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4:42

(In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

However, the law is just a metaphor on which we base blind faith in the pre-eminence of the prevailing order. But the metaphor is so strong that even today it colours not just our view of social relationships, but also feeds our recurring conviction that a society without laws must be a society that is rushing head-long towards its own annihilation. The law is such a powerfully charged metaphor that we cannot even look at nature and the Universe without presuming that these operate according to preordained and eternally valid laws. However there is no proof whatsoever of any such laws, and nor should there be. If we really are serious about our conviction that God is dead, we must also draw the conclusion that the legislator is dead. And without the original legislator, the eternal and metaphysical law does not exist either. Were we to carry this line of argument one step further, it would reveal that natural law is to be regarded as an incoherent battery of anthropocentric chicanery without foundation in anything whatsoever, and particularly not in nature.







Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58