{"id":14031,"date":"2012-03-11T10:41:35","date_gmt":"2012-03-11T14:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=14031"},"modified":"2019-10-02T18:50:30","modified_gmt":"2019-10-02T22:50:30","slug":"tim-worstall-on-protestant-and-catholic-laws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/03\/11\/tim-worstall-on-protestant-and-catholic-laws\/","title":{"rendered":"Tim Worstall on “Protestant” and “Catholic” laws"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, not the differing flavours of Christianity themselves, but more their different approaches<\/a> to understanding and interpreting the law:<\/p>\n

\n

The Protestant revolution was, in part (it never does to strain these analogy\/simile things too much) that the Bible, when in the vernacular, as clear an outline of God\u2019s will as any should need. Intervention was not needed, a man could commune directly with the Word and the Will of God.<\/p>\n

On the matter of the law I am a Protestant. As rigid and unyielding as any Puritan, Lutheran or Calvinist. With a twist of course: the law must be written so that it can be understood directly, without that intervention of the priestly caste of lawyers, accountants, diversity advisors or bureaucrat\u2019s helplines.<\/p>\n

If you cannot write a law with the clarity of \u201cthou shalt not kill\u201d then go away and think through what it is that you\u2019re trying to enact, the language that you are using to do so until you can, with clarity, tell us what it is that we must not do at fear of time in pokey.<\/p>\n

That modern society is complex is no excuse. If you cannot write simple and simply understood laws then better that we have fewer laws.<\/p>\n

That the Puritans went gargantuanly off the rails by using their new found revelations of God\u2019s Will to tell everyone else what to do is true. But I do find it interesting that our new would be ruling class, the nomenklatura, are adopting such a Catholic view of the law. We\u2019ll make it all so complex that no individual can understand it and thus there is the necessity of that nomenklatura to tell people what to do in detail by \u201cinterpreting\u201d it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, not the differing flavours of Christianity themselves, but more their different approaches to understanding and interpreting the law: The Protestant revolution was, in part (it never does to strain these analogy\/simile things too much) that the Bible, when in the vernacular, as clear an outline of God\u2019s will as any should need. Intervention was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,11],"tags":[360,267,1310,661],"class_list":["post-14031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-law","category-religion","tag-christianity","tag-justice","tag-puritanism","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3Ej","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14031"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51489,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14031\/revisions\/51489"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}