News that a son of the founder of Hamas, a 32 year old man named Mosab Hassan Yousef, has denounced his father’s cause and converted to Christianity is bound to received with disbelief in sophisticated circles, especially since Mosab spent years fighting the shadow war alongside his sire. The WSJ has the basic story.
Throughout the last decade, from the second Intifada to the current stalemate, he worked alongside his father in the West Bank. During that time the younger Mr. Yousef also secretly embraced Christianity. And as he reveals in his book “Son of Hamas,” out this week, he became one of the top spies for Israel’s internal security arm, the Shin Bet.
The news of this double conversion has sent ripples through the Middle East. One of Mr. Yousef’s handlers at the Shin Bet confirmed his account to the Israeli daily Haaretz. Hamas—already reeling from the assassination of a senior military chief in Dubai in January—calls his claims Zionist propaganda. From the Israeli prison he has occupied since 2005, Sheikh Yousef on Monday issued a statement that he and his family “have completely disowned the man who was our oldest son and who is called Mosab.”
If Mosab had been a US Army Major who converted to Islamism and shot his fellows, or a West Point Chaplain who has found Allah, or a Cambridge Apostle who became a KGB agent the literate public would have no problem lionizing him. But going the other way? A Western cafe leftist is often psychologically incapable of accepting any that any form of religious belief can be genuine, unless it suits his prejudices. Ironically Sheikh Yousef himself is probably more aware of the of the central role that belief plays in a revolutionary organization and hence not only the possibility of converting to another cause but the impossibility of living without it. Among the terror operators there always exists a leaven of dreamers for whom the point of life is faith. When a true believer becomes unable to adhere to one cause he generally finds another. This may have happened to Mosab who discovered in prison not that the Jews were perfect, but more subversively, that Muslims were no better. The WSJ takes up the story.
Mr. Yousef traces his awakening to his first sustained exposure to Hamas cruelty. In 1996, he was arrested by the Israelis for buying weapons. He says he was beaten and tortured badly in custody. It was then that the Shin Bet approached him. He says he thought about becoming a double agent. “I wanted revenge on Israel,” he writes. But when he was sent to serve his term at the Megiddo prison in northern Israel, he says he was more shocked by the way the maj’d, Hamas’s security wing, dealt with other prisoners.
“Every day, there was screaming; every night, torture. Hamas was torturing its own people!” he writes. The Muslims he met in jail “bore no resemblance to my father” and “were mean and petty . . . bigots and hypocrites.”
That hypocrisy shattered his world and probably made him want to strike out at the duplicity that he saw there. It was then that he turned to Shin Bet which cannily, asked him to do nothing. “Though he took money from Shin Bet and stayed on their payroll for a decade, his handlers in the early years didn’t ask much of him. They encouraged him to study and be a model son. His code name was the Green Prince: green as in the color of the Islamist Hamas flag, and prince as the offspring to Hamas royalty.” This was a psychological masterstroke. The Shin Bet probably understood that the mere awareness of working for Israel was a burden that could break him. And when they finally asked him to act they made sure it was on terms he could accept. Even in betrayal they would give him a measure of meaning.
He says he used his influence at Shin Bet to get the Israelis to try to arrest Hamas and other Palestinian figures rather than blow them up with missile strikes. He says he saved his father from the fate of Sheikh Yassin and other Hamas leaders whom the Israelis killed by secretly arranging to have him arrested. “I know for sure that my father is alive today, he still breathes, because I was involved in this thing,” he says.
But after the first thing he did for Israel, it was inevitable that Mosab would conclude that he could neither hold himself above the men he now worked for or the cause he had betrayed. There was no balm in his Gilead. He had reached the most dangerous conclusion that any activist can ever attain: the knowledge that he cannot be righteous. A true believer can be deprived of almost everything, except certainty. Time and again we read in history about Old Bolsheviks who would submit to any degradation except expulsion from the Party. Prison they can bear; expulsion from the road to paradise they cannot. A world so formerly comprehensible, stark in blacks and whites, with ready answers ever to hand cannot become one of relative grays without precipitating a crisis. All bolsheviks, environmentalists, and firebrands of all descriptions who lose their righteousness know they are living a lie. And then they must either get out of the game or go crazy.
It was probably fortunate that a cabbie in Jerusalem handed Mosab a copy of the New Testament. In the galaxy of faiths the one optimized for people who are lost and despairing is Christianity. Christianity is not for the righteous, it is for those who have fallen. It must intuitively appealed to the young man. Mosab said:
“I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love and humility that Jesus talked about,” he says in “Son of Hamas.” … [The WSJ says] Mr. Yousef has some of the evangelist in him, even as he insists he is not a particularly devoted Christian and is still learning about his new religion. He wants Palestinians and Israelis to learn what he did from the Christian God.
“I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn’t leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it’s a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.
Frederick Forsyth wrote about a meaning in a way that even die-hard secularists can understand. His character, Shannon, a mercenary in the novel The Dogs of War, reflected on why he needed to remain in the Life instead of pulling out and getting a job as a clerk in London. There are men who live for other things and he was one of them. It’s an explanation that both Sheikh Yousef and Mosab — and the Shin Bet controller — would understand in their own ways. The only ones who might have trouble comprehending are those who find no need to believe in anything more than getting laid, getting drunk and getting ahead: that mass of people television thinks it is talking to. And which maybe it does talk to. Shannon mused:
The real problem was being able to stick it out, to sit in an office under the orders of a wee man in a dark gray suit and look out of the window and recall the bush country, the waving palms, the smell of sweat and cordite, the grunts of men hauling the jeeps over the river crossings, the copper-tasting fears just before the attack, and the wild cruel joy of being alive afterward. To remember, and then to go back to the ledgers and the commuter train, that was what was impossible. He knew he would eat his heart out if it ever came to that. For Africa bites like a tse-tse fly, and once the drug is in the blood it can never be wholly exorcized.
St. Augustine of Hippo spoke for many when he wrote “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”” Whether or not we find, we are born to seek.
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“News that a son of the founder of Hamas, a 32 year old man named Mosab Hassan Yousef, has denounced his father’s cause and converted to Christianity…”
This is good news- God be praised
Bear in mind, folks, that the oh-so-enlightened NPR left reads a story like this and tells themselves that this conversion is a step backwards for Yousef, because to them, nothing can be worse than being a Christian. Gotta maintain the narrative.
Whiskey can, I’m sure, add commentary regarding additional reasons why urban leftist women would find Yousef less compelling after his conversion, as well.
Only the Christian Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is capable of changing and raising up such a man. He does this only to glorify himself. Saul of Tarsus was a great persecutor of the early church and would turn in believers to the Jews to be tortured and imprisoned. Jesus met him on the road to Damascus after his resurrection and blinded him. When Saul found the apostles, they were very afraid of him. He was healed and his sight returned. He then became one of the greatest of all the apostles, bringing the truth and the light to the gentiles.
If you don’t know him, do yourself a favor and at least read the Gospel of John from the King James Bible. It’s not a long read but it covers the fundamentals. I say the King James Bible because it’s the oldest english translation and there are many contradictions between the KJV and newer translations caused by poor translation or personal agendas.
http://www.youversion.com/bible/kjv/john/1/1
You Version provides the ability to compare the various versions, but I would beg that you consider the KJV to be the most accurate.
Apart from the obvious other crises facing the West — the well known financial, demographic and ideological ones — I’ve often wondered whether the most fundamental one of all was whether the world-view of 1960s was not under existential challenge. Just as there was for a long time an unstated assumption that the future would be economically socialist (“Star Trek Socialism”), I think there was a also the implicit hypothesis that it would also be “atheist” in a certain sense.
The best pop summary of this idea was John Lennon’s “Imagine”. He didn’t invent the ideas, merely expressed them; and in the forty years since the song came out, the academic, media and entertainment establishment pitched very similar themes as the standard attitude; it was the content between the laugh lines, the punch line in plots, the subliminal message in countless books, shows and dramas. I think many in the West began to accept the world of “Imagine” as inevitable despite the fact that there was no inherent reason, given the West’s own history and the history of the world, that it should be necessarily so. Finally it acquired the status of established fact the way driving on the left is established fact in certain countries; it became the assumed order of things simply because it was customary.
The long dominance of certain ideas made it easy for their adherents to assume that the rest of the world would sooner or later come around; that America would drop its backward religiosity and finally become socialist; as would the rest of the world. The great shock of September 11 and the American response to it was that this was not necessarily so. The End of History had not yet come, at least not in the form assumed; and I think some Europeans are beginning to have nagging doubts that its Islamic citizens are just going through a passing phase before they settle down and recite the “Imagine” creed. It’s begun to dawn on them that the Islamists in Europe might actually believe what they profess. And the possibility that Barack Obama might not represent the future but instead the last gasp of ancien regime has finally occurred to an increasing number of observers.
I may be putting the case too strongly, but I strongly suspect that something like this is actually taking place and that it partly explains the curious sterility in the response of Europe and “Left Coast” America to the geopolitical and ideological challenges facing them. Every challenge is met with a double-down as if the answer to each problem simply required repetition. There’s an intellectual elite out there that simply knows they have all the answers. Their inability to accept at face value their enemy’s oaths to destroy them are the flip side of the same confirmed ignorance that makes it impossible for them to accept that anyone might have a serious religious belief: simply not worthy of serious consideration. They are in denial of other possibilities which isn’t to say those other possibilities are necessarily true, but sufficient to suggest that the received conceit is almost certainly false.
“It was probably fortunate that a cabbie in Jerusalem handed Mosab a copy of the New Testament.”
