Donald Hank
Just say no to civility
By Donald Hank
The Left seeks to destroy all that is good and decent on this planet, including traditional family, truth and knowledge, the free market (our life blood), population and economic growth and freedom of expression. They have dressed up their monstrous, failure-bound platform to make it palatable to the chronically inattentive and are succeeding, not because they are intelligent, but because so few can see a pattern in their behavior.
Now, mainstream Christianity today believes that any person or group devoted to opposing something is not being "civil." Note, for example, that Rick Warren justified his participation in Obama's inauguration on the basis of this notion of civility.
But Jesus was never civil. He was an in-your-face provocateur. Even the early Christians never teamed up with the worldly leaders of their day, and were not civil toward sin. Paul bluntly condemned many specific sins, including those indulged in by the rich and powerful.
William Buckley defined conservatives best when he said it was their duty to "stand athwart history yelling stop!"
That is wiser than most suspect. By definition, conservatism may not stand for any one particular goal, because goals presuppose a movement, and conservatism may not be a movement. It must be an anchor. Except in cases where the status quo is ungodly, it must be an essentially non-moving entity, or a non-movement. But to be effective it must stop other movements that oppose it.
Because of its nature, it has been reluctant to do so. It just wants to exist.
But ironically, if it keeps just wanting to exist, it will very soon cease to exist, because the forces of change are upon us and won't go away without a fight.
But the end thereof are the ways of the Left...
The Left wants you to believe they are for the oppressed and the downtrodden. Yet their ideological brothers killed 100 million innocents in the last century (see the book "The Black Book of Communism" by Stephane Courtois), most of the victims representing the oppressed and downtrodden classes.
It seems the "beloved leader" of North Korea has a policy of jailing, torturing and then killing not only those he perceives as his enemies but also their children and grandchildren.
Kim Jong Il, the most far-left of all modern leaders, has produced a gulag whose cruelty goes far beyond Hitler, Mao and Stalin, and in fact, beyond anything the human imagination can conceive of.
The evidence that, at bottom, the Left is nothing less than a collective of evil people of murderous intent is abundantly clear when you look at any example of a nation in which the Left has had complete control, unopposed. Ironically, it was a group of French communists who tallied up the body count of communism, showing it to be around 100 million in the 20th Century alone, eclipsing all the killing by all wars and other evils perpetrated by any other group.
Yet, incredibly, the Left goes on unabated and almost without resistance, spreading the absolute malarkey that religion is dangerous, while atheism — the essence of the Left — represents enlightenment.
They point to the Crusades and the 30 Years War as if these were the distillate of what Christianity has produced since the beginning, and when confronted by the inconvenient facts of the slaughter of innocents in leftist regimes, they shrug them off, attributing this cruelty to an aberration, to accidents of human personality. [1]
So what do you say when someone tells you that Christianity is no better than leftism because both Christians and leftists have killed people?
It is true that people calling themselves Christians have done wrong, as have leftists.
But the harm attributed to Christians was done in disobedience to God's commandments.
The harm attributed to the Left was done in perfect obedience to a humanist system in which there is no absolute commandment, nor is there a concept of absolute right or wrong. In fact, it is a system based on "change" or in other words, revolution. By definition, such a system cannot be stable or lead to the stable utopia targeted by its proponents.
Thus, in both systems we have humans imperfectly executing commands. But in one, the humans in charge are, all too often, disobeying God. In the other, they are almost invariably obeying the wishes of imperfect humans, including themselves.
Thus when the humanist system fails, it does so because it was not only executed by humans who believe they are the center of the universe but is designed to be executed on the premise that man is the center of the universe. Thus it is designed for failure.
When a godly system fails, it does so due to disobedience — that is, man behaving in a man-centered manner. It is designed to succeed but fails when its executor behaves like a leftist! Thus Leftism fails when executed both by Leftists and by others (G.W. Bush, for example).
So the question that demands an answer is:
Why choose a man-centered (leftist) system that is not only designed by humans but also executed by humans when you can choose a system that is designed by God and, if executed according to design, will ineluctably succeed?
The Left is the quintessential "patient in charge of the asylum," but the "right" is so splintered and disarrayed, and currently, so steeped in a hopelessly naïve, smarmy, sentimental version of "Christianity" that they perfectly embody the "ripe plum" that Premier Krushchev predicted would soon fall into the lap of the communists.
