Posted on 06/30/2006 12:42:04 AM PDT by nickcarraway
The most amazing thing about Godless is the amount of intellectual meat Ann Coulter has packed into its pages.
Godless: The Church of Liberalism
by Ann Coulter
(Crown Forum, 310 pages, $27.95)
What's most amazing about Ann Coulter's book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, is the amount of intellectual meat she packs into 281 breezy, barb-filled pages. Among the topics the blonde bomb-thrower discusses in some depth are the following: liberal jurisprudence, privacy rights and abortion, Joe Wilson's modest career and inflated ego, and the solid record of failure in American public schools. The topics of Intelligent Design and Darwinism, to which the last eighty pages of text are devoted, are analyzed in even greater detail.
As one would expect from an author with a legal background, Supreme Court cases are high on Coulter's hit-list -- especially the idea of a "living Constitution." Citing various cases-in-point, Coulter shows that this popular doctrine is nothing more than a paralegal pretext for making the Constitution say whatever liberal judges want it to say. Though such a philosophy grants to the nation's founding document all the integrity of a bound and gagged assault victim, it at least has the virtue of mirroring liberals' self-referential view of morality.
Another dogma that Coulter skewers is the liberal commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Punish the Perp." This counterintuitive principle not only rejects the link between incarceration and lower crime rates, it also permits benevolent judges (like Clinton federal court nominee Frederica Massiah-Jackson) to shorten the sentence of child rapists so that other innocent children can pay the price for society's sins.
An unexpected bonus in this chapter is the author's extended sidebar on Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of Boston who, as his own correspondence shows, knew Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty but chose, for ideological and financial reasons, to portray them as innocent victims. In a related chapter, "The Martyr: Willie Horton," Coulter provides detailed information about Horton's crimes, Michael Dukakis' furlough program, and the precise nature of the Horton ads aired in the 1988 presidential campaign
CONTINUING THE RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, Coulter asserts in chapter five that abortion is the "holiest sacrament" of the "church of liberalism." For women this sacrament secures their "right to have sex with men they don't want to have children with." A corollary of this less-than-exalted principle is the right to suck the brains out of partially born infants. How far liberal politicians will go to safeguard this sacrament whose name must not be spoken (euphemisms are "choice," "reproductive freedom," and "family planning") is shown by an amendment offered by Senator Chuck Schumer that would exclude anti-abortion protestors from bankruptcy protection. How low these same pols will go is illustrated by the character assassination of Judge Charles Pickering -- a man honored by the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers but slimed by liberals at his confirmation hearing as racially insensitive. Coulter notes that the unspoken reason for this "Borking" of Pickering was the judge's prior criticism of Roe v. Wade.
The single chapter that Coulter's critics have honed in on is the one that exposes the liberal "Doctrine of Infallibility." This religiously resonant phrase applies to individuals who promote the Left's partisan agenda while immunizing themselves from criticism by touting their victim-status. In addition to the 9/11 "Jersey Girls," Coulter identifies Joe Wilson, Cindy Sheehan, Max Cleland, and John Murtha as persons who possess, at least by Maureen Dowd's lights, "absolute moral authority." Curiously, this exalted status isn't accorded victims who don't push liberal agendas. Perhaps the fact that Republican veterans outnumber their Democrat counterparts in Congress, 87 to 62, has something to do with this inconsistency.
Coulter's next chapter, "The Liberal Priesthood: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Teacher," focuses on the partisanship, compensation, and incompetence level of American teachers. A crucial statistic in these pages concerns the "correlation [that exists] between poor student achievement and time spent in U.S. public schools." In this regard, comments by Thomas Sowell and Al Shanker stand out. Sowell notes that college students with low SAT and ACT scores are more likely to major in education and that "teachers who have the lowest scores are the most likely to remain in the profession." From a different perspective, the late President of the American Federation of Teachers stated, with refreshing bluntness, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." The words of John Dewey, a founder of America's public education system, also fit nicely into Coulter's state-of-the-classroom address: "You can't make Socialists out of individualists -- children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent." Coulter responds, "You also can't make socialists out of people who can read, which is probably why Democrats think the public schools have nearly achieved Aristotelian perfection."
The last third of Godless focuses on matters scientific. Chapter seven, "The Left's War on Science," serves as an appetizer for Coulter's evolutionary piece de resistance. Prior to that main course, Coulter provides a litany of examples that illustrate the left's contempt for scientific data that doesn't comport with its worldview. Exhibits include the mendacious marketing of AIDS as an equal opportunity disease, the hysterical use of anecdotal evidence to ban silicon breast implants, and the firestorm arising from Lawrence Summers's heretical speculation about male and female brain differences.