Okay that is a lead in for a Jewish joke. Besides, it’s Sunday.
A Jewish man runs into a friend on the street who he has not seen in a few months. “Moshe, a funny thing has happened. I sent my son to Israel to learn more about or religion and he came home as an Evangelical Jew!”
His friend replies, “Funny thing! I sent my son to Israel and he came home as an Evangelical Jew too!”
The two decide to go talk to their rabbi about this issue. They explain things to the Rabbi and he says “I sent my son to Israel to learn more about our religion and he came home as an Evangelical Jew, too!”
The three men shake their heads and finally the Rabbi says, “Let’s go talk to Rabbi Rabinowitz. He is the greatest expert on Judaism that I know.”
They go to see Rabbi Rabinowitz and explain what has happened. Rabbi Rabinowitz shakes his head and says “Funny thing! I sent my son to Israel and he came home as an Evangelical Jew too! The only thing I can think to do is to pray on this.”
So the rabbi led the other three men in prayer. And then a big booming voice, seemingly coming from everywhere, filled the room “Funny thing! I sent my son to Israel and he came home as an Evangelical Jew, too!”
the most dangerous conclusion that any activist can ever attain: the knowledge that he cannot be righteous.
Here, not for the first time, is the insight that I believe makes our host the unique commentator he is.
But the next sentence, I submit, is only part of the truth. I think beyond the belief of the “true believer” there is a kind of belief (I’d rather call it faith) which accepts uncertainty, or perhaps better, doubt as a given. This is faith in a God who is and remains free: free to grant whatever vocation he will to whomever he will, free to show mercy or its opposite to whom he will, free to remain with his people or to abandon them, as the psalmists and prophets repeatedy attest.
Belief in this God has consequences for the believer’s own freedom which no lesser god can posssibly ensure. As I read about Yousef, I wasn’t sure whether, as Wretchard implies, his conversion is more a psychological necessity or an actual act of God upon him. But we never do know that of each other, and maybe not even of ourselves. (That old doubt again.)
I’ve described the onset of faith as akin to having a jackal leap onto one’s shoulders from above and behind. Flannery O’Connor once compared it to taking a bullet in the side. This is quite a remove from Sunday school flannel board lessons.
Wretchard, I hope you’re writing a book.
It is interesting to me that the addiction to hate fear and violence that underlays political-religious fanaticism seems less fixed than is the sexually based violence that is the basis of the child abuse and murder we discussed in the thread In the garden of bad and evil. While I have always suspected that there was a strong element of sexual addiction in Islamism this indicates that the condition is more complex. It may be necessary for whiskey to polish some of his thesis. It may be however that the attachment to a cause is of the same order as a sexual obsession but that the object of the fixation can change. If either is true then it has implications for how we fight them.
This reinforces the case for the Bush Doctrine. If we need to both hit them hard and then work to change their ideology and conduct then both military confrontation and engagement are needed. The Left paradoxically believes that the government can positively change human behavior domestically but that it can not be done in the case of Islamic culture. Personally I always felt that we needed to push harder on the levers to change their culture. That would include supporting minority groups in the region, such as Christians, Zoroastrians, Baha’i and Jews, and promoting missionary activity. Nothing would be better than a wave of Buddhism sweeping over the Middle East.
It is also is possible that in the case of Mosab we have someone who’s claims can be accepted at face value. Perhaps he simply was a young man who hadn’t been abused by his father and was psychologically healthy and therefor had not entered into the cycle of fear hate and degradation that underlays Islamism. If that is so then it seems unusual in that his father is that most unusual character, a fanatic steeped in violence and abuse who did not transmit the disease to a child in his care. Either that or his father is the even rarer case, the true believing leader of a cause who is personally more decent and honorable in his inner life than are his followers but who is so absorbed in his faith that he has divided humanity into two classes, those inside his shield he treated as fellow souls, that is family, and those outside of his inner circle who he disposes of as inhuman objects. Islam is particularly suited to promoting this view of the world. Whether that is a pathology or simply a path that leads to inefficiency stasis and failure in a society is a question.
James,
Regarding Christian Scripture, the KJV is not the oldest translation of the Bible in the English language and it is certainly not the most accurate. It is however among the finest examples of poetry available in English with phrases that can speak to the heart. Like Shakespeare, and a Quiller-Couch edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse, it belongs on the shelf in every English speaking home. On that shelf I would also recommend the original Book of Common Prayer. That and the KJV belie the general rule that nothing good ever came out of a government committee.
wretchard,
Barack Obama might not represent the future but instead the last gasp of ancien regime
That is a point that needs constant repetition to the public.
Thomas Drew,
faith in a God who is and remains free
The god of Islam is curiously unfree and incapable compared to the god of Judaism or Christianity. He needs humans to act on his behalf and is capable of being frozen into inaction or neglect by physical manifestations, such as disfigurement.
May I implore my fellow commentators to resist what seems to this non-Christian to be a most unchristian urge to post long passages from the Bible onto the thread?
W @ 4: I have long held that “progressive” infatuation with socialism is just what you describe: an unreasoning belief that socialism — or perhaps even communism — is the inevitable future of mankind. Faced with example after example that demonstrates its failure, the reply is “we just haven’t tried hard enough” and the beat goes on. Frankly, it baffles me that otherwise smart people live their entire life committed to a political ideal that fails time and again while vehemently closing their eyes to the fact that a free market system has offered humanity riches, education, equality and human rights the likes of which we’ve never before known. And still the progressives double down.
And then I recall LBJ’s War On Poverty and how, when everything they tried came up short, they just insisted on raising the ante. School lunches not resolving malnutrition? Let’s do breakfast AND lunch. That kind of approach. Of course the hardest thing to do is tell a sixties-educated liberal that this is the definition of madness.
One day over lunch with the German ambassador in a very poor African capital I opined about the failure of Marxism. this was a smart, well-educated man who enjoyed the fruits of a free market economy (more or less, I’ll admit), yet he defended Marxism as a “world philosophy”.
“Granted,” I replied, “but a failed one.” Mind you, this was before the fall of the wall, yet he felt constrained to defend a system that could quite easily be demonstrated to have failed in one-half of his own country (and not the half he represented). He was, as you may surmise, a product of the sixties.
Similarly, when posted to a South American country with substantial natural wealth but great poverty, the true believers would tell me how redistribution would solve their problems then jump in their Mercedes for the drive home. The belief runs deep, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but he established a belief system that survives no matter what reason should support. F
F @ 8:
The Left are Conflicted – it is a part of their Belief. When their ideology fails they blame an individual. But, they will not sustain a failed individual because he/she failed the Belief.
LifeOfTheMind @ 7:
Iraq is America ‘imposing’ free will. Free will is the basis of our experience. Choices will be made. The vote will part to the left and the right – not in the sense of the Left and the Right, in the sense of right and wrong. Before Bush’s Doctrine there was no open and obviouse choice, only an imposed cultural structure.
wretchard, if you want to know more about that 60′s athiesm, maybe you should read … Voltaire!
Nothing frightens me so much as a man who is convinced he is Right. It’s an absolute moral license to indulge his appetites.
“It is strange that the true source of cruelty should be desire.” – Novalis
Thanks for posting a VERY important post, I hope the readers do not miss a VERY important point that Mosab Hassan Yousef makes in the Wall Street Journel’s interview:
Do you consider your father a fanatic? “He’s not a fanatic,” says Mr. Yousef. “He’s a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don’t want to admit this is an ideological war.
“The problem is not in Muslims,” he continues. “The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to.”
The west has several choices.
Submit (not likely)
Genocide (hopefully not likely)
Destroy the “props” that support Islam’s superiority, such as banning the burka, mosques in europe and destruction of the Black Rock (since it is one of the 5 pillars of islam), the destruction of the Dome of the rock, claims by Christian and Jewish Groups across the globe that Islam has hijacked. (I can only dream)
Humiliation… That’s what is left for us to do…
How do we “kill” the islamic “allah”…..
I advocate pork rinds and spam………..
@Heathen:11,
Nothing frightens me so much as a man who is convinced he is Right. It’s an absolute moral license to indulge his appetites.
Programmer responds:
Nothing is as destructive of self as doubt. Stand firm in Faith, keeping always in mind that as ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Hmmmm,… Kind of like capitalism, nicht wahr?
Wretchard, #4 (or should I say, #73 – congratulations once more on making such a big splash in the blogosphere!): Just as there was for a long time an unstated assumption that the future would be economically socialist (“Star Trek Socialism”), I think there was a also the implicit hypothesis that it would also be “atheist” in a certain sense.
Secular leftists underestimated what techies might call traditional religion’s “killer app” – its assertion that yes, there is an afterlife beyond this mortal coil we find ourselves in at the present; along with its prescriptions for how to improve one’s standing in said afterlife. Pure rationalism or science are all fine and dandy, but they aren’t designed to give people hope of someday being reunited with departed loved ones in the presence of a loving God. Nor are they well-equipped to give people overriding incentives to live virtuously and do good in spite of any earthly consequences to themselves. Once eternity and your immortal soul enter the equation, that tends to skew any cost-benefit analysis for any decision hard in one direction.
Needless to say, these same qualities of traditional religion can also be twisted to encourage war and oppression on behalf of a deity who supposedly demands that of its believers as the price of one’s ticket to heaven. One need look no further than the elder Yousef and other Islamic supremacists to see this. Even so, the Earthbound, secular belief systems of the Left cannot compete with traditional religions simply because they’re not even on the same playing field.
