Let’s talk force. It is an indisputable historical fact that both socialism and communism have taken over many ideas from Christianity. And a superficial reading of any socialist or communist work will bring to mind certain Christian ideas. I myself live only a few blocks from a Catholic Church where words from Sacred Scripture are read and what follows the reading is a socialist or Marxist gloss on them in the homily. And it is clear to me that many people see little difference between Jesus and Auguste Comte or Karl Marx. But there is a big difference. And that difference has to do with ‘force.’Why not ‘force’ people to do good? Forcing them might be good for them and good for society. And this is precisely what socialism and communism are: you will be robotized by the coercive power of the State to do good. I am not even going to mention the HUGE problem of what happens when the State “decides” what is good. Let’s just remember what the Nazi State defined as good and leave it at that. Even if the State could force people to do “the real good,” would that be a good thing? Comte and Marx and their followers think it would be a very good thing. But this has nothing to do with the teaching of Jesus. Forcing “goodness” is evil whether it is done by the tyranny of a minority, even a minority of one dictator, or whether it is done by the tyranny of the majority. We may incarcerate a dangerous killer to protect ourselves. But we do not force the killer to be good. But when government gets into the “force” the citizens to do good things business, bad things happen.

God could have created the human race in the image of ants who put the needs of others of their species above their own needs by instinct or one could even say by “robotization.” The human race could have been been created robotized to do the altruistic thing in every situation by instinct. But we were not created this way by God. We were created with free will, which St. Bonaventure noted was the most powerful force in the universe because not even angels can abolish it and God Himself will not abolish it. Well socialism and communism [if they were not atheist] would say that God made a mistake there and that the State should correct that situation by making us humans like ants. And if the politicization and use of force to coerce good is so enlightened, why didn’t Jesus teach it. Obviously Jesus could have written “The Communist Manifesto.” Why didn’t He?

– Curt Stoler