Discernment, Discrimination and Wisdom

Let’s define the three words of the title of this piece.

Discernment – Noun – “the faculty of discerning; discrimination; acuteness of judgment and understanding; the act or an instance of discerning.”  Since discernment is the “faculty of discerning or an act of discerning, then we need to look up its definition.

Discern – Verb – (used with object) (1) to perceive by the sight or some other sense or by the intellect; see, recognize, or apprehend:  They discerned a sail on the horizon.

(2)  to distinguish mentally; recognize as distinct or different, to see or understand the difference; discriminate: He is incapable of discerning right from wrong.

Discern – Verb – (used without object) (3)  to distinguish or discriminate.

The origin of the word from Middle French meant to sift or separate.

We see that our second word, discrimination, is synonymous with discernment in some ways, but let’s look at its full definition anyway.

Discrimination:  (1) the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex

(2)  recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another:  discrimination between right and wrong.

From Latin to distinguish between.

Wisdom:  the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.

Wise:  (1)  characterized by wisdom :  marked by deep understanding, keen discernment, and a capacity for sound judgment.  The old Norse and Old English origin of the word meant “to know the way”.

(2)  exercising or showing sound judgment :  prudent (having or showing good judgment).

We now live in an age of relativism where the true meanings of the words above are either lost, banned or corrupted.  After the civil war, the first meaning we see listed above for “discrimination” to mean an unjust or prejudicial treatment, came into being for a definition of the word.  While it is one of the liberals’ favorite words to assault conservatives with, its original and correct meaning simply means to make a distinction between two different things.  When was the last time you’ve heard the words discernment or wisdom?

In the liberal west any distinctions, any discernment is attacked as wrong because to liberals there are no absolute values, all things are relative.  In liberal land we cannot make distinctions.  Why we ask?  The answer is simple, the liberals intend to crush traditional American culture.  It is the tree they are chopping down.  Nothing that is traditionally “American” can be advanced as good, advantageous, superior or better.

Let’s consider the basic tenants of American Conservatism.

Wikipedia gives an opening definition that just about sums it up, at least for me anyway.

“Historically, the central themes in American conservatism have included respect for American traditions, support of republicanism and the rule of law, Judeo-Christian values, anti-Communism, advocacy of American exceptionalism and a defense of Western civilization from perceived threats posed by moral relativism, multiculturalism, and postmodern ridicule of traditional culture. Liberty is a core value, with a particular emphasis on strengthening the free market, and opposition to high taxes and government or labor union encroachment on the entrepreneur.”

The wiki article goes on to quote William F. Buckley who at one time was just about the only conservative voice in America with national reach.  In the first issue of his magazine, “National Review” in 1955 he defined his conservative movement as-

“Among our convictions:

“It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side.

“The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order. We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience. On this point we are, without reservations, on the conservative side.”

So, what defines American conservatism?

1)  Respect for American traditions.

This point needs little discussion.  If you are a conservative you value our history, you recognize and appreciate the evolution of thinking that was only possible in a nation like ours.  America had the capacity for self-correction, Republicans ended slavery and then the jim crow laws a half century ago.  Americans over time made their actions match more and more the stated philosophies and standards of our founding documents.  No nation in the history of the world has ever equaled America as a land of freedom and opportunity.  One conservative motto may be “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

2)  Support for our constitutional government as created and intended by our founders.

True conservatives, as opposed to simply “republicans” work to diminish the size of our government as it has exploded into a monster that is consuming our nation.  As Reagan said, “government is not the solution, it is the problem”.  Liberals, of course believe that government, or The State can provide the answer for all of our problems.  Our founders never intended for the federal government to mutate into what it is today.

We do not have a constitutional government.  The federal government now intrudes into virtually every aspect of our lives, a far cry from the 18 enumerated powers the framers of the constitution granted to the central government with all over powers reserved for the state.  There is an inverse correlation at work here, the more government, the less liberty.

3)  The rule of law, every citizen should be treated equally under it and that all law should have the consent of the governed.

We witness the abuse of the law continually with the rich, famous, favored minorities and connected democrats flaunting the law with impunity.  Law should also have the consent of the governed.  Our founders intend America to be “a nation of Laws”, a nation under the rule of law as opposed to rule by monarchies as was common in Europe at the time.

The American colonies had revolted against the Crown and thus put into place what was intended to create a level playing field for all citizens as far as law and legal rights were concerned as opposed to the “rule of men” which would inevitably result in arbitrary, unforeseen or unknowable government actions against the individual.  The “rule of law” must therefore result in predictable outcomes and they must be laws overwhelmingly supported by the people, the consent or agreement of the governed.

This brings us to Natural Law.