Josh
Voltaire wasn’t atheist, but Deist by reasonnement
As Wretchard observed,
Apart from the obvious other crises facing the West — the well known financial, demographic and ideological ones — I’ve often wondered whether the most fundamental one of all was whether the world-view of 1960s was not under challenge.
Allow me to say that challenging it is certainly challenging.
The other day I had a thought (one of many, actually): the problem down in Washington is not the pathological liars in positions of power but the pathological believers that surround them, and penetrate into the hinterland (I’m a hinterlander). I mean, hello! How can anyone believe that this health care reform will actually produce a good outcome for ordinary citizens? But there are a lot of intelligent people who will say, “I do!”
I had the thought about pathological believing when a friend told me all the glaciers were going to melt and the oceans rise three feet by the year twenty-twenty. Personally, I feel he should have found it wonderful news when I told him it wasn’t going to happen. Alright, I shouldn’t have been laughing while I did so: “You don’t actually believe that, do you?” Well, turned out he did. Oh, he might have granted that it would take a few years longer before saying, “I have to go home now.”
Pathological believing. The pathological believer may readily admit that something he professes to believe in is actually an exaggeration, a spin, a “mistake” or even a lie. When they first make the statement that marshals the datum, it sounds like a granite block sitting in the very foundation of their world view. But challenge it, and they put up a very weak defense, before quickly abandoning the position (usually by just changing the subject — assuming they cannot have you shot).
I was unloading a truck after President Clinton announced to the world, “I did not have Sex with that Woman, Miss Whats-her-face…” So I asked the driver (a good Democrat and Union man) if he believed the President. He not only said yes, but said so with a conviction that, in another context, I may well have found admirable. Okay. I admit it. I laughed, and said, “Ah, come on, you can tell me!” He immediately abandoned the parapets of that particular fortification and fled the field. But of course, it did not effect his real belief. And he could go on maintaining that “he believes the President” to everyone else he meets.
So, far from being a granite block in the foundation of their world view, this profession of “fact” is more of an inflatable pillow. As it turns out, the stone cold tower in which their conscience is held captive is surrounded by these inflatable granite pillows of fact and truth. And, on the flip side, professions of doubt and accusations of “lies” that are just as easily abandoned and reacquired by the professor. The concrete walkways of logic, which promise a firm footing, are actually made of marshmallow (see The Climate Research Unit in East Anglia). If you try to reach that granite tower by treading the marshmallow paths — with the truth pillows of fake granite deflating before you and re-inflating behind you, and the thickets of “facts” you cut your way through quickly regrowing, you are just not going to get there. Problem is, the pathological believer is likely wandering around in the same thickets that ensnare those at the other end of the “conversation.”
Here is the reason: what the pathological believer “believes” is not the individual lies and deceptions that are told by the pathological liars and deceivers. No. The pathological believer believes that there is some great “truth” that justifies the deceptions. Churchill said that in war, “the truth must come with a bodyguard of lies.” But in the ideological struggle, the great lie must have a bodyguard — nay, battalions and divisions and whole “sciences” — of “truths.”
In religion I think this process results in what is often referred to as paganism, which comes down to the worship of the self — or the “greater good” (often tribal in character) that the self so closely identifies with.
We certainly need faith, but we should take care that the faith does not require us to abandon reason — or that reason is reserved for attacking other faiths (My reason vs. Your faith). And we should involve ourselves in the greater good, but take due care that it is not just greater, but actually good (My Greater vs your good).
And remember that it is not polite to laugh at the dearly held beliefs of others. But pure BS falls in a different category.
“Imagine”
“Imagine all the people
Living for today…”
The bland call to a communitarian materialism is just that.
There is no transcedence in Marxist thought (or in John Lennon’s “Imagine”). Human beings (mostly) crave a sense of something transcedent to their lives. With some, it is enough to know that they will live on through their children. With others, it may be patriotism, and the faith in the life of their nation and ideals.
But most seek a true spiritual transcendence, or we lose our way and our purpose, and our hope.
And perhaps this is the root of the declining fertility of many Western (and other) countries. Modernity, and all its charms, has eviscerated “hope” and “faith” in the common man, and substituted 24 hour sports channels and big screen TV’s instead.
A poor trade, in my judgement.
HDGreene’s comments remind me of the story/movie “Elmer Gantry”. We may want to believe in something so badly to have something transcendental in our lives, that we will believe anything. Those pathological believers he describes are simply poor souls (literally) whose real human spirit has been emptied out and a drab counterfeit manufactured by pop culture inserted in its place.
Nothing frightens me so much as a man who is convinced he is Right. It’s an absolute moral license to indulge his appetites.
And are you convinced you are Right in declaring the above statement as something true?
Here’s the problem with criticizing belief itself … the act of believing means little to nothing until you consider the *content* of the belief.
A man 100% convinced that it is wrong to, say, rape & murder a child is diametrically opposed to the man who is 100% convinced that raping & murdering children is a good thing (so reasoned because he finds pleasure in it).
I can’t understand what it is about the first man that would “frighten” you. As for the second man, yes, he is indeed granting himself absolute moral license for his (wicked and perverted) appetites. But the first? Thank God he is 100% convinced of being Right!
Both are true believers. But only one is an enemy of the good.
Once eternity and your immortal soul enter the equation, that tends to skew any cost-benefit analysis for any decision hard in one direction.
Nicely put, Joshua.
Ravi Zacharias tells an anecdote about lunching with a (Western) professor who was asserting not the either/or Western paradigm of non-contradiction, but the Eastern both/and paradigm. Zacharias let him pitch the whole thing, then proceeded to burst the both/and balloon with an either/or pinprick of a single question. At which point the prof conceded, “The either/or does seem to emerge, doesn’t it?”
I get the same sense about eternity, or, if one prefers, the non-exclusiveness of human existence to this material-temporal lifespan on earth. Despite all the efforts of hard-core secularists and materialists — and, as Wretchard points out, the West has been subjected to a full-fledged worldview assault on this for generations –in spite of all that, eternity does seem to emerge, doesn’t it?
I would submit that it is the very imperfections, injustices and outright atrocities of this world that cry out like a chorus of millions of witnesses to the existence of something beyond this here. This can’t be all there is, because our inner core as human beings clamors that what we see around us, and we ourselves, are somehow broken. The world has a wound, and pain itself testifies to the need for a balm.
Theists look at the insufficiency and suffering in this world and conclude that justice and healing are not completely achievable in this life and, therefore, both the need for the balm and the balm itself must have their origins in something outside of this existence.
Secularists look at the insuffiency and suffering in this world and conclude that we’re still hurting because we haven’t tried hard enough. Or we just don’t know enough. Or because “they” are causing all of “our” problems. The solution is of this world and, in the view of the secularist, is attainable, but for some reason it always seems to lie just beyond our grasp. Hence the endless striving of secularist progressives, and why belief in this-world solutions never goes away. The belief itself is all they have.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Eternity emerges. Meanwhile the secularists play the old, old game of whack-a-mole.
Picking up on Heathen and programmer’s exchange:
H@11: Nothing frightens me so much as a man who is convinced he is Right. It’s an absolute moral license to indulge his appetites.
p@14: Nothing is as destructive of self as doubt. Stand firm in Faith, keeping always in mind that as ye sow, so shall ye reap.
The (necessary) connection between dogmatism and doubt is imagination.**
But when we *imagine* that the dishes will wash themselves or the grass will mow itself, or the factory will run itself or the locked and loaded gun pointed right at you will not fire, then neither dogmatism nor doubt can sustain your next breath.
And that’s a whole lot like capitalism.
**Yes, the Lennon song. Tentatively I submit that the iconography surrounding the music does a dis-service to a very fine but powerful human ability. As with nearly all things (I’m trying to think of an exception and coming up short), trespassing the natural limits of any event, idea, or ability leads into different and usually dangerous ‘realities’ for which we have to build new rules in order to survive. My submission is that the Lennon crowd abused imagination in just that manner. I can’t imagine life without it.
That’s a tad touchy-feely for my (usual) taste but the exchange that started it off was very piquant.
As for the subject of this post, I am cynical. It strikes me that pyschOps is in full gear. About time.
Here is a little musical accompaniment for the latter part of Wretchard’s post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhRRWwH3Fro
Patty Hearst, heard the burst…
@Geeze Louise@21:
Your comment, I can’t imagine life without it. sparked a long train of thought for me which I am still meditating on. However, it occurs to me that in life, when faced with strong adversity, as the young man Mosab Hassan Yousef certainly was, we are given two choices; break or struggle on. Breaking is easy. To struggle, however, first requires that we imagine a path that leads us through the darkness to the light. Then we must dig deep within and find the Faith that helps us find that path and keeps us on it. And we must imagine, and have the faith that it is true, that no matter how deep and dark, how horrible the pit we are in is, that we will be Forgiven for our slips, our falls, or wrong turns. Focus on the Light, even if it is only in our imaginations at start. As we struggle it will get brighter. And I believe that is what helped this young man finally find some peace in his heart, struggle as he must. Knowing that he is Forgiven and God’s hand is always extended to help him as he struggles upward to the Light. May God bless him. And may God bless Wretchard and the commenters on this blog, good, bad and indifferent, for all atheists, agnostics, and true believers need God’s blessings in this world we live in.
bw@20: The solution is of this world and, in the view of the secularist, is attainable, but for some reason it always seems to lie just beyond our grasp.
I disagree. Many of us (how many, who knows) with neither the patience nor the imagination to ponder the imponderable go with ‘life as an incorrigible event.’ No other-world morality to complete the horror and injustice of this world is attached or contemplated. The founding fathers well knew that “man cannot govern himself,” the implication being that man cannot exist without war. They designed government to mitigate, not eliminate, our worst and most basic impulses.
