joe1776
Well-Known Member
Both the Bible and the US Constitution were authored by good men who meant well but lived in earlier times. And since we humans have been making moral progress, the societies in those earlier times were morally immature. Think about the attitudes of the Framers of the Constitution toward slavery and women's rights, for example.
When men were made to think about what it would feel like to be born a woman or a slave, the treatment of women and slaves felt wrong. This intuitive feeling of wrongness is commonly referred to as conscience. And it is conscience that motivates our moral progress. We humans are treating each other better today than at any time in the distant past.
The Bible and the Constitution aren't influential enough to stop humanity's moral progress, but they can slow its pace. In 1866, Pope Pius IX slowed the moral progress of some Catholics when he, quite correctly, told them that he found nothing in the Bible opposed to the buying, selling and trading of slaves. The conscience-motivated abolition movement was a century old at the time.
The Constitution also slowed the abolition movement. The constitutional amendment to abolish slavery (1865) was nearly a century behind Vermont's abolition in 1777. And, it would take another century for the descendants of slaves to gain equal rights as citizens (The Civil Rights Act of 1964).
I know that my conclusion will sound outrageous to most of you, but I'm convinced that the US Constitution, and the government it devised, should be regarded like a stagecoach, a no-longer-useful relic of the past. In its place, decisions on our nation's policies should be made by contemporary minds, the best we can find, organized into a modern, more efficient system, and unhindered by laws written by men of a morally-immature, earlier age.
When men were made to think about what it would feel like to be born a woman or a slave, the treatment of women and slaves felt wrong. This intuitive feeling of wrongness is commonly referred to as conscience. And it is conscience that motivates our moral progress. We humans are treating each other better today than at any time in the distant past.
The Bible and the Constitution aren't influential enough to stop humanity's moral progress, but they can slow its pace. In 1866, Pope Pius IX slowed the moral progress of some Catholics when he, quite correctly, told them that he found nothing in the Bible opposed to the buying, selling and trading of slaves. The conscience-motivated abolition movement was a century old at the time.
The Constitution also slowed the abolition movement. The constitutional amendment to abolish slavery (1865) was nearly a century behind Vermont's abolition in 1777. And, it would take another century for the descendants of slaves to gain equal rights as citizens (The Civil Rights Act of 1964).
I know that my conclusion will sound outrageous to most of you, but I'm convinced that the US Constitution, and the government it devised, should be regarded like a stagecoach, a no-longer-useful relic of the past. In its place, decisions on our nation's policies should be made by contemporary minds, the best we can find, organized into a modern, more efficient system, and unhindered by laws written by men of a morally-immature, earlier age.