Life, Naturally

This leads to the inference that the ultimate Good of man is life in accordance with nature, which we may interpret as meaning life in accordance with nature developed to its own perfection and supplied with all its needs.
Cicero, On Final Good and Evil
Rackham trans. p.421

Jefferson and Paine

Yesterday's George Will column said tht Reagan's religious philosophy owed more to Paine than Burke. That is, Burke believed man was easily corrupted, while Paine felt that man's nature was basically good. This is much like Rousseau- - the idea that it is society, and not nature, that makes men do evil.

The difference between Jefferson and Paine is that Jefferson romanticized the past (like Reagan), where Paine hated what he saw as the objectable story of history. In some sense, this makes Jefferson like Burke. The one hitch to this equation is that Burke saw European history as Christianity's struggle for order and morality. Jefferson clearly hated Christianity, only paying lip service to it in order to conceal his deistic idolatry for science. The lesson of this is that similarities are never so clear cut as to cast Ronald Reagan in either the shoes of Jefferson or of Paine.

Don't Push Me

What are the Democrats up to? A congresswoman is now taking on push-polling, that is, polls designed to inflence people's attitude. She says that push-polling is "immoral." My question is, why is convincing people to vote a certain way immoral? We aren't talking about anything that deprives anyone of their civil rights. On the contrary, it seems to me that the First Amendment protects the right to convince others about issues. The Democrats feel that they have a God-given right to rule America, and anything that interferes with their divine right to rule is thus "immoral." By the way, delivering 2/3 of a living baby, and then sucking its brains out is defended by nice rational Democrats.