I call it agnosticism, but note that even infinity has limits and some infinities are larger than others (ref Cantor set theory). Maybe faith is an infinite set of the totality of humanity.
[But I will apologize for that last sentence. Classic example of why the physicists hated the popularization of quantum dynamics. Brought us out of the woodwork, it did.]
Adam Gadahn captured in Pakistan. This is one wo I do want to see at a ful treasson trial.
Ok, last post for me today, I promise. As a continuation of my meditation it has occurred to me that the real power of Christianity over Islam is Forgiveness. I will spare you my expositions thereon, but I leave this song for you to contemplate (It is Sunday, after all).
Wait for the last part, dudes and dudettes, its good.
I recall a Star Trek episode where the Enterprise had gone to a planet with a Roman type civilization. I forget the plot. But some persecuted people on the planet were worshippers of the “sun”. At the end of the eipisode there is a conversation between captain Kirk(I think) and Uhura(sic). Kirk makes some comment about the worship of the sun. Uhura corrects Kirk by explaining that the people were worshipping the Son of God, not the sun. One of them comments that ‘it is happening all over again’. In light of
the “socialist” background of startrek, I’ve recalled this episode because it seemed to suggest that memory of the “Son of God” in Star Trek was seen as an admirable and real historical event, and possibly a real supernatural/theological event. Of course most “supernatural” events in StarTrek involved beings so far advanced that they would seem like gods to humans…
programmer@23:
In formal religious settings the role of imagination is not only marginalized, but aggressively dismissed, almost with contempt, as a contaminant or a pretender to pure faith and often a competitor.
OTOH imagination seems rather flimsy armor to protect ourselves from a world that is often horrific.
And god forbid that your impure behavior reach the Divine One or punishment will be swift and forthcoming. The Christian doctrine of punishment for lack of faith is a non-starter for me. Scared Straight might work in juvenile detention hall but it’s inadequate for reaching life’s stunned and shocked.
As an ex-futurist, I stand by my conviction that humanity will gradually (emphasis on slow) evolve away from war, incentivized not (so much) by religious beliefs, but the technology to eliminate resource competition and extend material comforts, the latter being a fully secular driver. Just not in my lifetime. And I have to say, in all seriousness, not until the aliens arrive and humanity is forcibly extracted from it’s ethnic historic hostilities by threat of a graver enmity.
However, wrt the subject of this thread, the Muslim conflict is not compatible with a technological solution (or criminal prosecution), but demands some reconfiguring of religious beliefs within the Muslim community to more effectively support the development of a sustainable society. I do not see a full resolution without self-introspection, as per the advocates of criminal prosecution for terrorists. The problem, at present (COIN could change that), is deeper than criminal law. My hope is that the world will begin to see the rise and expansion of the currently rare ‘moderate Muslim.’
And having evoked the aliens and the Divine in one post, I will take that as a cue to exit this conversation as well.
Re: TUDURI, #27: As noted in another recent thread, Star Trek‘s secular/socialist streak didn’t really kick in hard until its follow-up series of the late ’80s and ’90s. One particularly blatant example of this was “Who Watches the Watchers” (no, there was no question mark in the title), an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In it, Capt. Picard and crew encounter a pre-industrial alien civilization currently without a religion, but who maintain a cultural memory of having once had one. Through a series of events I won’t get into here, these aliens get it in their heads not only that maybe the old religion had something to it after all, but that Picard was its god. Picard spends the second half of the episode trying to disabuse them of this notion, highlighted by an angry, impassioned monologue declaring he won’t let this civilization go down a path that was so troublesome for humans.
That is what I get for posting from my phone.
Programmer wrote:
“Nothing is as destructive of self as doubt.”
Carrying on the theme of being religiously pithy:
Nothing bars the way to God more completely than the self, and Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam share the belief that the self must be negated – killed, even – before the true path to righteousness can be found.
The contrast of Gadahn, the traitor and Yousef is interesting. Gadahn threw away the blessing of the Judeo- Christian world for the sneering, murderous rage of Wahaabism. I pray for his conversion to Christ ,but hope his rotten carcass swings from the nearest yardarm. Yousef’s conversion is not atypical of those soured on the bad gods of this age. I found (or was found by) Christ after post- Viet Nam addiction, delusional embrace of the leftist call to “Revolution for the Hell of it” and the hopelessness wrought by all the hippie claptrap. I think the next wave of Christian converts in the USA will be those who’ve gagged on the emptiness of materialism and sensuality. I believe that is our hope for American renewal. Excuse me , Life of the Mind, but the Good Book says in Second Chronicles 7:14:” If my people who are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways’ then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sins and heal their land.”
On the topic of Star Trek’s view of the future, I never cease to be amazed that Heinlein, in his Future History, anticipated that a harsh return to a dogmatic theism is just as likely a part of our future as is atheism.
Hasn’t happened in our culture, but it sure has in the Islamic world. For example, who 50 years ago (when Heinlein was writing) would ever have dreamed that an emerging modern country like Turkey would, in 2010, be on the verge of falling back into fanatic fundamentalism?
Heinlein understood what we are capable of far better than Roddenberry ever did.
The worst of religions (and I consider ideologies to be secular religions) are those which consider hatred of non-believers to be a virtue. How convenient it is to be considered virtuous for behavior that would otherwise be considered reprehensible if it was done to a fellow believer. Such religions cater to the evil that is within us all.
As the saying goes “courage is not a lack of fear, but the ability to act while facing fear.” And so it is with virtue. It does not consist of never having evil impulses–it consists of having the control to resist acting upon them.
And what such pathologies breed is what plagues the world today. In effect an attitude of let’s put the screws to the people outside our “tribe.” For their sins they deserve to be punished–by us, and anything they have that makes us envious of them should, and really does, belong to us. For we are the chosen ones, and if the Others have more or better than we do it could only have happened by them cheating us, even if we can’t explain how that happened.
MMMfffff,MMMMffff,MMMMfff. <- Me trying to keep my promise to shut up after my last post.
Wretchard — You realize of course that TV is a female-gay ghetto? Almost all the audience for TV is female. Indeed, George F Will had a column on men not growing up in the West, enabled partly by culture, partly by the advance of women, partly by economics, and with dire consequences. In 1959, there were 27 Westerns on TV extolling how to be “a man” and face up to things.
Now, TV is dominated by women. The only male-oriented show (“Life” with “Band of Brothers” lead Damien Lewis) on network TV failed to find an audience, which rejected its male-oriented themes of revenge, compassion, decency, violence, and nailing the bad guys without becoming a villain oneself.
What TV really is, and most of Western culture, is one massive (what Pick Up Artists would call) “sh– test.” I.E. a “do these jeans make me look fat?” question designed to sort out socially dominant, aggressive, Alpha A-holes who are cocky, funny, and don’t care about much (the Bad Boy women dream of taming) from the “beta” type of guys who no matter how macho/tough/etc. might be want to please their wives (instead of being the Bad Boy always just on the verge but never quite of being tamed by them).
Look at John Lennon. “Imagine” is about the most feminine, female-utopia you could dream up. Lennon himself, was totally dominated by the dubious Yoko Ono. He certainly wasn’t the male-appetite Elvis, or Sinatra, or Miles Davis, or John Fogerty, or Roy Orbison, or Muddy Waters, or even Brian Wilson. Lennon’s utopia is utterly repellent to the average Western man who finds himself locked out in the race for women. Indeed you can compare pre- and post-Lennon popular music, and how male-oriented artists sang about subject matter, mostly about winning the girl, and afterwards how dubious bi-sexual folks like Mick Jagger or David Bowie appealed to mostly women on the aspect of status. I.E. they already were the bad boy to be tamed, rather than the “only the lonely” residing in “Heartbreak Hotel.”
I mean, “why this shift?” You’ve talked about if often, but have never explicitly said WHY? I mean, a shift this big, of this magnitude, and this lasting, does not just happen “because” a few aging hippies write books. Lennon could not sell anything that people didn’t already want to buy.
IMHO, both the West and the Muslim world are on a collision course over sexual competition. In the West, the advancement of women is a huge positive but has like everything else a cost: most men are simply about as desirable as Fred Armisen in the “Tom Brady Explains Sexual Harassment” skit by Robert Smigel on Saturday Night Live. This is true for Forsyth’s Shannon. Compared to Mr. Big on Sex and the City, Shannon is a loser. Even though Shannon is far more dangerous, he is not the “Bad Boy” (i.e. semi-domesticated Casanova) that a female dominated society wants. He’s rude, uncouth, does not make a roomful of women weak in the knees when he walks in. Like say, Charlie Sheen does in “Two and A Half Men,” the most popular sitcom on TV (sitcom audiences are 80% female).
Two and A Half Men might as well be the template for Western Society: women laugh at the discomfort and loser-dom of the Cryer character, the nebbishy nerd no woman wants, and love Sheen. Even after his arrest, Sheen has seen no drop in popularity or ratings. Women love him even more — the Big Man can get away with almost anything so long as he remains the Big Man. The crux of the show is who will the kid become? His nebbishy loser father who works at a nothing job, or the glamorous, Hollywood composer semi-alcoholic Bad Boy Uncle?
The few Charlie Sheens certainly won’t fight for Western society, that’s not in their nature and women would cease to find them attractive if they did. Remember, Forsyth’s Shannon is a loser for most women, while Sheen is a winner. The vast mass of men who fit in the Armisen/Cryer category, who in half a century past were the “Band of Brothers,” are now guys who have retreated into eternal adolescence. No reason to fight for Western Society that relegates them into something for women and the Big Men to laugh at.
