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Democracy and Religion
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A period when many of the ideas behind the American democracy were being formed and explored. These links will lead you to many of the works of philosophers whose influence is felt in the U.S. even today.
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Little wonder then, that Voll and Esposito advocate "reconceptualizing democracy." But to what end? And why, just when democracy enjoys its widest consensus of definition, widest popularity, and widest domain in history, why should it now need reconceptualization? Voll and Esposito say that "there is no universally accepted or clearly defined model of democracy." But these are two different claims. Any dissenter can prevent a model from being "universally" accepted--so what?
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For the most part, lawyers and judges influence democracy through the courts. Laws diminishing judicial power, especially making judges elected officials and subjecting them to frequent reelection, are extremely harmful to a democracy. The influence of lawyers can be seen in that while political laws are constantly changing, civil lawsover which lawyers have great influencehave changed so little that they are practically outdated.
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This issue then is the most current and poignant illustration of the problem with democracy. It is possible, in the Rousseauist tradition, for a whole people -- and not just the American people, the British in many ways enlightened our paths in this unhappy practice -- by proper democratic methods, using all three branches of government, to choose what is not right and cannot be made right by the method which justifies the claim to rightness. Again, "democracy works" means that it is not working. There is some intrinsic fault in the system, a fault that is probably related to Johnson's point about revelation and to Plato's point that the order of personal soul is ultimately what enables us, even in a democracy, to understand and do what is right.
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By its own inherent tendencies, democracy tends to lower tastes and passions, to devolve into materialistic preoccupations, and to undercut its own principles by a morally indifferent relativism. Further, democracy left to itself tends to surrender liberty to the passion for security and equality, and ... to end in a new soft despotism, tied down with a thousand silken threads by a benign authority.
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Knesset Speaker MK Reuven Rivlin (Likud) called Israel an unparalleled democracy, but warned of the ideological gaps between mainstream Jewish-Israelis and the Arab minority, such as affiliation with the national anthem. He recommended defining the terms “Jewish” and “democracy.”
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