I caught myself being contradictory

I caught myself being contradictory, so I deleted the following sentence out of a blog-in-process:

But being pro-peace means being anti-violence; and that includes violence from the state against individuals. You can't have a fully-orbed pro-peace philosophy if you are pro-violence somewhere down the line in your thinking.

This means I can never be fully libertarian in the Rothbardian sense of the word.

The truth is that I do believe in government force, but only where it is legitimate.

As one high-level person in the Libertarian Party once told me, under the Libertarian Party, 90 percent of government would shrink at all levels.

That's pretty much what biblical law would do as well.

Can non-religious libertarians account for their libertarianism?

Please allow me to plagiarize myself without using quotation marks for a moment.

As I wrote in my last blog post, according to a poll on the Libertarian Party website, most self-identified libertarians in a recent poll are Christians.

Following Christians, the non-religious (including atheists and agnostics) make up the next largest group of liberty lovers.

In fact, those with no religion, which would include atheists and agnostics, accounted for 39 percent of those polled.

However, when you add Catholic, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and "Other Christians" together, Christians collectively make up 46 percent of the poll.

Those who identified "Other Christian" made up 24 percent of the poll.

Muslims made up the smallest sliver of the poll, coming in at 1 percent.

This is all well and dandy. But the real question is can atheists and agnostics and other non-religious people account for their libertarianism?

Do non-religious libertarians have the proper foundations to ground their libertarianism?

Given their materialism, why should they be libertarians at all? On secular grounds, why should they be libertarians over Marxists? Is it all a matter of preference on the materialistic view?

The best essay that I have read that answers these questions is one I came across earlier this year by Gordan Runyan in his essay "God - the Only Ground for Freedom (or, Why Secular Libertarianism is a Bust)."

Here's a good summary paragraph from the essay:

As I have shown in my book, Resistance to Tyrants, it is only Christianity, with its special revelation, a full Bible breathed out by the one living God, that is capable of supplying the philosophical and moral foundations that will allow human freedom to weather the storms and remain standing. Christianity is the basis for genuine libertarianism. Atheistic libertarianism is the contradiction. It only ever gets anything right by stumbling into a biblical principle now and again. It is the proverbial blind squirrel that manages to accidentally find a few nuts. 

Read the rest.

God - the Only Ground for Freedom (or, Why Secular Libertarianism is a Bust)

by Gordan Runyan

Douglas Wilson on the Five Smooth Stones of Theocratic Libertarianism

Reformed writer Douglas Wilson proposes five things that must be done in order to reform the government and, by extension, American society. 

He stresses that liberty is a Christian value. Therefore, he wants liberty for secularists not because secularism is a good thing in itself; it isn't, even if some things within secularism are biblical and reflect the heart of the creator. I have always thought that if secularism is true, then it should be able to withstand free debate (no coercion). Truth wins out, right?

Read Wilson's The Five Smooth Stones of Theocratic Libertarianism

Note that the first stone is not the same as the fourth. Formally professing that Jesus Christ is Lord (the first stone) is not the same as fourth (allowing preachers to be free to preach the gospel).  But a formal declaring is necessary, he argues, and I agree.

Also, professing mere areas of agreement is not the same as establishing a national church. He wants none of the latter.

Here are some notable quotables:

If you protest that this would kill the great secular experiment that is America, I would reply that the great secular experiment that is America appears to have already gone out behind the barn and shot itself.

….we must have countless preachers of the gospel, faithfully declaring the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. The role of the government here is to stay out of the way, allowing such preachers free access to the people, and thereby encouraging them to have at it. 

There is a straight line blessing that runs from free grace to free men, and from free men to free markets.

Using their own money, voluntarily donated, the secularists and atheists may build their own schools, write poems and novels, produce plays and movies, build cathedrals, compose concertos, and so on.