to say when murder is legitimate?  That is a value judgement.  The fact is that Liberalism supports adultery and does everything in its power to promote adultery.  The Bible takes a different approach.  Since the Bible bans the murder of one member of society by another without exception, it must provide the punishment through the government, and this is why adultery is punished under the Bible.  But again, the point here is that Liberalism claims to be for freedom when this is clearly not the case.  Liberal societies tend to be very highly regulated and not free at all.  The Liberals themselves can't see this because those things that Liberals want to do are generally permitted, it is what everyone else wants to do that is banned.

The issues I brought up, equality laws and adultery, were to make specific points.  But looking at the big picture, we see that Liberal societies tend to be over-regulated which makes the claim that Liberals support liberty obviously false.  A good video on the over-regulation of America is Illegal Everything.  Two of the issues mentioned in this video are drug laws and anti-prostitution laws.  These are usually not seen as Liberal laws, but in fact they are.  When America was primarily a Christian nation, neither of these were illegal.  They became illegal when America became more Liberal.  Today's "conservatives" in America are really nothing more than another sect of Liberalism.  These "conservatives" do not stand for the values found in the Bible.  They do not worry about the Ten Commandments.  Instead they worry about issues like drugs and prostitution, neither of which are condemned in the Bible.

Another Liberal lie is that Liberals support equality and are more caring.  This lie can be seen in dating.  The most egalitarian dating system is monogamy because then everyone gets a mate.  Liberals hate monogamy and support promiscuity which is the most unequal mating system.  With promiscuity, some men get many women and many men get no women.  It is extreme reproductive and sexual inequality.  Liberals support this system because it is immoral and selfish.  But this also explains why Liberals are so concerned about women and children, or at least say they are.  Liberal men are concerned that women and children are cared for because they are promiscuous and so have no idea who their children are, so they want children generally cared for.  It's true that contraception changes this practically, but it doesn't change the instinct.  The promiscuous male instinct is to care about women and children, but not care about other men.  The monogamous male instinct is to be part of a loyal male group and care for that group where each man has his wife.  Of course the Liberal caring for children is also a kind of lie.  Liberals only care that children are provided for, they don't really care what is in the child's best interest because that would be having both parents there to raise the child.  Liberal men care about economic equality because they do not want to compete for women on the basis of how good a provider they are, but only based on their seduction skills.  Economic freedom allows men to attract women as wives based on their ability to provide and this removes these women from the shared harem enjoyed by Liberal men.  Of course Liberal women support economic equality because they want to be provided for.

So what is Liberalism?  Liberalism is a fast evolving religion that started as an anti-tradition movement and gradually evolved into the ego-worshipping religion that it is today.  To understand Liberalism, we have to trace its history.  It started with the Protestant Reformation which told Christians to search the Bible for the truth for themselves and not to rely on the authority of priests.  The result that was expected was that Christians would find faith through this.  But not all did.  Searching for oneself involves reasoning, so reasoning increased and resulted in the Enlightenment.  This reasoning increased scientific knowledge which explained many things that were previously only explained through religion, and this undermined faith.  Since the Enlightenment was about reason, Liberalism made reason the core of its religion.  This makes Liberalism sound like it is somehow scientific.  But in fact Liberalism lacks the core feature that makes science work which is the scientific method that demands a procedure for validation based on experiments.

All of those fields that rose dramatically after the Enlightenment were exactly those fields that use both reason and validation.  Mathematics is one.  The means for validation in math is the mathematical proof.  Mathematics has become an extension of formal logic where proofs following a clear procedure are demanded.  These proofs can prove a hypothesis true of false.  Science is another.  Validation in science is based on experiments.  An experiment can only prove a hypothesis to be false.  A hypothesis becomes an accepted theory after repeated experiments fail to disprove the hypothesis.  This is inductive reasoning.  The last field is engineering.  In this case, validation is simply that the thing designed doesn't fail.  If you design and build a bridge and it falls down, then the design has failed.  This has become somewhat more formalized with procedural tests, but the idea is the basically the same.  These three fields are the only ones that dramatically benefited from the Enlightenment.

Now let's consider fields that use reason without validation.  These include ethics, urban design, architecture, modern art, and the so called "social sciences".  I believe that all of these fields have regressed since the Enlightenment.  The use of reason produced many new ideas in each of these fields, but since there was no method of validation, those ideas that had the most appeal won out.  And which ideas generally have the most appeal?  Those that appeal to the base human instincts.  This is why our current modern art and ethics are at about the same level as for cavemen.

There are fields that use neither reason nor validation.  These are the pure arts that work directly from feeling such as music, film, and writing.  These fields have all benefited from advances in technology without suffering from the abuse of reason.

Liberalism rejected tradition from the beginning because Liberalism didn't understand the reasoning behind tradition.  The failure wasn't in the tradition, it was in the ability of Liberals to understand the reasons for tradition, and there are very good reasons for tradition.  We can understand this based on the ideas of evolution.  One can think of traditions as the genes (memes) of a culture, the culture itself being a product of the sum of its traditions.  Cultures certainly cross-fertilize when they come into contact with each other and traditions can be exchanged.  So one can almost take an evolutionary view to cultures where traditions act like genes with the culture being the host, and traditions evolve based on how suitable they make the host culture.  The time scale for the expression of the effects of changes in tradition is longer than for changes in genes.  For a new tradition to fully express its effect on a culture probably takes around three generations.  This means that for cultural evolution to work, traditions must change slowly.

Religion is very important because it acts as the carrier of traditional memes.  Since most people cannot possibly understand the reasons for traditions, it is best for people to follow traditions based on their religion.  Religions do change slowly, slowly enough for the mutation rate to contribute to cultural evolution rather than destroy it.  Religion gives people faith in their traditions which keeps society stable.

