Hello Michael,
It's the opinion of many that the entire Christmas story and life of
Christ are Libertarian.
Good article below.
Mike
The Greatest Gift For All
by Paul Craig Roberts <mailto:PCRoberts@postmark.net>
by Paul Craig Roberts
Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush
before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new
tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the
beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a
tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the
season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national
Christmas tree on the White House lawn.
Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise men
or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts
were more modest than they are now, but even then people were
complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown
accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of
many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take
time from our harried lives to give them thought.
The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a
Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000
years.
In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual person
to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a
reformer and to take on injustice.
This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It
has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other citizens,
protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and free speech.
These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle, but they
all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual's soul that
he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating the individual,
Christianity gave him a voice.
Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization
people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of
justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform,
investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial
enterprises, new products and new occupations.
The result was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted
immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives.
Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.
In recent decades we have begun losing sight of the historic achievement
that empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political roots
of this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high
schools, colleges and universities. The voices that reach us through the
millennia and connect us to our culture are being silenced by "political
correctness." Prayer has been driven from schools and religious symbols
from public life. Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, is too
fearful of offending diversity to display the crucifix.
There is plenty of room for cultural diversity in the world, but not
within a single country. A Tower of Babel has no culture. A person
cannot be a Christian one day, a pagan the next and a Muslim the day
after. A hodgepodge of cultural and religious values provides no basis
for law - except the raw power of the pre-Christian past.
All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are
individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral
doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak. Power is the
horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard. One
hundred million people were exterminated by National Socialists in
Germany and by Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were
members of a race or class that had been demonized by intellectuals and
political authority.
Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not
limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when
he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as "unlimited power, resting
directly on force, not limited by anything."
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076152553X/lewrockwell/>
Christianity's emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power
as Lenin claimed unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our
celebration of Christ's birthday celebrates a religion that made us
masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion
as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
December 24, 2003
Dr. Roberts [send him mail <mailto:PCRoberts@…> ] is John M.
Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research
Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research
Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of
the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S.
Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076152553X/lewrockwell/> .
Copyright (c) 2003 Creators Syndicate