After all, women don’t find men their equals or even rough equals anything attractive — it takes higher status. For most Middle Class women in the West, that means a few high-status Big Men. Lower class women, unable to get these men, turn to pure thugs, often associated with cultural/racial preferences (Tina Turner, Rhihanna, Whitney Houston, Lauren London, etc.)
Meanwhile, the Muslim world is filled with a seething mass of young men, who affluent far beyond what they were fifty years ago, are priced out of marriage by not the advancement of women, but the Polygamy domination of the Chiefs (Big Men in a different way). The Crotch bomber, Mohammed Atta, Major Hassan, all of them complain like George Sodini, that IRS plane crasher, Klebold and Harris, and the Pentagon Shooter, that they are priced out of the relationship market.
The difference being is that there is not the cultural acceptance of eternal adolescence in the West for men, and their is an organizing ideology to turn them into foot soldiers. Not just suicide bombers, but “Thugs for Allah” in a way that promises those who take up the path of violence, power that gets women. In a way that absent the lower-class thuggery in the West, Middle Class Western men do not see.
A stable society that ensures a rough amount of equality in family formation for men, no matter how poor, does not make war on powerful neighbors or distant ones with power, for that matter. Ordinary men have too much to lose (and enough power as a consequence of family formation to make themselves the decisive factor in war-making). Those priced out by Big Men want to roll the dice, sometimes for suicide that ensures a harem in the afterlife, more often by becoming a leader of thugs with enough power to just take a woman (no consent needed).
Against this is a female dominated West that while very, very peaceful, and opposed to imperialism, colonialism, general oppression, and wanting tolerance (all to be assured, GOOD THINGS IN AND OF THEMSELVES) is simply incapable of generating lots of male support to go out and fight against real threats empowered by technology and rising global wealth. Indeed women tend to glamorize and find exciting the ruthless jihadi who has the thrill of the thug and exotic nature of an alien culture. Which of course must not be judged. This is why Cheri Blair, noted feminist lawyer, defends the right of women in the UK to wear the Burqa.
Ultimately neither situation is sustainable. There are not enough free women to go around even by conquest to make a fair/stable distribution of family formation for most Muslim men in non-brutally impoverished nations. AQ and Jihad cannot kill enough non-Muslims and take their women to make social peace in Muslim places possible, not the least of which is that the leaders will simply add the most and most desirable women to their own harems.
Nor can the vast majority of currently passive, eternal man-boys with a culture totally female (and gay) find anything to fight for. No one is going to die for Mr. Big and Johnny Weir’s right to be fabulous. Eventually a Shannon or someone like him will realize that a large following of men, mostly NOT warriors, soldiers, or anything but ordinary men, can be influenced to form decisive political blocs. To re-order society based upon the Al Capone model, overthrowing the existing syndicates.
Overlaid on this is the clash of Jihad against a spineless West, with the danger that the female-dominated West will rapidly switch in increasing volatility enabled by technology to something radically different.
Very few Muslim men will convert to Christianity. It is a female religion, based on feelings and love. Islam is a male religion, follow “the rules” and you are supposed to be rewarded by the Master with women. Women of course abandoned Christianity because of its restrictions on pursuing the Alpha male, but retain the form without the moral judgments and constraints on behavior (nearly all of them sexual). Christianity is good for the lonely, but very few young women with even a modicum of attractiveness are lonely, and most young men find it just too female (and a path to Jon Cryer-like loserdom) instead of the path to being Charlie Sheen. Which is what the culture and women want these days.
# Geeze Louise
I once thought as you do, but I kept searching and inquiring. I looked at all the major faiths and chose Christianity because it’s not about:
-rules and restrictions, but a roadmap to true freedom
-striving, but forgiveness and grace
-the denial of self, but communion with the Divine
-creating value, but understanding what is valuable
-perfect people, but perfect love
If I may, I recommend C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity.” It provides a solid intellectual basis for Christianity. During my own quest I found his journey from unbeliever to believer very helpful.
Geeze Lousie, I pray God continue to shower His blessings upon you.
Regarding Star Trek’s socialist view of the future, I have always thought that the alien culture that best represented a socialist\communist society was the Borg. I’m also positive that this is completely unintentional by the writers.
The debate surrounding Gadahn’s capture will be over whether or not he will, or should be tried for treason. The reluctance to charge him with treason is driven by the inability to believe in the authenticity of “conversion”. ‘Enlightened’ Western society doesn’t believe in the possibility of these mental acts any more. Treason, like conversion, is a supreme act. And Good Morning America doesn’t cover supreme acts; that’s something for revival tents with dirt floors. Hee haw.
But it wasn’t always like that. In Dante’s Inferno traitors are in the ninth circle; until recently the word “Judas” was the ultimate insult. Today a “patriot” in the movies is almost by definition someone who doesn’t believe in treason.
Like Mosab’s conversion, treason has become one of those impossible things. You can’t commit it. Like CS Lewis’ clever devils, it’s a pulled a vanishing act. Gadahn’s transgression is a child’s crime just as Mosab’s change of heart will be dismissed as an illusory quest; it has no existence in a universe whose only objects are a council house, nationalized health care, the dole and some sex while you can.
“Imagine”; but they can’t imagine and that’s the point. Large parts of modern culture have a blind spot where both treason or the genuine desire for salvation are unsee-able. We just couldn’t “see” Hassan, nor can we see the Green Prince nor for that matter, Gadahn. For that reason, I think there will be pressure to charge him on other grounds just because “treason” is something too hokey for the enlightened man to accept.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I’ve often argued that the current crisis is a crisis of information. Our operating system has been corrupted, something that tends to happen in any complex arrangement; and unless we successfully carry out our memory management routines (something that tends to happen in any complex arrangement), we’ll Blue Screen. That is what the culture wars are about, though we may see it in other terms. It’s about reforming our thought processes to align them with reality after a somewhat extended departure from it.
The Borg – ultimate goal was the forcible assimilation of diverse sentient species, technologies, and knowledge.
== Islam,
wants to take over everyone/everyplace
submit or die
Probably not Gadahn after all.
Some other revert guy with “Adam” in his name.
Carry on.
CNN claims Gadahn not captured.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/03/07/pakistan.alqaeda.american/index.html?hpt=T1
Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ was shown throughout the Moslem world during 2004 and afterwards. One of the movie’s strong impacts is its depiction of flogging, which was the torture that was applied to Jesus. Flogging is the use of a whip that has pieces of metal that rip apart the subject’s skin.
There is nothing in the biography of Mohammed that is similar to the tortures that Jesus suffered. I suppose that the movie’s depictions of the tortures that Jesus suffered was quite thought-provoking for Moslems who watched the movie.
It was the issue of torture among Moslems that moved Mosab Hassan Yousef to defect from Islam to Christianity.
For me, the key moment in the movie was the incident that involved Simon of Cyrene.
The movie showed that Jesus already was dying because of the flogging, he nevertheless was forced to drag his cross a long way to the execution site. He collapsed several times, and each time the soldiers and bystanders beat Jesus to make him stand up and continue. Eventually a Roman officer ordered his soldiers to make a bystander help Jesus drag the cross the rest of the way. The soldiers then picked a tall, strong man (Simon of Cyrene) out of the crowd and told him to help. The tall man tried to talk his way out of the order, complaining that he was just passing through and knew nothing and had nothing to do with the events, but the soldiers nevertheless compelled him to help.
The procession to the execution site then continued for a while, and gradually the tall man sympathized and even admired Jesus for the endured suffering. After a while Jesus collapsed again, and the soldiers and bystanders resumed beating him. The tall man watched for a moment and then swung his hands at the attackers to make them stop and move back. He then yelled (something like): “Stop beating him. If you keep hitting him, then I’ll stop helping here; I don’t care what you do to me!” That statement is (as I recall) immediately followed by a very brief flashback of Jesus reciting his beatitudes in his Sermon on the Mount.
Simon of Cyrene was a uninformed, unengaged, ordinary, cowardly man who did not realize his own strength and moral instinct. Unexpectedly placed into a dangerous situation where he might exercise that strength and instinct to defend a doomed stranger against many dangerous attackers, he was inspired by Jesus’ suffering to risk his own safety. On one hand, his threat is: “I’ll stop helping here.” On the other hand, though, his defiance is brave: “I don’t care what you do to me.”
A positive message that I thus took from this very brutal film is that, like Simon of Cyrene, we too should feel encouraged by Jesus’ suffering to do even small good deeds when crucial moments occur in our own always confused and sometimes frightening lives.
39. wretchard
In much of the Western world there are many “Progressives” who believe that treason is the highest form of patriotism. Its the blindness of the damned. The most dangerous fool is the fool who is convinced that he is in fact a genius. And these are exactly the people who are currently running the US government.
Scary indeed.
#38 Mark Razak . . .
I agree that the writers of Star Trek probably never thought of the Borg as being communists. The Borg were all about “assimilating,” not about bringing a just society.
As it turns out, followers of Mohammed are the Borg. Who could ever predicted that “in the Year 2000,” which used to be the “future,” the “future” would bring us the Borg.
And so many stupid liberals did not recognize the Borg when they arrived on the scene. Cuz the Borg were supposed to be all hi-tech, not head choppers with fuzzy beards.
Whiskey: I’m not sure if you’ve seen this yet, but The Futurist’s recent (and I should warn you, quite lengthy) post The Misandry Bubble has some interesting implications for your thesis – specifically, that we may be facing our day of cultural reckoning sooner rather than later. And for good measure, it even cites TNG’s Picard as an exemplar of manliness!