What is faith?  The definitions I see are: "confidence or trust in a person or thing" and "belief that is not based on proof".  What is the opposite of this?  Skepticism.  Liberals believe that reason is the opposite of faith.  But which of the beliefs of Liberals are actually based on proof?  None.  Proof only exists in the limited worlds of formal logic and mathematics.  Nothing in the real world can be proven.  Reason only tells you what seems reasonable, nothing more.  But what exactly is the Liberal's basis for trusting reason?  The answer is simply that Liberals have faith in reason.  And this faith is just as strong as a religious person's faith in God.

Whose faith is more justified, the religious person or the Liberal?  In my opinion as a skeptic, the religious person's faith is far more justified because of the simple fact that his belief system is older and has stood the test of time, while the Liberal has absolutely nothing to support his belief system.  What about science?  Since it uses reason, is it based on faith?  Not at all.  The scientist is a true skeptic who doesn't have faith in reason but requires that ideas generated by reason be subject to experimental testing.  It is testing that validates scientific ideas, not reason.

When I was researching religions, I went to a Liberal Jewish synagogue.  The Torah reading included the story of the Tower of Babel.  The rabbi was a woman and she tried to explain why God didn't like this tower.  All of her explanations were absurd Liberal attempts to avoid the real issue.  The reason is clear from the explanation of the builders themselves "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Let us make a name for ourselves;".  God wasn't angry about the tower itself but rather about the motive, namely making a name for themselves.  In other words, vanity.  The tower was to be a monument to the vanity of its builders.  Of course Liberals have a hard time understanding why vanity is such a bad thing, so it is no surprise that this rabbi didn't get it.  But arrogance and vanity are the basis of much evil in the world.  Both religion and science are expressions of humility.  Religion is humility before God and science is humility before the real world.  But Liberalism is arrogance and vanity.  To believe that they can find the correct answers strictly based on their own reason without any outside validation is pure insolence.

Liberalism is the biological equivalent of exposing DNA to high powered radiation.  It causes such a high mutation rate in accepted behavior that traditions are doomed.  With traditions destroyed, people begin behaving based on their selfish instincts.  Liberalism then uses reasoning to justify this selfishness.  So instead of using reasoning to determine morality, it is actually the other way around.  Morality decays to base instincts and then Liberalism tries to justify this.  In some sense, the biological equivalent of Liberalism is cancer.  Cancer can be caused by radiation which increases randomness in cells and breaks down the rules for cooperation between cells.  Cells begin to act selfishly, not in the best interest of the organism (analogous to society) and so the organism (society) breaks down.  This is how Liberalism transformed from initially being based on reason and against tradition, to today being an ego-worshipping religion that supports selfishness and inconsideration for others.

We can see this ego-worshipping in our society.  Liberals condemn guilt which is the emotion of morality.  Guilt conflicts with ego and Liberals want ego to be supreme.  Selfishness is celebrated.  Inconsideration for others and dishonesty are standard in modern Liberal culture.  The movie Falling Down shows one man snapping because he can't tolerate Liberal society any longer.

All of modern society is essentially Liberal.  Some may argue that America is less Liberal than Europe because America is more religious and Europe is more Atheist.  But in my opinion, Atheism is preferable to Liberal religion.  I say this based on the Commandment Do not misuse the name of the LORD your God, because the LORD will not leave anyone unpunished who misuses His name.  Based on this, I prefer Liberal Atheists who at least don't use God's name in support of Liberalism.  Liberal Christians and Jews are worse because they are misusing God's name.

The beliefs and history of Liberalism are new, but Liberal values are very old.  There have been many religions based on decadence and selfishness.  The Bible contains an example in the worship of Baal.  Liberals are the modern equivalent of Baal worshippers.  Baal worshippers had the same decadence, promiscuity, and selfishness.  Everything that the Bible says about Baal worshipper should be applied to today's Liberals.  In particular, God repeatedly tells the Israelites not to mix with Baal worshippers because this would corrupt the Israelites.  This applies today as well.  No decent culture can survive mixing with Liberal culture which inevitably leads to corruption.  Those religions which fail to sufficiently separate themselves from Liberal culture have no future.  The religions that separate themselves well today include Anabaptist Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, and Islam.  A nice movie which shows how Orthodox Judaism and Islam do this is Arranged.  

One of the first to recognize the threat of Liberalism to traditional religion was Rabbi Shneur Zalman, the founder of Chabad Judaism.  He lived in Tsarist Russia where there was descrimination and pogroms against Jews.  But when Napoleon threatened to being Liberalism to Russia, Rabbi Zalman chose to fight for Tsar Alexander.  As he explained:

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Should Napoleon be victorious, wealth among the Jews will be abundant. . .but the hearts of Israel will be separated and distant from their father in heaven. But if our master Alexander will triumph, though poverty will be abundant. . . the heart of Israel will be bound and joined with their father in heaven. . . And for God's sake: Burn this letter.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shneur_Zalman_of_Liadi#Opposition_to_Napoleon_and_Support_for_the_Tsar

The Bible is full of God's condemnation of the corruption of Judaism by the Baal religion.  All of this condemnation could just as well apply to today's corruption seen in Liberal Christianity and Liberal Judaism.  Liberal religion reminds me of this passage where God says:

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I hate, I despise your feasts!
I can’t stand the stench
of your solemn assemblies.
Even if you offer Me
your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
I will have no regard
for your fellowship offerings of fattened cattle.
Take away from Me the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice flow like water,
and righteousness, like an unfailing stream.
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Amos 5:21-24