Introduction
The secular West has got a bad case of the staggers. And if I might engage in a little bit of cultural appropriation of my own—which is almost as bad as selling burritos in Portland while white—I would like to take a comment by Chesterton, jigger it just a bit, and then apply it to our current malaise. Chesterton said something to the effect that if you do not stand for something, then you will fall for anything. Applied to societies like ours, societies with the soul sucked out, I would say that a culture that doesn’t stand for something will fall to anything.
A Culture with AIDS
The recent attacks in London were breathlessly reported on one news channel as a monumental problem. “Saturday attack in London a tipping point in a campaign to destroy the West.” To this one commenter said, in effect, really? The West has gone through a couple world wars, worse terrorism than this in the 70’s, not to mention the Cold War, and now we have reached the tipping point? After all that, we somehow cannot handle “a van and two guys with machetes”?
And of course the commenter has a point if he is comparing threat to threat, attacker to attacker, and danger to danger. But if he has missed the point entirely—as he has—he fails to compare the cultures under attack. He is not comparing the culture that fought the Second World War to the culture that is responding to these current threats. The residents of London withstood a withering bombing campaign by the Nazis with courage and aplomb; we answer the terrorists with teary candlelight vigils, mounds of Teddy Bears propped up against gates, and blathering PC nonsense from our elected officials.
A man whose immune system has collapsed can’t laugh off what years before—back in his robust days—would have been just a minor infection. The fact that he blew through a bout of pneumonia thirty years ago is irrelevant. What his immune system was like thirty years ago is not to the purpose. We need to know what his immune system is like now. This is because the threat is not the threat. The state of the immune system is the threat.
So the issue is not whether the West has ever faced greater threats. Of course we have—much greater threats. But that is a different question from whether we have ever been in as great a danger. We are in great peril, not because the threat is so much greater, but rather because we are so much weaker.
The Optical Illusion
But what do I mean by weaker? I am talking about our spiritual weakness. When it comes to understanding the meaning of our lives, the meaning of society, we are a worldview stretcher case. When it comes to teleology, purpose, direction, focus, we are a couple of toddlers lost in the middle of a Mirkwood straight out of a Grimm brothers’ nightmare.
So I am not referring to the throw weight of our missiles. I am not talking about how many aircraft carriers we have. This is not a reference to our scientific achievements, which have been remarkable. Our economy in the West is a colossus, and the American economy is bigger than that. We are certainly richer than all get out, but as someone once asked, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? A man cannot live on bread alone, and neither can the nations of men.
So when people lose their soul, they lose the thread. They lose the point. They lose it. Because man was created to have a purpose, he cannot function without it. Trying to function without it—as we are currently trying to do—is an exercise in trying to lose our minds.
Now all this has happened because we have extracted Christianity from our body politic—we have sought to remove all traces of the Lordship of Christ from any kind of public recognition. And the bills are coming due. We are starting to face the stark reality that it is Christ or chaos, Christ or the void. Our collective will doesn’t like this very much, but as Flannery O’Connor once put it, quite trenchantly, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
Such an operation of Christianity extraction is no small thing, like we got a haircut, or trimmed our nails or something. No, the removal of Christianity from the laws, customs, standards, constitutions, and foundational narrative of the West has been more like the removal of the skeleton. All the bones have been taken out, and although the mass of our flesh is still there, it is a quivering, shapeless mass, resembling a bean bag chair that is trying to get away from a nameless predator.
We have no structure any more. We have no shared creed. We do not know what we are here for. It makes no sense to speak of our inherited “shared values,” or better yet, “core values.” If they are arbitrary, shared values are worthless. If they are arbitrary, core values are simply located where our intestines are, and are full of the same thing.
So a culture that does not stand for something will fall to anything. And this is because somebody else with a different brand of “shared values” will come along and say that they like blowing up little girls at concerts. They like driving vans into pedestrians. They like watching the candlelight vigils afterward. They like measuring how bloodless and desiccated and lame our responses are. They like watching us not having a clue. Why wouldn’t they?
Collectively, we have no God. The ramifications of this are simple. We have absolutely no way to answer the most basic questions. Why are their “shared values” inferior to ours? They prize suicide bombings. We prize sex change operations. They prize one kind of genital mutilation and we prize another another. Tomato, tomahto. So we need to answer the questions.
But do not give us any crap about “the West.” Without Christ, the West is just a datum in geography. And without Christ, it will not be long before the secularists are saying that the West is whatever self-identifies as West, and this even includes the East, which means that Kipling was wrong. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Meaningless Is as Meaningless Does
So what is the official line? What is the foundation of our social order? Why should we organize ourselves in the way we do? Why should our values be obligatory for anyone? What gives us the right to call our values values? Isn’t that imperialistic?
We are, according to the toffs who run everything these days, the end product of so many millions of years of mindless evolution. We are a blind concatenation of countless atoms, cascading down through endless years, to no particular end or purpose. Nothing has a point. There is no telos, no shared purpose. Human life is just another device—which evolved in the days before refrigeration—for keeping meat fresh.
Imagine there’s no heaven—easy if you try. Above us, only sky. And if the only thing above us is sky, this means that Macbeth was right—history is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. If there is no arche, no integration point for all things, then nothing ties together. And if nothing ties together, then—follow me closely here—it can’t be tied together. If nothing coheres, then individuals and groups are absolutely free to come up with their own ad hoc approaches, however destructive others might feel their approach to be. And feel is the right word. One set of chemical reactions occur when other chemical reactions disturb the equilibrium. So what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t signify.
So when some troubled kids in some Agnostic Factory go “off the rails,” and shoot a bunch of their classmates, this should not be taken as a signal for everyone to start wailing about the need to hunt for “root causes.” The root causes are to be found in the curriculum of the damned school. Who taught these kids? Who taught them that there is no God or, failing that, if there happens to be some kind of a god, his existence is irrelevant to whatever we might be doing here in the classroom. And if this petty-god’s existence is irrelevant to what we say or do in the classroom, a dismayed society is going to rapidly discover that the boundaries of propriety are far more elastic than they had assumed going into this new regime. They thought that banishing God from the classroom would result in a free exchange of ideas, not to mention the freedom to have the kids read Catcher in the Rye. Liberal nostrums from a generation ago are so cute. Little did we anticipate the penchant many would show for Lord of the Flies instead. What banishing God from the classroom has actually resulted in has been murderous rampages in the cafeteria and the English teacher bonking her students after hours.
I am not saying that back before we banished God from our public discourse there were no outrageous crimes. There certainly were. But when they occurred, we all knew what we thought about them, and more importantly, why. We knew that the God of Abraham had prohibited such things, and that was the end of the story. We did not spiral down into epistemic confusion, muttering things about “different perspectives.”
So the next time some meaningless bits of protoplasm cause some other meaningless bits of protoplasm to reassume an earlier stage in the meaningless cycle of life, perhaps we should not rush to condemn them. Perhaps we should award them for their murder/suicide performance art. Give them a posthumous diploma—here were the only students in the entire school to pick up on the ramifications of what the school is actually teaching. Finally, someone following the arguments.
A Hot Knife through Butter
And this brings us back to the threats of radical Islam. The issue is not whether a van and two guys with machetes are stronger than all of our assembled might. Of course they are not. But the point is that our society does not have a unified direction or point, and on top of that, we have all of us pretty much noticed this fact. And what that means is that our enervated society has no real reason to rise to its own defense. We cannot articulate to ourselves what we do not possess. And if we do rise to our own defense, we manage to make our displays of strength just as pointless as everything else is. If we send our ships far enough east in the Mediterranean, we could fire our Tomahawks in pretty much any direction. Whatever else it is, that should count as a show of strength. Flexing on the lip of the Void is no more impressive than wailing on the lip of the Void.
We have no direction, no eschatology. Our politicians do promise to build bridges to “the future” (as though there were anywhere else to go), but the nature of that promised future is shapeless and ill-defined. This is all done under the banner of progress (with that word undefined as well), but maybe it means that we will build machines with sharper blades that can chop babies up into smaller pieces faster. Maybe we can continue to develop this promising new religion that worships the weather gods of the next century.
Layered Incoherence
You say there is no God. Deal with it.
If the official line of the West is that there is no transcendent reality that defines our lives for us—and that is our official line—then Muslim radicals will continue to feel free to dash about among us, running a real time reductio that illustrates just how LAME we are. How lame are we? If the theology of the secular West were any lamer, it would take about thirty Benny Hinn assistants to get us up to the stage for our show healing.
There is no salvation for us without a Savior. It is Jesus or nothing. It is Christ or more of the same. It is Christ or the Abyss. It is Christ or damnation. And shoot, we are so far gone that this paragraph is controversial to the Christians.
We are a busy place, with a lot going on. We have malaise, and we have ennui. We have our advanced stages of decrepitude. The paint is peeling off. To say “a lot is going on” is to say that the deterioration is proceeding apace. But underneath all of it, we find that the bottom layer is the fundamental fact that we don’t know who or what we are, we don’t know why we are here, and we don’t know where we are going. Other than that, everything is fine.
The bedrock reality for modern man is ultimate meaninglessness—and what an awful thing to have that for bedrock. Bedrock that is vapory, watery, unstable, and prone to random disappearances. In fact, bedrock is the wrong word. When we get down to the bottom layer of our lives, we find that there is no bottom layer—because, as the prophet of Patmos taught us, the pit is bottomless.
If every human being were a little bit of confetti, and we threw billions of them into the bottomless pit—why that image? oh, I don’t know. Maybe we swept them up after a gay pride parade or something, and needed a place to put them—each bit of confetti could float downward forever and ever. They are all floating the same direction. Let that serve for the bedrock. Let that direction be your constant.
Some, like Sartre, want us to roll our own meaning. The abyss is yawning in front of us, so we should just choose to act “in good faith.” Why should we? What the hell does he mean by good? Whatever else might be done while prancing along the rim of an infinite Void, casting your anchor in there is not one of them.
The Hand of God on Us
None of this is happening by accident. God sees exactly what we are doing.
“Sheol and Abaddon lie open before the Lord; how much more the hearts of the children of man!” (Proverbs 15:11, ESV).
Not only does He see what we are doing, He sees what He is doing.
“Stay yourselves, and wonder; Cry ye out, and cry: They are drunken, but not with wine; They stagger, but not with strong drink. For the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, And hath closed your eyes: The prophets and your rulers, the seers hath he covered” (Is. 29:9–10).
And we also need to see what we need to ask for.
“Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; Renew our days as of old” (Lam. 5:21).
Fact check: WRONG!
It was Aaron Tippin.
Thanks for the coffee on my screen!
What GKC actually said (you’ll probably prove me wrong) is that people who don’t believe in God, don’t believe in nothing, rather they believe in anything. That is our modern world. We don’t believe in the ONE BIG THING, but in a trillion little things like Islam is a religion of peace, homosexuality is a viable life style, that multiculturalism works.
There is a video of police running into a pub while the attack is in progress and telling everyone to get down. One man yelled an obscenity about Muslims and the fellows around him proceeded to lecture him about his bigotry and Islamophobia… as the attack by Muslims yelling Allahu Akbar was still happening.
So yeah, a van and two machetes has done what the Luftwaffe could not.
A guy on the radio talking about farm markets says “The cure for high prices is high prices”. Meaning that farmers will increase supply to try to take advantage of the higher price, thereby driving the price down. In the same way, the cure for a secular godless hell is a secular godless hell. The unfortunate part is, atheism is never the destination, it is only the route you go through to get to somewhere else. We won’t stay secular because secular atheist society is, in an irony to end all ironies, an evolutionary dead end. Whether we end up… Read more »
It wouldn’t be that hard to win if the West had the stomach for it, which, as you point out, it doesn’t.
Lots of good word pictures and metaphors here btw. I particularly like the idea of some people dragged down to Hell by an anchor while others float down like confetti. In the long run the rate of descent makes no practical difference.
“Nec vitia nostra nec remedium tolerare possumus.” Livy
And the Barbarians are at the gathering.
Fantastic, engaging, and true! Now I remember why I keep coming back.
Masterpiece.
I am grieved over how much of my life I have paid nominal “lip service” to the tenements of our faith. I the drag on my soul is visceral and my families life is a reflection of that. Any advise or counsel on restoring heart and hope?
Yes! Be thankful for what God has done and given you.
Gratitude starts eveything else.
Yes, gratitude, and the prayer from Lamentations that Wilson ended this article with: “Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned”.
“The residents of London withstood a withering bombing campaign by the
Nazis with courage and aplomb; we answer the terrorists with teary
candlelight vigils, mounds of Teddy Bears propped up against gates, and
blathering PC nonsense from our elected officials.”
As opposed to…what exactly? What works here?
Bringing in more immigrants, town hall meetings to increase tolerance for Muslims and shame everyone else, etc. You know, the usual stuff that’s working so well.
Right, so what does work? You can cut immigration off, but then what?
The immigrants trying to kill us won’t be here.
