Posted on 04/02/2019 4:18:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
Nothing keeps me religious more than the left, not even religion itself.
I am not even particularly "spiritual." My religiosity is overwhelmingly rational (the title of my Bible commentary is "The Rational Bible"). I believe in God because creation rationally suggests a Creator.
The force that has most propelled me to religion is the great (secular) religion of the last hundred years: the left. If most people of the left (the left, not liberalism) -- people who have not only rejected but scorned God, Judaism, Christianity and the Bible -- were decent individuals, were committed to intellectual honesty and had produced some great art and works of wisdom, leftism would have constituted a serious challenge to my religious beliefs.
But the very opposite is the case. While liberals have done some good, everything the left has touched it has ruined. The most obvious example is universities. As Harvard professor Steven Pinker, a liberal and an atheist, put it, the left has rendered the universities a "laughingstock."
The most godless, religion-free and Bible-free institution in the West, the university, has become the both the stupidest and most morally corrupt institution in the West. That is what first awakened me to the indispensability of God, religion and the Bible. I first wrote about it some 25 years ago ("How I found God at Columbia").
Our universities, because of the left, are intellectually and morally sick. And if that is not a result of their antipathy to the Bible, its God and Judeo-Christian thought, what is it the result of?
Let's begin with the moral. The left and the universities teach gullible young students lies, immoral ideas and foolish doctrines. At almost any university in the English-speaking world, the United States -- arguably the most decent large society in history -- is depicted as a vile society, founded by bigots who engaged in genocidal evil, sustained by racism, misogyny, xenophobia and greed. Its wars are depicted as racist and imperialist. Students are taught that it is a racist "microaggression" to say that "There is only one race: the human race" or "America is a land of opportunity" or "I try to treat everyone the same." At universities, minority students are taught that they are hated by all white Americans -- perhaps the greatest libel since the medieval blood libel that charged Jews with killing Christian children to use their blood for Passover matzos.
The universities teach that in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, it is humane, democratic, liberal Israel that is the villain, not the totalitarian genocidal theocrats of Hamas. I debated this very issue at Oxford University, where my opponents, two left-wing academics, argued that between Israel and Hamas, Israel was the greater threat to Middle East peace.
The godless left and universities teach there is no male and female in the human species, that these terms are mere "social constructs." A few weeks ago, two trans females came in first and second place in a Connecticut high school track race. These runners won solely because they were biological males. Yet, not only they were allowed to race against females, but they also set new records in Connecticut girls track. Anyone who complained this was unfair -- which to every non-leftist it was -- was attacked by the left as "haters." A writer for The Nation defended the male bodies that won the races because, in his moronic words, "trans women are in fact women" (italics added). As I showed in my last column, truth has never been a left-wing value.
Moreover, I could not find one "feminist" organization that defended the girl runners of Connecticut. Feminism is no more interested in protecting women than communism was in protecting workers.
The left is also the Western home of contemporary anti-Semitism. There are individual anti-Semites across the political spectrum, but the incubator of modern anti-Semitism is the left. Thanks to leftists such as Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the British Labour Party, and the two new female Muslim members of the U.S. Congress, anti-Semitism is becoming respectable in the West for the first time since the Holocaust. The left has rendered Zionism, the oldest national movement in history -- the 2,000-year-old Jewish aspiration to return to Israel -- a term of opprobrium. While many individuals continue to support Zionism, the one non-Jewish group to continue to defend it is the evangelical Christian community.
As I show in my commentary on Genesis, what the first book of the Bible depicts is not only God's creation of the world but, equally important, God's shaping primordial chaos (Genesis 1:2) into order. The divine order consists of distinctions; prominent examples include man and God, man and animal, male and female, good and evil, holy and profane, parent and child. The left is a war against order; in its essence, leftism creates chaos. It has worked to destroy all those biblical distinctions. The present giveaway is the nihilist project of the left to erase the male-female distinction, the only innate human distinction God cares about: "God created mankind in his own image ...male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27); "He created them male and female and blessed them" (Genesis 5:2). No ethnic or racial distinction matters in Genesis; only the male-female distinction.
The God-centered West produced Bach and Michelangelo. The left, which dominates music and art, has produced mostly junk; there is nothing higher to aspire to, as excellence is not a left-wing value and the left uses art to shock, not inspire. Hence the huge amount of scatological art, for example.
Belief in God and the Bible were instrumental to the creation of America, the last, best hope of mankind. The rejection of that God and that Bible are instrumental to wrecking America (and the rest of the West). That alone tells me how important that God and that Bible are. The left knows it, too.
Even the Rolling Stones?
Great article by Dennis.
I understand this sentiment. It is the dying gasp of the cultural institutions once birthed and nurtured by the gospel.
As the influence of the hearbeat diminishes, people like Prager, Rush, Levin and others will die off, fade, wilt, crumble and vanish, if not revolt and join the other side.
Don’t get me wrong. I am thankful for them. Prager is an articulate and cogent spokesman. It is just that he is rear guard and defensive.
The most foolish thing that Christian people can do is put their hope in this sort of thing, and I see it everywhere among culturally conservative Christians.
The only thing that will “save” our culture is an explosion of the gospel (which most of the prominent conservative icons do NOT embrace). The weird thing is that when you set your hope on THAT, the preservation of the west, “America” and our way of life becomes something you actually care less about.