Mark Razak, #38: Regarding Star Trek’s socialist view of the future, I have always thought that the alien culture that best represented a socialistcommunist society was the Borg. I’m also positive that this is completely unintentional by the writers.
Indeed, it’s also been claimed that Borg cube-ships are modeled after the description in Revelations of the New Jerusalem. I’ll have to admit, the resemblance is striking.
To give up one’s religion for another is one thing, to then work for the enemy is another. There is a difference between conversion and betrayal. If Mosad had converted to Christianity and declared himself ready to take the consequences, I would have applauded him; but to then work for Shin Bet, against his father and his own people, no matter that I think the Israelis are in the right and the Palestinians in the wrong, leaves me with a queasy feeling.
Constantine betrayed his god
To follow the New Way
It worked out well for Constantine
We honor still today
Some others though did not do well
Betrayal did not pay
The thirty silver pieces did not
Keep the rope away
When General Arnold beat Burgoyne
On Saratoga plain
He left a foot upon the field
But died a traitor’s pain
Lord Haw Haw did as Hitler bade
He joined his broadcast staff
But when the British hanged him then
Lord Haw Haw did not laugh
No one likes a traitor and
Thus none will be surprised
That Mosad Hassan Yousef dead
Will leave this world despised
The turncoat knows he will be used
His new friends will not care
When Mosad Yousef’s sightless eyes
Behold the Judgment Chair
#24 Geeze Louise
“I call it agnosticism, but note that even infinity has limits and some infinities are larger than others (ref Cantor set theory).”
Don’t hear this comment on infinities very often so had to comment:
The infinity of all whole numbers is about double the infinity of all even whole numbers. I think I learned this from one of Issac Asimov’s
books.
@47 – Mr Yousef is, of course, named Mosab, not Mosad. Mind must have still been on the other thread with the Mossad in Dubai.
I agree with the posters concerning how the Borg are similar to radical Islam. What struck me when the Borg were first introduced was the absolute equality of among the individual Borg. This fictional society was the embodiment of “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” (In fact, wasn’t the Borg also called “the collective.”) The natural consequence of this type of enforced, extreme equality was that no one individual mattered, the individual was meaningless therefore everyone was expendable. For all of their technology, the individual Borg were less than insects. For me, that is the horror of socialism.
Another thing about the Borg is that it wasn’t until several years after they first showed up that it was revealed they did have a powerful leader of sorts after all (i.e. the Borg Queen), which in many Star Trek fans’ minds ruined their entire image of the Borg. Instead of a true collective, leaderless society that acted on its members’ combined will, they turned out to be just another eeevil empire with a power-hungry ruler – and as it turned out in the final episode of Star Trek: Voyager, remarkably vulnerable to a decapitation strike to boot.
Come to think of it, there’s an analogy in there somewhere between those disillusioned Star Trek fans and similarly disillusioned Obama voters, finding out too late that “hope and change” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be…
It is only “treason” when you defect to the losing side.
Wretchard, good think post. Star Trek socialism/atheism ignored human weakness/strength, and the basic discretionary/corrupt power of a ruling socialist party’s moral hazard and criminal propensity. Oddly, the Borg Queen was an acknowledgement that groupthink is inevitably controlled by the worst/most depraved not the best/brightest.
Sad, It appears the son of hamas wrote this as a self-eulogy knowing the Brotherhood will eventually kill him, knowing that their leftist enabelers will allow it, but knowing his own salvation.
EdGi@ 53
Most unsurprisingly, “the Borg Queen was an acknowledgement that groupthink is inevtiably controlled by” women.
Jimbob/52 – It is only “treason” when you defect to the losing side.
A more cynical and true statement I have never read.
Walt
Back in 2006 (actually I wrote this a few years earlier, but I can’t find it now).
Anyway I wrote:
Dark times are coming…
a snippet:
Great Post W.
Thanks
Papa Ray
Whiskey wrote: “Very few Muslim men will convert to Christianity. It is a female religion, based on feelings and love.”
Whiskey, who is often wrong but interesting, is this time wrong simpliciter, and heretical to boot. I have no information on Muslim men converting to Christianity, but this characterization of it as a touchy-feely religion is simply nonsense. I second Mike Sylwester’s excellent comment above, and would add that no religion besides Christianity has produced such an unbroken stream of saints, martyrs, and missionaries; and no civilization except the West (the one formed by Christianity) has yielded the sort of granite-men who are our statesmen, philosophers, scientists, and adventurers. It was not “feelings and love” that fought the Crusades, circumnavigated the globe, and colonized much of its surface. It was not “feelings and love” that drove Albert the Great, Copernicus, Newton, and Leibniz to penetrate the veil of nature. It was not “feelings and love” that Giotto and Durer painted. And it certainly wasn’t sentimentality that caused Mother Theresa to plunge into the black hole of Calcutta, never again to leave it. In each case it was the yearning for perfection, the desire to emulate the almighty God, even if it meant wearing His crown of thorns. Christianity is par excellence a religion of gumption and grit. Anyone who says otherwise knowns nothing of what it means to take up his cross.
While we’re on the subject of space-based fiction, I liken Mosab’s case to that of Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi. Watching his son being slowly and painfully fried by the Emperor Palpatine’s dark magic, he knows that he has to make a choice, yet he vacillates for some time. We all know well what was going through his mind at that moment, because we have been there ourselves: the cost of his prior commitments, the weight of the people he’s destroyed, the knowledge that it is easy to give in to pride and anger and to make one’s own life into everybody else’s problem, but that ultimately this is nothing but weakness and self-delusion. When Vader finally chucked the Emperor down the chute, he made the same decision that each Christian has to make whenever he says, “I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault…” Divesting oneself of pride and throwing away one’s inner Vader is the most difficult thing we will ever have to do. Christianity is not a religion for wimps.
Wretchard wrote: “Apart from the obvious other crises facing the West — the well known financial, demographic and ideological ones — I’ve often wondered whether the most fundamental one of all was whether the world-view of 1960s was not under existential challenge.”
I wish I had a dollar for each time I said the same thing. What we are witnessing now is the end of a century. And of course I do not mean simply the end of some hundred-year period ending with ’00, but the end of an interrelated complex of ideas which bound together the thought-forms of whole nations and generations into a single determinate sensorium. An ineffable similarity runs through the welfare state mentality of the 1930s and ’40s, the social-revolutionary agitations of the 1960s, and the go-go yuppiedom of the ’80s and ’90s. The same movement reaches its inevitable (and necessarily final) stage in the form of Obamacare and the buffoonery of Bailout Nation. After this the new forms will appear, shadowy at first but presently with more and more distinctness. And they will turn out to be nothing but the old forms, as if a mist had cleared off the landscape, but this time grasped with a tenacity bordering on fanaticism. For it is reality that dictates what philosophies we are to hold, not vice versa; and the perennial philosophy is called perennial for a reason.
Matt, wonderful post. Fin de Siecle, indeed.
Joshua, I was one of the fans who felt that the writers completely destroyed the original concept when they introduced the Borg Queen. (another one of Brannon Braga’s many schlocky ideas) But let me explain exactly why: One of the laziest parts of the writing in Star Trek has been that they would always write in FF aliens, who were really just Humans with Funny Foreheads. Nothing truly innovative in that, just an active makeup department. Yes, even the Klingons are just FF aliens, as are the rest of the races they play with.
But the Borg! For the first time, a popular sci-fi show had actually hit upon the idea of a culture that truly was completely alien to everything we know about human culture! And through this society, the viewers could experience the wonder of trying to figure out the truly alien, the truly unfathomable opponent. This was a set of characters towards which *none* of our instinctive assumptions would work – no love, no emotion, no greed as we would understand it, only an insatiable group appetite that could never be satisfied and an implacable power. Genius! And the Cube was the perfect ship design for them for a very simple reason – it is a perfectly logical design for a ship operating in deep space – an aerodynamic design is a ridiculous anachronism only used because it makes us feel good. By using a logical design whose logic offends us on an emotional level, it was the perfect symbolism for a society which is based on a logic which we as humans would see as offensive, while also recognizing it as superior. And the genius of the original collective was that it was shown as a vast, technologically functional society that existed with no individual personalities. Of course they would be willing to sacrifice themselves – in fact, they would be capable of doing it casually, since losing a unit was no more than a human losing a few skin cells. The idea of a single sentient being inhabiting billions of bodies across half a galaxy was a fresh and creative idea worthy of the best of the science fiction canon. The fact that there was no individual leader was the key to the entire concept – there was a single mind, so a “leader” made no more sense than you having a “leader” inside your own head. It is not understandable as a human consciousness, it would be a truly alien (to us) level of consciousness.
As a new cast of characters, this opened up an incredible new field of possibilities! The FF aliens are easy to imagine, but how do we possibly deal with the truly alien? Alas, the task was too great for the writers to maintain. Because when they introduced the “Queen” they threw all of the wonderful possibilities into the trash, and instead rewrote the Borg so that they could now recycle any of several dozen hackneyed and ancient “evil queen” stories through the show. It was a tragedy – they took one of the best new sci-fi concepts in decades, one that opened up a writers universe of new ideas and daring thoughts, and threw it all away for a cheesy rewrite of Grimm’s fairly tales. Pathetic.
rab@48: IIRC, I first learned of Cantor set theory from Godel Escher and Bach by Doug Hofstadter. However, as I recall very well, I subsequently moved on to Roger Penrose’s work where I was unceremoniously yanked back into the reality of my own intellectual limitations. Shame about those CERN magnets.
