I like to create neologisms and even a truism on occasion. My latest truism is that bad ideas invariably drive out good ideas in a society. I am referring to the idea that people who have fundamental religious, moral and ethical beliefs have been victimized by the secular idea that the new liberal Taliban will not tolerate any idea that differs from their new orthodoxy.
I am not talking about Islam but cultural atheism or what president Obama identified as the new national religion in his speech at Notre Dame University in 2009. Pope emeritus Benedict XVI often remarked that he thought it was not so much religious atheists who damage the Christian faith, as it is the practical atheists who do the real damage. The practical atheists are those who profess themselves Christians but who then live as if God does not exist.
At the heart of this practical atheism, which is very present in our day and also very easy to fall into, is a false relationship with God. We say one thing, yet we do another, and we convince ourselves that no one is the wiser. And that includes God.
Racism, multiculturalism and diversity have been adroitly employed to chase religious and moral people from the public square. This all may have begun with the virtual elimination of the Bible from the public school system in the 1940s and 1950s. As C.S. Lewis noted, the modern world insists that religion be a purely private affair, then shrinks the area of privacy to the vanishing point.
Total elimination has always been high on the left-wing agenda throughout history.
I need only cite the French Revolution to dramatize my point. Racial prejudice and bigotry has become the driving wedge to open up new venues of religious elimination for years now.
The Civil Rights was essentially necessary, but it lost its credibility after affirmative action was defended many years after it had become obsolete.
Good grief! Affirmative action or reverse discrimination has been the law of the land for 40 years. Enough is enough! It is so deeply embedded in the national psyche, thanks to the Democrat Party, that to mock or criticize any black person even in private is a mortal sin that demands a symbolic public execution.
Apply this fear to presidential elections and you see what we get. By not recognizing the excesses of this racial intransigence, traditional society has indirectly delegated or surrendered too much power and moral authority to these real purveyors of intolerance and hatred.
If they would only stop the hatin’! I am talking about the self-empowered racialists who abuse the moral authority bestowed upon them.
While the Civil Rights movement was legitimate in its early days, its justification now serves as a moral proxy card to auxiliary groups such as homosexuals, and even many feminists. Homosexuals have used the accidents of birth to demand acceptance of a lifestyle that had been condemned for millennia. This is not to say that the Christian virtues of our once-moral society should not temper the grave and inhumane excesses of past history, but this does not translate into any legitimacy granted to their sexual practices. The newest phrase to capture all this has been On the Wrong Side of History.
This noxious phrase looks to erstwhile president, Barack H. Obama, for its origins. He ruminated on his enlightened Arc of History as he called. As detailed in David Horowitz’s recent book, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, one of Obama’s first priorities after his historic election in 2009 was to install a new rug in the Oval Office with the following inscription: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. For him history is like a moral guide with Hegelian and Marxist underpinning, underscoring the secular progressive advance of history to establish peace on earth for all in their Marxist paradise on earth. God has no presence in their view.
As if the liberal caliphate has a clue as to what was moral and immoral! For a collective group that has rejected traditional religion and virtually all of its moral values, they are woefully unqualified to create any replacement set of values that would have universal appeal, such as the Golden and Silver Rules.
They self-righteously think they represent the right side of history. In a screed, published in her USA Today column, a few years ago, sportswriter, Christine Brennan pontificated about football coach, Tony Dungy’s alleged intolerance of homosexuality in the NFL. She was directing HER intolerance to his honest and heart-felt beliefs that he made about the last man drafted in the NFL’s college draft, Michael Sam, who wantonly disturbed the relative tranquility of NFL locker-room politics with his self-admission that he was gay and proud of it. Millions of football fans were subjected to the kiss on national TV without warning, where he and his boyfriend exchanged a passionate exchange on national television. Where is all the concern about our sensitivities?
With regard to Sam’s admission, Dungy noted I wouldn’t have taken him. It’s not going to be totally smooth…Things will happen. In other words, he did not want his then new football team, the Tampa Bay Bucs, turned into a media circus. The then St. Louis Rams were more willing to take that chance, since Sam played at the University of Missouri. That was their choice. There is only a 50-50 chance he would make the team unless the media forces the Rams to deny a better player an opportunity to play for the Rams. Needless to say, he quickly washed out with the Rams and later the Dallas Cowboys.
The following season the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football league signed him to a contract, making him the first openly gay player in their league. Sam never played for them and left the team for mental health reasons. Personally I think there is something prescient in his rationale for ending his non-existent professional career. Was it because of his gayness? In truth he was either too slow or too small for the positions he could play.
Everything Dungy said was reasonable and honest. So why should we even listen to people like Ms. Brennan, who is notorious for using her column as a soapbox for her own liberal ideology, sound off about subjects she really don’t understand? And how come sports fans must be subjected to her liberal drivel? Give her an opinion page and leave the sports to someone who really cares about what goes on between the lines or on the court, not in the courts.
To paraphrase Thomas Paine, these movements have attempted to make the world anew. This is all part of the hope and change that candidate Obama promised us, a hope founded on the illusions, lies and myths of a history gone bad. Theirs is not the right side of history or even the wrong side of history. History is neither. The moral judgments it makes are wholly subjective. What the liberals have today is only the Marxist side of history. And if the history they claim to own is any guide, what they propose has failed all over the world for centuries.
You left out the original practical atheists , the Pharisees. All of our modern institutions have been taken over by these modern Pharisees. They think only of themselves and what is in it for them. They destroy everything they touch.