The National Party

Interesting you label anyone who challenges you points as "far left" without any foundation other that they dont buy into horsh*t talking points.

But of course in the "new" right anything to the left of Atilla the Hun is Marxist of course

I think its more delusional to imagine that socialism was invented by Marx and Engels.

Keep telling you - centerist.

Social Democrat to be more specific.

WTF does any of this have to do with The National Paty?

Oh, I never questioned anything. I called you out on making a very clear and ignorant generalisation that had nothing to do with the post you were replying to. The subject of you claim was "the left" - not the church or the history of religion in Europe.

The filth and their shrills would almost make you want to vote SF.

I think there's a large measure of truth in that. But of course that happened because civil officials were using state power to try to control the church and to control people's religious lives and practice.

In itself, that wasn't a new thing; church had always been closely integrated with state, with kings, e.g., choosing bishops and using state power to enforce religious conformity and exclude dissidents. It was only the the religiously diverse conditions of the Reformation that that approach turned into the foundation for a widespread bloodbath.

You can see how people might think that a solution to this was to establish religion as an area in which the state had no competence — state directs civic matters; churches directs religious matters. Viola! Separation of church and state, and the use of state power to enforce religious conformity becomes illegitimate.

(Of course, they didn't arrive at that solution immediately. The Thirty Years War, you'll recall, was brought to a weary conclusion on the basis of an understanding that (a) the ruler of each state would decide whether the church in that state would be Catholic, Lutheran or Calvinist; (b) rulers would tolerate minority religious groups so long as they were law-abiding and didn't seek to control or take over the established church; (c) rulers of neighbouring states with a different flavour of established church wouldn't seek to interfere. No separation of church and state there, obviously.

That worked reasonably well in Germany. If you were a nonconformist in (say) Hannover, you would be tolerated and not oppressed provided you were well-behaved. And if you found that too restrictive, well, you didn't have to travel far or go anywhere "foreign" to find yourself in a place where your religious preferences were flavour of the month. (And precisely because it was easy for people to relocate rulers had an added incentive not to be mean to religious minorities; it's damaging to the state to drive out its people.) But in big nation-states like France, England and so on it didn't play out the same way; if you were an adherent of a minority religion, going somewhere where that was the established religion was effectively going into exile; the cultural and economic barriers to doing that were very high. And kings in those countries didn't display anything like the same tolerance of minorities.

So I think it was in France, England, etc that what we would recognise as separation of church and state was really worked out. All churches and religious communities should be equally free to pursue their own religious ideals and practices, subject only to compliance with civil laws that were indifferent to religion. The state shouldn't favour any of them to any degree, and there should be no establishment/toleration distinction.

That idea was there from the 18th century onwards, but France didn't actually make it a reality until, I think, 1905, and technically the UK never has, at least in England. But of course the US embraced the idea and ran with it.

But, the point remains; the fundamental goal all along was not to prevent the state from being controlled by churches, but to prevent churches from being controlled by the state.

The bizarre thing is that he imagines that a left leaning communitarian life philosophy didn't exist before Marx and Engels. The reality is that this sort of philosophy was entirely common throughout history and that's because it follows a natural human instinct to build strong and stable communities of social support.
Marx and Engels were only significant in that they projected those principles into a modern industrialized age - a scenario which had never existed before in the history of humanity and showed particular challenges to workers cleaved from their stable social environments and thrust into exploitative urban societies.

Socialism was as common as social conservatism in the past just not quite so easy to point a finger at and say that is "socialism", but both philosophies exist because they are a natural projection of aspects of human nature.

Ah, this again.

It's just the consequence of the "Ireland is a Christian / Catholic country" stuff the NP among many others like to come out with.

Islam isn't part of our heritage, Judaism isn't part of our heritage, Hinduism isn't part of our heritage... When religion gets attacked in Ireland (usually with justification) it's Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular that's going to be in the firing line.

Pointing out a fallacy or weakness in someone's logic in an open debate is not 'moral high ground', and you know this.

This is not your personal.blog, if you post things they are either wrongor vindictive, you're gonna be challenged as you have been by me AND various others.

The National Party is nothing to do with socialism, nor do pretty much any of the posters you're replying to.

If i can just turn your strawman back on you for a second, are you honestly suggesting that the real, stated, explicit intention of Socialism was to enslave all workers to a rigid state corporatism where any deviance was met with punishment and death?

As to your second question, what is the difference, genuinely, between a fascist dictator and a communist dictator, aside from the flavour of their rhetoric?

I blame American conservative commentary where the words socialist, marxist and communist are used interchangeably to describe anything to the left of the Republican party.