57 Matt Beck I agree with your comments re: Christianity up to a point: I am sure I agree with you as far as the Roman Catholic Church. Protestants are a mixed bag: the (shrinking) mainline Protestants are, in my experience, pretty much as Whiskey has described. The evangelicals, by their nature are hard to categorize, but I think they are largely healthy in their priorities, and would fit into your accurate and heartfelt description.
In your second paragraph, you can get an even longer view by looking at the last few issues of National Review, where editor Jonah Goldberg has laid out the intellectual history of the Progressive movement, from the early 20th century until today. I would put the intellectual roots back with JJ Rousseau who believed that people could be perfectible through a perfect society. . .
But it is certainly far from the principle of allowing people to trade among themselves, and only guaranteeing domestic peace and the sanctity of property and contracts. The feeling is widely held among us that the Progressives would rather burn the whole nation to the ground than abandon one plank of the Progressive platform.
46. Joshua:
It’s funny that you mentioned The Misandry Bubble. I just read it earlier this morning and came here to recommend it to whiskey.
That article is about two months old. It’s interesting that it should suddenly pop up now.
60. weSwinger – you are describing the mindset of the irrational fanatic, who refuses to consider the possibility that any other viewpoint can have any validity, even partial.
One thing I try to do, not always successfully, is to review some of the things I think I know about the way the world works, especially to see if there’s any new information that might demand I reconsider views that seemed settled.
Of course, there aren’t any Liberals or Leftists who would believe this, on accounta every time I re-do the calculations, checkin’em forward and backward, clockwise and counter, they give me the same answers.
So far, anyhow.
I may wrong in many respects, but there’s nothing I’ve seen that any way can be twisted or contorted to show that pointy-headed Marxists and leftward hurtling transnational-progressives have ANY answers.
See? I’m nothing if not open minded! >;-p
wretchard @ 4:
And more, they mouth the platitudes (to them) or the words that they wish to destroy their enemy conservatives. (See Rahm Emmanual) Then they, self absorbed fools they are, forget to listen to the reply which is usually along the lines of “Bring It!”. The modern liberal is a moral and physical coward. They believe in nothing and therefore will defend nothing.
I, too read The Misandry Bubble just recently.
It is meant to predict the entire decade, but it seems to be on track already. No wonder The Futurist is known to be startlingly accurate.
WWS #33:
“On the topic of Star Trek’s view of the future, I never cease to be amazed that Heinlein, in his Future History, anticipated that a harsh return to a dogmatic theism is just as likely a part of our future as is atheism.
Hasn’t happened in our culture ….”
Not so fast!
Baroque Obama sure looks a lot like Neimaih Scudder to me.
Think about it. Scudder controlled by mass exhortations on TV as much as by
religion. And what Obama is pushing amounts to a religion anyway.
The fact that Obama grew up Muslim
just makes your analogy more interesting. You can easily imagine him thinking “You know, this Islam crap could have real possibilities if pushed under a different name somewhere that has hot and cold running water.”
Scudder supposedly was The Prophet. What else could you call Obama?
Remember the title of this thread!
Whiskey can, I’m sure, add commentary regarding additional reasons why urban leftist women would find Yousef less compelling after his conversion, as well.
More commentary might illuminate the urban leftist mindset of she who gave birth to one who carries the father’s name of Obama.
trangbang68,
For whatever my opinion is worth, I thought that everyone’s use of Scripture in this thread was spot on appropriate.
#67 IS
If you are referrring to the self-loathing mindset of the left that led BHO’s mom to both communism and repudiation of the West by serially marrying and procreating outside of it, then I concur.
I’m an agnostic, and was once a militant atheist. I have come to realize that western civilization owes its true greatness to the Judeo-Christian overlay it acquired some 1600-plus years ago. It isn’t really so much because religious doctrine and belief as it is the worldviews that Chritianity allowed itself to nurture in the cultures of the Meditarranean and in Europe in particular.
While not a believer, I am alarmed by the outright hostility to religion by so many western “sophisticates.” They are the barbarians, not the “practicing primitivists” who still have faith.
Joshua @46
Thank You for the link to “The Misandry Bubble.”
Fascinating reading that hit home in many ways, having had an ex that tried to take me out while using my children the entire way. In Family and Child Support court, there is seldom justice for a man. I personally found that the best I could ever hope for was a “push.”
It might require a putsch to turn THAT around.
Hmm, RWE, Nehemiah Scudder – never thought of that, although I should have.
Looked up the timeline again – according to the Future History, Scudder was first elected in 2012, and after 2016 there were no more elections….
Yikes!
Whiskey wrote: “Very few Muslim men will convert to Christianity. It is a female religion, based on feelings and love.”
I believe in Africa, once largely Muslim, there has been a huge conversion to Christianity. From memory, I believe Africa, which had few Christians at the turn of the last century, now has something like 300 million Christians. Some say there are now as many as six million conversions a year. So much so that many think the next Pope may be African. The true believers in the Anglican Church are already African, not British.
At the Catholic Church I attend we have many visiting African priests, and we often hear the tales of their struggles. Africa is a real battleground between Islam and Christianity.
LifeoftheMind, Didn’t mean any offense, sometimes arguing from a Christian worldview requires use of Scripture.
I am very optimistic about the place of the church (or some of it) in re-ordering our society. I think some of the shallow heresies like The Health and Wealth churches are falling by the wayside in a post- affluent society. Contrary to Whiskey’s assertion, authentic New Testament Christianity is anything but feminized. Men are called to “take up their cross and deny themselves”, a sure antidote for a self centered frivolous society and the metrosexual weaklings it produces.
O/T- I just finished “The Last Stand of Fox Company” by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. It is an account of the Marine company that held the pass
so their fellow Marines could escape the entrapment in the Chosin Reservoir. What a wonderful account of courage that produced 3 Medal of Honor winners. The one hero, a guy named Hector Caffareta when invited to the White House for a ceremony asked them to mail the medal to him.
That’s my America.
Whiskey,
While I don’t always agree with your analysis, it is interesting to consider your diagnosis as to the lack of he-men with regard to China. China has a real problem with an overabundance of men. How they deal with that will be very interesting. There is sufficient cultural difference that our popular culture is a buffet for them where they can sample what they like, it’s not the whole meal the way it is here. I wonder how they will address their bubble of gender imbalance.
Matt Beck,
Well-stated, sir. In addition to being the end of a century (I would put the beginning of the last decade at 9/11/01), it is also the end of a generation as the Boomer phase out of work and into retirement. That will have some significant effects as well in terms of dictating what amounts to common thought or conventional wisdom. The Yuppies of 1980 are now close to or hitting retirement, and the folks born in 1949, who turned 18 in time for the Summer of Love, are even closer to getting their first SSI check and Medicare EOB. Their like is passing from the workplace, if not yet the world, and their experiences and mindset along with it. BHO is a child of the 1960s but without the experiences of the 1960s as an adult.
At least George McGovern had the experience of war to give him a basis for his antiwar views. BHO is a McGovern liberal without any counterbalance, he is liberal because he has been raised to be and educated to be so. Even McGovern had some social programs that were well-intentioned but somewhat conservative by today’s standards, BHO is just a doctrinaire liberal. His doubling-down on healthcare speaks of an ideological commitment in the face of impeding electoral losses of the kind that would make a Japanese infantry officer of WWII blush. He has lost sight of his goal, yet is redoubling his efforts. That’s the kind of action you might expect from a second-generation ideologue removed from the direct experiences from which his chosen viewpoint arose. It’s very pure, in a way, being untainted by practical considerations or actual experience. I find that a lot more threatening.
WRT Christianity, if child-bearing is a statement on hope for the future, the Christians (particularly the evangelicals) are among the more hopeful segments of the population, along with Mormons and Hispanics. Organizations like QuiverFull, while somewhat extremist in pursuit of fertility, are bound to have a demographic impact down the road.
My personal favorite African mission: Malo Go Kujilana. There are more Christians in Africa than in the US.
O/T @ trangbang
Have you read A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley? Its focus is the war after Tet and General Abrams taking command, and how much differently it was fought from then until 1972-3.
Also, here’s a Book TV interview with the author (Who is a retired Army Lt. Colonel) if you or anyone else happens to be interested: Lewis Sorley
WWS #73:
Not sure how long it would take to dig up my Heinlein collection, but didn’t Scudder end all US manned space exploration, supposedly because it was an affront to God but in reality because he did not want to have to pay for it?
Curiouser and curiouser….
Personally, I think Mike Huckabee is a much better real-life fit for Mr. Scudder than is BO. America, and the world, was spared the election of a theocrat as president. We might not be so lucky next time.
And one thing is really for certain; once a Scudder clone is elected, that’s the end of democracy in the USA. For a century or two, at least.
Mrs. Grundy should not have political clout. Ever. Unfortunately, she already does.
I watched Mosab Yousef on FOX’s Hannity last week.
I suspect his original ‘conversion’; when he “witnessed Hamas brutalities inside prison” is subconsciously motivated by animosity toward his father. If not, why is it so very rare for any Muslim to see the violence and hypocrisy, which is all around them and, not reach the same ‘awakening’ as Yousef?
But whatever the case, he’s getting close to the heart of the matter; “It is not a religion of peace,” said Yousef, who converted to Christianity. “The biggest terrorist is the God of the Quran… The more you follow the steps of the prophet of Islam and the God of Islam, the more you get close to being a terrorist.”
Why do ‘moderate’ Muslims not speak out against extremists?
Obviously, if an individual speaks out there would be reprisals but what of mass protests, when the anonymity of the crowd provides support and protection?
The answer is the “God of the Quran” or rather Mohammad’s rendition of Allah.