THE REMAINING CHAPTERS OF GODLESS all deal with Darwinism. Nowhere else can one find a tart-tongued compendium of information that not only presents a major argument for Intelligent Design but also exposes the blatant dishonesty of "Darwiniacs" who continue to employ evidence (such as the Miller-Urey experiment, Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings, and the famous peppered moth experiment) that they know is outdated or fraudulent.
Within this bracing analysis, Coulter employs the observations of such biological and philosophical heavyweights as Stephen Gould, Richard Dawkins, Michael Behe, and Karl Popper. The price of the whole book is worth the information contained in these chapters about the statistical improbability of random evolution, the embarrassing absence of "transitional" fossils, and the inquisitorial attitude that prevails among many scientists (and most liberals) when discussing these matters. Unlike biologist Richard Lewontin, who candidly admits that a prior commitment to materialism informs his allegiance to evolution, most of his colleagues (and certainly most of the liberal scribblers Coulter sets on the road to extinction) won't concede that Darwinism is a corollary, rather than a premise, of their godlessness.
Coulter's final chapter serves as a thought-provoking addendum to her searing cross-examination of evolution's star witnesses. "The Aped Crusader" displays the devastating social consequences that have thus far attended Darwinism. From German and American eugenicists (including Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger), to Aryan racists, to the infanticidal musings of Princeton's Peter Singer, Darwinian evolution boasts a political and philosophical heritage that could only be envied by the likes of Charles Manson. Yet it is a history ignored by liberals for whom Darwin's theory provides what they want above all else -- a creation myth that sanctifies their sexual urges, sanctions abortion, and disposes of God.
Coulter's book is clearly not a systematic argument for the idea that liberalism is a godless religion. Indeed, prior to the material on evolution, the concept is treated more as a clever theme for chapter headings than as a serious intellectual proposition. In those final chapters, however, Coulter manages to present a cogent, sustained argument that actually begins to link modern liberalism (or more specifically, leftism) to an atheistic perspective. At the very least Coulter succeeds in raising an important issue -- namely, that American courts currently ignore the religious or quasi-religious character of a philosophy that pervades public institutions and is propagated with public funds. This fact, if honestly recognized, would render contemporary church-state jurisprudence untenable. A Court taking these arguments seriously would have to recognize that all philosophies, including "liberalism," swim in the same intellectual current as religion.
THUS FAR, THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA have focused almost all their attention on Coulter's take-no-prisoners rhetorical style -- and particularly on the "heartless" remarks about those 9/11 widows who seem to be "enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." Clearly, diplomatic language is not Coulter's forte, as one would also gather from this representative zinger: "I don't particularly care if liberals believe in God. In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven."
What undercuts the liberals' case against Coulter on this score, however, is their own (not always tacit) endorsement of vile epithets that are regularly directed against President Bush and his supporters by the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and a gaggle of celebrity politicos. Coulter employs the same linguistic standard against liberals (with a touch of humor) that they regularly use (with somber faces and dogmatic conviction) when they accuse conservatives of being racist homophobes who gladly send youngsters to war under false pretences to line the pockets of Halliburton executives. Hate-speech of this stripe is old-hat for leftists.
Until Air America, Helen Thomas, and most Democrat constituencies alter their rhetoric, I see no reason for conservatives to denounce Coulter for using, more truthfully, the same harsh language that leftists have employed, with no regard for accuracy, since the time of Lenin. When liberals denounce communist tyrants as fervently as they do real Nazis, then it will be time for Coulter to cool the rhetoric. Until that time her "verbal reprisals" serve a useful function within an intellectual marketplace that resembles a commodities pit more than a debating society.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, California. He is a regular columnist for San Diego's North County Times. His book reviews have also appeared in the American Enterprise Magazine, First Things, and Touchstone.
Wasn't Hitler a Christian?
>>Which ones?<<
I'll save that for the crevo threads. I'm making the general point here, as Ann has made the general points in her book.
Sort of like the Bible? I mean when they extract 14 books out of the Bible and hide that fact from the consumer, that is sort of liken to fraud. I mean if you are going to extract nearly 20%, you should at least have the decency to quit putting the original rev date on the cover. But no, that might hurt sales since the consumer would then know that he wasn't getting the 'real' bible, he was only getting half a bible.
