Pray for fair weather, and the freedom to make wrong decisions

Francis Bacon, a 17th-century English judge, scientist, author and philosopher, said, “When any of the four pillars of government: religion, justice, counsel, and treasure, are mainly shaken or weakened, men had need to pray for fair weather.”

Every year at Christmas time, in Nativity plays across the nation, children recite to us the Bible verse that identifies Jesus Christ as the pillar of religion supporting government: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder.” (Isaiah 9:6)

We, as citizens, must individually give Christ this right to govern us, otherwise, as another major influence on our nation’s designers, Edmund Burke, said: “Among a people generally corrupt, liberty
cannot long exist.”

The reason for that is simple: unless we freely accept the structure proposed for our lives by God, we will always be resting on a support that can never be as insightful, effective or as strong as the
one created by God, our Father.

Many citizens no longer have this internal pillar of spiritual government in their lives, and so we have recently been experiencing many legislative expressions of our choice as a society to exchange our historic celebration of individual liberty for the apparent security of governmental benefits for the majority.

In the past we have described other nations which have made that exchange as fascist, communist, socialist or Nazi.

The word “fascist” means “bundle, group, assemblage” and was chosen by Benito Mussolini for the name of his World War II-era Italian dictatorship that created a merger of state and industry.

A “socialist” nation is one in which the government owns or controls the means of production and distribution of good and resources. “Nazi” was simply the German phonetic shortening of the term National-sozialist, for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

In Marxist theory, socialism is a transitional phase from capitalism (private people own and control private property) to communism (there is no such thing as private property).

Inherent in each of those political ideologies is the idea that the will of the state and the collective good of the majority is of more value than the freedoms of the individuals within that society.

In George Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm: A fairy story,” the leader of Animal Farm — the boar Comrade Napoleon — begins to incrementally remove the barnyard citizens’ freedoms in order to gain more power for himself. Squealer, the public relations pig for Napoleon, tries to placate the animals:

“Comrades,” he said, “I trust that every animal here appreciates the sacrifice that Comrade Napoleon has made in taking this extra labour upon himself. Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

If we have lost the freedom to fail, then we have also lost the freedom to truly succeed.

Such an enormous loss as that shakes our national foundation and weakens our nation’s core belief that we are all individually endowed by our mutual Creator, with certain unalienable personal rights, among them being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Pray for fair weather ahead.

Sharman’s column appears each Tuesday.