From there we can deal with our own criminals.
Deal with them how? Terrorists are not always immigrants.
I like the idea of flogging, but that’s just me.
No, it’s not just you, there’s a whole book on that topic.
Well, how about that.
I read the review, and then I read the comment section, some of which struck me as approaching what I would call perv.
There are lots of things that might work but that civilized people can’t do. We could burn down arsonists’ houses. We could shoot muggers in the kneecap. We could round them all up and ship them to Australia. Oh, wait…
Burning down houses is just wasteful and maiming people seems unnecessary, given modern technology. Flogging is not debilitating and provides cheap deterrence of crime. The only thing I can think of being better would be some kind of direct nerve stimulation to inflict a certain amount of pain instead, thus removing even the need for physical injury to punish crime.
Do you want to defend locking people up with criminals in an uncivilised environment for months or years, instead? Seems like it’s worse for the individual and for society.
And they get ahold of previously-discussed FBI-supplied literature and then join the Aryan Brotherhood or get supplied with fake explosives to try to blow up a family park in Portland.
Well you can flog them, but by then the damage is done.
Proberbs 19:29 and 26:3.
????
In general or just for jihadists? Do your children look at your nervously?
Come on Jillybean, is this a serious question?
But, to be fair, my children do look at me nervously when they do something they know is wrong. But generally, I can’t walk three step through the door after work without getting bombarded.
So, the reason that I’m so hot under the collar about Wilson’s posts is that they cede full moral authority to the globalists. What is necessary is not repentance followed by mass deportations or any other action that the globalist might find objectionable (we know this because Wilson has reiterated his opposition to the very reasonable measure of a Muslim ban) but that we simply acknowledge Christ as the author and sustainer of our activism and social engineering. Our ancestors thrived based solely on their repentance and all the muskets and palisades were just unnecesary manifestations of their sinful and… Read more »
The question is “Repentance of what sins?” Everybody in this conflict thinks something should be repented of, so let’s get down to specifics.
I’m with you on this one, I think – the main thing to repent of is hatred of fatherly, pastoral, and governmental authority, both among those wielding it and those subject to it.
As a hypothetical… if the revolutionaries of 1776 had submitted to the rule of England instead of fighting a war, would jihadis be running loose in London today?
Wilson is clearly talking about repentance for unbelief in the Christian God but there is not a clear correlation between Christian faith and rejection of multiculturalism. If anything, there is a social class correlation between unfashionable cultural holdouts supporting Trump and holding 30 year stale Christian right beliefs. Christian leaders are in a holiness competition with secular leaders on these issues. Let the conversation move from vaguely bashing secularists and calling for repentance to policy measures and the last best hope for American Christianity, here, starts punching right.
I was persuaded by the argument that the presence of a faithful Christian witness was the single most important element in creating a prosperous society. Then I started wondering about Ethiopia.
The idea is an off-the-cuff Christian version of Guns, Germs and Steel motivated by ethnomasochism and it doesn’t stand up to five minutes of thought on the history of human civilization. Pagans following the God of the Copybook Headings will prosper while Christians following The Gods of the Marketplace die out.
I think “ethnomasochism” is a bit strong, I think it’s just well-meaning belief that inheritance (both cultural and genetic) isn’t as important as one’s choices. (A belief that has worked out pretty good for a lot of Americans over the past couple centuries.)
The important issue is the question of what it takes to break free of the conservative pattern of moving ever leftward while serving to police thought to your right. As a tool for social influence, pragmatism always loses out to holiness. I think that the concept of the cuckhold is a vital one. The man who would allow other men sexual access to his wife is being kind and generous, self-sacrificing in the extreme. He is also morally disordered in a way that people recoil from on a visceral level. The pathological altruist is similarly disordered. A Christian shouldn’t go… Read more »
Barnabas wrote:
Is Barnabas suggesting that we might have something to repent of?
Barnabas wrote:
Does this mean Barnabas is finally rejecting ethnomasochism?
Barnabas wrote: Let the conversation move from vaguely bashing secularists and calling for repentance to policy measures and the last best hope for American Christianity, here, starts punching right. I corrected Barnabas on this precise error awhile back. The culture has a sin problem, not simply a policy problem. The policy permitting the slaughter of the unborn is a reflection of a seared heart. Simply changing the policy from above is not going to avert God’s judgment on us. The blood will still flow, it will just go underground to chemical abortion. Nothing lasting will result in the attempt to… Read more »
How about repentance for abdication to the secular worldview? How about repentance for the bloodbath of abortion? How about repentance for an entire monetary and financial system based on debt creation and lies? We’ve been over this before. Not sure why ashv still thinks he needs a special invitation for repentance. Is repentance somehow to be avoided until everything else has failed?
Barnabas wrote: So, the reason that I’m so hot under the collar about Wilson’s posts is that they cede full moral authority to the globalists. … Pastors like Wilson are going to use Libertarian economic theory, scriptural revisionism or rhetorical sqid ink but they don’t dare say that these lands are ours and it is good and right that we fight to keep them for our children. Barnabas has failed to demonstrate any of these assertions about Wilson, but I would grant that Wilson is more concerned about the heart of the culture than about land rights. Barnabas’s priorities seem… Read more »
After the debris is cleared away following each Islamic terrorist incident, the Home Secretary in the UK always releases the same depressing little statment: “The perpetrator was known to the authorities”. There are 3000 jihadis in Britain “known to authorities” and 20’000 more borderlines. They can no longer be tolerated in our society. Intern or deport. And freeze all muslim immigration to the UK except for the blindingly obvious humanitarian ones (old people, children suffering from serious illnesses, etc.)
I saw some folks referring to them as “known-wolf” rather than “lone-wolf” attackers.
The word you may be looking for is “Reconquista”.
Having “kids” in the military I have asked this question. They explain that we have foolishly over the decades interjected ourselves (the West) into a family dispute among Muslims. Those who have actually interacted face-to-face with them said it is lunacy to increase their ranks in our countries. Cordon them off, let them fight it out and return in a decade or two and see if they’re ready to interact with the rest of the world. Our approach makes as much sense as thinking we’re helping a neighbor by getting in between a crazy screaming wife and violent drunken husband.… Read more »
Nice distinction between band-aid and cure. I hope Barnabas reads it.
Unfortunately, Trump has two contradictory agendas. First he says he wants to extract us from the Muslim terrorist scene with travels bans, etc, but then he repeatedly injects himself directly into the Middle East by sending cruise missiles into Syria, and now a $110 billion arms deals with Saudi Arabia. Obama wasn’t even this overt. This meddling and choosing sides is foolishness. It just invites terrorist retribution from Muslim factions. In this analogy, Trump has basically sided with the drunken Sunni husband against the drunken Shia wife.
– Ivan Karamazov
Objector: “But but but … HUMAN FLOURISHING!!”
Me: “And what if someone were to respond with ‘If there’s no God, why should human flourishing be my priority?'”
Objector: “You don’t care about human flourishing!! You’re a monster!”
Me: (sigh)
Sounds like an interaction with Krychek_2.
More than one.
No, you cant blame this one on the secularists. The Christians I know are Facebook flag filter posting, refugee welcoming Third Worldists. You yourself had nothing good to say about the common sense measures Trump sought and instead called for an expanded surveillance state. If America has cultural AIDS then Christians are bug chasers. “Repent” while you keep smacking your head against a wall and see if your headache goes away.
“You yourself had nothing good to say about the common sense measures
Trump sought and instead called for an expanded surveillance state.”
???
How Then Shall We Deport.
Re travel ban “…simplistic, unworkable, and obnoxious…”
Re surveillance “One Facebook like of the wrong post, and they are frogmarched to the coast.”
Marginally related, have you followed the Evergreen State protests? How long do you think it’ll be before you get struggle
sessions like that in seminaries and church buildings?
Barnabas, I went back and reread “How Then Shall We Deport.” and still agree with it. But I think you misunderstood a couple things. The travel ban I was objecting to was a flat ban on Muslims from Candidate Trump. The travel ban that President Trump actually instituted was much more responsible. And I still believe in deporting a Facebook jihadi, but I don’t believe the government should be monitoring anybody online without a warrant.
Why would such a travel ban not make sense? Why would we allow any Muslims in? And why would we allow those here to stay?
It would take much more than a Muslim ban to reverse any of this and you can’t even support that. Fine, no travel ban, no Ottoman heads on pikes, no Crusade, no wall, no Naturalization Act of 1790, no DREAMers sent back and no rafts sunk in the Med but those choices have consequences. Defend the marginal tax rate but defending a nation is beyond the pale. If you can’t stomach the basic defenses required to preserve civilization then you will be pillaged and replaced by a sterner lot. What is this talk of repentance? The blood of a thousand… Read more »
Barnabas wrote: Defend the marginal tax rate but defending a nation is beyond the pale. Barnabas simply doesn’t get it. He thinks the greatest threat to the U.S. is an external one. He might want to re-read Wilson’s original article above. Building a hermetic seal around the U.S. is not going to magically restore our eschatology and teleology. It will simply make the jug sound all the more hollow. Wilson already grants a sane, evidence-based approach to dealing with jihadists, but why does Barnabas suppose that our cultural immunodeficiency can only be mortally taken out by an external threat, rather… Read more »
I can’t find the post, but you were against the wall and you said something about monitoring Facebook pages.
I think that is what he is referring to.
Not getting in the middle of this, just clarifying.
Likely he meant to be replying to somebody else.
Look, too many Christians are following the secularists and mimicking their behavior while putting on Christian window dressing, but surely we can agree that the secularists are the driving force of most of the globalist nonsense, no?
It’s a hard pill to swollow that legit believing Christians are just as susceptible to destructive ideology as secularists. This ideology didn’t take over the world by being weak and it turns out that God has not chosen to supernaturally protect his people from it. How many Christians do you know (including our host) willing to say that Western lands belong to Western people and should be defended with gunboats in the Mediterranean or land mines on the Rio Grande? Christians 100 years ago would have considered that common sense. I don’t know there’s any hope for our people but… Read more »
Of course it is a hard pill to swallow, but that doesn’t mean that secularists are not the driving force.
I don’t deny that unwitting Christians have been duped into following the secular line far too often, but I also know that secularists have intentionally tried to infiltrate Church leadership to use those levers of power to further their ends (see the PCUSA as one example). Combine that with wide spread biblical illiteracy and we see why it is happening.
This is not being drive by Christians, and the 81% who voted for Trump are clear evidence of this.
but I also know that secularists have intentionally tried to infiltrate Church leadership to use those levers of power to further their ends
Sure, but how many were invited in, not even bothering the hide in the wooden horse but escorting it through the gates?
I don’t know. More than makes me happy to admit. It is a point of deep shame that the American church was so easily duped and still so easily duped into swallowing the enemy’s bait.
Still doesn’t mean we get to let the secularists off the hook.
It is easier to turn and chastise the ones losing for not being better at winning. It is far harder and costs much more socially to go after the secular enemies that are driving the battle.
Part of the problem defining this is that the “secularists” are essentially intellectual descendants of the Puritans who have left all that God stuff behind but kept the rest. Were the 19th century abolitionists, suffragettes and socialists “secularists” or not? “Heretics” might be a better word.
I certainly won’t deny the proximity of Puritans and secularists (New England being what it is and all), but I don’t think I would connect the intellectual teachings of the Puritans to modern-day secularism.
Yes, socialism is rooted in secular thought coming from Europe. The suffragettes were not secular in the formal sense, but they were definitely rooted in Enlightenment thinking, hence we eventually get from them third wave feminism.
The abolitionists were the ones who can legitimately claim intellectual lineage from the Puritans. And no they were definitely not secular in any sense of the word.
Did it come from Europe, or just gain popularity there?
A heard a guy say one time that “knowledge is a very seductive thing”. Seems like at the end of the day, King Solomon couldn’t handle it, where King Josiah could.
Speaking as a Puritan myself, it’s the about same with us.
Didn’t WIlson argue in SSAIW that the rot set in when Unitarians apostasized from Puritan Calvinism. He states explicitly that the Unitarian apostasy was the source of wicked abolitionism. Wouldn’t be logical to assume that secularists, socialists, and suffragists came from the same batch of poisoned holy water?
Sounds like the short version to me, although I’d put “socialists” in a separate kettle of fish, possibly suffragettes too.
I wondered about socialists but I never miss a chance to alliterate.
Yes, and the Half-way Covenant was a significant link in that chain.
And I would also add, for a counterbalance, how many secularists do you know who are “willing to say that Western lands belong to Western people and should be defended with gunboats in the Mediterranean or land mines on the Rio Grande?”
My suspicions are close to zero.
My church would oppose to its last breath the placement of land mines on the shores of the Rio Grande, and I don’t think the moral framework dictating such opposition is even remotely secular. Could I ask instead why you think that Christians could support such a thing if its primary purpose would be to kill Central Americans hoping to cross the Southern border? Is there warrant in scripture for killing unarmed refugees?
