How we arrive at our conclusions

If you scroll down my blog, you'll see that for the past three days, I've been doing a lot of posts that touch upon the fact that the liberals have a completely different set of operating principles than do conservatives. I've sort of poked fun at this, but Hugh Hewitt, in his most recent Weekly Standard column tackles the real world problems that occur when two groups have competing value systems, and one utterly rejects the validity of the other's. What's happening here is that the Left is saying that, if your ultimate policy conclusions come, even in part, through a religious filter, they are not just wrong, but entirely invalid. Thus, the Left says that he only valid conclusions come from thought that is utterly uninformed or "uninfected" by religion. In that regard, the Left falls into the same error I was making, only they present it as a virtue, not a fault: They believe that they don't have "principles" -- they just have pure, rationale conclusions, mathematical in their perfection, utterly removed from any polluting principles. I think the feeling is that principles are an old-fashioned construct and, as such, must inevitably be tainted by old fashioned ideas, such as racism, sexism, poverty-ism, empire lust, capitalism, pro-life-ism, etc. Hat tip: Palm Tree Pundit