Part # 1
Radical Centrism and the Individual
Creating a Philosophy of Life
By: Billy Rojas
Here we are again, facing the prospect of still another bad joke
by way of our choices for president of the United States.
The Republican race is effectively over and who is standing
after months of voting in primary elections is the worst imaginable
candidate, Donald Trump -who is poorly informed on issue
after issue, who is hypocritical to an extent unimaginable in a
candidate of any election in American history except for
Barack Hussein Obama, and whose values seem to be
scripted from a combination of the most ruthless gangster
movies in the history of the film industry.
The presumptive Democratic candidate, unless some kind of
divine intervention upsets everyone's calculations, is Hillary Clinton,
a feminist who has no higher purpose in running for office than
assuaging her long-suffering ego. She is bereft of all imagination,
of serious interest in the life of the mind, and of any sense of
right vs. wrong except that provided her by the DNC, as if
American Leftist philosophy was something other than diluted Marxism
mixed with special interest identity politics. Except that in her case
there
IS something else: If you ever wanted a model for
a female equivalent of Machiavelli.....
All of this begs the question: When was the last time we had two good
choices
for president in an election? You would need to go back in time to the
1950s
and the contests between Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, three generations
ago. If even one good candidate would be sufficient you'd still need to go
back
nearly as far, to JFK, flawed or not, the "last of the Mohicans."
.
I don't give a damn what many Republicans may think, so-called
'conservatives'
who worship Ronald Reagan, venerate a nice man without functional
intelligence, someone who didn't give a damn for anything conservative
except protecting the interests of the rich. His knowledge of the Bible
rivaled
only that of Donald Trump and his views of homosexual pathology, which he
did not begin to conceive of as pathological, were little different than
that
of any Democrat you can name. His one redeeming virtue was that
he wasn't Jimmy Carter.
In so many words our choices for president tell us something no sane person
wants know about the extent of social pathology in the American population.
Which is anything but a question of the "good Left" vs. "the wicked Right"
or the good Right against the demented Left. It may well be that the
Right is more stupid than evil and the Left is more evil than stupid,
but the fact remains that both parties are dysfunctional and horribly
misguided in most of what they stand for.
This is not -or not necessarily- a question of budget expenditures for
public works or for defense or government employment. Those kinds of issues
are bean counter problems amenable to economic analysis -presuming
we can ever get beyond malfunctional laissez faire theory or also
malfunctional
Keynesianism. No, the more fundamental issues are values questions,
what is morally right and what is wrong, from which follow all other
decisions
that a society makes and that each of us as individuals make to create
the lives we lead.
As University of Toronto scholar Jordan Peterson has pointed out, the great
existentialists of the 19th century -speaking of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and
Kierkegaard- foresaw the disintegration of the old values paradigm that
had set all standards for Western civilization, a tragic series of events
that
could only end in disaster, According to their forecasts the necessary-
viz., inevitable- consequence of massive loss of faith could only go in
two directions, (1) worship of the state as a substitute for God, hence
totalitarianism, or (2) descent into nihilism and rejection of all values
except uncompromising self-centeredness and over-emphasis on
liberty as the be-all and end-all of morality, with 'anything goes'
as the foundational principle of a religionless society.
The first option was given a tryout in the 20th century; it failed
miserably
and gave us monstrous ideologies in the form of Nazism / Fascism and
Communism, plus millions of needless deaths -and suffering on a
massive scale. We are now in the midst of trying out the second
alternative,
throwing out all traditional values and substituting mindless conformism
to the values of what had been society's outcastes, especially those of
homosexuals -who have contributed nothing to our civilization who,
instead, cause enormous harm to families and communities.
There are also gender feminists, many of whom are female homosexuals,
who reject the teachings of sociobiology / evolution and demand that
all of the rest of us conform to their dysfunctional notions based on
the supposed arbitrary nature of gender. Then there are illegal immigrants
who should never have been admitted into the country in the first place,
not because they are Mexicans or others, but because they are illegal.
It is totally absurd that this group, in excess of ten million souls,
should
now be demanding rights that only belong to US citizens; nothing of the
kind would be considered seriously for one minute in Mexico or any
other sovereign state anyplace in the world. Plus there are the
Afro-centrists
who believe in invented histories that never were, proclaiming black
superiority.
And there are Muslims and supporters of Muslims, promoting tolerance
for the most intolerant religion on the face of the Earth.
None of this is remotely sane.