Our founders applied the concepts of “Natural Law” in formulating the U.S. Constitution and what it was intended to accomplish.  Obama was correct in saying that the Constitution, especially the first ten Amendments, was one of “negative” rights.  Naturally, obama is critical of these negative rights simply because our constitution proclaims what our government cannot do.  Liberals believe in positive rights granted by the government, that the government should provide a chicken in every pot, cradle to grave welfare, free healthcare, etc.

Fortunately, our founders understood the sure disaster that would ensue had our rights sprung from government, so they fashioned a government that did not guarantee rights, but protected god given or natural rights that man should have already.  Our constitution was intended to restrain government not unleash it as we see today.   With regard to law, our founders and the first several generations of lawyers were trained by the writings of the great English Jurist Sir William Blackstone who had written-

“For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the…direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of (or meaning of) those laws.”

Thomas Jefferson had echoed those sentiments by saying-

“Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him …. The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society… their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation.”

So what is Natural Law?

From the legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com we see this definition

“The unwritten body of universal moral principles that underlie the ethical and legal norms by which human conduct is sometimes evaluated and governed. Natural law is often contrasted with positive law, which consists of the written rules and regulations enacted by government. The term natural law is derived from the Roman term jus naturale. Adherents to natural law philosophy are known as naturalists.”

There are three basic schools of Natural Law – Divine, Secular and Historical.  Clearly our founders were influenced primarily by Divine Natural Law, although at that time, there were no great conflicts between the three and in fact, all three were operative.  A brief definition of these three are as follows.

Divine – In a protestant Christian environment that characterized our nation nearly two and half centuries ago, this could be summed up as crimes and liberties as defined in the Bible.  Up until very recently, our lifetimes, if something was prohibited in the scriptures, other than dietary and other special restrictions God placed on Israel as a nation, it was illegal or certainly unethical.  Our liberties also came from the scriptures – a free market economy, rights of property and self- defense.  If the bible was against something, America was against it, if the bible was for something, America was for it.

“Secular – The school of natural law known as secular natural law replaces the divine laws of God with the physical, biological, and behavioral laws of nature as understood by human reason. This school theorizes about the uniform and fixed rules of nature, particularly human nature, to identify moral and ethical norms. Influenced by the rational empiricism of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers who stressed the importance of observation and experiment in arriving at reliable and demonstrable truths, secular natural law elevates the capacity of the human intellect over the spiritual authority of religion.” 

Our founders would not have “replaced the divine laws of God” with the laws of nature as understood by human reason simply because the new nation of the United States was thoroughly Christianized.  It has likely never been true that the majority of American citizens at any given time were Christians, but it was certainly true that the ethical environment, or the ethos, of America in 1787 was Christian in nature.  There was simply no serious competing view present at that time, the atheistic or deistic views of the European mainland just couldn’t make significant inroads into colonial American thinking as it did in France (and adopted by modern Western Liberals)

Rather than “Secular Natural Law” competing against Divine Natural Law it was perfectly complementary.  The moral standards at the time were buttressed by colleges such as Yale, Harvard and Princeton that were started so that

“youth may be instructed in the Arts and Sciences who through the blessing of God may be fitted for Public employment both in Church and Civil State” (Yale)

and “Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life, John 17:3, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning…” (Harvard)

and “… our great Intention was to erect a seminary for educating Ministers of the Gospel”. (Princeton).

These colleges along with others were formed as a result of the Great Awakening, religious revivals that swept the colonies decades before the revolution that spiritually energized the colonies, spurring them on to missionary efforts among the Indians, these colleges to train pastors and they also served as a repository for the sentiment of independence from the Anglican Church and ultimately of independence from England itself.

The last form of Natural Law is Historical –

According to this school, law must be made to conform with the well-established, but unwritten, customs, traditions, and experiences that have evolved over the course of history. Historical natural law has played an integral role in the development of the Anglo-American system of justice. When King James I attempted to assert the absolute power of the British monarchy during the seventeenth century, for example, English jurist Sir Edward Coke argued that the sovereignty of the crown was limited by the ancient liberties of the English people, immemorial custom, and the rights prescribed by Magna Charta in 1215. 

Magna Charta also laid the cornerstone for many U.S. constitutional liberties. The Supreme Court has traced the origins of grand juries, petit juries, and the writ of Habeas Corpus to Magna Charta. The Eighth Amendment proportionality analysis, which requires that criminal sanctions bear some reasonable relationship to the seriousness of the offense, was foreshadowed by the Magna Charta prohibition of excessive fines. The concept of due process was inherited from the requirement in Magna Charta that all legal proceedings comport with the “law of the land”.  