You may have misunderstood my point.
I wasn’t defending that idea. Barnabas was trying to blame Christians for the immigration problems, and I was trying to pointing out that the problem is driven by secularism, and that he simply does not have support from secularists for his ideas.
And my point was that, when it comes to the specifics he mentioned, I don’t think he could count on Christians either. But are you sure that the “problem” ( and I am using quotation marks because I am not sure exactly how he would define it) is driven more by secularists than by Christians who are not conservatives on immigration? The Christians I know well would agree that we should not take in terrorists, and that there must be some limits on immigration. They would vehemently deny that mining the southern border so that people who hate Mexicans don’t… Read more »
Why do you think that expecting people to obey the law implies hating them?
It does not, and should not, always imply this, but all too often it does here. If you spend five minutes on the Breitbart comment section, you will find the following phrases with dreary regularity: disgusting and filthy brown people bringing their low-IQ brats into our country, living like cockroaches, not happy just to rape their own kids, they start raping ours too, living ten people in a garage and every single of them on welfare, bunch of drug dealers who are too stupid to learn English, the women are all whores demanding free slut pills from the government. It… Read more »
I don’t hate crows, but I don’t want them in my garden either. I don’t have especially strong feelings about Central Americans either way, but there are also very few in my neighbourhood.
I save that ire for the people responsible for the wellbeing of those whose livelihoods and communities have been disrupted, and those who could have prevented the rapes and murders by illegal immigrants but did not.
I have no sympathy for failing to deport criminal immigrants, legal or not. Do you realize that a legal alien such as myself can be deported for a misdemeanor such as shoplifting? I am not quarreling with that, but it does seem odd. Perhaps it is because, with my being a lawful soul, they always know where to find me. You would probably approve of this law because it has prevented me from engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience from time to time. It sounds to me as if you have gone to some trouble to find the kind of neighborhood… Read more »
Immigration is 4GW. Military historian Martin VanCreveld explains clearly how immigration vitiates its host country and is a form of warfare.
But if the salt shall loose its taste.
There are many rational non-believers who think as I do on these matters. I think you would be surprised how many support (non-cucked) Christianity as necessary for civilization. You should read them as well as reading the type of Christian bloggers who could never be referenced on this blog.
I have read a few. It is odd how many are virulently anti-Semitic when one would think old testament Judaism would be much more in line with their idea of a truly manly religion.
I have read some of them, primarily after our earlier chats. I do know that some of them see Christianity as a possible route to civilizational restoration and I am glad they do. It is the only hope. I will also look at any other links you recommend. But I would like to know what they mean by “non-cucked” Christianity. If they mean traditional Christianity, with its delineated authority, a legal system based on God’s Law, and a willingness to use cultural norms to enforce morality, sign me up. Think Puritan style Christianity or even further back to what we… Read more »
More truth here than in a month of Mablogs and partially explains why Wilson can’t tell the truth about so many issues.
http://mileswmathis.com/equality.html
It is more important to hold the rightward bound of the Overton Window accountable than it is the leftward bound and a traitor is worse than an enemy. If suicidal immigration policies are the fruit of non-repentance, as Wilson claims, then why do Wilson and millions of other Christians support the same policies? Is Wilson a secularist or an infiltrator? Regardless of your position on Islamic immigration there is clearly a load of cognitive dissonance going on in Wilson’s post. I see no reason to let Wilson off the hook. As he’ll tell you, he’s the most politically incorrect guy… Read more »
It does seem a curious way to stop terrorism.
“Every city in the world has the death penalty for stepping in front of a
bus. How do we live with this draconian, irrational, and instantly
enforced rule? By not violating it. Most of us never give the matter a
second thought.”
The principle is simple, and is older than Rome: friends come through the gate, enemies come over the wall. Even if that wall is so short that it can be jumped by a reasonably athletic young man.
I agree that foreigners should not violate our immigration laws. But there is no international law that allows a nation to set up death traps along its borders when there is a state of peace between two bordering countries. To the extent that the people crossing the southern border are economic refugees, it would be a grave violation of man’s law and God’s simply to kill them. We don’t have to admit them, and we don’t have to keep the ones already here. But we can’t kill them.
What right do economic refugees have to violate the borders of another nation?
Again, they are not our friends. If they were friends, they would come through the gate.
If they were attempting to throw themselves on our mercy, because conditions are so terrible in their home countries, they would come as friends, and come through the gates.
Because they come over the wall, they are enemies. Enemies are to be killed, before they kill you and yours.
Many of them are children. I realize that they must be sent back, but would you really be prepared to see them killed? Some are 15-year-olds trying to find the mothers who left them when they were very young. Some are sexually trafficked against their will. We don’t kill European tourists who overstay their visas with the intention of remaining here. Nobody wants to kill Canadians who wander across thousands of miles of undefended border. I think we are entitled to use deadly force to repel armed invaders, but not people who come, how ever illegally, in search of a… Read more »
You’re more concerned with claims to physical property than union with the Church. That says it all, really. “They went out from us, because they were not of us.”
Internet flotsam: Aristotle on Trolling.
“And this is in fact what the troll claims: that he is a gadfly and beneficial, and without him to ‘stir up’ the thread it would become dull and unintelligent. But this is incorrect. … For annoyance results from many kinds of speech; and the peculiarity of the troll is not annoyance or controversy in general, but confusion and strife among a community who really agree.” For those who regard themselves as outsiders to the community of this blog, this is a principle they might want to carefully consider (if they genuinely want to avoid taking up the function of… Read more »
My only concern with that, Katecho, is that I view myself, and I expect I am viewed by others, as an outsider because I am not an evangelical Protestant. I do try, despite my occasional tussle with you, to be fair, honest, and civil. But when it comes to expressing disagreement, does my outsider status mean that I should be held to a higher standard than the insiders?
Yes, back in the 1930s when Jews were desperately trying to escape Nazi Germany and we were refusing to accept them, even turning around ships with hundreds of Jews in them when they arrived on our shores and instead delivering them right back to Hitler, doing almost nothing about the Holocaust until 70% of Europe’s Jews had died, we were definitely much more deeply rooted in our Christianity. Or when internal US government memos between the leading architects of the Cold War were stating: Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This… Read more »
Yeah, man. Our parents and grandparents suck. Forget them. Let’s dump everything we learned about and from them and become Muslim. They are way better than our racist Founding Fathers.
With friends like this, who needs enemies.
I thought some of Jonathan’s other false analogies were bad, but this takes the cake. I’ve seen him make halfway serious Trump/Hitler comparisons before, but the situation with Muslims now is so different than Jews in the 1930s that’s it’s plain laughable.
It’s not surprising, though. “Compare the current situation to Nazi Germany or slavery” must be rule #1 in the secret SJW playbook.
I stopped taking Jonathan seriously a while back.
I thought some of Jonathan’s other false analogies were bad, but this takes the cake. I’ve seen him make halfway serious Trump/Hitler comparisons before, but the situation with Muslims now is so different than Jews in the 1930s that’s it’s plain laughable. Let’s approximate that as the 67th, 68th, and 69th times you have lied about one of my positions on these boards. I did NOT make an analogy between Muslims and Jews. That is a lie. I listed refusal to take in Jewish refugees as one of several things that shows that back in the WW2 era we were… Read more »
I would never say anything remotely like that. I am talking about looking with clear eyes. On these pages I have before praised things we did in the 1950s as better than now. And some things were worse. I don’t see a particular reason to think that we’re suddenly much worse people than we were 70 years ago – some sins that were mostly acceptable then are anathema now, some sins that were anathema then are more acceptable now, and for better or worse there are probably fewer fake Christians walking around then there used to be because it’s more… Read more »
So… what exactly do you object to in those quotes, and why?
1. He states that our goal is to remain incredibly, obscenely wealthy in comparison to the rest of the world and that we should take significant measures to maintain and pursue wealth. Jesus stated quite clearly that we should not seek to be wealthy.
2. He states that we cannot afford altruism and benefaction. Jesus said that the wealthy should use their wealth to pursue good works for others.
3. He states that we should deal in straight power concepts. Jesus said that that is what the gentile rulers do, and that we need to be different.
That’s a start.
Are these quotes not from government officials? There is a difference of the government of a wealthy people and wealthy people. Governments have different duties and callings from God.
Well, this strikes at the root of what I object to in your understanding of the gospel – you do not distinguish between what should be done for our own sakes, and what we should do for those we have responsibility to care for. Rulers have a responsibility to care for their subjects in a way they do not for other people. Fathers have a responsibility to care for their families in a way they do not for other people. If this were not so, how can one make sense of Jesus’ statement “It is not right to take the… Read more »
If this were not so, how can one make sense of Jesus’ statement “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs”? That’s a simply incredible misuse of an analogy – first off, America is certainly NOT the chosen nation, and second off, the woman eventually gives the retort that Jesus affirms (and affirms throughout his ministry as well as through the ministry of the disciples) – that this is the point in history where the chosen nation is going to do what it was meant to do all along and share the bounty… Read more »
A more accurate way of putting it is that I believe government officials have to follow Jesus’s commands too.Also, keeping people extremely wealthy is not a caring thing for them, especially when it is done at the expense of poor people. No, this won’t do. Jesus never commanded rulers to impoverish their subjects. In fact, this would fit pretty well under what the Bible calls “oppression”. Why did Jesus condemn the Pharisees for giving away the money they should have let their parents have? Why did Paul call people who don’t provide for their families worse than unbelievers? present company… Read more »
No, this won’t do. Jesus never commanded rulers to impoverish their subjects. In fact, this would fit pretty well under what the Bible calls “oppression”. No ashv, the alternative to “actively working to keep Asia poor so that half of the world’s wealth continues moving to America” is NOT “impoverishing our subjects.” It is only under an absolutely disgusting idolatry to wealth that someone would take an argument in favor of “enriching our nation at the expense of some of the poorest nations on Earth” and then claim that to work for anything less than that is “impoverishing” us. I… Read more »
You’ve got a pretty good imagination. What, exactly, are you referring to by the phrase “enriching our nation at the expense of some of the poorest nations on Earth”? You put quote marks around it, are you quoting someone? Do you believe the state, God’s minister of judgement, is responsible for charity and generosity with its subjects’ wealth?
You can’t actually be this naive. As if the original quote wasn’t clear enough…. Do you know how US trade law works? Are you aware that our trade laws with poor nations, unlike our trade laws with wealthy nations, are frequently written to be lopsided and unfair in order to ensure that our own wealthy producers are advantaged at the expense of their entire economy. Do you need me to start listing the trade laws, aid laws, and other international arrangements that are designed to disadvantage 3rd-world economies so that 1st-world producers remain especially rich, even to the point of… Read more »
Jonathan, if you’re looking for someone to defend the behaviour of the USA, I am the last person in this comment section you should come to. The USA destroyed the civilisation of my fathers. I am on record as being ready for the entire thing to be gotten rid of. Nevertheless, you’re trying to take the excesses of a world-spanning empire and use to to argue against the very idea of power being used to benefit its dependents. This is the sort of unjustified leap I’ve come to view as your signature. And to hark back to your original Cold… Read more »
No, I’m arguing against the very idea of power being used to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Something the Bible itself argues against in numerous places. That argument doesn’t suddenly disappear because you think nationalism trumps the gospel.
I am not a nationalist.
Are you saying that because you see sub-national racial lines as even more important than national lines?
You equated preserving an extremely wealthy nation’s outsized wealth at the expense of the rights of poor nations with Gospel obligations to one’s family. That appeared to me to be nationalism.
As I never tire of reminding people, the USA is an empire, not a nation.
No, I’m not a nationalist because I don’t believe in national self-determination as a principle of government.
I have to wonder what “rights of nations” means to you.
ashv wrote: No, I’m not a nationalist because I don’t believe in national self-determination as a principle of government. Ashv may be willing to exist as a protectorate, or tributary state, but that doesn’t make him any less nationalistic in the goal of preserving the identity of his kin and country. For example, ashv seems perfectly willing to submit to a foreign king in exchange for continued recognition as a distinct ethno-national identity. That’s still nationalism, but more of the sort that “First Nation” American Indians have on their tribal reservations. In regard to “self-determination as a principle of government”,… Read more »
Jonathan wrote:
Did Wilson say anything remotely like the Kennan quotes that Jonathan offered to us?
No, I was not equating Pastor Wilson with Kennan and have no idea how you would get that impression. I was arguing that American public morality in the WWII era was by no means superior to American public morality today, the claim that was the entire basis for Pastor Wilson’s post. Now all this has happened because we have extracted Christianity from our body politic—we have sought to remove all traces of the Lordship of Christ from any kind of public recognition. I am not saying that back before we banished God from our public discourse there were no outrageous… Read more »
I always find moral superiority contests pretty amusing!
Right up there with humility contests” in fact! ????
amen
Wait! What? Ok buster, somehow I am still more humble that you! ????
