| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Godfrey" |
| Date: |
09 Nov 2004 05:51:48 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Left Like Me |
He's an atheist, a "leftist" and he supports the war. Smart guy.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109377/
Bush's Secularist Triumph
The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, at 7:34 AM PT
Many are the cheap and easy laughs in which one could indulge at the
extraordinary, pitiful hysteria of the defeated Democrats. "Kerry
won," according to one e-mail I received from Greg Palast, to whom the
Florida vote in 2000 is, and always will be, a combination of
Gettysburg and Waterloo. According to Nikki Finke of the LA Weekly,
the Fox News channel "called" Ohio for Bush for reasons too sinister
to enumerate. Gregory Maniatis, whose last communication to me had
predicted an annihilating Democratic landslide, kept quiet for only a
day or so before forwarding the details on how to emigrate to Canada.
Thus do the liberals build their bridge to the 20th century.
Who can care about this pathos? Not I. But I do take strong exception
to one strain in the general moaning. It seems that anyone fool enough
to favor the re-election of the president is by definition a
God-bothering, pulpit-pounding Armageddon-artist, enslaved by ancient
texts and prophecies and committed to theocratic rule. I was
instructed in last week's New York Times that this was the case, and
that the Enlightenment had come to an end, by no less an expert than
Garry Wills, who makes at least one of his many livings by being an
Augustinian Roman Catholic.
I step lightly over the ancient history of Wills' church (which was
the originator of the counter-Enlightenment and then the patron of
fascism in Europe) as well as over its more recent and local history
(as the patron, protector, and financier of child-rape in the United
States, and the sponsor of the cruel "annulment" of Joe Kennedy's and
John Kerry's first marriages). As far as I know, all religions and all
churches are equally demented in their belief in divine intervention,
divine intercession, or even the existence of the divine in the first
place.
But all faiths are not always equally demented in the same way, or at
the same time. Islam, which was once a civilizing and creative force
in many societies, is now undergoing a civil war. One faction in this
civil war is explicitly totalitarian and wedded to a cult of death. We
have seen it at work on the streets of our own cities, and most
recently on the streets of Amsterdam. We know that the obscene
butchery of filmmaker Theo van Gogh was only a warning of what is
coming in Madrid, London, Rome, and Paris, let alone Baghdad and
Basra.
So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of
secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself
able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that
immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am
sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the
immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present
moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent
the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these
people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in
Palestine—disowned and denounced by the new leader of the
PLO—described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and
the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for
antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather
bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote,
pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the
moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal
secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from
Kentucky every time, as long as he didn't want to impose his
principles on me (which our Constitution forbids him to do).
One probably should not rest too much on the similarity between Bin
Laden's last video and the newly available DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11. I
would only say that, if Bin Laden had issued a tape that with equal
fealty followed the playbook of Karl Rove (and do please by all means
cross yourself at the mention of this unholy name), it might have
garnered some more attention. The Bearded One moved pedantically
through Moore's bill of indictment, checking off the Florida
vote-count in 2000, the "Pet Goat" episode on the day of hell, the
violent intrusion into hitherto peaceful and Muslim Iraq, and the
division between Bush and the much nicer Europeans. (For some reason,
unknown to me at any rate, he did not attack the President for
allowing the Bin Laden family to fly out of American airspace.)
George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the U.S. armed
forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the
American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of
the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and
the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge
advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The
"antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only
indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated
the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept
the apparent corollary—that we should have been pursuing a policy to
which the fanatics had no objection?
Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of
democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after
several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the
clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and
revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there
will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything
from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in
courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side
of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow
can't hear Robert Ingersoll* or Clarence Darrow being soft and
cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that
daily threatens us from within and without.
-Godfrey
* * * * *
The truth is a precious commodity. That's why I use it so sparingly.
- Mark Twain
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| User: "Jez" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Left Like Me |
09 Nov 2004 05:55:56 PM |
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Godfrey wrote:
He's an atheist, a "leftist" and he supports the war. Smart guy.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109377/
Bush's Secularist Triumph
The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, at 7:34 AM PT
No Hitchens is no-longer a leftist.
He's just drunk a few bottles too many.
Not to worry, you can help the guy out.......
http://windsofchange.net/archives/005182.php
--
Jez
'Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable
notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often
led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what
that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be
skeptical of someone else's description of reality.'-
Howard Zinn
Skype callto://hellward
NFS Porsche Unleashed, Hot Pursuit 2, Underground.
Yeowww
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| User: "Godfrey" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Left Like Me |
09 Nov 2004 11:42:43 PM |
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On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 23:55:56 +0000, Jez
<iced_spear@NOSPAMdsl.pipex.com> wrote:
Godfrey wrote:
He's an atheist, a "leftist" and he supports the war. Smart guy.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109377/
Bush's Secularist Triumph
The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, at 7:34 AM PT
No Hitchens is no-longer a leftist.
He's just drunk a few bottles too many.
Not to worry, you can help the guy out.......
http://windsofchange.net/archives/005182.php
That's hilarious- some people have way too much time on their hands...
-Godfrey
* * * * *
The truth is a precious commodity. That's why I use it so sparingly.
- Mark Twain
.
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