Tag Archives: Totalitarianism

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What opposition to Christmas displays tells us about atheism

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A post critical of litigious atheists, by Doug Giles.

Excerpt:

The atheists I grew up with in Texas were a tad bit pluckier than today’s lardy hagfish atheists who file lawsuits every winter when they see a child wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Yep, the anti-theists I used to hang out with in the Lone Star state were rugged individualists who were so busy milking this existence that they didn’t have time to bleat like a stuck sheep because a plastic baby Jesus statue endangered their delicate beliefs.

My other non-believing buddies who weren’t the robust Hemingway types were usually heady stoners who were into physics, Pink Floyd and Frisbee and were completely comfortable around people of faith versus today’s reflexively irate, touchy atheists who pop a blood vein in their forehead if they accidentally hear “Silent Night” playing at Macy’s.

For God’s sake atheists, übermensch up why don’t you?

Giles then goes on to explain one of the latest attempts by former-Pentecostal-hymn-singer Dan Barker to ban nativity scenes and other Christmas stuff from being displayed.

Then concludes:

Yep, according to the 21st century metrosexual atheist motif, anything that offends them should now be banned. That makes me scratch my head because I thought the atheists were the tough-minded ones who could stare death in the face and mock God and His dictates, but now a silicone statue of Yeshua in diapers puts them in a tailspin. Hello, sweetie.

He mentions Dan Barker in his article, so I think it’s worth linking to this post I wrote about how Dan Barker abandoned Christianity. To persist in the Christian life requires a certain amount of intelligence and wisdom. You have to be good at life. Dan couldn’t cut it.

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Failed Democrat politician sues pro-life group for exposing his voting record

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From U.S. News and World Report. (H/T Sense of Events)

Excerpt:

When voters in Ohio’s 1st Congressional District threw Democrat Steve Driehaus out of office after only one term, he did not bow out gracefully. No, he decided to get even. So he did what anyone does in today’s culture: he sued somebody.

Charging that its activities contributed to his defeat and thus to his “loss of livelihood,” Driehaus is suing the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that supports pro-life candidates for Congress and which has been one of the leading and most effective organizations involved in the fight to cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood.

During the 2010 elections the Susan B. Anthony List engaged in a campaign to identify and call out a group of allegedly anti-abortion-rights members of Congress who provided the margin that allowed President Barack Obama’s reform of the nation’s healthcare system to get through the U.S. House of Representatives. The Susan B. Anthony List said their vote in favor of the law, which did not include any pro-life protections, amounted to a betrayal of their pro-life principles.

According to Driehaus, who was one of that group, what the Susan B. Anthony List said in its public communications amounted to a malicious lie that contributed to his defeat. Amazingly, rather than laugh the suit out of court U.S. District Court judge Timothy S. Black, an Obama appointee, is allowing it to go forward. …

Driehaus’s suit is breaking new legal ground and may already be having a very chilling effect on political speech. It goes directly at the heart of our First Amendment protections and criminalizes what is at least a difference of opinion. And it’s curious that the case has not received more attention from the national press.

What is equally curious, however, is why Judge Black has allowed the case to move forward and why he did not recuse himself from it since, as Barbara Hollingsworth reported Friday in The Washington Examiner, he apparently is the former president and director of the Planned Parenthood Association of Cincinnati. As seeming conflicts of interest go this one is a real humdinger.

So this politician takes certain positions and the SBA List makes known to the public what those positions are, and he sues them. And an Obama-appointed judicial activist thnks that the case should go forward. This is just another example of the left wanting to control speech and the flow of information. There is something alarming about the way that the left operates when dealing with dissent. They are so desperate to achieve uniformity of opinion, for all their misleading talk about diversity, that they don’t blink about using force to silence anyone who disagrees with them. And this doesn’t just happen on the abortion issue, where pro-life demonstrators are routinely hand-cuffed and arrested by police. It happens with everything from same-sex marriage to global warming to Darwinian evolution.

People on the secular left are the most close-minded people in the world, and they seem to think nothing about using force to punish those who disagree with them. They won’t debate – they prefer to overpower. Is it really so hard to believe? We just came off of the 20th century where the secular leftists murdered 100 million people, in places like Cambodia, North Kora, China and the Soviet Union. Human rights, like the right to life and freedom of speech, are invented rights on a secular leftist worldview. They aren’t objective – and that’s why people on the secular left find it so easy to violate them – because their worldview has no capacity to ground fundamental human rights. If there is no Creator and Designer of the universe, then anything is possible – we are all just matter in motion. Whatever standards of conduct we agree on are arbitrary and subjective – just conventions that vary from by time and place – from one society to the next. For a secular leftist, any immoral act is permissible. Their rule is “do what you like, and don’t get caught”.

Not all secular leftists are fascists, to be sure. But their worldview does seem to lend itself to narrow-mindedness and intolerance.

News

How do secular leftist professors feel about Christian students?

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From the Alliance Defense Fund.

Excerpt:

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty (d. 2007) in describing his assessment of the role of university professor wrote:  “When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures.  Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.”  The re-education imperative is one that he, “like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”  Rorty explains to the “fundamentalist” parents of his students:  “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”  He helpfully explains that “I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner in his book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class set forth a number of the historical developments that were decisive in the formation of the revolutionary intellectual class.  Among the factors is the process of secularization which de-sacralizes authority and enables challenges to theological traditions.  Another factor was the extension of non-church public schooling.  The colleges and universities in particular generate “dissent, deviance, and the cultivation of an authority-subverting culture of critical discourse.”  And the school teachers at all levels conceive and fulfill their tasks as representatives of (the abstract) society as a whole (whatever that is), thus distanced from and with no allegiance or obligation to the values of the parents of their students.  A related factor is the structure of the new educational system:  “increasingly insulated from the family system,” thereby situated to serve as “an important source of values among students divergent from those of their families.”  In both form and content (which are not so neatly divisible, by the way) the state educational enterprise has been leveraged to missionary ends, further undermining parental authority and replacing its formative function.

Law Professor Samuel Levinson has with welcome candor revealed that it is not due to his sympathy for certain religious students that he prefers that public grade schools grant limited exemptions to those students with conscientious objections to portions of the curriculum.  Rather, such measures are calculated to mollify those religious students, thereby keeping them in the secularizing environment of the government school where they are likely to have their views transformed.  With just enough solicitude for such students’ interests, they may be convinced to stay put, and thus be “lured away from the views—some of them only foolish, others, alas, quite pernicious—of their parents.”

To push these [Christian] students from the public schools . . . will assure that they will in fact be educated within institutions that are, from my perspective at least, far more limited, and indeed, “totalitarian” than anything likely to be found within a decent public school.  My desire to “lure” religious parents back to the public schools thus has at least a trace of the spider’s web about it.

And there’s more than a trace of irony in his assigning “totalitarian” levels as he plots means to manipulate the worldviews of children by coaxing them to remain in institutions designed for that very purpose.  Spider’s web, indeed.

I was just having a conversation with a couple of left-wing Christians on Facebook who were telling me how Christianity was compatible with left-wing politics. They have no idea what they are talking about – they just don’t know what they are up against. They are the ones who vote for more funding for public schools, thinking they are innocuous.

One of the reasons that kept me from marrying is that I didn’t meet anyone in university who took this threat as seriously as I do. If you believe that children should be influential for the Christ, then reading that excerpt should scare you. But if babies are just for baby pictures, then it’s not really a big deal. But it’s a big deal to me.