Which is to say that we are dealing with a disease of the Left, but a
disease
that is empowered by a weak-willed and basically ignorant Right that
is uninformed about nearly everything that matters. The opposition offered
by the Right consists of making noises, crying, and postponement of
initiatives sponsored by the Left. And that's it; the Right gives us
the Left, just a little bit latter than it otherwise would have happened.
The political Left wasn't always this way, of course. Some of us remember
when it was a working class movement based on community values,
trade union ideas, compassion for the unfortunate, and the need we all have
for unbiased justice. To the extent this version of the Left survives it is
where
Bernie Sanders gets his support. But the dominant Left has remade itself
into a nihilistic cause, which it must, because the constituent parts of
its coalition do not make sense together. Hence no traditional values of
any kind are accepted, all are thrown out so that the anti-values
of nihilists may prevail.
There is an oddity in all of this, however. The philosophy just described
is
a near cousin to libertarianism. But while libertarianism is Left-wing
in Europe, it is Right-wing in America -minus exceptions like Noam Chomsky
and his acolytes. Indeed, for a while, in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
the libertarian movement in the United States was more Left-wing in
character than otherwise. However, that didn't last and libertarians
drifted Rightward precisely because Democrats of that time were
community oriented and it was the conservative Right that stressed
such things as individual freedoms (so that private businesses could
flourish) and state's rights against the national government.
The one caveat to make explicit is that there is a smart and articulate
Right. It can be seen in the work of people like Charles Krauthammer,
Dennis Prager, Monica Crowley, Michael Medved, Thomas Sowell,
Ross Douthat, Dinesh D'Souza, David Horowitz, Naomi Shaeffer Riley,
Michael Barone, Kirsten Powers, and George Will, among others.
The trouble is that these people are basically ignored by the Republican
establishment, or, at best, they have very limited influence. And that is
the way things will stay as long as the motto of GOP decision makers
remains, "money talks" -and if you don't represent wealth
you simply don't count. Hence an endless parade of second rate
intellects as candidates for high elective office. And hence their
poor performance if they do get elected; the party is an idea wasteland.
And so the agenda of the Left goes further and further, never stopped
in its tracks, and no rollbacks anywhere.
In any case, we are living through a time of ascendency of nihilism.
Along with this goes an all-out assault upon religion, aided and abetted
by the "new Atheists" and their allies in the universities
Not that religious believers are defenseless against this onslaught,
currently under leadership of the Obama administration. After all,
there now is a rather large intellectual movement among Evangelicals
influenced by the late Francis Schaeffer, but speaking of "the pews"
and the clear majority on the Religious Right, the situation is pathetic.
And this is made worse by the identification of conservative believers
with the Republican Party, a party that has consistently promised
the moon to Christians and delivered almost nothing. Where are
these voters supposed to go? We now have the answer, at least
for some of them, a world class blowhard, Donald Trump.
All of this is completely unacceptable to Radical Centrists. The question
is:
Does it matter what is or is not acceptable to Radical Centrists?
There are so few of us that we can be disregarded by all political factions
and parties. However, maybe such disregard isn't such a hot idea if you
take a long range view. Which is the point of this essay: Radical
Centrism
has a future, and not only that, it represents the only future worth having
-certainly it does if nihilism is understood for what it is, unmitigated
evil.
The motto of Radical Centrism is, or so it is to me:
"One man and the truth equals a majority."
We are lied to again and again by "official Washington," by the mass media,
by opinion leaders of almost every description, and for what? In every
case
to protect elite interests -in the process warping the minds of nearly
every
citizen of the United States. This was done to protect Saudi Muslims
because George W. Bush had limited comprehension of Islam to begin with,
i.e., hardly any comprehension, because of the perceived need to safeguard
Mid East oil interests, and because of concerns about Muslim opinion
and how it might effect American or European politics. There was similar
lying
about Islam under William Clinton, including using the bombing of a
Sudanese
pharmaceutical plant "coincidentally" at the same time as the Monica
Lewinsky
scandal was erupting, something widely suspected as a high stakes
diversion to
attempt to mute public discussion of sexual escapades in the White House.
Clinton, of course, also lied about drug running out of Mena airport in
western Arkansas, an operation that had bi-partisan connections to
George H.W. Bush in Texas, such information documented in several
thick exposés of hundreds of pages in length, each of which has been
suppressed by the mainstream media.
Under Barack Obama there have been repeated lies intended to falsify
the nature of Islam, the pathological nature of homosexuality, the damaging
nature of black racism by blaming white people, often enough law
enforcement
officials, for crimes perpetrated by African-Americans like Trayvon Martin.