When I say that, the rxn of conservatives reinforces in my mind the conviction that in fact we may well have to see the destruction of the West in order to “save” it.
I am not afraid. Are you?
>>If most people of the left (the left, not liberalism) — people who have not only rejected but scorned God, Judaism, Christianity and the Bible — were decent individuals, were committed to intellectual honesty and had produced some great art and works of wisdom, leftism would have constituted a serious challenge to my religious beliefs. But the very opposite is the case. While liberals have done some good, everything the left has touched it has ruined. The most obvious example is universities. As Harvard professor Steven Pinker, a liberal and an atheist, put it, the left has rendered the universities a “laughingstock.”
The same Left that hates all religion (except sacred Islamonazist theocratic despotism) hates our Constitution with it’s protections of self-defense, freedom of speech, freedom of association, personal liberty to travel where you want, take what job you want, work for what wage you want to hold out for, and the right to enjoy the rewards your earned from your labor and investment.
Lord god Obama talked on record how he didn’t like the Constitution’s restrictions on the government and sought Supremacist Court edicts as a runaround.
The Rolling Stones give lip service to Leftist rhetoric (Street Fighting Man, Dirty Neo-con, are there ANY others?) but they want to tax shelter as much of their wealth as they can (Tax Exile On Main Street Southern France being a prime example).
I like your post but you owe Rush an apology for grouping him with the others. He (unlike the others) has never shown signs of wilting. Just the opposite actually. He has become (I’d guess with the help of his brother David who recently wrote a book titled ‘Jesus has Risen’) more outspoken about Christ.
understood. Prager has never wilted either.
I hope Rush will embrace the savior of his brother.
What I was trying to say (and did so poorly, big surprise! :) ), is that the offshoots of cultural traditions which rely on the gospel as their basis, cannot stand on their own. They WILL wilt and fade away. I am not saying Rush will walk away (though I was, before Trump, extremely disappointed in his willingness to be a water boy for some of the swamp dwelling republicans). I am just saying that he is not our standard, not our hope, and not our quarterback. America would still be in a sorry mess if every household eagerly tuned in to him every day.
Idols seldom come saying “I AM AN IDOL!” They look like the real thing. That is how they get to be idols.
At any rate, thank you for your interaction.
These thoughts really resonate with me.
Conservatives are called the “Right” as they are “Correct.”
Liberals are called the “Left” as their brain “left” them.
ML/NJ
Do you really think people will be listening to the Rolling Stones 100 years from now?
ML/NJ
As I have been deeper in prayer and contemplation for the past few months, its been impressed upon me the pure evil Democrats are willing to live with. How many of us can name friends or family members who either don’t care or are willing to turn a blind eye to what the Gov. of Virginia touted -— abortion after the baby has been born!? I had one family member so blind that she refused to believe the audio tape of his interview promoting this!!
What Ralph Northam stated, calmly, coherently, and kindly, was nothing Less than pure unadulterated evil. Where in the Democrat Party was the outrage? Did any of your Democratic friends or family begin to question their allegiance to a party that supports what amounts to infanticide?
Not one Democrat member of my family nor one Democrat friend of mine questioned this evil.
We are in a war of good vs. evil. What people term “Culture War” is just a manifestation of the underlying evil.
As an aside, you know it’s not nor ever will be my place to judge individuals, God will according to his time. But I sure understand what Christ meant when he spoke of the narrow gate.
Good post.
Good post.
As the closest thing to a musicologist here :-) I'll make two quick points:
1) Popular music is a derivative of the way musical elements have been used since the time of Bach. The way traditional classical music thinks of the use of tempo, dynamics, modality, harmonic tension, and timbre is the way pop, rock and roll, and rock music thinks; the difference is that the latter derives from the former. Without Bach, there could have been no Rolling Stones.
2) There are connections between classical music and "classic" rock, in part because of the number of rock musicians who were classically trained. Musicians like John Paul Jones, Jon Lord, and Keith Emerson brought their classical music training to their rock music--Lord even wrote a Concerto for Rock Band and Orchestra (cf. here).
George Harrison was also classically trained, albeit in the classical music of India rather than Europe, but his best works came after his time with Ravi Shankar, not before. And speaking of Ravi Shankar, one can see his classical influence in the music of his two daughters, the Indian music of Anoushka Shankar, and the Euro-American music of Norah Jones.
Since the rise of Romanticism, the proto-philosophy of the left, in the early 1800s, the arts have over decades become less and less connected to Western civilization as it was traditionally constituted, the amalgam of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ideals, and as they have lost the connection, they have become more and more sensational and less and less significant.
I listened to his first hour yesterday via Pragertopia.
He seemed willing to give Biden a pass in that - according to Prager - he’d done this only to grown women, without even mentioning all the kids he’s molested over the years.
I was quite taken aback by this level of ignorance since Prager usually locks his themes in fairly well.
I can only hope he revises his thoughts on this going forward.
bookmark
I don't think anyone listens to them today. People go to "see" them; the spectacle is what they're after.
This is a very good article. The total lack of any moral code within todays’ leftists is what has turned many God-loving people of the Judeo-Christian world towards prayer and to support of Donald Trump. How can we explain this phenomenon other than it seems to be a sort of Divine intervention to raise up an unlikely man to lead a rebirth of pride in our country, our constitution, and our faith?
To believers, it seems so obvious; to non-believers it seems ludicrous.
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