NOTES:
© Donald Hank
December 19, 2008
The Left seeks to destroy all that is good and decent on this planet, including traditional family, truth and knowledge, the free market (our life blood), population and economic growth and freedom of expression. They have dressed up their monstrous, failure-bound platform to make it palatable to the chronically inattentive and are succeeding, not because they are intelligent, but because so few can see a pattern in their behavior.
Now, mainstream Christianity today believes that any person or group devoted to opposing something is not being "civil." Note, for example, that Rick Warren justified his participation in Obama's inauguration on the basis of this notion of civility.
But Jesus was never civil. He was an in-your-face provocateur. Even the early Christians never teamed up with the worldly leaders of their day, and were not civil toward sin. Paul bluntly condemned many specific sins, including those indulged in by the rich and powerful.
William Buckley defined conservatives best when he said it was their duty to "stand athwart history yelling stop!"
That is wiser than most suspect. By definition, conservatism may not stand for any one particular goal, because goals presuppose a movement, and conservatism may not be a movement. It must be an anchor. Except in cases where the status quo is ungodly, it must be an essentially non-moving entity, or a non-movement. But to be effective it must stop other movements that oppose it.
Because of its nature, it has been reluctant to do so. It just wants to exist.
But ironically, if it keeps just wanting to exist, it will very soon cease to exist, because the forces of change are upon us and won't go away without a fight.
But the end thereof are the ways of the Left...
The Left wants you to believe they are for the oppressed and the downtrodden. Yet their ideological brothers killed 100 million innocents in the last century (see the book "The Black Book of Communism" by Stephane Courtois), most of the victims representing the oppressed and downtrodden classes.
It seems the "beloved leader" of North Korea has a policy of jailing, torturing and then killing not only those he perceives as his enemies but also their children and grandchildren.
Kim Jong Il, the most far-left of all modern leaders, has produced a gulag whose cruelty goes far beyond Hitler, Mao and Stalin, and in fact, beyond anything the human imagination can conceive of.
The evidence that, at bottom, the Left is nothing less than a collective of evil people of murderous intent is abundantly clear when you look at any example of a nation in which the Left has had complete control, unopposed. Ironically, it was a group of French communists who tallied up the body count of communism, showing it to be around 100 million in the 20th Century alone, eclipsing all the killing by all wars and other evils perpetrated by any other group.
Yet, incredibly, the Left goes on unabated and almost without resistance, spreading the absolute malarkey that religion is dangerous, while atheism — the essence of the Left — represents enlightenment.
They point to the Crusades and the 30 Years War as if these were the distillate of what Christianity has produced since the beginning, and when confronted by the inconvenient facts of the slaughter of innocents in leftist regimes, they shrug them off, attributing this cruelty to an aberration, to accidents of human personality. [1]
So what do you say when someone tells you that Christianity is no better than leftism because both Christians and leftists have killed people?
It is true that people calling themselves Christians have done wrong, as have leftists.
But the harm attributed to Christians was done in disobedience to God's commandments.
The harm attributed to the Left was done in perfect obedience to a humanist system in which there is no absolute commandment, nor is there a concept of absolute right or wrong. In fact, it is a system based on "change" or in other words, revolution. By definition, such a system cannot be stable or lead to the stable utopia targeted by its proponents.
Thus, in both systems we have humans imperfectly executing commands. But in one, the humans in charge are, all too often, disobeying God. In the other, they are almost invariably obeying the wishes of imperfect humans, including themselves.
Thus when the humanist system fails, it does so because it was not only executed by humans who believe they are the center of the universe but is designed to be executed on the premise that man is the center of the universe. Thus it is designed for failure.
When a godly system fails, it does so due to disobedience — that is, man behaving in a man-centered manner. It is designed to succeed but fails when its executor behaves like a leftist! Thus Leftism fails when executed both by Leftists and by others (G.W. Bush, for example).
So the question that demands an answer is:
Why choose a man-centered (leftist) system that is not only designed by humans but also executed by humans when you can choose a system that is designed by God and, if executed according to design, will ineluctably succeed?
The Left is the quintessential "patient in charge of the asylum," but the "right" is so splintered and disarrayed, and currently, so steeped in a hopelessly naïve, smarmy, sentimental version of "Christianity" that they perfectly embody the "ripe plum" that Premier Krushchev predicted would soon fall into the lap of the communists.
NOTES:
[1] The Left also muddy the waters by portraying Hitler as a right-winger. In fact, Hitler's system was based on a utopian vision, a hallmark of the Left. Not only that, the European Right shared a vision of monarchic divine right. Hitler denied divinity, jailing and even executing many religious leaders.
© Donald Hank
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