Leftism

The Wacky World of Liberal Fundamentalism

August 25, 2011August 25, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

American Thinker logo conservatives by Robert Weissberg –

The candidacies of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, Bible-affirming Christians, predictably have ignited the liberal media’s zeal for exposing their allegedly odd if not wacko religious beliefs (see here). Support for some version of creationism, a faith in the efficacy of prayer, and actual belief in scriptural condemnation of homosexuality (among other religious views) are taken as prima facie evidence of presidential unsuitability. To be sure, millions of Americans (assumed to be ill-educated trailer-court denizens with rotting teeth and beer guts) may share these odd inclinations, but, at least according to liberal pundits, holding them betrays a lack of intellectual sophistication plus an aversion to modern science. Such antediluvian fundamentalism should, say the experts, have gone extinct with the Scopes Monkey Trials.

Ironically, liberal attackers are guilty of far greater unscientific dogmatism, sloppy thinking, and mind-boggling confusion but fail to notice it thanks to a manufactured respectability that deters — if not forbids — close inspection. [Read more…]

Christian Church facing a revolution that is shaking its foundations: the gay revolution

August 24, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Albert Mohler –
The Christian church has faced no shortage of challenges in its 2,000-year history. But now it’s facing a challenge that is shaking its foundations: homosexuality.

To many onlookers, this seems strange or even tragic. Why can’t Christians just join the revolution?

And make no mistake, it is a moral revolution. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University demonstrated in his recent book, “The Honor Code,” moral revolutions generally happen over a long period of time. But this is hardly the case with the shift we’ve witnessed on the question of homosexuality.

In less than a single generation, homosexuality has gone from something almost universally understood to be sinful, to something now declared to be the moral equivalent of heterosexuality—and deserving of both legal protection and public encouragement. Theo Hobson, a British theologian, has argued that this is not just the waning of a taboo. Instead, it is a moral inversion that has left those holding the old morality now accused of nothing less than “moral deficiency.” [Read more…]

The Credit Downgrade: Symptom of the Marxist Disease

August 20, 2011August 21, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Democrat Communist Marxist no difference by Ion Mihai Pacepa –
On August 5, 2011, the credit rating of the United States was downgraded for the first time in this country’s history. That was a shot across the bow warning that Marxism can damage even the almighty United States.

Native Americans say that if you really want to know someone, you have to walk a mile in his moccasins. I walked in Marxist shoes over many miles and for many years, and I am convinced that if the Democratic Party has its way, it will transform the United States into a socialist country in all but name. During the 2008 election campaign, its leaders loudly announced that they would drastically increase taxes on the American rich — American businesses and their owners — in order to finance programs for the poor. In other words, that they would start transforming capitalist America into a socialist state.

If there had been any doubt in my mind that the Democratic Party was following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, that doubt vanished when the Democrats began ferociously fighting against extending the Bush tax cuts for individuals making more than $200,000 per year. That is core Marxism at its fundamental best. [Read more…]

Obama Vineyards, while America Burns

August 19, 2011August 19, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Obama’s narcissism, callousness, and disregard (and dare we say hatred) for America reach new lows. While unemployment rises, inflation jumps, the stock market disintegrates, more layoffs announced, the dollar’s value crashes, the economy heading towards another Recession, with 45.8 Million Americans on food stamps, and tens of millions more suffering and struggling to survive, his majesty Emperor Obama and his entourage runs off to yet another luxurious vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, playground for the rich and famous.