The best is an aura of gentle humility as the frosting on a three-layer moral superiority cake. Don’t ask me how I know this.
I actually did laugh out loud! ; – )
And no doubt, served cold! ????????
What Jonathan actually said was:
“There were some things Christians in the 1940s and 1950s were doing much better than today’s Christians are…and some things they were doing much worse. Let’s not overglamorize the past.”
With which part of that do you disagree? Do you really think the only alternative to claiming everything or parents and grandparents did was exactly right and much better than anything we do, and that the past was altogether a golden age, is to declare “Our parents and grandparents suck” ? Because it isn’t.
JohnM wrote:
For starters, I disagree with Jonathan’s implication that Wilson was attempting to “overglamorize the past”. I also disagree that Wilson said anything like the Kennan quotations that Jonathan casually flumped into the conversation. But I would have just said so, rather than go off on the ethnonationalistic tangent that ashv went on.
I think BJ’s sarcastic response was well-matched to the quality of Jonathan’s original troll maneuver.
(I realize that ashv doesn’t acknowledge being nationalistic, but I tried to respond to that elsewhere.)
We’d be better off now if fewer people in that time had been treated as citizens.
“Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.… Read more »
Yes, back in the 1930s when Jews were desperately trying to escape Nazi Germany and we were refusing to accept them, even turning around ships with hundreds of Jews in them when they arrived on our shores and instead delivering them right back to Hitler, doing almost nothing about the Holocaust until 70% of Europe’s Jews had died, we were definitely much more deeply rooted in our Christianity. Can you square that up with your point on another post that the Final Solution wasn’t devised until ’41 and implemented in ’42? Why should the US have accepted them in the… Read more »
Because they were undergoing extremely serious persecution to the point that they were fleeing in mass (Kristalnacht being the most dramatic example), any reasonable means of having a normal life had been taken away and it was clear there wasn’t a future left for them in Germany, and there was a high likelihood that the persecution would worsen.
The mass killings of the 1941-1945 period of the Holocaust are not my minimal barrier for accepting refugees, or even remotely close to it.
I did not claim that the Germans and the SS weren’t behind Hitler. You’re distorting me again. I said that before the war, the majority of the Germans and the SS wouldn’t support Hitler in a campaign of mass execution/genocide. There was still a great deal of anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany, and there had been so for centuries as I had repeatedly pointed out to you. Under a ideologue like Hitler, the casual racism of the people can be inflamed into something more sinister. Blame towards the Jews increased, and more and more rights were progressively taken away from them,… Read more »
Yes, though quite unlikely as long as Hitler was in charge. There would be a chance that Hitler’s officers would have rebelled to the point that they rejected Hitler’s racist agenda and stopped carrying out his commands, as happened in Denmark first and eventually to some degree in spots in France and the Netherlands. However, that likely would have required some major events first, like large-scale nonviolent resistance. But we don’t refuse refugees because things “might” get better in the future. All wars end, but we still take war refugees because life in their situation has become unsustainable in the… Read more »
World economics lesson one:
Pagan perspective: You guys have more stuff than me; I want you to have less, so we will be equal!
Biblical perspective: Don’t be envious and don’t covet! God rewards gratitude, diligence, and risk, so that you can handle more blessings, without envy.
Those two views interact neither with the quotes I posted above nor with each other. Some of it is true but irrelevant and some of it is nonsense. Jesus had a great deal to say about wealth which you are ignoring. The community in Acts and the Church after them acted it out. Why do you ignore that witness? We who are disciples of Christ claim that our purpose on earth is to lay up treasures in heaven. But our actions often belie our words. Many Christians build for themselves fine houses, lay out splendid gardens, construct bathhouses, and buy… Read more »
Those are real nice quotes. I’m sorry you couldn’t see the relevance of my input. It is this: Today, Christians are wealthy beyond what Basil or John could have imagined, so… how do we handle all this wealth?
I gave you two views, but there is a third, that may seem irrelevant to you, which we find in Jonah. Jonah was a grump because he didn’t want God to bless other people. My advice is: don’t be a grump!
I gave you two views, but there is a third, that may seem irrelevant to you, which we find in Jonah. Jonah was a grump because he didn’t want God to bless other people. My advice is: don’t be a grump! To a degree Jonah’s example does become relevant here! Jonah’s central problem was his refusal to be obedient to God, a refusal that centered on the fact that he thought what God was asking of him was impossible, and required him to do too much. In the end he finally was forced to do it, and when he did,… Read more »
I find this interaction between Christianity and Pagans to be more informative, and real. The pagan Roman emperor Julian, the last non-Christian emperor, writing in the early 360s. The religion of the Greeks does not yet prosper as I would wish, on account of those who profess it. But the gifts of the gods are great and splendid, better than any prayer or any hope…. Why then do we think that this is sufficient and do not observe how the kindness of Christians to strangers, their care for the burial of their dead, and the sobriety of their lifestyle has… Read more »
All in all that is a valid point and a good reminder. One difference may be that in the Roman empire “charity” had not become entitlement, with contributions mandatory, and distribution taken over by the kingdoms of this world.
JohnM wrote:
Unfortunately, whatever may be a valid and good reminder, when descending from Jonathan’s keyboard almost always comes at the cost of a pound of someone’s innocent flesh.
Yes, but I don’t see where the silly and/or ineffective policies of government should somehow excuse Christians from obedience. They’re doing it wrong? Then let’s do it right. There is FAR more than enough money available in the congregation no matter what the government is doing.
I notice that Katecho has taken “pound of flesh” as his new catchphrase for me to accompany “statist”. I’m not sure if he really understands what it meant in the original context, much less how it got the idea that it applied to this one.
The great lie of liberal democracy is that power is not power. As Pastor Wilson says, the authorities possess the means and responsibility to end this bloodshed, but choose not to. (Similarly, gang and Black community violence in the USA could be ended as soon as the authorities decided it was beneficial to do so.) I agree that part of the issue may be that they are so blind that they do not believe they can do it. But we must also consider the possibility that they simply find it more beneficial to their goals to not try. After all,… Read more »
Well said, ashv. It is not just the lie that “power is not power”, but that authority is not authority and force is not force. It should come as no surprise to any one that when this deception happens Gov’s also have no accountability or responsibility to the people they are non-serving with their non power. This is why ideology is so dangerous. The buck stops in some imaginary set of rules, at the moment this idea that we must be “fair” to everyone,even those who clearly wish us harm.
Wow, livin’ Orwellian “New speak” within a lifetime of Orwell!
Thanks Bill Clinton!????
Masterful article.
There is no god and we are his prophets. – Cormac McCarthy
Does a society of victims have a right to complain when they are victimized?
I think so. I believe they should complain. It is learned helplessness that leads them to not complain, to rational-lies, justify, and perpetually hold grief sessions and candlelight vigils. So, complaining loudly is the first step.
It may have a right, but I would ask if it does any good. People have a limited amount of compassion for victims. Think of it like a bank account on which I draw every time I feel victimized and need some sympathy. If I keep writing sympathy checks every time I feel hard done by, sooner or later the capital is all gone. It’s a good reason to save your complaints for the things that really matter.
Besides, I am much happier with people who save their complaints for the wrongs done to others.
Good points. We need to recover the ability to discern true victims from self-identifying victims, so that when a true victim, with true needs, does cross our path, we will not have an empty compassion account to draw from. We have to defend ourselves from becoming jaded or deaf to genuine need. The entitlement “victims” aren’t doing real victims any favors.
This was awesome. I quite approve. All of it.
In the interest of consistency, I will object to this however, “as bad as selling burritos in Portland while white.” White people in Portland this week are actually busy selling ice cream to raise money for their war against capitalism. Seriously. That is the kind of stuff that just messes with your head.
Also a couple of guys in a pub in London were recorded actually having a heated argument over the horrrors of Islamaphobia and discrimination…. all while hiding under a table for what must now be labeled unspecified reasons.
DW’s referring to an actual story of two white women and their food truck being shut down because they were making their own tortillas — based on recipes and methods gleaned from a trip to Mexico — and profiting off of “Mexican” culture.
Yes, I know. I’m referring to an actual Portland story, too. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if the anti capitalists running the ice cream fundraiser didn’t shut down the women’s taco cart.
I just researched this story. I think it is important to point out, to anyone who hasn’t read it, that the women were not shut down by any government agency; they chose to close down after receiving negative press attention (and, while the article did not say this, they probably also got mean and/or threatening internet attention). And the cultural appropriation thing, while silly, should not be seen in a vacuum. Where I live, a lot of very poor Central Americans eke out a lousy living selling tortillas from handcarts. If I, who can earn money in so many ways… Read more »
So…….., you’ll be going with maple syrup snow cones instead?
Right? ????❄️????
Way too sweet. The only Canadian food I like is Kraft Dinner and butter tarts. I eat a lot of vegan ethnic food, and the funny thing about the appropriation argument is that whatever the sign may say on the front door (Cambodian, Laotian, Ethiopian, Jamaican, Armenian, Greek just to list the ones within two blocks of me), I can be positive that 90% of the kitchen staff will be Hispanic!
Butter tarts sound very much like pecan tarts (or pie) without the pecans. I’m sure they’re tasty, but I bet they would be much better with pecans.
Pecan pie is to die for, but butter tarts are something else altogether. First you must have a huge and flaky crust, intended for one devourer. We don’t share our butter tarts. Then you put in enough pure, unsalted melted butter to cause an instant heart attack in anyone but a triathlon competitor. Into that liquid gold you drop enough brown sugar to last a professional baker for a week. But now the quarrel begins. There are false and disloyal Canadians who would desecrate the tart’s exquisite perfection by adding some raisins. These are very bad people, and you must… Read more »
Hi ME, do you support every aspect of capitalism? I wondered because you have often criticized a system which tolerates such wide gaps between the rich and poor, and I also remembered your criticizing the investment and monetary system that drives it.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-18/
404
I don’t know what you meant to link, but ZeroHedge is a very poor source for anything at all. It’s a Bulgarian website run by a former trader banned from the industry for insider trading who mostly does it to prop up Putin, his own political views, and various conspiracy theories. When their main political writer quit, he said that he was heavily pressured to post as much material as possible following the basic formula of “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft”.
LOL
And this is worse than the people who run the NYT, Disney, CNN, etc how, exactly?
Россия
Wow, Jonathan can cut-and-paste from Wikipedia. I think a participation trophy is in order!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge
It’s worth mentioning George Soros is a convicted felon due to his insider trading. This is a guy who heavily funds the left-leaning MSM:
https://www.propublica.org/about/pr-adv-board-feb7-2008
Of course, he’s also given over $25 million to Democratic candidates on more than one occasion, and sent huge sums to BLM and other groups.
I actually learned about ZeroHedge from Colin Lokey’s tell-all article in Bloomberg, but that article has expired and you have to pay to get access to it now. The quote I inserted there is repeated on hundreds of websites.
So, let’s make that lie #70 you’ve told about me.
I don’t trust Soros either, but what does that have anything to do with anything? Was someone posting Soros quotes here?
In the immortal words of Johnny Cash, “Cry, baby, cry.” First, you have no understanding of what a lie is. Apparently it’s a cheap way for you to try to discredit anyone with whom you disagree. As far as Lokey’s article, it’s about as reliable as listening to “he said, she said” after a couple has a nasty break-up. He and Ivandjiiski are former co-workers at extreme odds with each other. Lokey’s account isn’t any more reliable just because it’s published in Bloomberg: http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/04/bloomberg-outs-zero-hedge-today-zero-hedge-strikes-back/ With that said, I’m done here. It’s largely a waste of time. Before I go, I’ll… Read more »
First, you have no understanding of what a lie is. Apparently it’s a cheap way for you to try to discredit anyone with whom you disagree. No, actually, I use the word “lie” with you primarily when you make false claims about my personal life or actions, or when you claim that I said things in previous discussions that I never, ever said. And I find it rather amusing that in the many times I’ve pointed out your false statements, you’ve never once been able to rebut me by quoting the thing you claimed I had said. You’ve stated that… Read more »
I deleted it.
In the United States, statistically, acts of terror are far more likely to be committed by white supremacists, anti-government activists, and other assorted right wingers than they are by Muslims, and the numbers aren’t even close. From a public safety standpoint, if you’re looking for someone to deport, getting rid of the alt-right would make far more sense than excluding Muslims.
Propose a solution.
First you have to decide which problem you want a solution for. In the US, thousands of people die every year from gun violence compared to a handful from terrorism of all kinds, Muslim, right wing or left wing. So if your agenda is to stop the carnage, shutting down the gun industry would make far more sense than shutting down mosques (which I’m not proposing by the way; I support the Second Amendment. I’m just saying that in terms of social harm, guns do far more damage.) But that’s not the agenda. The agenda is that extremists in all… Read more »
“The solution, if what you’re really interested in is stopping the carnage, is to attack extremism and religious intolerance of all stripes. If you want to quietly and peacefully practice your religion without interfering with anyone else, whatever your particular religion may be, great. If you want to practice or encourage violence (including using the civil magistrate to impose your particular theocracy), then you are part of the problem and should be opposed with great vigor. That’s the solution.” This is partly Pastor Wilson’s point though, I think. There will never be peace as long as there are multiple religions… Read more »
“Then whoever reigns will set the standard for right and wrong, good and bad.”
