Mark Steyn: O come, all ye faithless

The Spectator (U.K.) ^ | 12/17/05 | Mark Steyn

[Uncledave]

In before the ping

[Uncledave]

Yes, victory is mine!!!!

[Pokey78]

Steyn ping!

[Kenny Bunkport]

How does he do it?

[r9etb]

A thinking atheist ought to be able to appreciate the benefits the secular world derives from monotheism — for example, the most glorious achievements in Western art and music.

Not to mention the distinctly Judeao-Christian idea that individuals matter as individuals -- which just happens to be the basis for what's now called Western Civilization....

[saveliberty]

May I please be added to your Steyn ping?

[TX Bluebonnet]

bookmark to read complete article later.

Oh goody! I see he's bashing my least favorite song - "Imagine"

[sima_yi]

The single worst idea in human history? I vote...communism.

[Mr. Blonde]

For a big-ideas guy, Watson is missing the bigger question: something has to be ‘responsible for most of the wars and bigotry’, and if it wasn’t religion, it would surely be something else. In fact, in the 20th century, it was. Europe’s post-Christian pathogens of communism and Nazism unleashed horrors on a scale inconceivable even to the most ambitious Pope.

Gotta love lines like this.

[Pokey78]

Sure!

[Restorer]

the distinctly Judeao-Christian idea that individuals matter as individuals

To clarify while agreeing.

What was unique was the idea that every individual mattered. All other cultures believed that some people mattered and others just didn't. At all.

The Jews and their Christian offshoot invented the idea that every individual is important simply because he/she is a child of God. Probably the most revolutionary idea in history.

[FreedomPoster]

LOL! Well-played.

I love it when the Lefties on some forums I'm on start mindlessly bashing Christians for mass killings/wars. They really don't like it when I rub the numbers in their faces. Atheist Leftists have the leaderboard pretty well covered.

The numbers:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

[cgk]

Excellent article. Thanks for the ping!

[GSlob]

Since the global warming would not be happening on my [or their] watch, why should they be so exercised about it? I see a gross inconsistency here.

[saveliberty]

Thank you!

[atomicpossum]

That page only gives Mao's China 35,000,000 dead? I think that's a little low-- I've read his 'Great Leap Forward' was closer to 70,000,000 alone...

[redgolum]

The Krauts are so slumped in despond that they’re running some Teutonic feelgood marketing campaign in which old people are posed against pastoral vistas, fetching gays mooch around the Holocaust memorial, Katarina Witt stands in front of some photogenic moppets, etc., and they all point their fingers at the camera and shout ‘Du bist Deutschland!’ — ‘You are Germany!’ — which is meant somehow to pep up glum Hun couch potatoes.

I am ethnically a Kraut. I have never known very many of my relatives to ever be optimistic about much. Something in the culture I guess. But to show a bunch of but buddies dancing around the Holocaust memorial as an ad campaign? What are they trying to do, increase suicide rates?

[Truth is a Weapon]

Ping!

[r9etb]

This modest thought provoked Paul Z. Myers, professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, into paroxysms of scorn ... the s*** would just pile up (this would explain his written output, though).’

Everything I need to know about Paul Z. Myers is summed up in this little quote.