>>What is our 'purpose'?<<
To please God. Why does a man make a motorcycle or a teddy bear? Does the bible not say we are made in God'd image? It makes it easy to understand the concept of making us - with a free will - to choose to have a relationship with him. And those of us that refuse? Well, if you made some self willed creature to have a relationship with you and after you created it it said "bug off" and walked away, what would you do with it?
Translated: "I will make up these things that I have no basis for and hope nobody will call me on it."
I really don't care what "SOME" ID sites say about science. There are all sorts of nuts out there on all sides of an issue.
I have never personally met a creationist or ID adherant that thought science itself and the study of creation was "evil" or even wrong.
But God is without sin. We can't be made in God's image.
>>Wasn't Hitler a Christian?<<
Um... No.
>>Translated: "I will make up these things that I have no basis for and hope nobody will call me on it."<<
You can take it any way you want. I will not use this thread to argue specifics. That is for a real, live crevo thread.
O.K. Now you have Jenny's questionnaire. Once you answer it, thus specifying what is "there" and what is "here," one of us can do our best to answer your question.
Guess where this comes from!
The central beliefs of Identity are that:
1) - The Biblical God, or Yahweh, created a single race in his own image - the White Race. These are the Chosen People. The message of the Bible, both Old and New testaments, is a message only for the White People. Only White People have souls, or have a hope of salvation. The identity of the White People - and hence the name Christian Identity - is that they are the Old Testament Israelites. Some Identity believers follow all of the dietary laws and prohibitions of the early chapters of the Bible, and the majority maintain a fundamentalist belief in the literal interpretation of Biblical texts. In their view, Christ himself was a blue-eyed, blond-haired Israelite, with absolutely no Jewish ancestry, or any connection to the Jews. To claim that Christ had a Jewish genealogy is, from the point of view of Identity, a blasphemy of the first order. The White People eventually became dispersed from Israel and settled in Northern Europe, Scandinavia, Britain, and eventually, in the ! USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These White People are known as the Aryans, and where they live are the Aryan Nations.
2) - Before the creation of Adam and Eve, the God Yahweh created a second race. These are sometimes called "Mud People" in Identity literature, and are the ancestors of all people of color; Africans, Asians, Aboriginal Australians, African-Americans, and so on. These "Mud People" were intended by God to be the servants and slaves of the White People. They have no souls, are not truly human, and are not valued by God.
3) - The third race of people are the Jews. According to Identity, they were not created by God but by Satan. They are not the Old Testament Israelites, but have simply falsely assumed that ancestry in order to hide their evil origin, and as a cover for their Satanic purposes. The Jews have intermarried with the Mud People and created a variety of mixed racial groups in order to further insinuate themselves into the human community. Lacking souls, or even a conscience, they are able to devote themselves to their true task - the destruction of God's chosen people - the Aryans. The Jews do this through slyly pitting people of color against the Aryans; through taking control of the world banking and financial institutions; through the invention of socialism and communism; by taking control of the media and of the government; and by an endless conspiracy to seize global control through a One World Government.
4) - Identity theology maintains that any intermarriage between Aryans and non-Aryans automatically yields off-spring who are spiritually, biologically, and mentally degenerate, and who are soul-less. They believe that intermarriage is slowly polluting Aryan gene pools and destroying the Aryan peoples. Any Aryan who has mixed-race children, who marries a Mud person or a Jew, is a "race traitor." Race traitors, so defined, are frequently the objects of intimidation, assault, or murder. In the white racist State advocated by Aryan Nations and other militant Identity groups, race traitors would be summarily executed by the State. Parenthetically, the term "race traitor" is sometimes used in Identity literature to denote Aryans who are actively opposed to Identity, such as anti-fascist or anti-racist workers.
5) - Identity also maintains a strong belief in the Second Coming of Christ. Like many fundamentalist Christians, they believe that Christ will return soon and usher in the Millennium - a thousand years of God's Kingdom on earth. However, they also believe that Christ will not return until the Aryan people have done their duty and restored God's original plan; namely, the return of people of color to servant and slave status, and the genocide of the Jews.
That's awful selfish of the Almighty, don't you think? Is God so shallow He has to be given His props by mere mortals?
Name one.
Yes, he was. Unfortunately, your ignorance of history is not exactly shocking.
If nothing has changed, then why has the bible undergone thousands of changes?
hmmm. The Church has accepted heliocentricity over geocentricity. The Church has accepted evolution or instant creation.
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)
"I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice..."
Amen.
except the mult Phd's in mult fields who do not hold to evolution - and they're not all dead yet
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