doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Are these liberals you guys talking about?

Greg, I'm among the Canadians who are kind of slow to pick up on things, among the timid and tethered you referred to earlier.

I'm pleased that I don't have to consider "natural rights" preceding Constitition and Bill , as you do.

There was a natural right to enslave and disenfranchise and chain and shackle to ensure a particular pursuit of happiness stemming ostensibly from the Creator.

No more, in your country and mine. The Age of Reason prevailed.

King, from where does this right to enslave others pretain and/or proceed from? What is its metaphysical basis? Understand I'm not trying to be smart or sarcastic, but I'm very interested to understand why you believe this.

The knee-jerk liberal bashers are missing the entire point of the NYT article. Influential legal scholars who formerly opposed the Second Amendment have rethought their position, in light of their own political philosophy, and come around to our side. That is extremely significant. Yes, gun-owners and their representatives have been making this argument for a long time, but this reversal of opinion by intelligent people suggests that we are finally winning. Why grouse about that?

Some are simply recognizing it's an individual right and now calling for its repeal. Recognizing the right is a step in the right direction, but it's far from a reversal of thinking. It's only a more honest attempt to do what they've been trying to do all along: ban guns.

JM, the Protestant ethic, the Bible's injunctions, St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians etc supported notions of slavery that bothered masters of entire economic systems and societies not at all. It was the way of the world. Where people were cast as sub-humans with beasts of burden, what difference blacks or mules?

We had our liberty, our pursuit of happiness, our natural rights. The president of a white college in Georgia told me 50 years ago he taught from St. Paul that slaves were to obey their masters. I asked his students if they could accept federal injunctions to obey the law. No, they said, but they could accept their children doing so.

If these "natural" rights Greg refers to came from the Creator, it's a safe bet that they were rooted in an earlier Christianity. I heard it from the pulpits of the American South. Queen Elizabeth referred last week in America to how the Empire changed in this respect and lauded Virginia as the first state to apologize to blacks.

In Atlanta, in MLK's home, I asked where he got his physique. He looked soft but he wasn't soft, believe me. He could manhandle six-foot-one former-boxer me. "In the pool, the YMCA," he said. "The black YMCA." Jackie Robinson, who got his first break in Montreal, couldn't eat with his Dodger teammates. Few demurred.

Branch Rickey is one of my heroes.

Just because something was tolerated or practiced does not make it an inherent right. When Moses was given the law from the Lord, the Lord never said that Israel had a right to enslave others. If He did, please tell me what book and verse it appears.

Slavery created racism, racism did not create slavery.

So....If I'm a Christian who believes that most liberals are in favor of abridging my 2nd Amendment rights then I also am in favor of enslaving Black people which was still being practiced until 1957 by certain college professors in Georgia until Martin Luther King took time away from wrestling King Brown around the living room to put a stop to it.

Ok. Just so I have it straight in my head.

Nick

Why do folks insist on dividing the whole world into "liberals" and "conservatives"?

Sure, there are unthinking, unquestioning "liberals" who swallow that orthodoxy whole. And unthinking, unquestioning "conservatives" who do the same. But hopefully most people here use their God-given brains to think things out issue by issue, and don't define themselves with bumper-sticker slogans and slapdash labels.

Why, one of my best friends is a Democrat...

The Lord speaks to Moses in the Book of Leviticus:

Far as I'm concerned there is only one "natural" right: the right to eat or be eaten. Way of all flesh and some vegetables; sort of a universally-sanctioned competition. I don't think it makes much difference whether you're using your teeth, the jawbone of an ass, or waving your arms while the buffalo stampede over the cliff. However, I find that I get more sleep when the County and State fellers do the night shift around nearby Ferris School for Boys. A social compact is trusting provisionally those you can't trust absolutely; something which you get used to as you get older. I've lost all interest in Greg's Green Mtn. Boy rhetoric, King's bona fides as someone present at the creation of everything, and wrangling over biblical, and by extension, divine justification. I don't mind if people think I have guns and know how to use them but I don't really want to find out.

jack