por James Kalb
Four religions:
Liberalism: A single human world ordered by pure reason, based on pure (content-free) concepts. Freedom says you ignore the content of human goals so you promote all of them simply as such, and equality says you ignore the content of human qualities so you treat all men as equal in value. Put them together and you get liberalism.
Islam: A single human world ordered by pure will. There’s no place for reason, since God, who acts by arbitrary choice and is not bound by reason, is the immediate cause of everything.
Judaism: Two parallel human worlds, the public world everyone is part of that can be appropriately ordered by pure reason, and a private Jewish world ordered by will in the form of a contract between God and the Jewish people that imposes arbitrary conditions like keeping kosher.
Catholicism: Two human worlds, the order of nature and the order of grace, that are conceptually distinct but cannot be separated without violence because they are part of a single rational divine order: grace completes nature, and is meant for all.
To the extent the foregoing schema approximates reality, it appears that liberalism and Islam are direct mortal foes, and liberalism and Judaism are natural allies, since they need not interfere with each other. Liberalism and Catholicism can work together on some practical issues but in the long run are irreconcilable since the conceptions or reason and reality are different—Catholic reason has natural-law content, liberal reason does not.
