A story:
'Before beginning my talk I want to tell you a story about Moses. When
he struck the rock and it brought forth water, he thought, 'What a good
opportunity to have a bath!'
He removed his clothes, put them aside on the rock and entered the
water. When he got out and wanted to dress, his clothes had vanished.
An Israeli had stolen them.'
The Israeli representative jumped up furiously and shouted, 'What are
you talking about? There were no Israelis there then!'
The Palestinian representative smiled and said:
'And now that we have made that quite clear, I will begin my speech.'
Sounds great, huh? The Israeli just got owned by history. A liberal responded to it with:
“How about we don't care what an old book of myths says about who owns or should own the land?
That being said, I wish [the] story was true.”
Ah, the great answer to the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Why not ignore the religious claims and just blindly support the Palestinian's great historical ownage. This has pretty much been the left's view on the conflict since Israeli's creation 60 years ago. Ignore legitimate Jewish claims to their ancient homeland. Ignore the ethnic history. Ignore the political claims. The Palestinians are the underdogs, so they're the ones to support.
Aside from over 5000 years of Jewish history in the region (that's 3700 years before Islam), the ethnic similarities between the two warring parties and the decades of Jewish political organization under secular Zionism before the birth of Israel, yeah, that answer pretty much has the entire thing down.
To dismiss faith has been part of the left's agenda since the mid-1900s. Before that, the Progressives were quite religious. Woodrow Wilson based his proto-fascism on, among many things, Christian supremacy. It was the infection of hardcore Marxism that turned formerly pious eugenicists into atheistic fire-starters. Since that time, faith is decadent and evil (see: Dawkins vs. the Catholic Church), and science has become not just a method of investigation, but an ideology (see: Dawkins and Darwin, any atheist). If you think a pompous priest is annoying, wait until you meet a atheist leftist from community college. Gah!
Anyway, liberals, socialist, communists, and pretty much any other left-wing ideology, have this century and a half-long mythology running their political religion. Marx was a genius, not a anti-Semitic Jew who failed in pretty much all his predictions. Wilson was a visionary, not a theocratic tyrant who re-segregated the government and had a true imperialistic vision for America. FDR was a God, not a racist who imprisoned Asian citizens based solely on their race, or a horrible economist who prolonged the Depression and created a culture of dependency and currency inflation. Kennedy was a leftist, not the anti-Communist, pro-free market, “pro-war” president he actually way. LBJ's Great Society sunk minorities into poverty and dependency. Carter's peace overtures killed more people than saved. Clinton's deficit was actually the Republican Congress'. If I had the time and the attention span, a whole book could be written on the myths of the left.
The left believes in these things because, sadly, they have no real faith. They don't cross that line between reason and beyond reason, they straddle it. People of faith believe in things beyond human beings. They believe in the redeeming power of Jesus, or the mercy of G-d, or the righteousness of Allah, or the enlightenment of Buddha. They believe beyond people into the realm of revelation and the soul. They believe, and this is key, in something that TRANSCENDES human nature and act upon that belief. Altruism, as close as one can get to it, is never based on reason, even for those claiming strict atheism. Transcendence beyond our nature is a religious idea. Those atheistic leftists who support indulgence of base instincts like promiscuity, early sexual experimentation, primitivism and the like are much closer to true atheism than those who claim to not believe, but also call on our higher faculties (ie. Against our selfish nature) to give up wealth and economic freedom for others.
Unlike the left's myth of religion, faith and reason are NOT opposites. Of course, you'll encounter those who deny reason because of faith: creationists, Islamists, global warming fanatics; but those people aren't exactly the mainstream of human thought. Science grew within countless religious cultures. A Muslim created algebra. A Catholic created astronomy. An Orthodox Christian founded an alphabet now used by hundreds of millions. A Christian founded modern physics. Science, much to the chagrin of the left, has flourished due to, not in spite of, religious faith. That's not to say that religious INSTITUTIONS haven't interfered with scientific endeavors, but simply believing in God does not discount someone from being a scientist.
Leftist atheists love to shove it in your face that everyone else is stupid. Studies about creationists are their favorite. It's creationists this and God that. If you have faith, you're on the wrong side of history. And amusingly, if you ask a leftist about global warming, they tell you the “science is settled”, which spits in the face of the very idea of science. Or ask about John Kennedy, as I described above. Ask any number of historical or philosophical ideas, and you'll get a pre-engineered response about it from most. Say Hitler, you get right-winger. Say USSR, you'll hear not real communism. Like the religious fanatics in Islam and Protestantism, they're knee jerks will knock you out of your reason chair. But don't tell them they aren't reasonable... because they are... because they say so. And to dispute it is being closed minded.
Sheesh.
Posts