True! I totally believe Christian values are what give us freedom of religion in the first place. That is why it is absolutely critical that we are following Christ and not some extremist perversion of our faith that suggests hatred and violence are Christian virtues. By all means, we can defend ourselves and fight, but we simply cannot be claiming that hatred is a Christian value.
Here’s my question, ME. What recourse do Christians have given the scenario Pastor Wilson so vividly laid before us?
Well, I think we have to get serious about our faith and start preaching Jesus Christ and actually living as if we were following Him. I think we’re starting to see some of that. There is a kind of revival going on all over the country. Secularists don’t concern me, people misrepresenting Christ do. People like white supremacists and abortion clinic bombers. Prosperity preachers, mega churches,assorted other hypocrites, it’s a long list. Kathy Griffin is not a threat to our faith, but some pretty rabid anti semitic alt right Christians sure are. If anything, people take one look at Kathy… Read more »
Yes, I think cleaning up our own house is paramount. I don’t see how it can happen though. It would almost require a council across denominations. Has anything like that ever happened before?
I think there already is far more unity within the Body of Christ than people realize. We don’t need conformity,we just need to start following Christ. Simple things,like denouncing the rabid white supremacists preaching hatred. Like setting aside some of our politics. Like actually preaching Christ for a change. There are an astounding number of cultural Christians who have no understanding of grace and believe they were just born into faith. People don’t read their bibles,people don’t pray. We really need people to just actually stand in faith.
Thanks. NT Wright talks a lot about speaking truth to power. I think we could do a lot more of that too. On the flip side, I don’t like the idea of becoming a voting block. If we each individually would speak truth to government, society leaders, etc, what a profound and loud trumpet shout that would be.
“Yes, I think cleaning up our own house is paramount. I don’t see how it can happen though.”
Correct, in that we can’t do it ourselves. It is happening before our very eyes; ‘the blood of the martyrs…’ When we can’t clean it ourselves God will get our attention. I think once the physical American church has contracted through persecution, we’ll see much ecumenical hand-holding as our currently super-important denominational distinctives are viewed as less important than the need to truly love one another and to love our enemies.
Yes! That’s why I desire so strongly that the church come together on our own. At this point in this nation, we would have to fail quite badly to get to the point where we were persecuted like the early church. Honestly though I don’t know if there is any other way than the blood of the saints.
First, let’s recognize that hate has different contexts. Yes, hatred based on human values is often wrong, but I posit that hatred is indeed a Christian value”.
“Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.” [Rom. 12:9 NIV]
What is evil? Proverbs 6:16-19 provides 7 specific forms of evil that “the Lord hates”: Pride, Lying, Murder, Wicked plans, Running to evil, False witness (a 2nd reference to lying), and Spreading strife.
So, yes, hatred, when based on God’s standard, is a Christian value. I recommend keeping this in mind the next time you see “Say No to hate”.
Hatred is NOT a Christian virtue.
I encourage you to take note of the fact that revilers are ranked right there next to homosexuality and adultery in the bible.
To revile is to assail someone with contempt, to abusively scold, upbraid, berate, denounce, lambaste, condemn, and attack.
I recommend YOU keep that in mind when you’re pouring contempt all over me and forever trying to denounce me all over the intertoobz as a liar, etc, etc.
Hatred is NOT a Christian virtue.
Rather than literally doubling-down with “Hatred is NOT a Christian virtue.”, how about addressing what the Bible says about hate? It appears that instead of simply acknowledging the truth as found in God’s Word, you instead chose to shift to an ad hominem attack on me. Surely you see the irony in you reviling me by saying I am “pouring contempt” all over you and “forever trying to denounce” you. That would be a textbook example of reviling, and exactly the same behavior you often display with Red Pillians, Christian men, Christian women, Wilson, et al. It is your modus… Read more »
I do not revile you. Long before I ever begin to hold you in contempt, I would simply block your comments. You are easily dealt with if I chose to do so. I am certainly not yelping, either.
You however, have pursued me across the internet always quick to denounce everything I say, to point out to everyone that you believe I am a liar, etc, etc. That is contempt and it is reviling.
In this case, I disagreed with your statement and provided my reasoning. There is already too much bad “teaching” from “Christians”. If you are willing to actually address what the Bible teaches about hating evil, I’m ready. Otherwise, spare me your lectures on how I should behave.
ME, I think maybe you’re not making any distinction between hating people and hating evil. OKR didn’t advise anyone to hate people. He quoted St. Paul’s warning to us that we must hate pride, murder, and other forms of evil. Let me come at this a different way. Do you personally hate the sexual abuse of children? Do you hate cruelty to children and animals? Do you think that sexual abuse and cruelty are evil? Do you think that Jesus hates cruelty to children? It is very hard for me to believe you would say no to any of these… Read more »
I do not hate Jilly. Hatred is NOT a fruit of the spirit. Hatred towards things is ALWAYS going to shift over to the people who do them.
Rick pours contempt over me constantly. Don’t kid yourself into believing he’s just being virtuous by hating alleged liars, because that kind of unawareness lives somewhere on the other side of naive and blind.
Then how you would you describe your attitude towards the act of child abuse? Not the person who does it, but the act? I’m honestly not trying to pick at you, I simply don’t understand you about this. How do you handle all the times in the Bible that we are commanded to hate evil? I think that hatred of evil can certainly spill over onto the people who commit evil deeds, but it is part of our duty as Christians not to let that happen. For me, it is easy to think back on things I have done were… Read more »
“I simply don’t understand you about this.” Let me explain it for you. Since I have a track record of disagreeing with ME (which she dislikes from anyone, as I expect you have noticed) and, on occasion, pointing out lies on her part (always vehemently denied, of course, regardless who does it), it does not matter what I say about anything. It must be wrong because it comes from Rick, a source that ME absolutely refuses to accept as possibly being true. Now I don’t think I’m unique or get special treatment. There are very few responses to ME that… Read more »
I actually get along with the vast majority of people, cheerfully have disagreements without any problem, and no one ever calls me a liar because they know me well. However, I’m not likely to take crap from anyone and you Rick, have attempted to heap crap on me for a long while now. The fact that you address every comment directed to me with an attempt to denounce my character and call me a liar, speaks to the truth of what I say. One reason why I get irritated with Jilly and Dunsworth is because they are so easily deceived… Read more »
I want to discuss your last statement: Hence those two [Jilly and Dunsworth] calling me a liar while completely ignoring another man posting about hot asian chicks and banging ten year olds, which is pretty much the epitome of everything I was allegedly “lying” about in the first place. Unfortunately for your case, I happen to have been blessed, or cursed, with an eidetic memory. It took me about three minutes to remember that five months ago this board was visited by a couple of alt-right trolls who engaged some of the women in conversation. I remembered that one of… Read more »
Your claim that I attempt to “heap crap” on you suggests the possibility that Satan is working overtime to prevent you from seeing the truth about your own behavior. I pray that the Holy Spirit will open your eyes. There is the possibility that Jilly and Dunsworth (and whoever else you may choose to denigrate next) “like” comments because they contain the truth. (I am aware that Jilly has already responded to your comment, but I fully expect that you will choose to refuse to apologize as you should. Which is exactly what I would expect from a hypocritical “Christian”.… Read more »
And have you noticed that we actually have less sectarian violence in the US than many other parts of the world precisely because, at least on paper, no religion gets to reign supreme?
That’s certainly how Elizabeth I and King Henry of Navarre put a stop to the religious wars.
Like Stalinist Russia or Mao’s China or does violence perpetrated by the secular government not count?
Stalin and Mao were not religion-neutral; they were religion-hostile, and there is a difference. Any time a government puts its thumb on the religion scale, on either side, you’re asking for problems.
Nonsense. They were extreme religious fanatics. Their religion was statism, and anyone who didn’t bow to their god was sacrificed/silenced.
I would be extremely reluctant to make that argument if I were you, because you’ve just moved their millions of deaths into the “religious terrorism” category. If they acted out of religion, then it’s religious terror and not secular terror.
I don’t agree with you by the way; I’m just pointing out where your argument takes you if you insist on going down that road.
I’m not sure I follow your point. As a Christian I put all non-Christian violence in the same category, whether Muslim, statism, Roman emperor worship or atheism. Violence at the state level has always been religion-based. The fight within nations has nearly always been which god is worshipped or how a particular god should be worshipped. I don’t see how you could say otherwise.
Then I think you have a category error, and if you’re right that violence at the state level is nearly always religion based, then perhaps we should consider getting rid of religion.
That’s my point, Krycheck_2. Asking people to live without religion would be as easy as asking them to live without thinking. It has always been this way and always will.
The choice is not whether you belong to a religion. The choice is which one you belong to. In other words, we are all ruled by a god, the question is which one is it?
The left/right paradigm is a false paradigm. Ask which god those who perpetrate violence belong to. You will get much closer to the truth that way.
No, not believing in God isn’t a religion any more than not collecting stamps is a hobby.
There is not a person on this planet that doesn’t know God exists. Not one, including you, assuming you’re not a bot of course. Those who choose not to belong to God have chosen another god. It’s really that simple.
You want to assign violence to our God so that you feel better about your god. Yet our God continually overpowers you because you insist on fighting against Him.
Don’t you know that that which you fight against controls you?
You don’t *know* God exists; you *believe* God exists.
Krychek_2, how many Muslim websites do you go to in order to argue against their god or to tell them how much evil their god has done in the world? What about Buddhist websites? Hindu? Shinto?
Presuming that saying one “cannot know God exists” because His existence cannot be proven directly by, for example, science, I will agree. Conversely, if one’s faith (“believing God exists”) is great enough, then one “can know God exists” in the sense that one is philosophically certain of His existence, basing it on indirect evidence.
But if that’s the standard, then one can equally as well know that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy exist. If your faith is great enough, you can be convinced based on indirect evidence, such as presents left under the tree, chocolate eggs that appear on Easter morning, and money left under a child’s pillow.
That’s true, of course. However, that is not the entire standard for faith in God (or anything else). When the evidence for one’s faith is disproven, the rational human recognizes their faith was wrong. In my opinion, the evidence for God is not disproven, and thus I retain my faith in God. As you likely know, there are many “apologists” for Christian faith that you can read if you wish to understand how Christians can have faith in God while being rational.
I started off as a devout Christian and spent two years in seminary preparing to go into ministry before becoming convinced that there was no real evidence for the existence of God. I’ve read a shelf of books on Christian apologetics and have the advantage of understanding the best arguments on both sides, since I’ve been on both sides. While I’d be happy to be wrong, I simply see no good evidence for the existence of God. That said, if God exists, he seems to be making no real effort to clearly and unambiguously reveal himself. There are a dozen… Read more »
“…, if God exists, he seems to be making no real effort to clearly and unambiguously reveal himself.” What would be the point? Even when He has done this, humans have often still insisted on their own interpretation. For example, the Israelites in the wilderness travelling from Egypt turned from God even with their own first-hand experience of His miracles and the second-hand account by Moses of his direct encounters with God. So, while I understand why it seems logical that the real God would make it absolutely clear to all people who He is and which is the true… Read more »
What you have described is basically a shell game (or, if you prefer, playing with a stacked deck). Humans are prone to sin because that’s how they were designed, yet the designer bears no responsibility for the outcome, even though he could have made them prone not to sin. There’s no point to making sure everyone gets the message because they wouldn’t pay attention anyway — there’s that design defect again — but nevertheless everyone is responsible for the message they didn’t get, and is going to be punished for acting in accordance with the nature they were born with… Read more »
Whether prone to sin (or not), isn’t the capability of sinning the logical result of free will? If God removed our free will, then wouldn’t we be mindless beings following a prescribed pattern of behavior?
In the first place, there’s little evidence for free will and I don’t believe in that either. Neither, I assume, would most of the Calvinists here. Basically, biological determinism is Calvinism for atheists, and Calvinism is determinism for theists, the only difference being whether it’s God or nature calling the shots. Tell me how you square free will with Paul’s statement in Romans about how that which he doesn’t want to do, that he does, and what he would do, that he does not. But we are not talking about a mere capability. We are talking about never having had… Read more »
Hey Eric, hope all is well. The fact that we’re even having this conversation is evidence that he hasn’t done a good job of revealing himself The existence of a dispute is no more evidence for or against the clarity of a matter than a child’s denial of eating the candy proves his innocence. You would argue, I presume, that evolution and deep time are undeniably clear. Yet, I deny them both. By this logic, you have to admit that they are not clear at all. In short, you are avoiding the element of human denialism in the face that… Read more »
Hi BJ, are you back for good from overseas now?
