The left viscerally hates both George Bush and Sarah Palin because they are both unapologetic Christians and their lives betoken their faith. George Bush conquered his alcoholism through an epiphany experienced with no less A hated Christian figure than Billy Graham. Sarah Palin committed the unforgivable sin, she knowingly carried a mongoloid baby to term. Both people are walking, living expressions of their faith. Why does generate such hatred? Because they are also living, walking reproaches to the very eschatology of the leftist.
Some time ago I published the following reply which starts off considering the elements of humility as those elements might apply to George Bush. Rather than edit out references to my interlocutor in that reply, I leave the piece unedited. The essential point is that Christian humility, properly understood, reveals the God playing of the leftist to be grotesque. That messenger must be killed. Here is that reply:
"Christians are often mischaracterized, sometimes deliberately so, on these issues that have to do with humility. The best definition I ever heard of humility is, "knowing your place in line and taking it." I like this definition because it expresses an affirmative duty as well as a negative passivity. It is in the latter expression of humility that Christians are often tangled up by their critics. Sniveling handwringing is not humility. If one has an acquaintanceship with the whole of the Sermon on the Mount one sees A Christ who is manly and virile in defense of his father's righteousness.
The Father-son relationship suggests a vertical component. I find it useful to think of these things along a vertical and horizontal axis. If I lay your questions on this axis with the putative answers which are self evident it is apparent that you have the matter of humility right side up. True humility comes from surrender to a higher vertical power which, contrary to the false notions of atheists (read leftists), does not enfeeble the humble man but frees him, enriches him, and wonderfully empowers him.
A humble man who is surrendered vertically has a polar star with which to find his way. It then becomes possible for him to place others in their proper position in the world around him. He knows where his place in line is. George Bush, for example, knew his place when it came to restoring the dignity and honor of the office of the President of the United States.
But if our subject has no vertical component, he must key off his fellow man to establish his place and find his way. In this circumstance the temptation to manipulate your fellow man to enhance your own position becomes nearly irresistible. If you are a narcissist, as many believe Barak Obama is, your horizontal world becomes a happy hunting ground for manipulation. He becomes so good at it that he put out all the signals which so deceived those who believe that humility is a matter of horizontal adjustment.
So to put the Teddy Kennedy example on the graph, you are quite correct, George Bush even as President, and certainly as titular head of the Republican Party, had no warrant to forgive Teddy Kennedy's bitch slaps against Republican cheeks. George Bush's proper role was to defend his father's righteousness, that is, to defend the principles of the party and the country which he undertook to defend and protect. Even the slurs against himself might arguably be the kind that he must react against because in that case he must take his place in line protect the office of president of the United States of America.
So the corollary to this answers your second question, we have no right to arbitrate another man's vertical alignment. We cannot insist that someone else turn his cheek. You are right, that is socialism because it is at the very root of the socialist mentality: they would be God.
The socialist operates purely on a horizontal plane except when he is trying to impose his will on others in which case he usurps the ultimate vertical position because he is a stranger to the first and second commandments. In fact that is why he is an atheist in the first place, so that he can play God. That is why he viscerally hates Sarah Palin-because she has got herself so manifestly aligned properly on a vertical- horizontal axis. She is a walking reproach to his grotesquely miss-positioned self. It is noteworthy that leftists had the same reaction to George Bush.
The Christian call to humility is a vertical adventure between God and man and it is an individual activity-not a group effort. There is no wholesale salvation in my Christian dogma, each man must come to it on his own. Socialism is essentially a group activity in which ultimately the individual disappears into the mass.
I do not think Christianity offers the slightest hope to socialism. But it is interesting to know that the Great Revival of the 1740s created a climate of individual freedom in colonial America which led directly to the Declaration of Independence."
