Posts by UglyTruth
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to BenWilson,
Correct.
Because you don't believe that there is such a thing as an afterlife?
Natural rights are a highly contentious idea.
Like the idea of having a conscience? Both are contentious ideas for the NZ state.
My focus here is natural rights as they exist within the common law. The state doesn't acknowledge the source of natural rights, so this argument could reduce to arguing for the state's factually false position vs the documentary sources of the common law.
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WTF? If you are religious please state it plainly NOW.
How do you differentiate between a person of religion and a rational theist?
Religion is often corrupted for political purposes.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to ,
If it’s not practical, it’s not spiritual.
Avoiding the pointy things and the burny things of the afterlife isn't practical?
Plain english please
The natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can be restated as life, liberty, and the pursuit of justice (or ethical behaviour).
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Blackstone's commentary on the connection between justice, happiness, and morality:
As therefore the creator is a being, not only of infinite power, and wisdom, but also of infinite goodness, he has been pleased so to contrive the constitution and frame of humanity, that we should want no other prompter to inquire after and pursue the rule of right, but only our own self-love, that universal principle of action. For he has so intimately connected, so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained but by observing the former; and, if the former be punctually obeyed, it cannot but induce the latter. In consequence of which mutual connection of justice and human felicity, he has not perplexed the law of nature with a multitude of abstracted rules and precepts, referring merely to the fitness or unfitness of things, as some have vainly surmised; but has graciously reduced the rule of obedience to this one paternal precept, "that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness." This is the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to BenWilson,
No, not really.
It is. You can't swear an oath without doing it.
Jurare est Deum in testum vocare, et est actus divini cultus. To swear is to call God to witness, and is an act of religion. 3 Co. Inst. 165. Vide 3 Bouv. Inst. n. 3180, note; 1 Benth. Rat. of Jud. Ev. 376, 371, note.
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You fundamentally misunderstand the meaning of secular.
Hows that?
The reference to God in common law precisely signifies that Christianity has special status. Ask any non-Christian who is asked to swear on a bible.
Swearing an oath is essentially an act of calling deity to witness. A non-Christian who wants to swear an oath has no obligation to use a Bible.
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You really, truly don't want non-secular laws. Because whichever sect they embody, there'll be several they oppress.
You're assuming that non-secular law implies adoption of a particular religious creed. The common law focuses on reason, not on faith, and develops a doctrine of natural rights from a philosophy which acknowledges the existence of a creator, rather than from the Christian Bible. While the common law is fundamentally theistic, the most significant religious practice it has is the attestation of truth by oath. The reference to "God" in the common law is cultural, it doesn't signify that Christianity has any special status at law.
If what you're saying is that we need to do away with the futile trappings in law, such as swearing on a bible, or praying in the House, I'm with you 100%.
You're not going to do away with them unless you abandon their source, a head of state who is a central figure within the Anglican church. And then that implies also abandoning the core institutions because of the oath of allegiance.
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I think every citizen who feels strongly enough about what's been revealed should look an MP in the eye, one on one, and ask them about their moral standards, about where they rate serving the citizens of this country as opposed to staying in Parliament
Good luck with that.
Please don't take that the wrong way, kudos to anyone who is prepared to actually do something to fix the problem. Historically speaking, the important issue for the public here is wisdom, apply that in conjunction with reason and conscience and you've got a fighting change of making a difference.
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If we don't get the rot cut out in the next term, only rebellion is going to force positive change. It may not be that far away either, if you think about the decision to fortify MSD offices.
You can't cut the rot out, it's institutional. Rebellion isn't the only alternative though, there's also desertion or abandonment of the civil state in favour of returning the law of the land to its natural condition.
The primary change of focus here is security, with a transition away from the current centralized territorial system to a more localized arrangement. The judge & jury model is a reasonable approach to the local administration of justice, the process can be simplified by using character references in a similar way to the oath-helpers of the common law.
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We need to apply some democratic penicillin to heal the wound.
What sort of democracy, English, Greek, or Roman?
If we start with the assumption that NZ democracy is based on English democracy, then how do we identify the rights which are characteristic of English democracy? Why should civil rights or human rights be presumed to trump natural rights when the opposite was the case for eighteenth century English law?