The Counterfeits Of Transcendence

The Counterfeits of Transcendence

W. H. Marshner

Cultural Conservative Policy Insights
721 Second Street N.E., Washington, D.C 20002
(202) 546-3004
Institute for Cultural Conservatism Policy Insight Number Three
May 12, 1988

Cultural Conservative Policy Insights is published by the Institute for Cultural Conservatism, a division of The Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, Inc, a non-profit tax-exempt educational organization, nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the view of the Institute for Cultural Conservatism or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress.

In a previous policy insight, entitled “Cultural Conservatism and Transcendent Norms,” it was argued that a high understanding of right and wrong is implicit in the stance of cultural conservatives.

The present essay takes the argument a step further. It deals with the problems of moral relativism, because the relativist position is often based on ideas about culture. Challenging those ideas will expose the dangers which emerge when transcendence is misallocated to sheer “human consciousness,” or to the alleged future of our consciousness, and when transcendent right and wrong are thereby mismanaged. In the hands of cultural radicals, the mismanagement is common and multifarious.

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Belief and Public Policy: An Answer To “People For The American Way”

BELIEF AND PUBLIC POLICY: AN ANSWER TO “PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY”

by William H. Marshner

Family Policy Insights
VOL. V: Number 2
721 Second Street, N.E.Washington D.C. 20002
(202) 546-3004
February, 1986

Family Policy Insights is published by the Child and Family Protection Institute, a project of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, Inc., a non-profit, tax-exempt educational organization. Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Child and Family Protection Institute or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

In the public-policy debate on family issues, it so happens that religious beliefs and religiously based moral convictions are absolutely crucial to some of us who are parties to the debate. Should we be penalized for that fact? Should we have to play by different rules from other parties in the debate, whose views are more secular?
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Dignitatis Humanae And Traditional Teaching On Church And State

Faith and Reason (Fall 1983): 222-248.

Vatican II clearly holds that there is a rightful religious liberty which, within “due limits,” even objectively false religions ought to enjoy vis-à-vis the State. In what follows, I shall refer to this claim as the “basic holding” of the Declaration Dignitatis humanae, whose title I shall shorten to DH.^[1]
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Liberty And Social Order

By W. H. MARSHNER

Triumph
May 1973

A medical analogy aptly explains the laity’s role in social action. The idea is that the present social order is diseased and that Christian social action is a medicine, whose effect, if God wills it, will be social health.

The disease is probably the least problematic part of this analogy. Its symptoms are the assault upon the unborn, the assault upon the sanctity of marriage, the corruption of children through public education, the extinction of individual and corporate liberties through centralized and bureaucratic government—an enormous range of social ills which collectively constitute the disease of the social order. But, the analogy goes on, there is to this disease a contrary which is called health.

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