As Yousef points out, Radical Islam is Islam.
‘Moderate’ Muslims cannot escape what their own religion preaches.
Moderates may not practice or follow ‘orthodox’ Islam but when a Muslim does advocate a strict interpretation of Islam, moderate Muslims theologically have no intellectually honest basis upon which to disagree with the radical Muslim interpretation.
That is the reason why there is silence from the moderates.
The Koran and Hadith’s (sayings of Mohammad) do contain numerous radically violent pronouncements and the later exhortations to violence, by long settled doctrine, take precedence over the earlier, more peaceful ‘Median’ statements.
Moderates know this and thus are silent.
They don’t join the violence but they cannot speak out against it, having no theological grounds upon which to do so.
Thus, they condone the violence and this is the reason why they are silent and, what the politically correct West does not want to face.
Theologically, not only is violent aggression foundational to Islam but Islamic doctrine is settled, there is no reform possible without challenging one of its central tenets; that Mohammad is God’s final prophet.
I maintain this to be extremely important because it’s all tied together, Mohammad has to be the ‘final’ prophet because that tenet logically follows from Mohammad’s claim that he didn’t write the Koran, God dictated it through the Archangel Gabriel.
That claim is the foundational tenet of Islam; without that, Islam theologically collapses, for if Mohammad lied or imagined that, what else did he get wrong?
And, if Mohammad transcribed accurately, then God changes his mind by later revising what he’s already said…and then logically, how can he be perfect?
In which case, not only is ‘Allah’ not divine but he can’t be “the one and only God”. And the entire rationale for theological allegiance to Islam disappears…
Moderate Muslims are caught between the proverbial ‘rock and a hard place’ they can’t theologically revise and eliminate the violent exhortations of Mohammad without destroying the very premises of their own religion.
Vincent ,thanks for the tip on the Sorley book. I’ll look for it. I’ve read lots of books on the war from Bernard Fall onwards. The “Fox Company” book reminded me of the late Keith William Nolan’s battle histories in that it fleshed out the individual Marines. I have been interested in reading about World War I and Korea as they’re pretty forgotten wars, I’ll look for the Sorley Viet Nam book though . Thanks.
Vincent, I watched the Sorley speech and found it inspiring. Thanks again.
Would somebody please explain this fletcher Christian guy to me?
Mike Huckabee as a theocrat? Check out his record as governor and put your brain in gear before putting your mouth in motion, FC.
FWIW: Huckabees 2008 campaign was the same as George Wallace’s 1968 campaign but this time without the racial baggage. The fact that social conservatism coupled with economic populism could play as well as it did without
Jim Crow is something for which we should all be grateful.
BTW: In America, Mrs Grundy remains her usual annoying self. In England the silly biddy has police powers.
Obviously, the NHS has a more than ample supply of hallucogenic drugs at its disposal.
FC is a book-smart guy with some interesting (often wrong) notions about the U.S. of A., Dave.
His premise about theocracy falls flat on its face with very little investigation.
W, the religious one, pushed for greater exapnsion into space.
O, the (at best) religiously ambiguous one, has killed off our space program.
That examples alone blows his theory.
In America, it is the secular left which constantly and consistently argues against any expenditures for space on the grounds that all that money should be used to prop up welfare for people who won’t work. This has been going on for so long that most Americans know it as simple geography in the political landscape. We don’t mention it because it is so obvious.
Apparently not everyone in the UK is simlarly endowed with that knowledge.
Bibles and porn, same difference? – http://bit.ly/9sAPSd video with students in Texas that are saying that Bible, Koran, or porn, see the women condition a bit the same or porn
débates that wouldn’t occur here
No Mo #85:
Yes, I agree, I can just imagine Scudder playing music in a band.
But I think that Fletcher C is rendered senseless by the case of an openly religious politician who is also a Baptist minister. In European terms that must sound as unlikely as a nice, friendly, reasonable, swastika-wearing member of the Nazi Party would be to us.
If I had to pick a Neimiah Scudder in the USA today it would have to be, either Obama, or even more likely, Jessie Jackson or Louis Farrkan. And yes, they are all black, but that has nothing to do with it,… unless it does. Obama looks like a nice, friendly, reasonable Scudder.
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/03/07/faith-in-cynicism/#comment-57
Whiskey may be right that Western Christianity has been largely emasculated. But despite the fact that most Russian Orthodox Churches are maintained by women, babushkas mostly, Orthodox priests are male BUT mostly married. And Orthodoxy has not only gentle contemplative saints like Seraphim of Sarov or Theophan the Recluse but also warrior saints like Alexander Nevsky (for the Lord of the Rings fans unfamiliar with the Eisenstein film loosely based on Nevsky’s life, think of the Rohirrim).
All the Western intellectuals who wrote off Russia in the 90s as a society doomed to collapse and eventual conquest by Islamdom and Greater China have underestimated the seeds of Orthodox revival. Russia may emerge with something less than the present 140 million souls (since birth rates can’t stay as high among the women born in the 90s as among those born during the perestroika era) and with fewer Olympic medals than the old USSR, but it will still be an important country on the world stage.
What’s happened to Greece of course is harder to explain. That is the land of Mount Athos where women aren’t allowed but has succumbed to the same welfare statist disease.
@81 Trangbang – The Great War and Modern Memory is a good place to start reading about WWI.
MarieClaude, what those students have noticed is the way women were generally regarded in the ancient world; the Bible being a product of that world, it’s not surprising that those views form the backdrop. However, I would submit that most of the stories, even the oldest ones, actually undercut and subvert these views and show many women as quite strong and independant.
A well regarded book about the topic is “Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity.” Good job of summing up the thesis with a title.
on another note, the reason I dislike Huckabee has nothing to do with him being a “theocrat”, which is laughable – I think he’s just another high tax, big government liberal who disguises his politics by throwing in some religious red meat to make him look like some kind of social conservative. And I don’t base my views on what he says, but what he actually did when he was a Governor. In my opinion he was a pretty lousy one.
Mr X, Thanks for the book tip. I read Martin Gilbert’s history of WWI and have John Keegan’s book. I’ll look for the one you recommended. Thanks. I am reading Paul Johnson’s brief Churchill biography and apparently Churchill saw the incredible destruction the Great War would bring while most of the British ruling class thought it would be quick and painless.As someone said, wars are much easier to start than finish.
trangbang68/90
I’m very late to this discussion, but John Dos Passos’s Mr. Wilson’s War is worth the read if you can find it. Re Churchill seeing the destruction the Great War would bring, I believe it was in Niall Ferguson’s The Pity Of War that I read the British Cabinet, in 1914, was prepared to vote No on entering the war, but Churchill, by his eloquence, persuaded the Cabinet that Britain must honor its treaty obligation to Belgium. If Ferguson has it right, and I have no reason to think he does not, then Churchill’s action that fateful morning meant there would not be a short European war, with Germany winning and some territory changing hands, but a world war that would go on for four years, cause the rise of Soviet Communism and Hitler, destroying five of the world’s existing empires, and ultimately destroy Western civilization. Talk about hinges of history.
no mor uro; RWE; For Scudder personified, look at the 1996 Democratic Convention and
the spectacle of quadraplegic Christopher Reeves.
The message was clear: vote for Bill Clinton and Superman will fly again. Look, Clinton signed the Brady Bill and James Brady can walk again!
(Shortly thereafter Sarah did not get on way on something or other so her next appearance was with her manipulated husband back in his wheelchair looking pathetic once more.)
wretchard @ 4 “…the received conceit….”
A brilliant comment. The frustration in trying to talk to the left is that they have never had to examine their assumptions. They simply partake of the received wisdom…
The left has the cultural inheritance/backing, solidified over the past 30 years, that traces it lineage through Ken Kesey and the hippy movement of the 60s through Kerouac and the beats in the 50s and back to Henry Miller in the 40s and 30s. The dominant theme is, as poet Karl Shapiro wrote: “America, the air-conditioned nightmare.” Every time you hear a snide Joe Kleinish or NPRish ‘hate America’ or ‘it’s America’s fault’ report you can be sure this unquestioned legacy is in play. It make for a hellofa cultural backstop.
Think of the tiny crack of light that the director of ‘Hurt Locker’ opened the other night at the Oscars when she asked everyone ‘to remember all the men and women in uniform fighting for us.’
Wws, I am aware that the condition of whore in Roman empire had some privileges (for the upper class ones) but they couldn’t have a family, nor that the Romans wives could have extra-affairs, for the preservation of the family, I’d love to read the book you’re referring, though at the moment I’m more preocupated to decipherate the money crisis and its aftermaths
An interesting thing about Judas Iscariot is that among the theories about the name of the disciple that betrayed Jesus is one that “Iscariot” identifies Judas as a member of the sicarii.[6] These were a cadre of assassins among Jewish rebels intent on driving the Romans out of Judea.
Matthew 26:14-16 suggests that Judas betrayed Jesus out of simple greed for the bribe money, whereas Luke 22:3 and John 13:27 say that the Devil entered into him and made him do it. But some biblical scholars have put forward another theory. They say that Judas wanted Jesus to lead a revolt against the Romans and got angry when it became clear that no revolt was planned.
So why would Judas betray Jesus if he were a zealot? I have heard that Judas idea was to force Jesus’s hand. That is make Jesus show himself as the powerful temporal ruler that Judas believed he was.
The jewish notion of a messiah was that the messiah would come in power as a political ruler –which is what the zealot’s wanted.
Judas was wrong.
Christians now look for Jesus to return a second time in power. Jews look for Jesus to come too in power. Only it would be the first time.