Natural Law
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Of course 'moral' as well as 'God' has to be defined.
A related subject that is good to know is the subject of natural law. The Wikipedia page on it is good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
To a Christian natural law is defined in Romans 1 where it is said that God has put His law in everybody's heart so that even unbelievers know right from wrong regarding murder and theft and lying and so forth.
Atheists and secularists in general think that natural law can be determined by man's reason and experience, but without an absolute standard it's all opinion and leads to might makes right, basically. Ultimately.
In the area of liberty vs. tyranny the subject of natural law can be seen like this: take the U.S. Constitution. Our laws and rights come from God (we are endowed by our Creator). This is because if our laws and rights (rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) came from man then what man gives man can take away, but what God gives man can't take away.
So it goes like this: our Constitution rests (or in grounded in) first English Common Law, then under that on Natural Law, but then ultimately under that on God's revealed law.
So, which law of God? Basically the Ten Commandments. The moral law that is for all generations. (I.e. not the civil laws of ancient national Israel, they became defunct upon the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ).
But that's Theocracy! the atheists and secularists scream. But when has America been a theocracy? Protestants don't think the state should have anything to do with regulating or policing an individual's relationship with God (the first table of the Ten Commandments, i.e. the first four which speak of how we are to act towards God, vertical), yet the second table of the Ten Commandments very much are what the state needs to regulate and police (thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, covet, give false witness, beat up your parents, rape and other sexual crimes, etc. i.e. horizontal, our relationship with other people).
There is a small group of Christians called Theonomists who say the first table of the Ten Commandments should be policed by the state, but they are a very small and trollish group, but sometimes louder than their numbers, or better stated, the media tends to focus on them because they fill the role better of their stereotype of Christians.
Morality has to be absolute, i.e. grounded in something higher than man's or a community's mere opinion or else it becomes merely the whim and demands of whoever has the most power to coerce others.
The great Satanic counterfeit of Christianity, Islam, attempts to ground their morality in their 'holy' book and sayings of their prophet and what not, but it all goes against what God - the real God of creation - has put in all of our hearts (re Romans 1). That's how we know, unless we are still in rebellion and our conscience is really buried, that Islam is false and the Ten Commandments are true. I.e. Islam preaches lying is OK if to an infidel, but that goes against the law God has put in our hearts which is the same law delineated in the Ten Commandments. Same with Islam's preaching that it is OK to murder infidels, to rape women, etc., etc. We know those Islamic teachings are wrong because they go against the law God has put in all of our hearts as Romans 1 states. That is Natural Law as a Protestant Christian understands it. I say Protestant because Thomas Aquinas, Roman Catholic Doctor of the Church, separated Natural Law from God's revelation, but that is getting too far into the weeds...
- C.
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