I would not say evolution and deep time are undeniably clear; I would say that’s where the best available evidence points. But in any event, no one is at risk of going to hell for doubting evolution or deep time.
Do you know Neptune exists?
I have not personally looked at it through a telescope, no, but if I entertained any doubt on the question I would have the ability to see it with my own eyes through a telescope. I have no comparable ability to independently verify the existence of God.
I’m not sure I can agree with you here, JL. Right now it is obvious that a certain element of people who believe in Islam are initiating violence. But there have been times in history when devout Christians were the source of appalling violence and state-sponsored repression. I don’t think a case can be made that, throughout history, those who worship the Christian God have been peaceful and righteous in their dealings with those who disagreed with them. We agree that Muslims have no right to use force to impose their religious beliefs on anyone else. Yet the fact that… Read more »
“I personally believe that this is inevitable, given our fallen nature.” Yes, Jilly, I have come to the same conclusion. I think that you are looking at what can be at one point in time, and I am looking at what the inevitable result will be given our fallen natures. This is true of any religion, including Christianity, because we are fallen. Christ is not fallen, but we are, and our ability to be vigilant and to discern threats to his body have been very poor so far. Because we do not discern well, evil ones have come in and… Read more »
That’s a very difficult question. I am a pragmatist and a centrist, which means that I am usually more interested in “can we do this, will it work, and what will be the downside?” than in “what would be done in an ideal world?” That being said, I do think there are things that we must not do because, even if effective, they are unjust. If putting every harmless Muslim American on a one-way boat somewhere would guarantee our freedom from terrorist attacks, we can’t do that because it is unjust to punish people for crimes committed by others. If… Read more »
Jilly, those are all sensible ideas and solutions. The only problem I have with it is it rests on the idea that people are honest and also objective, both of which seem to be in short supply the farther one travels in the hallways of power. I did another! great transcription yesterday. It was a private conversation between an author and a past president. The president, in a direct fashion, spoke about what is needed in his party. He said that the President Trump had won the election because he had successfully created an ‘us verses them’ (exact quote) atmosphere… Read more »
This is my concern. Short of divine intervention, there will never be only one religion here without a bloodbath. Even among Christian groups, who would rule? Christians have murdered each other for centuries over obscure points of dogma. And there are many Christians here who absolutely do not want to live in a theocratic state! Is our problem that we don’t all believe the same things, or is our problem that some believers use violence to try to impose their will on the rest of us? I have no problem with Muslims and Hindus who obey the law, worship according… Read more »
I’m not sure there is such a thing as sustained religious tolerance or if it’s even possible. In the end only one religion has a valid claim to the truth, but all religions try to claim it. There is an automatic tension there. Which religion defines sin?
Within Christianity, a big problem is lack of discernment. I don’t know how to overcome it except through honest and sincere study of and conversations about Scripture together.
I think it doesn’t have to be that difficult in that the majority of people, regardless of religion, tend to have pretty similar views on what should be criminal. Abortion is a major exception, but I believe that even that is better argued as a human rights issue. What constitutes a crime is decided by the people, either through referenda or through elected representatives. I think the problem arises when one group demands that something on which there is no general consensus be considered a crime. If the Muslims and a certain group of Baptists got together to impose an… Read more »
“Abortion is a major exception, but I believe that even that is better argued as a human rights issue.” This is the reason I don’t think different religions can peacefully coexist for long in one country. In order to coexist one group will have to deny a basic tenet of their religion. There are religions that think abortion is not sinful and would fight for the ‘right’ to abort. What then? If it isn’t abortion it will be something else. How about FGM? How about animal sacrifice? How about temple prostitution or child marriage? I have such a temptation to… Read more »
But that is no solution at all for people who do not believe in Him! For them, it is tyranny. If Muslims were in the majority here, should they be allowed to make you pray to Mecca? My understanding is that people can practice those religious beliefs we find kind of awful as long as they don’t violate a criminal law that serves a vital secular purpose. I can’t torture kittens because animal cruelty is against the law, and even if I claimed to have a valid religious purpose, the state’s interest in preventing kitten torture comes first. Same with… Read more »
“If Muslims were in the majority here, should they be allowed to make you pray to Mecca?” Last year I did several very interesting transcriptions of an imam in Australia being interviewed by a lefty sympathizer. He was very direct in his belief that all Jews would be slaughtered along with all infidels. His greatest contempt though was for what we call moderate Muslims or what he called apostates. If we go by what the Koran says, he is actually being true to his holy book whereas moderate Muslims are not. My point is not that he is radical. My… Read more »
“But that is no solution at all for people who do not believe in Him!”
Yes, it is. They need to believe.
Of course we can’t do anything by force, but there actually IS no answer to anything that will work while people continue to reject Christ’s rule, which is equivalent on the spiritual and philosophical level to denying gravity on the physical level.
Yes, well said. I once thought that if Christians took over the government that we could rule justly and do what was good for the people in spite of the people.
Now I think history is more like God damping a sine wave.
http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/acoustics/waveforms/waveadd08.gif
That’s probably wrong too, but I’ve given up the idea that we as Christians can persuade the unbelievers through governing, even humble and just governing. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but we shouldn’t put our hopes in it.
I have read this, but I am trying to find an impeccable source of data. Can you recommend one?
How about the Cato Institute:
https://www.cato.org/blog/gao-weighs-countering-violent-extremism?utm_content=buffer111c5&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
When I googled it, I found literally hundreds of articles documenting that right wing terror is a much greater threat in the US than Muslim terror. I deliberately picked the Cato Institute instead of Time, Newsweek or the New York Times because it’s a conservative source, and therefore not subject to being discounted by conservatives as part of the liberal, mainstream media.
Thank you. Some people are calling Jeremy Christian left wing because of his FB posts supported Bernie Sanders. I guess you can conclude this if you ignore his adoration of Hitler and his detestation of Hillary.
Hitler was a left wing nationalist.
Yes,but you could make the same argument about Stalin, Pol Pot, Lenin, several other communists, and banana republic dictators. The thing is, this is the Western world, we’re supposed to be looking to Christ for our standard and instead we have lunkheads idolizing Hitler and Anders Breivik
Since when was Hitler a left wing nationalist? He fits firmly on the right, and don’t be fooled by the term national socialism.
Sounds like you’ve been drinking the progressive Kool-Aid again. “There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will.” – Hitler “We are socialists because we see in socialism . . . the only chance to… Read more »
I notice you didn’t give a citation for either quote and my strong suspicion is that they’re fabricated since they are directly at odds with everything Hitler did, including: 1. Sending socialists to concentration camps; 2. Making common cause with fascists like Mussolini and Franco; 3. Making common cause with the Catholic church on social issues and anti-Semitism (as Pope John Paul II later acknowledged and apologized for): 4. Banning unions and sending trade unionists to concentration camps; 5. Not nationalizing the means of production. As with later claims that Hitler was an atheist (he was actually Catholic), this sounds… Read more »
“Fabricated” is a pretty rich term from someone who outright lied about Muslims vs. “right wing terrorists” numbers. 2,996 people died in 9/11 alone. No matter how many terrorist attacks you want to claim are “right wing” (the articles take great liberties when they do this), it’s no match for that.
The quote sources:
Hitler: Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction. New York: Putnam, 1940
Goebbels: http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm
There are plenty more here:
http://www.stephenhicks.org/2009/12/04/appendix-2-quotations-on-nazi-socialism-and-fascism-nietzsche-and-the-nazis/
Your other statements are either misleading, extremely simplified or flat-out wrong. They sound like something pulled from a 10-page propaganda pamphlet handed out at Antifa rallies.
And I’ve already explained why 9/11 is a separate category; it’s in this thread somewhere. What specifically is misleading, simplified, or flat out wrong? Try to give us some actual analysis.
K, since always.
And why should I not believe the term socialist?
For the same reason you should not assume Federal Express is an agency of the federal government just because it has the word “federal” in its name. What Hitler actually did was far more important than what he called himself. And in point of fact, Germany was not a socialist country under Hitler; it was mostly free market.
Your evidence for this being?
Start with “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by William Schirer (not sure the spelling of his last name.) You might also recall that a number of corporations that were war profiteers were put on trial after the war, which is not how a socialist state would have operated.
I have to go read and entire book then get back to you?
Is state control over the means of production a capitalist, free-market tendency, in your view?
It’s a matter of degree. Every regulation is state control over the means of production; the fact that you are not allowed to hire 12 year olds to work 14 hour days is a control over the means of production. So it really depends on how much control and over what aspects of production we’re talking about.
Fair enough. My recollection (although I would have to check my sources) is that Mussolini and his fascist flunkies intervened in extreme (and ruinous) ways into the Italian economy, whereas Hitler, although a lighter touch in some ways, essentially put the German economy on a war footing way back in the thirties. I am trying to recall one of Churchill’s table of figures from “The Gathering Storm”, and it strikes me that the immense jump in military spending after Hitler took power suggests something approaching a command economy.
What Hitler actually did was far more important than what he called himself.
Agreed. So why do you keep calling Hitler a Christian and Catholic?
You’re looking at Christianity and Catholicism as the terms are understood by a 21st century Westerner. For centuries, Christianity taught that the Jews should be persecuted, and they were, through pogroms, expulsions, and inquisitions. Martin Luther said that Jews should convert or be killed, and no doubt a number of popes would have wondered why they didn’t think of the Holocaust first. From a Christian standpoint, Hitler’s problem was that he lived a few centuries too late.
My understanding of true socialism is not state control over production, but rather state ownership of the means of production, including capital, labor, land, resources, and facilities. In that sense, North Korea and Cuba are truly socialist. Wages and prices are set by the government, and private ownership is prohibited. Income equality is a central goal. But, in Spain or Italy during their fascist years, the government had a lot of control but did not, as policy, wrest ownership from private hands or attempt to equalize wages. I think it’s important to have clear definitions. Otherwise, we tend to end… Read more »
Hi Jill, I used the term left and right not socialist. It is important to note that these are on a continuum. But socialist type policies are left. Excessive government intervention and control is left. This does not mean there is none happening in centrist governments, but the perspective on economic freedom for all and low tax and private property as right.
To understand what you mean by that, would you consider Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar also to have been left wing?
Don’t want to put words in bethyada’s mouth, but probably. They were bad people so they must have been leftists.
Fascism is left wing too.
Trying I get my head around this, I googled extreme right and left wing as it pertains to fascism and totalitarianism. I wish I hadn’t as there appears to be no agreement on terms. Are you viewing fascism as left wing because the state plays a major role in controlling the economy? Or, do you see any totalitarian state as left wing by definition?
But in what way could Franco’s Spain be seen as left wing, and yet historians unanimously consider it fascist? Could you clarify the definitions a bit?
I am not sure totalitarian is intrinsically a left definition. Though It seems that totalitarianism is more likely a consequence of the left as the left is about control elsewhere. (All government is control, it is a matter of degree). Left governments have a history of totalitarianism but I would not call a government left based solely on that criterion (consider Pinochet).
When corporations are in bed with the government this is antagonist to economic freedom.
While historians by and large call Nazism right-wing (nationalist, authoritarian, anti-Communist, anti-equality, and came to power allied with right-wing parties), it’s not like it actually matters. Hitler considered it to take from both left-wing and right-wing, and hated the establishment on both sides. Italian fascism was similar – while its proponents sometimes referred to it as right-wing, they more often mocked the whole concept, and included converts from both the left and the right. “We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right,’ a fascist century.” – The Doctrine of Fascism,… Read more »
I have to intervene here: Mussolini was a leftist, and called himself a leftist many times. He was a member of the socialist party. There should not be any debate on this point! Now, he was also a nationalist, as opposed to the internationalist view of the broader thread of Marxist thought. But that doesn’t tell on his economics.
How would you know? You died in the 13th century!
Sure, but I get news updates periodically. Lotta heretics in the last 8 centuries.
Mussolini’s founding statement, “The Doctrine of Fascism” Granted that the XIXth century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the XXth century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ” right “, a Fascist century. It’s hard to be more obvious that he is contrasting fascism on the “right” as opposed to socialism/liberalism. Of course, like I said, he didn’t always say that fascism was “on the right”. Fascism, sitting on… Read more »
I would agree that the argument is silly, except that it continues to be trotted out by the left against people like me. Trump is “literally Hitler” because he believes a nations are permitted to have actual borders. The people wearing black masks and starting street battles over political differences call themselves “antifascists”. And so on. This is an irritating trend, because it ignores history, and also presents a real and growing danger to me and my family. That makes it at least worth the effort of a blog comment.