Due Process of Law, the Supreme Court has observed, contains both procedural and historical aspects that tend to converge in criminal cases. Procedurally, due process guarantees criminal defendants a fair trial. Historically, due process guarantees that no defendant may be convicted of a crime unless the government can prove his or her guilt Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Although the reasonable doubt standard can be found nowhere in the express language of the Constitution, the Supreme Court has said that the demand for a higher degree of persuasion in criminal cases has been repeatedly expressed since “ancient times” through the common-law tradition and is now “embodied in the Constitution”. 

As with Secular Historical Law, the Historical also easily merged with the Divine at the start of our nation.  As the precepts of secular law were determined by reason, in other words men determined that some things were good and some bad based on deductive reasoning, but since the mindset of our founders was Christian in nature and form, they reasoned from a biblical perspective.  Likewise, up to that point and years beyond it was simply that the “customs, traditions, and experiences that have evolved over the course of history” of America was Christian.

Thus, in the founding era of our nation, all aspects of “Natural Law” were Christian in nature.

It’s the last phrase I just used that divides Americans at the moment.  Traditional conservative Americans are generally of one mind on what constitutes reasonable laws that are understood, equally applied and viewed as good for society as a whole.  Liberals, on the other hand, in their process of shattering the homogenous nature of our society push for laws that only their fringe groups approve of, the most notable, the homosexual “rights” laws.

The final values that define conservatism are-

4)  Judeo-Christian values.  Our nation was founded by Christians for Christians and it was these values that compelled our revolt against England.

5)  Anti-communistic.  Communism was the great enemy of our nation for many decades.  America fought a long hard cold war and some hot wars to stop its encroachment upon the world against nation enemies such as the Soviet Union, China and North Korea as well as our domestic enemies, the liberals, who have much more in common with commies than traditional Americans.

6)  Conservatives are proud of our country and see no need to “transform” it.  By nearly any standard, America is exceptional, not as Obama would proclaim just as any other nation considers itself exception, but truly exceptional and unique.

7)  Conservatives are opposed to forces attempting to destroy what America is and represents.  Conservatives, therefore, opposes moral relativism, multiculturalism, and postmodern ridicule of traditional culture.

8)  Conservatives do defend the free market, entrepreneurism against government intrusion and growth beyond constitutional boundaries.

America is becoming more and more lawless by the day.  Rebellion against God and tradition has run its course and has created the rotting corpse of America that we witness today.  Hillary Clinton is not popular because of what she says, but by what she does.  She is a criminal candidate for a criminal class of humans that infest our country.

As others have noted and several other articles on this site discuss, the democrat party is a coalition party of aggrieved fools who are united by hatred of traditional America.

Just over the past few days, black thugs cheered on by the democrat party including Obama and Hillary have escalated the war against “whitey”, actually against “white culture” made up of all races, as they’ve taken to murdering police officers.

To the racists (liberals/democrats and their minority plantation members) “blue” is part of the white establishment, as we know “law and order” are code words for racism. Obviously its racist to expect feral blacks to act appropriately in our society.

Notice over the past few years that black thugs are becoming more and more brazen, largely because they get away with it and the democrat party is cheering them on. Years ago, the violence was largely contained in the black ghetto strongholds, you just simply didn’t take any “wrong turns” to end up there. Next, over the past decade we began seeing the assaults of the “youth” gangs just inundating stores, laughing in the camera as they stripped it nearly bare.

Then we started witnessing the “knock out games”, the “polar bear hunts”, as the thugs began attacking whites and Asians. Then we began witnessing the assaults at various state fairs, where the violent thugs would just assault the throngs of people with near complete impunity.

Then we witnessed the thugs burning down their communities and going on looting sprees while authorities watched and video taped, once again with total immunity, in fact, encouraged by the local and state democrat leaders.

What’s a good thug to do? They’re getting away with everything, why not ramp it up, why not start a shooting war with authorities, with the white establishment.  Heck, the president and the AG praise them, coddle them, defend them, show up at the funerals of their fallen comrades.  Hillary, their girl has embraced them.

Thugs are like animals in the respect that they only respond to pain and pleasure.  Their sensory input tells them that there is no pain or consequences for any of their actions so far, therefore they will continue the pleasure of taking whitey out.  They will continue until it becomes painful.

They know the democrat plantation masters are far more interested in disarming the law abiding than correcting their actions.  In fact, the not so subliminal message is “keep it up, we have an agenda that requires your increased violence, be our good foot soldiers”.

It is sort of humorous in a way watching the likes of Obama, Hillary, Lynch, the BTM (black thugs matter) bunch moon-walking backwards attempting to distance themselves from all this after doing nothing but incite this escalating violence against whitey. Naturally, the press will allow them to get away with it. All these murderous thugs are doing was “bring a gun…”.

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