Along with this has gone skewing official reporting on the state of Israel
to make it seem as if this one successful example of a functional democracy
in the Mid East was some sort of "apartheid state" when, in fact, the real
problem lies with HAMAS, which is founded on the principle that genocide
of the Jews is the best solution to the problems of the region and
the realm of Dar al-Islam generally.
All of which is only to scratch the surface. Official lying, usually in
collusion
with the mass media, characterizes the US Government at the highest levels
and this has been true even before Nixon, but especially since that era.
And now, of course, although some of this is explainable as necessary
in order to combat terrorism, we have massive official snooping of the
sort made public by Edward Snowden and Julian Assange -neither
of whom are remotely heroes of mine, but credit where credit is due.
.
There now is actual transparency in Government even if it turns out,
all the while as government has been proclaiming the virtues of openness,
it was deceiving the American people at massive scale. Not even counting
an unknown-to-the-public number of private individuals whom the
government has seen fit to defame to safeguard secrets it would
prefer no-one knows so that the undeserved reputations of political
leaders are never challenged and various 'paragons of virtue'
exposed for what they are.
Where else does this go? Many of those who read this paper know
perfectly well where it leads even if they are too timid to say one word
because, you see, at their level, they have their own deceptions
to think about -embarrassments to conceal, large and small.
However, that fact does not nullify another fact, namely that the
US Government is quite capable of its own transgressions against
basic human decency. We live under a rigged system that protects
the interests of the powerful regardless of the morality -lack of
morality- of "important people."
Doesn't the fact that no finance executives, big bankers, or Wall Street
insiders were ever held legally liable for nearly wrecking the American
economy in 2008-2009 register? Doesn't the fact that both George
H.W. Bush and William Clinton pardoned platoons of dishonest
criminals upon leaving office register? Doesn't anything?
Jordan Peterson has observed that the societies of both America and Canada
can be characterized as cultures of deception. Lying is endemic, in other
words,
it is inescapable, and we are in serious trouble because of it. Trust in
institutions
has eroded, including institutions on which we depend, and what is
especially troubling is how religion, the traditional guarantor of social
stability,
is under attack almost everywhere.
Not that criticisms long overdue aren't "good." We need all kinds of
critiques
of religion, but not to tear faith institutions down, but to become
objective
about their strengths and weaknesses. However, this is not what is
happening.
or only what is happening selectively. What is most characteristic is an
Atheist attack against all forms of religion, sometimes including Islam
(which is highly unusual for Leftists), the objective being the dismantling
of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and you name it, and not replacing
religion with anything at all. In the end, or so we are led to believe,
a new "age of reason" will arise, free of all "superstition," and featuring
free-for-all non-morality where everything will work out smoothly,
no problems anticipated. Which, said Peterson, is utter fantasy.
But policy makers take such nonsense seriously. They do so because of
their fundamental ignorance of human psychology, of social psychology,.
of behavioral science, and, for that matter, of history of religion. After
all,
what matters is STEM / Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics,.
and Business, and almost nothing else. Anything related to culture, that is
to our social environment and to the realm of values, is regarded as
essentially worthless. Which is the set of foundational principles
at the root of modern Atheism.
Peterson, many of whose lectures are accessible for free on Youtube videos,
is hardly arguing for "old time religion," he is the opposite of a
Pentecostal
or hard-line conservative Wesleyan. However, he is very much interested in
what can be called Comparative Religion and the sociological study of
religion
as pioneered by Emile Durkheim. That is, he regards it as vital to look at
religion in terms of its utility, its usefulness, and how it serves human
needs
at the level of personal psychology. For without it, what we usually get
is pathology -either of individuals or even whole societies, think
Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, or Communist China.
In effect, Peterson is seeking to explain his version of "the religion of
the future"
and why this form of faith is crucial to human well being even if it looks
almost nothing like traditional religion.
To be sure, George W. Bush made at least half hearted efforts to lead some
sort
of revival of old time religion -basically, the only kind of religion he
really
knows- but that kind of effort is just about useless. The entire culture,
or a very large part of it, is moving away from that kind of model of
faith.
Which Ross Douthat in his 2012 best seller, Bad Religion, has pointed out
by noting that although Americans are less and less committed to
institutional religion as it has been known historically, we seem to be
more "spiritual" than ever before. By some measures -he cites
a wide variety of pubic opinion studies- we ar even more religious
at any time since the very religious 1950s. But the churches are not
automatic beneficiaries, only some denominations show any growth
at all, some are at stasis levels of no growth and no loss, while most
are in membership decline. In point of fact fewer and fewer people
are satisfied with traditional faith.
