As we were just talking about "Natural Law," here is a little interlude on this subject. It boils down to my brief comment on a Hobbes passage, as applicable to our most recent discussion.
There must be no doubt about my partiality to Hobbes in such matters, particularly, in the instances of my criticism of current American practices. As I have already repeated several times before, the English philosopher Hobbes represents that same branch of European sociopolitical thought, from which sprang its American offshoot, and therefore, there can be no excuse for a potential American detractor to dismiss this passage on the grounds of illi alienum putare.
The question of the ambiguity of the term “natural law” has already been raised in this section, and my next entry, Living According To Nature, will be discussing the subject of natural law much further, but this little commentary ought to stand on its own, and it is thus featured as a separate entry.
The teachers of “Democracy” to the world need to go back to school. Apparently, there is something very wrong with their education, or maybe with their mental capacity (or maybe with both), if they have not been able to commit the following passage from Hobbes’s Elements (9:15:1), to memory:
“…What it is that we call the law of nature is not agreed upon by those that have hitherto written. For the most part, such writers, as have occasion to affirm that anything is against the law of nature, do allege no more than that it is against the consent of all nations or the wisest and most civil of these nations. But it is not agreed upon who shall judge, which nations are the wisest.”
This exceptionally astute and modern observation, capped by the magnificent question, “Who shall judge, which nations are the wisest?” needs a prompt application to our reality, already distorted beyond belief. Generally speaking I suggest that the “law of nature” as such ought not to be sought in the national legal wisdom, even the most brilliant one, of any given nation, but in a consensus of national wisdoms, in general philosophy, and in the timeless Divine laws, as conveyed through the Bible, the Koran, and through other sacred traditions of the world’s major transnational religions.
There must be no doubt about my partiality to Hobbes in such matters, particularly, in the instances of my criticism of current American practices. As I have already repeated several times before, the English philosopher Hobbes represents that same branch of European sociopolitical thought, from which sprang its American offshoot, and therefore, there can be no excuse for a potential American detractor to dismiss this passage on the grounds of illi alienum putare.
The question of the ambiguity of the term “natural law” has already been raised in this section, and my next entry, Living According To Nature, will be discussing the subject of natural law much further, but this little commentary ought to stand on its own, and it is thus featured as a separate entry.
The teachers of “Democracy” to the world need to go back to school. Apparently, there is something very wrong with their education, or maybe with their mental capacity (or maybe with both), if they have not been able to commit the following passage from Hobbes’s Elements (9:15:1), to memory:
“…What it is that we call the law of nature is not agreed upon by those that have hitherto written. For the most part, such writers, as have occasion to affirm that anything is against the law of nature, do allege no more than that it is against the consent of all nations or the wisest and most civil of these nations. But it is not agreed upon who shall judge, which nations are the wisest.”
This exceptionally astute and modern observation, capped by the magnificent question, “Who shall judge, which nations are the wisest?” needs a prompt application to our reality, already distorted beyond belief. Generally speaking I suggest that the “law of nature” as such ought not to be sought in the national legal wisdom, even the most brilliant one, of any given nation, but in a consensus of national wisdoms, in general philosophy, and in the timeless Divine laws, as conveyed through the Bible, the Koran, and through other sacred traditions of the world’s major transnational religions.
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