Orthodox Editors

America: Time to Start Over

July 30, 2011July 30, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Liberty Crying America Crumbling by Matt Patterson –
This must have been what it was like living in the 1930s: politicians running around, fingers in their ears, unwilling or unable to confront a rising conflagration that they helped to light.

Back then, the threat came from a revivified and revanchist Germany. Western leaders stood by while the Germans rearmed, then looked the other way as ever larger chunks of the Continent fell to the blitzkrieg. When the enervated Western elites finally took a stand over Poland, it was too late — the fire was so large that, by the time it was finally quenched, the world lay in smoldering ruin.

Today we face a different, though no less mortal, sort of threat: the wealth of the West has been revealed to be largely illusory, built on the foolish foundations of credit that shift and scatter like sands in the wind. [Read more…]

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism

July 27, 2011August 2, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

NASA Data No Global Warming by James Taylor –
NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models. [Read more…]

Food Totalitarians on Parade

July 27, 2011July 28, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Food Totalitarians Food Police by Chuck Roger –
Within the last few years, we have been treated to attempts by government to control our food intake with regulatory “nudges” and legislative edicts. Sugar, salt, trans-fats, fats in general, fast foods, and school lunches are just a few ingredients and food types which have come under assault by sanctimonious busybodies seeking to dictate “healthy” eating to everyone.

New York Times food writer Mark Bittman provides the latest in we-know-what’s-best-for-you babble. In a Times op-ed, Bittman complains, “WHAT will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits?”

The question itself makes a fundamentally flawed assumption and exhibits arrogance. Why is it anyone’s job to “get Americans to change [their] eating habits?” By posing the question in the first place, Bittman implicitly considers himself to be among a select minority tasked with providing guidance to the majority. [Read more…]

Beyond the Dictatorship of Relativism

July 26, 2011July 28, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Pope Benedict Moral Relativism by Robert Royal –
Almost everyone who pays attention to religion and public affairs knows of Joseph Ratzinger’s famous homily shortly before he was elected pope denouncing the modern “dictatorship of relativism.” The future Benedict XVI rightly drew the connection between, on the one hand, the alleged tolerance and openness professed by many people opposed to the old faith and morals, and, on the other hand, the highhanded public means by which they now force their views on everyone else.

All quite true and profound. But it’s become quite clear that what now most threatens traditional religious belief and behavior is not exactly relativism. Or openness. Or tolerance. Not by a long shot. It’s a substantial set of alternative beliefs and teachings. And claiming that this new faith is fairness or neutrality simply won’t survive a moment’s thought.

Take the gay marriage measures passed in New York State. The ground had been prepared for this and a whole host of other public policy shifts by claiming, for instance, that for all of us sexuality is fluid and “socially constructed.” A kind of relativism, if you will. [Read more…]

A Fling with the Welfare State

July 25, 2011July 26, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Welfare State Democrats Obama by Noemie Emery –
From the best of intentions to bankruptcy and recriminations

The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.” [Read more…]

Embracing the Moral Order – Jane Austen’s Marital Advice

July 22, 2011July 23, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen by Chuck Colson –
The experts have a lot of ideas about why marriages crumble. But one of my favorite answers comes from someone who gave literary marriage advice — some 200 years ago: Jane Austen.

Miss Austen had a delightfully satirical eye — an approach to life that was reflected in her novels. But as Benjamin Wiker points out in his new book, 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read, Austen, the daughter of a clergyman, also had a strong and biblical core of common sense — especially when it came to romantic relationships. Her books reflect the moral order, and celebrate marriage itself.

Wiker notes that Austen lived during the early Romantic movement. The Romantics were lived a life “defined by the passions of the moment. For them, to feel is everything.”

In her novel, Sense and Sensibility, Austen describes the inevitable consequences of this approach to life. It’s the story of two sisters, both of whom fall deeply in love. [Read more…]

Islamic Supremacism Trumps Christianity at Ground Zero

July 21, 2011July 22, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Pamela Geller –

While New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg works in anxious haste to build the cultural obscenity that is the Ground Zero mosque, the iconic St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was built in 1916 and destroyed in the attack on the World Trade Center towers by Muslim terrorists, remains vanquished, unable to rebuild.

Bloomberg is lobbying for 9/11 taxpayer funds for the Islamic supremacist grifters behind the Ground Zero mosque, but St. Nicholas Church is in purgatory ten years after the worst day in modern American history.

Perhaps St. Nicholas Church should claim that it is a mosque — then Bloomberg and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn would probably pour the cement for its foundation. [Read more…]

Obama Redefining ‘Poverty’

July 20, 2011July 22, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by David Paulin –
What does it mean to be poor in America today? For typical “poor” households — as defined by the government — it means cable television, two color television sets, and two or more cars.

As for housing, it means living in air-conditioned comfort — in decent accommodations with even more space than “average” Europeans have. (Not poor Europeans, to be sure, but “average” Europeans.) Moreover, most “poor” Americans get the medical care they need, and they eat enough — in fact, they eat too much. [Read more…]

Ten Ways Progressive Policies Harm Society’s Moral Character

July 19, 2011July 20, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –

While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society’s moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are 10 reasons:

1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.

The greatest description of American civilization was written in the early 19th century by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the differences distinguishing Americans from Europeans that he most marveled at was how much Americans — through myriad associations — took care of one another. Until President Franklin Roosevelt began the seemingly inexorable movement of America toward the European welfare state — vastly expanded later by other Democratic presidents — Americans took responsibility for one another and for themselves far more than they do today. Churches, Rotary Clubs, free-loan societies and other voluntary associations were ubiquitous. As the state grew, however, all these associations declined. In Western Europe, they have virtually all disappeared. [Read more…]

Charlie Rangel’s Misunderstanding of Christ and Charity

July 18, 2011July 20, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Vineyard Parable Christianity Christ by William Sullivan –
The left is desperate to coerce Americans into embracing the president’s platform of increasing taxes on the wealthy to redistribute to the downtrodden, slothful, and all those between who stand to collect. So Charlie Rangel appealed to a largely Christian nation, “What would Jesus do?”

The hypocrisy here is so obvious that it need not be discussed in detail. Suffice it to say, when and where progressives draw the line on Christian influence in legislation tends to compromise any faith they claim to have. Asking this question about the current budget debate but not about, say, the morality of tax dollars serving to mutilate and siphon unborn babies from their mothers’ wombs is suspicious to say the least. If conservatives cite Christ’s teaching to protect unborn lives from a progressive agenda that indiscriminately allows for their destruction, it is panned as the archaic ravings of crackpots. Yet when Christ is referenced as a template of charity to advance the progressives’ redistributive agenda, nothing could be more pertinent to American values. [Read more…]