CHRISTIANITY AND TOLERANCE REVISITED

A couple of days ago I commented on the preposterous claim by Christopher Hitchens to the effect that Christianity is intrinsically intolerant and that secularism is the path to tolerance. One only needs to point to the wonderful "tolerance" of atheistic Communism to see how absurd that proposition is. What PID says about Christianity and politics set me to thinking about the topic again, however. PID points out that for around a century now the theologically "modernist" churches -- which mostly means the established churches -- have been supporters of the political Left -- including such unsavoury and intolerant Leftists as Communists. So I think one could in fact argue the opposite of what Hitchens does. I think it is the LEFTIST churches that are most intolerant. Like all Leftists, they are would-be dictators and they support authoritarian and control-freak policies with great regularity. For more details, see today's post on LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS.

And when we look at history, who is the most raving Christian fundamentalist who has ever had significant political power? I think it would have to be Britain's Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658). And what did he do? Did he ruthlessly destroy all who disagreed with his doctrines? What did he do about the Jews in particular? No group could be a bigger challenge to Cromwell's theology than the Jews. They didn't even accept Jesus as the Messiah, let alone any of the other doctrines of Protestantism. You know what I am going to say, don't you? Far from persecuting the Jews, it was Cromwell who allowed them back into England -- for the first time since Edward I expelled them all in 1290. That nasty intolerant old fundamentalist Protestant!

Cromwell was no saint. He massacred those who opposed him militarily (such as the Irish) but after the holocausts unleashed on Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki under the aegis of FDR and Truman, I don't think the Left have much room to condemn Cromwell for that.

The basic point I am making is once again the perennial conservative warning about the complexity of human affairs. Simple generalizations (such as "secularism leads to tolerance") just will not do. Those who preach tolerance are often the most tyrannical and those who want to impose minor restrictions -- as Christian conservatives certainly do on things like homosexual marriage -- may nonetheless be the most tolerant overall.

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LOL: "Planned Parenthood has launched a campaign to motivate all of its members and supporters, nominal Catholics and non-Catholics, to send letters to the editor, requesting that Pope Benedict XVI reconsider his "backward views" and change his opinion on sexual morality."

GWB has called the Democrats' bluff: "By embracing the progressive indexing of Social Security benefits, the president has asked us to make a shared sacrifice for the common good. He's asking middle- and upper-class folks to accept benefit cuts so there will be money for the people who are really facing poverty. He has asked us to redistribute money down the income scale. Why should programs for children and families be strangled so Donald Trump can get bigger benefit checks? He has made the hard choices.... So how has the St. Francis of Assisi wing of the Democratic Party responded to Bush's challenge? Does it applaud him for doing what it has spent the past years telling him he should do? Of course not. The Democratic leadership has dropped all that shared sacrifice talk and started making demagogic appeals to people's narrow self-interest. ... For two decades they've been courageously saying we need to means-test Social Security, so we can focus our resources on those who need it. Now Bush has embraced their view. Are they saying that since Bush has moved so far in a redistributionist direction that perhaps the Democrats should budge slightly, too? Of course not. They're inventing lame reasons to explain why they shouldn't be for the policy they have been for over the past 20 years."

Democrats discovering free speech: "Something remarkable is happening as a Republican Congress and president move to crackdown on 527 groups like the MoveOn.org Voter Fund and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: Liberals are realizing that something's fishy. Three years after the passage of McCain-Feingold (a.k.a. the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a.k.a. the End of Free Speech As We Know It), a smattering of Democrats and liberal activists are slowly coming to the conclusion that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to let the government decide who can and cannot engage in political speech."

Conservative law schools growing: "In the past few years, religious conservatives have realized what their liberal counterparts saw long ago: The place where the culture wars are won or lost is in the courtroom. Some religious leaders, including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, have set up schools to train their own battalion of lawyers..... the students at these schools were very bright and they were turning down good, well-known -- sometimes Ivy League -- schools to attend these instead..... Both schools seemed determined not to turn into religious ghettos. Rather, they wanted their graduates to really go out into the culture and change it from the inside... schools like Patrick Henry and Ave Maria [are] growing at a very rapid pace (Evangelical college enrollment grew 60 percent between 1990 and 2002, while enrollment at other private and public schools remained stagnant)."

Immigration: Sowell sums it up: "Social Security used to be called the third rail of politics but illegal immigration is the real third rail that both political parties are afraid to touch. Cops who find illegal aliens are under orders not to turn them in to the feds. And the federal government's own border guards have their hands tied by the higher-ups as well. Now that Hispanics are the largest minority in the country, and with the country closely divided politically, neither party wants to risk alienating the Hispanic vote by enforcing immigration laws. Many other Americans may be outraged at the way illegal aliens are handled with kid gloves -- and, in some places, even given rights normally reserved for citizens -- but so long as this outrage is directed at both parties, neither party wants to be the one to risk losing the Hispanic vote."

The Left don't want the poor to get rich: "In recent years, the idea of development - in the sense of economic modernisation - has come to be seen as not feasible, or even desirable. A landmark here was the United Nations Brundtland Report of 1987, which promoted the idea of 'sustainable development' - defined as giving overriding priority to 'the essential needs of the world's poor'. In other words, the sole focus should be on the most basic needs of the poor. Even worse, the report argued that technology and social organisation put limits on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs - so suggesting that the environment places natural limits on development"

Attacks on McDonalds are really attacks on people who eat there: "Some people aren't very sensible or conventional. But of course, the people making a federal case of the McDonald's enthusiasm will not accept this as fact. They need an American villain, some typically American institution, like big business, so they can then denounce not the stupid or peculiar people who are overeating of their own free will but the McDonald's big business people who are, you guessed it, coercing them all to come and eat there."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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