Quotable Friday

I’m starting a new weekly feature.. “Quotable Friday”. Every Friday I will be posting 6 notable quotes from ancient and contemporary sources on a variety of different topics from various different perspectives.

“The greenest home is the one you don’t build. If you really want to save the Earth, move in with another family and share a house that’s already built. Better yet, live in the forest and eat whatever the squirrels don’t want. Don’t brag to me about riding your bicycle to work; a lot of energy went into building that bicycle. Stop being a hypocrite like me.I prefer a more pragmatic definition of green. I think of it as living the life you want, with as much Earth-wise efficiency as your time and budget reasonably allow.”

– Scott Adams on green homes in his August 21, 2010 Wall Street Journal piece, How I (Almost) Saved The Earth

“When we have made ourselves to a certain extent familiar with the language of Scripture, we may proceed to open up and investigate the obscure passages, and in doing so draw examples from the plainer expressions to throw light upon the more obscure, and use the evidence of passages about which there is no doubt to remove all hesitation in regard to the doubtful passages.”

– Augustine in City of God and Christian Doctrine on How We Should Proceed In Studying Scripture

“The problem with Glen Beck’s big Mall rally was not that evangelicals were in danger of going over to Beck’s Mormonism, but rather that they were all displaying the shared territory of a shared secondary religion, that of Americolatry.”

– Douglas Wilson in his 2010 blog post The Complete Totalitarian Hellhole

“Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.“

– Robert Heinlein in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)

“I don’t mean to be churlish about any kind intentions, but when September 20 comes, please do not trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries.”

– Christopher Hitchens on why he doesn’t want prayer for his illness in Unanswerable Prayers in Vanity Fair, October 2010

“And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny’s the worst.”

– Quoted by Daniel Defoe in Jure Divino: A Satire In Twelve Books (1706)

A Neglected Issue in the Debates over the Mosque in NYC

One thing that is not often talked about in the debates over the building of a mosque in New York City is the concept of property rights.

Do we have them? Can people/organizations/companies do what they want with their property? Or do we need the government to tell us what to do with it? Are we allowed to do unpopular things with our property? Are we allowed to build things that are distasteful to others on our property?

Quite frankly: I think Islam is a false religion (if I believe that the premises of Christianity are true, which I do, then I must come to that conclusion since they make a number of opposing claims). However, I also support the right of Muslims to build Mosques where ever they want, provided they own the property and have obtained it legitimately.  By doing this I am standing within a very Western and Christian tradition of political thought and liberty.

Of course, many people who are busy bantering about property rights, aren’t willing to support it in this case. I’ve observed that the commitment to property rights of many conservatives is rather fickle.

In other words what any conservatives are really saying when they support “private property” is “you can do whatever you want with your property, as long as I’m OK with it”.  But just like you don’t believe in freedom of speech unless you are willing to protect speech that is unpopular and distasteful to you, you don’t believe in property rights unless you are willing to protect a person or organizations right to build things that are unpopular and distasteful to you.  By definition, popular and favorable things don’t need the protection of any liberty (ie. property rights or freedom of speech).  It’s the unpopular, distasteful things that need the protection (and what is unpopular, of course, can shift over time).   If the building of a particular building on a particular property is distasteful to the majority of Americans, and this process is conducted lawfully, then what is needed more than anything else from a political perspective, is the protection of those property rights.