And yet he also said, in that same speech “Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of… Read more »
How does your understanding of fascism explain Franco’s Spain? Do we end up with a civil war fought to the death between two left wing groups? Is there any meaningful sense in which Franco’s Spain can be regarded as left wing, or would you deny that it was fascist? The Catholic church, which was very authoritarian at the time, threw its support behind Franco, giving us the spectacle of bishops blessing the rifles used in firing squads. How can this possibly be seen as a left wing phenomenon? Or, is Italy’s experience under Mussolini substantially different from Spain’s under Franco?
right-wing: nationalist, authoritarian, anti-Communist, anti-equality, and came to power allied with right-wing parties I’ll give you nationalist (though I don’t see it as a strong factor) On what planet does authoritarian = right wing? The most authoritarian governments of all time were left wing. Anti-communist. Exactly. So they are right of the most left position there is. Still plenty of room on the left. Labour is right of Green (in NZ) but they are both left wing. anti-equality. Not really a feature of the right, but if it were I would say they they hold more to an equality of… Read more »
It matters because “Nazi” is used by the left against the right completely oblivious to the fact that most of the Nazi principles were left. That does not mean that every left party is about to start a Holocaust, but it does mean that they are remain ignorant to the threats of Nazism and Fascism.
This debunks several articles, including Cato’s. https://areomagazine.com/2017/05/28/no-youre-not-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-right-wing-extremist-than-an-islamic-terrorist/ Anyone with the slightest quant background can pick up the problems here. “The lopsidedness of this report is also evident in the fact that, according to the article, it treats terrorists with an Islamist agenda as one dataset, and compares it to terrorists with a white supremacist agenda, terrorists with an anti-government agenda, and terrorist with a fundamentalist Christian agenda, by treating all three non-Islamic motivations as one dataset. This is not an apples to apples comparison. This is an apples to fruit bowl comparison.” It’s a clear case of “here’s the conclusion… Read more »
Well, mkt, here’s a question for you: What is it that white supremacists, anti-government activists and violent fundamentalists (which I understand is not most fundamentalists) have in common that would make it appropriate to consider them a single data set? Once you figure out the answer to that question, you might then figure out why Islam per se isn’t the problem.
You didn’t ask me but I would say: (1) A loathing for democracy; (2) An inability to tolerate the messiness that is part of a politically, racially, and religiously diverse society; (3) A belief that it is possible to enforce rigid external and internal conformity to a narrow set of views; (4) A loathing for free speech and a free press; (5) A tendency to perceive a different viewpoint as proof of evil; (6) The use of scapegoating to increase group fear and therefore group loyalty; and finally (7) A belief in violence not only as a means to an… Read more »
Not really, but you described your Berklee neighbors perfectly…
If you think jillybean is neighbors with Berkeley (or Berklee) then you’re wildly confused.
“Neighbor” is a relative term.I was in a hurry, and have seen plenty of spelling/capitalization errors on here…guess I’m just not pedantic or bored enough to point them out.
Four hundred miles away, but it is the home of the Snowflake’s crazy old Marxist uncle. Of whom I am actually very fond.
They’re all hated by the left and lumping them together can make an easy clickbait article for the braindead crowd.
Oh come now, you’re much smarter than that. Try reading Jillybean’s response and see if it gives you any ideas.
LOL! Thank you. I’ve been trying to point that out since forever. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
If you count left leaning nut cases as right wingers.
For the figures to be really useful, we need a better way to classify ideologies and to rule out truly insane people whose ideology may reflect elements of both right and left but whose real issue is psychosis. For example, Tim McVeigh seems to be a pretty good example of a right wing extremist. But it would be inaccurate to call him a Christian right wing extremist because he had stopped being Catholic years earlier and religion was not part of his ideology. Dylann Roof was clearly a white supremacist, but he also strikes me as mentally ill. On the… Read more »
I don’t consider Dylan Roof, who shot up a black church in Charleston because he’s a white supremacist, to be a left winger. Or the so-called right to lifers who shoot abortion providers. Or the guy in Portland who stabbed two people this past weekend for coming to the aid of Muslims he was harassing. Or Tim McVeigh. And those names all popped into my head without any effort at all; I’m having trouble thinking of ANY leftists who have committed comparable acts in the past 20 years or so.
What about Ted Kaszynski? Or would he be anti-tech anarchist?
He’s definitely left-leaning…an anarchist in the spirit of antifa, no Lysander Spooner:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/25/ted-kaczynski-the-unabomber-i-favored-clinton-and-/
So were Jim Jones (the ultimate SJW) and John Wayne Gacy.
But Ted was also a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. We must remember this in case we ever want to distance ourselves from some lunatic on the right!
Jilly, my larger point is that the MSM wastes no time pointing out any connection to conservative Christians–even when it’s a mental case where the guy was a Sanders fan. Clearly, his views weren’t coherent and I don’t think he’s a typical DNC type.. Yet how much do they talk about Gavin Long (Baton Rouge cop killer’s) affiliation with the Nation of Islam? Or the Dallas sniper being a fan of The New Black Panther Party and the African American Defense League? Are these counted in articles comparing left vs right violence…or Muslim vs. “kitchen sink-anything-that-may-be-right-wing” terror attacks? Again, 2,996… Read more »
I am issuing an edict that everybody just stop this. All criminal violence is wrong. Nobody wants to live in a society where hate-filled maniacs kill people on trains. Nobody should assume any connections that haven’t been verified and analyzed to see if they are truly relevant.
Would you issue an edict that everyone gets a butter tart? I think this might solve a lot of problems. Then again, I can already foresee the raisin zealots at odds with the Makers Mark extremists. Pity that. I would rather have liked to try a butter tart at teatime.
I am a generous woman. Send me your most intimate financial information, including routing numbers for checks, and I will undertake to have the USPS deliver you a dozen butter tarts. Half with Bourbon, half without.
We have an account with the Bank of Serta. Would a picture of the mattress be sufficient? :)
A girl after my own heart.
Yes,but Jilly paranoid schizophrenics are rarely violent. There are literally thousands of them living peaceful lives. In fact, many of them lack the ability to actually plan out an atrocity. So when you blame Kaszynski on schizophrenia,what you’re really doing is a labeling mental illness “evil” and it really isn’t. Far more dangerous are those we perceive as sane.
I understand your concern, and the last thing I would want to do is to suggest that your average schizophrenic is a homicidal maniac. I did a little checking, and I read that a person with simple schizophrenia is not at greater risk than you or I for committing violent crime. But the picture is a little different for a paranoid schizophrenic (who has a much less common form of brain disease). When he is not medicated, a paranoid schizophrenic may feel so threatened by his delusions that he comes to believe that someone else might be trying to kill… Read more »
My understanding is that he doesn’t have well defined political views; he just hates modern society.
Yes, the closest descriptor I could find was “anarcho-primitive.”
Well, Pastor Wilson touches on that here, “So when some troubled kids in some Agnostic Factory go “off the rails,” and shoot a bunch of their classmates, this should not be taken as a signal for everyone to start wailing about the need to hunt for “root causes.” My disagreement with Pastor Wilson is that he doesn’t really want to look at root causes, as in the far right hyping people up with violent rhetoric, people preaching hatred in Christ’s name, and some of our beloved Pastors excusing and/or condoning violence and poor behavior. I totally agree with Him about… Read more »
I agree with you that there seems to be an epidemic of young men being seduced by grievance-based ideologies. Any website that implicitly or explicitly encourages violence against women and racial/religious minorities is wicked. I would also like a see a stronger denunciation of anyone who advocates violence to bring about change. Sadly, we are so polarized that I think that some sincerely good people are reluctant to condemn this sort of rhetoric because they do not want to be seen as giving up one tiny inch to their enemies on the left. I am not saying this is true… Read more »
“I have also seen this phenomenon on the left, and it is equally detestable.”
Yes, but while speaking of how polarized we are, you mention the left. There is no left and right in Christ, there is just Christ. So it doesn’t matter what the left or right does, what matters is what we who follow Christ do.
I agree with you. I think it is tragic that political labels seem to play so strong a role in religious identity.
The same crowd called McVeigh a “religious nut” and “reconstructionist” even though he proclaimed science as his god and identified as an agnostic.
I was always told that he abandoned his childhood Catholicism while retaining a vague belief in God. From what I’ve read, he had some sort of faith in Christian Identity–which I don’t think most Christians think of as a valid form of the faith! At one time he said science was his god, but he definitely got more religious on death row. At the end, he had the last rites of the Catholic church which I do realize I have to make myself be happy about. Unless somebody is defining reconstructionism acting out The Turner Diaries, I think that is… Read more »
He called himself an agnostic the day before his execution, but as we know, there are very few atheists/agnostics in foxholes or hours before certain death.
This is total bunk, based completely on how and when they do their “studies.” It’s easy to lie with statistics. 2,996 died in 9/11 alone. Over 150 more have died since. Then you have cop killers associated with Muslims and radical black groups (conveniently left out of studies), the DC snipers and others.
BTW, Jeremy Christian was more in line with your beliefs–a Bernie Sanders fan!
Hi, mkt, I agree that it is very difficult to sort out the numbers. But I don’t accept your Jeremy Christian conclusion. First of all, he was a convicted criminal with a history of mental illness. Do you really think that he studied Sanders’ political platform and decided that he was acting in accord with Sanders’ principles when he decided to kill people on the train? Wouldn’t it be much more likely that he developed his homicidal rage toward minorities while hanging out with alt-right Hitler fans? To say that he held leftwing principles is to ignore the FB posts… Read more »
Hating Jews is from the right?All the Palestinans can do no wrong and the Israelis are evil posts that show up in my Facebook feed are from my left leaning friends.
No, there are plenty of lefties who don’t like Jews, although they always claim to be anti-Zionist. I have met anti-Zionist Jews, if it comes to that. The Snowflake’s rabidly left wing Jewish uncle is mad at her for going to Israel with an organization funded by a Jewish casino owner who gave money to Trump’s campaign. I told him that if the money for her trip had been donated by the Manson Family, I would have told her to take it and go. To tell you the truth, bethyada, I am starting to dislike everybody. Except all of you,… Read more »
I don’t approve of racial hatred. Even so, much of what the right is reacting against is leftist Jews and American Jews placing the welfare of Israel ahead of the US. So much of the rhetoric can be understood as: You love Israel so much, go live there. And although I disagree with anti-Semitism, some Jews do exacerbate the problem by being excessive vocal. I don’t even know my Jewish friends are Jewish until they tell me. I agree that evangelicals are perhaps one of the Jews last friends. I expect to see anti-Semitism on the rise in the coming… Read more »
I don’t approve of racial hatred. Even so, much of what the right is reacting against is leftist Jews and American Jews placing the welfare of Israel ahead of the US. So much of the rhetoric can be understood as: You love Israel so much, go live there. A primarily left-wing bias towards Israel hasn’t been true in decades. While both parties are still pro-Israel, it is right-wing Christians, not left-wing Jews, who elevate the platform of the secular state of Israel over all else. The average American Jew, especially left-wing Jews, are much less blindly pro-Israel than the average… Read more »
“You love Israel so much, go live there.”
Reminds me of the bumper sticker I saw in Florida years ago (presumably in response to the multitude of “I ♥ NY” bumper stickers). It read: “If you love NY, take I-95 north”.
I also expect this. But, a new poll released by the Pew Research Center shows that Americans feel more kindly toward its 2% Jewish population than toward any other religious group–including Catholics and mainstream Protestants. This is comforting, and it should be borne in mind when we read hateful screed against the Jews. I think that many people who express serious anti-Jewish prejudice have not actually lived in areas with large Jewish populations. When you do, you realize that there is much more diversity than people might expect, and that preconceptions, both positive and negative, don’t really hold true. Some… Read more »
I wasn’t speaking for all the Americans. I was just supposing for the far right group that you reference. It seems that Jews lean more left than right in the US
Jews pretty reliably vote Democrat, but not necessarily for the most left-leaning Democrat. Most of my Jewish liberal friends did not support Sanders as they did not see him as likely to be fiscally prudent. “I don’t want him coming and taking all my trust funds,” was a statement I heard from them during the primaries! Of course, my experience is with moderately religious Jews; I have been told that many Orthodox Jews vote similarly to conservative Christians. Most Jews are liberal on issues like gay and women’s rights, and are willing to pay taxes to support public education and… Read more »
Don’t forget the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, champion of all things right wing!
True, and I forgot about him in my analysis below.
And how many terrorist incidents was he behind? Rhetoric is one thing; actual violence is another.
Not entirely, because an important subtopic here is the role of rhetoric in provoking violence.
All true, Bethyada. But how many left leaning Jew haters have actually committed acts of domestic terrorism and violence?
Exactly right. The left has a lot of hateful rhetoric but the right has more actual carnage.
I don’t think that has been an American phenomenon. We saw it a lot in Europe in the 1970s when the Red Army Faction got together with Black September.
9/11 needs to be categorized by itself because the numbers are so large they skew the rest of the scale. Similar to the use of atomic weapons against Japan in World War II; it’s an event unlike any other so it doesn’t get classified with any other. But even if you do count it, it’s still a single event, and my point was there are more events of right-wing terrorism than there are of Islamic terrorism, at least in this country.