[Read more…]

Silence of the Shepherds

August 16, 2011August 17, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

American Thinker logo conservatives by Fay Voshell –

As early as 1867, Matthew Arnold warned that the ebbing of Christianity in England would disturb the societal order and usher in waves of violence. His famous poem, “Dover Beach,” noted the result of the weakening of Christianity would mean “we are here as on a darkling plain, Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Years later, in 1919, surveying the aftermath of World War I, William Butler Yeats would write his equally famous poem “The Second Coming.” Like Arnold, the poet saw that the dissolution of the ideals foundational to Great Britain’s moral order, plus the dissolution of the global societal order imposed by the British Empire, would result in “anarchy loosed upon the world.” [Read more…]

British Degeneracy on Parade

August 11, 2011August 12, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

British Violence Moral Failure by Theodore Dalrymple

The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population during the current riots has not surprised me in the least. I have been writing about it, in its slightly less acute manifestations, for the past 20 years. To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

Three men were run over and killed as they tried to protect their property in the very area of Birmingham in which I used to work, and through which I walked daily; the large town that I live near when I’m in England has also seen rioting. Only someone who never looked around him and never drew any conclusions from the faces and manner of the young men he saw would have been surprised. [Read more…]

Obama Downgraded, Tea Party Vindicated

August 10, 2011August 10, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Obama Fail Downgraded by Peter Ferrara

President Obama achieved the historic downgrading of America’s credit rating the old-fashioned way. He earned it.

He came into office with federal spending already near an historic peak, with a percent of GDP at 20.7 percent and having increased by one-seventh during the Bush years. One year earlier Bush had joined with then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to enact a pointless Keynesian stimulus package of $168 billion, which the record will show created exactly 0.00 jobs, and stimulated nothing but national debt.

Send In the Clowns
Barack Obama surveyed the continuing wreckage of the financial crisis, and decided to follow the advice of the reknowned economist Otter, “who famously said in ‘Animal House,’ this situation ‘absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part,'” as quoted by Andy Kessler in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. [Read more…]

‘I’ Is for Indoctrination

August 6, 2011August 8, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Indoctrination of Children by Lucia Rafanelli –
“Back to school” may soon mean something more like “back to political education camp” if liberal regulators have their way.

If your child is looking to get a high school diploma in Maryland, reading, writing, and arithmetic may no longer be enough. Students may soon have to be able to “[e]xplain that differences in the behavior of individuals arise from the interaction of culture and experience” in order to graduate.

Despite it sounding more like the stuff of sociology than hard environmental science, that line is taken from a draft of the state’s new “Environmental Literacy Curriculum.” The draft, according to William Reinhard of the Maryland State Department of Education, is meant to “help guide local [school] systems as they develop their own plans” to integrate environmental literacy into their curricula. [Read more…]

Obama’s Failed Presidency

August 2, 2011August 2, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Obama is a Failure by Steve McCann –
There comes a time and a point in history which indelibly define a President. Oftentimes the event may not be of major import in the greater scheme of things but the management of it is of such prominence that the success or failure in the handling of the issue is permanently attached to the individual. Such a moment has happened to Barack Obama. His incompetence, inability to lead, prevarications, petulance and immaturity in the debt ceiling crisis have indelibly created an image of abject failure in the minds of a critical mass of people in the United States and around the globe. He will never be able to overcome the portrait that has been etched in too many minds.

Barack Obama’s only interest in the debt ceiling debate was to raise the borrowing limit sufficiently to get by the next election, and as a cudgel to denigrate the Republicans. His concern was not for the American people and the impact of overwhelming national debt, nor an impending and inevitable credit downgrade. Rather, he was determined that raising the debt ceiling would not become an issue during the presidential campaign. Thus, spending cuts created out of whole cloth, combined with tax increases aimed at stoking the embers of class envy, were bandied about by his party in order to justify an increase in the debt ceiling of $2.4 Trillion. [Read more…]

Why It’s Time to Speak about God Again

August 1, 2011August 1, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

God Trinity Light of World by Jay Haug –
America is living under an illusion: the idea that we can expunge God (broadly understood) from our national and public belief system and still operate a moral and accountable government.

C.S. Lewis summed up the problem in The Abolition of Man. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.” John Adams asserted, “Our Constitution was made for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Our founding fathers laid down a system that demanded conscientious, self-restrained implementation — a government dependent on the character of the people. Ben Franklin, perhaps the most deistic of the founding fathers, famously assured one curious bystander that the Constitutional Conventions had engendered “a Republic, if you can keep it.” How many people today truly understand that America’s health depends on the moral character of its citizens, of their personal “keeping” of our nation? [Read more…]