Portal:Libertarianism/Selected quote/8

“ In the first place, the fact that religious people are hostile to traitors and apostates does not make their views incorrect. Mr. Waters adopts an old canard by lumping in moral principles as "religious," thereby indicting hostility to immoral actions with the dread stamp of "religion." You don't have to be religious to detest immorality or hypocrisy, or to be angry and indignant at backstabbing by friends or lovers. Mr. Waters's ideal of the passionless scientist is, as far as I am concerned, totally off the wall. I have known many scientists, and I have never known any who were not passionately indignant against what they considered the promotion of quackery or the betrayal of the ideals [e.g. truth-seeking] of science. I confess also to be annoyed at Mr. Waters invoking of my dear mentor, Ludwig von Mises, in his argument. It is true that Mises was a utilitarian, but it is also true that he was passionately devoted to liberty, and equally passionately opposed to all forms of statism, and to those who purvey it. Scientist he was; bloodless he was not.

Parenthetically, I am getting tired of the offhanded smearing of religion that has long been endemic to the libertarian movement. Religion is generally dismissed as imbecilic at best, inherently evil at worst. The greatest and most creative minds in the history of mankind have been deeply and profoundly religious, most of them Christian. It is not necessary to be religious to come to grips with that fact. Speaking in Mr. Water's pragmatic bailiwick, we libertarians will never win the hearts and minds of Americans or of the rest of the world if we persist in wrongly identifying libertarianism with atheism. If even Stalin couldn't stamp out religion, libertarians are not going to succeed with a few Randian syllogisms.

” — Murray Rothbard (1926–1995)
Liberty article "Libertarians in a State-Run World" (December 1987)