Suppose you have five people working for a company: The president, who makes a million dollars a year, and four office workers who each make 50k. It is true, but misleading, to say that the people who work there make an average of 240k per year, because the one big salary completely skews things, And any time you have an outlier of that magnitude, it gets considered by itself for that reason. There are in all probability white supremacists who would love to pull off a 9/11 of their own if they had the technology and ingenuity to do so.… Read more »
You may imagine that there are “white supremacists who would love to pull off a 9/11”, but we all know there are large, well-organized and funded organizations that are actively looking for another mass-casuality opportunity in the US.
Amazing, then, that right wing terror surpasses them in body counts.
Only if your definition of “right wing terror” is so broad as to be practically meaningless.
No, it’s an easy analysis: Who benefits from the cause they’re espousing. The fundamental difference between left wing and right wing is that the left wants “the people” to benefit whereas the right wants elites and authoritarian institutions to benefit. This is a bit of a generalization, but the left wants health care for all and the right wants tax cuts for the rich. And there’s often a huge breakdown between theory and practice, but that’s the theory. The extremists in both camps are willing to use violence, but that’s beside the point. Stalin was a leftist because communism, in… Read more »
“In fact, there’s a good case to be made that Muslim terror is right wing terror.'”
You rendered your own distinction meaningless.
Nope. Muslim terror is about promoting an authoritarian institution over the interests of the masses.
Original Premise: …acts of terror are far more likely to be committed by white supremacists, anti-government activists, and other assorted right wingers than they are by Muslims.
New Premise: …Muslim terror is right wing terror.
Ah, I misunderstood you. I don’t think the two premises are in conflict, but I will rephrase Premise One so as to avoid confusion: Acts of terror are far more likely to be committed by white supremacists, anti-government activists, and other assorted non-Muslim right wingers than they are by Muslims. How’s that?
I am starting to think that the left and right wing labels are not useful as there is no consensus on what they mean. Charles Manson, for example, hated blacks and Jews and the government. His religion, such as it was, was a mixture of earth worship and Scientology. He admired Hitler, and believed that government should be as repressive as possible, assuming he had a role in it. He saw women as almost subhuman. The only meaningful label to apply to his beliefs, in my opinion, is “Crazy Evil” but I am sure that the left and right wing… Read more »
Jilly, I think you’re right. And part of my original point is that banning Muslims doesn’t fix the problem because most Muslims have the same opinion of Islamic terror that the rest of us do. The problem is the people willing to use violence, regardless of their motivation.
You are exactly right Jilly.
The political categories, “left” and “right” originate in the Assemblée Nationale seating arrangements at the start of the French Revolution: supporters of the king on the right and those backing change on the left. That left/right division actually has its roots in basic human psychology. In very general terms, people on the “left-wing” place high value on equality, compassion and change, while those on “right-wing” include order, tradition, and stability as important values. Jonathan Haidt’s 2008 TED Talk delves into the research behind this. Haidt’s keynote speech to the 2016 American Psychological Association convention updates his analysis to our current… Read more »
Well, if I were going to do something so wicked, either for the left or right, I would definitely class it up by singing La Marseillaise, giving particular emphasis to:
Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons!
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons!
Similarly, it blows my mind that people list Isis and other fanatical Islamic terrorists as “left-wing”. Again, the categories are changeable and I don’t fully agree with how they’re laid out, but anyone who thinks that Isis is liberal clearly has lost touch with the meaning of words!
“Smash the estate tax” is a specific application of the general principle that, as you point out, those on the right value support authoritarianism over individual rights; not having an estate tax makes it easier for the 1% to remain the 1% and control governance, rather than allow what for want of a better term I will call the little people to run things. I don’t think you said anything that much different than what I said.
Cue further research by Haidt showing that conservatives are much better able to accurately describe the beliefs liberals, than liberals are of conservatives.
Do you know any right-wingers? Do you have a rudimentary theory of mind? Your caricature is ridiculous. I assure you that “right-wing terrorists” aren’t out in support of authority structures and in opposition to “freedom”. You fail the ideological Turing test.
I think there is a glimmer of agreement here!
I too favor individual rights over authoritarianism and much prefer allowing “little people to run things”.
However, I believe that in our current day the right values individual rights more than the left.
Both left and right understand that we all have rights and obligations. The right sees these as generally fixed and rooted in unchanging human nature. The left views these as ever-evolving and emerging.
In any case, approximately 0% of murders labelled “right-wing terror” were intended by the perpetrators to bolster the position of the 1% in our society.
Actually, I think that depends on which right you have in mind. If I were a lawyer arguing an individual rights case, I would want a conservative judge for gun rights and property rights, and I would want a liberal judge for holding the police and prosecutors in check. Someone, I forget who, said that conservatives believe in the Second, Ninth and Tenth Amendments, whereas liberals believe in the First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth. That about sums it up. And I don’t think the left views rights and obligations as changing so much as that our understanding of them is… Read more »
Technology ? Box cutters?
and what you attribute to ingenuity is more like capitalizing on the willful blindness of political correctness.
You’re right that there was a higher body count. However, it’s also true that the number of people who died in 9/11 is less than the number of people killed that year by either cars or guns, but because of the manner in which it happened, and the fact that there were so many in a single incident, gets it singled out in a way that car deaths and gun deaths don’t.
Yeah, but were the cars turning left or right? ????
Here’s an interesting dive into how those statistics are tallied:
Tallying Right-Wing Terror vs. Jihad
In short, the “right-wing” numbers are pumped up by including any murderer who utters anything that can be interpreted as an anti-government thought – whether or not that thought was the motivation for his act or he had any coherent ideology at all.
And every gunman shouting “Allah Akbar” gets counted as a Muslim terrorist whether he’s acting out of ideology or mental illness, whether he has a coherent theology or is simply a nut case who decided to shoot up a train one morning.
You can’t look inside someone’s heart. You can only go by what they say. So, if he says something anti-government he gets counted as a right winger, and if he says Allah Akbar, he gets counted as a Muslim terrorist. You have a better method to propose?
Did you read the linked article? How many of the murders that she describes in detail would you count as motivated by “right-wing” ideology?
I did read the article. In between your comment and this response, elsewhere on this thread I posted a discussion of the difference between left wing and right wing. Let me know if you can’t find it.
I’ve posted a response to that comment.
Since none of the cases from the list that McArdle examined match any of the definitions for “right wing” yet given by anyone on this thread, it is clear that that side of the list has been inflated.
Y’all don’t forget about the left-wing terrorists, too. Pretty much every riot is a left-wing terrorist scheme. Look at the voting booths in deep blue districts, the LGBQZX parades, college campuses, and various racially- or sexually-motivate demonstrations on the DC Mall. Consider the terror felt by bakers, photographers, Hobby Lobby, Chick-fil-a, nuns in Colorado, and many others who run afoul of left-wing haters and their supporters.
I am inclined to think left-wing terrorism is every bit as strong as right-wing. It just doesn’t get talked about, and we’re all not supposed to notice.
Is it your contention that right-wingers are anarchists? Because “Victory for Allah” or however the barbarian bafflegab should translate signifies specific theological commitments. Disliking “the government” or even some component thereof is obviously a far looser standard – this is like an Apples to Knapsack Full of Various Objects comparison. Hint: if your definition of “Right wing” includes Communists like Lee Harvey Oswald, the guy who shot Reagan, and John Wilkes Booth, it’s a pretense.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist so he’s left wing. John Hinckley wasn’t acting out of ideology. John Wilkes Booth was right wing. And yes, I would consider anarchists (in the classical meaning of the word) to be right wing too. And my earlier point was that just because someone shouts a Muslim slogan does not necessarily mean that Islam motivated the act; he may simply be crazy. I had a mental health case once in which someone was convinced that J. Edgar Hoover had tried to have him killed, and he told anyone who would listen about this nefarious… Read more »
Agree generally, but there’s a difference between a murderer who is obviously off his meds – if your guy had tried to attack you under the belief that you were sent by Hoover to persecute him – and an otherwise sane man who happens to subscribe to a murderous dogma. In other words, because some deem it convenient to insulate and protect Islam, there seems to be a strong bias to identify Islamic terrorists as “lone wolf” crazy types, when in fact they’re just obeying Koran with unusual consistency. This bias I have noticed makes me slow to accept allegations… Read more »
I think you have to take more study of Islamic theology and of the sociology of terrorists before you make those claims. First off, it’s ridiculous to claim that they’re “obeying Koran with unusual consistency”. First off, the Koran is fairly self-contradictory, so where they might claim one verse in the Koran that supports them there are usually other verses that clearly show they should be doing something different. But hardly any of these terrorists are devout, consistent Koran followers. Second, none of the established schools of Islam agree with the alignment of Isis terrorism with islamic Law. Here are… Read more »
My point is that, contra many Western politicians, it is not for me to decide who is a real Muslim and who is an unhinged wacko. If a man reads the Koran and finds in it some reason for violence, who am I to say that he has perverted his faith?He apparently believes that Islam justifies such behavior, and he is obviously far from alone in that conviction. I have no more warrant to insist he’s no true Muslim than I do to insist that the Orthodox aren’t true Christians. Besides, unlike Christianity, which can credibly claim to be a… Read more »
This is made most clear when we compare the founders. One simple comparison between Jesus’ method of spreading His message and the methods used by Mohammad show quite the disticntion. One simple look at the ethical standards of each also makes it clear, as well.
We could also look at the initial behavior of the their followers in the subsequent years after their deaths. One is a building of community by reasoning and love, the other by military dominance and coercion.
Where does modern America, the British Empire, the Roman Empire, or even Moses fit in there?
Not saying that I agree with Mohammed in any way whatsoever. But building a community by coercion and military dominance is pretty much the default for sinful humans. Jesus is distinct from Mohammed because he was distinct from everyone else who had ever held power, and asks us to be as well, not being Mohammed was particularly unusual in the grand scheme of things.
What if he doesn’t read the Koran, was already violent before he got any religious motivations at all, and is just following a charismatic figure who happens to use religious imagery in leading a violent political movement? Look up the actual guys who commit these attacks and that is the general trend. Most of them were not practicing Muslims who turned to violence as an expression of their devotion, they were violent or mentally unstable non-practicing Muslims who were already involved in criminal and disruptive activity and got used as a tool by a charismatic figure who didn’t really care… Read more »
I also don’t get the strategy for claiming that the violent Muslims are the ones following the Koran “consistently”. Not only is it untrue, but what’s the point? Are you trying to encourage other Muslims to be more consistent in “their faith” and start acting in violence as well? Obviously you wouldn’t be wanting to do that…which seems to mean that you don’t think your words will have much effect on Muslims at all. Which reduces the effect down to a bit of right-wing virtue signaling.
This is a really good point. I don’t believe that either the left or right is being careful with definitions, both sides being much more concerned with scoring points. I think we should all be wiling to agree that our anxiety about Islamic terrorism should not blind us to the possibility of domestic terrorism carried out by right wing extremists. It strikes me as silly to deny that there are people with extreme right wing views who have carried out violent acts. Just as it would be silly to deny that some extreme left wingers have also been violent. My… Read more »
Who is more right-winged violent than radicalized Muslim terrorists?
That’s intentionally ludicrous, and furthermore you know it.
Of the two things you are trying to equate (or really, to reverse their positions), only one is a worldwide movement. Only one is having any success whatsoever in achieving its aims. Only one is being pandered to by the elites of the West. Only one topples countries like dominoes upon reaching critical mass. Only one is actually faithful to the doctrines of a major religion. I could go on and on.
And you know which one. You are either being intentionally obtuse, or intentionally blinding yourself.
Krychek_2 wrote: In the United States, statistically, acts of terror are far more likely to be committed by white supremacists, anti-government activists, and other assorted right wingers than they are by Muslims, and the numbers aren’t even close. From a public safety standpoint, if you’re looking for someone to deport, getting rid of the alt-right would make far more sense than excluding Muslims. And all of these acts of terror pale in comparison to the unborn being culled under the watching eye of the secular state who legalized the slaughter. From a public safety standpoint, Krychek_2 still needs to widen… Read more »
Doug Wilson for President, King (We need a titular head who stands for something), Pastor-in-Chief, and Editor-in-Chief of Rolling Stone because he ROCKS!
I think I am quite broadminded about gender-bending apparel. But this might be my personal line in the sand:
&action=click
The secularist left, with its bent toward totalitariansim, will likely answer, instead of identifying and limiting and/or banning the “religion” behind the terror, willnindiscriminately ban all religious expressions so as not to discriminate.
This is the approach France seems to be taking. We will get to see how that works in real-time.
More Chesterton: We do not disagree, like doctors, about the precise nature of the illness, while agreeing about the nature of health. On the contrary, we all agree that England is unhealthy, but half of us would not look at her in what the other half would call blooming health. Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We forget that, while we agree about the abuses of things, we should differ very much about the uses of them. . . . I maintain, therefore, that the common sociological… Read more »