But this is an epiphenomenon, and it cannot be something else. We are
innately religious, it is hard wired into us (or into the great majority of
people)
from the stone age past when religious behaviors and religion-led social
groups
were highly useful for human survival needs. That is, we have religious
natures
because religion is the source for much and maybe most human co-operation,
the source for a strong sense of morality, the source for agreed sense of
purpose by communities, and the glue that holds families together.
This is independent of membership in a church or temple or synagogue
or anything else. This is to speak of the religious impulse or, s'il vous
plait,
the "God gene." Hence the universality of religion throughout the world.
Historically there have been almost no Atheist societies while most
societies,
at the 95+ % level, have a religious foundation. Which is to say that the
exceptions
in our era, primarily Western Europe and Canada, plus increasingly Japan,
are courting disaster. To the extent that this is true of the United
States,
which is very real, this danger also applies here. And yet the march of
progress
continues as one regime after another, especially on the Left, does what it
can to
belittle, ridicule, or simply ignore religion as a vital factor in public
life,
you know, the way that rubes "cling to their guns and religion" because
they don't know any better and, besides, what can you expect
from rednecks?
My question ever since 2008 has been: How can supposedly educated people
actually vote for an affirmative-action unqualified candidate for president
whose frame of reference was social work first and foremast, and who
obviously
-despite all of his false representations of himself as a "centrist"- was
and is
a Left-wing ideologue?
For that matter, how in the hell did he manage to graduate from Harvard?
He had no publications record, he had little interest in scholarly
anything,
and only became an editor of the Harvard Law Review on the strength
of whom he befriended who, as luck had it, were interested in a high
profile
minority student that year for the post. There really isn't something else
to conclude once you look into Obama's life story. He is the most overrated
president in the history of the republic and it should have been
transparent
to everyone eight years ago and even more obvious in 2012 but
he won both elections anyway. Of course, while 2008 may have been
understandable because of the economic crash, the GOP handed
the election to Barack Hussein four years later by nominating someone
who personified the metaphor, "stuffed shirt," but the fact is that Obama
was one more poseur, one more incompetent, and he won office
for reasons that had little or nothing to do with talents he did not have.
But that is also an example of the "religion effect;" Obama was the
savior
of the unchurched, their very own (semi-) black Jesus, their new messiah,
in a word, a phoney worshipped by the deluded.
When people are not members of a real religion, say Christianity or
Judaism
or Buddhism, they nonetheless will sign up for a substitute religion,
most often
a political party that, for them, can serve the purpose. Usually, in
America,
this is the Democratic party -for the simple reason that among religious
voters
most are registered Republicans. They have a religion, almost always some
Christian faith, sometimes orthodox Judaism, and they do not need to recast
their political affiliation as a substitute for spirituality. For
Democrats,
a plurality who have no religious affiliation, their party can be made
to fulfill spiritual needs even when they are not consciously aware
of any such thing. But the God gene doesn't care if someone is
aware or not, all it is concerned with is religious self expression.
An ingrained psychological need is felt and must be acted upon.
And so, as everyone who was not dead from the neck up realized
in 2008 and 2012, Barack Hussein became a de facto stand-in
for Jesus, or maybe Moses, about which no argument
was thinkable.
Two classic examples of this were the absurdities uttered by Chris Matthews
and Michael Richard Beschloss. For Matthews it was chills that ran up his
leg;
for Beschloss the new redeemer was the most intelligent president in
US history. Surely there was something Freudian in Matthews' sentiments,
as if he had a romantic crush on Obama, while for Beschloss his view
of things was pure nonsense, the product of religious enthusiasm par
excellence
that required no evidence, mere assertion was sufficient. Obama wrote
nothing,
his books were ghost written, Dreams from My Father the work of
Communist shill, Bill Ayers, as demonstrated in detail by Jack Cashill,
while his other books were penned by lesser lights. In any case, Obama
wrote nothing himself. Meanwhile Teddy Roosevelt wrote about 30 books,
Thomas Jefferson wrote the highly regarded Notes on the State of Virginia,
the Declaration of Independence, and scholarly correspondence that fills a
score
of volumes. Likewise Madison, the author of the US Constitution, also
wrote
most of the Federalist Papers and the equivalent of an encyclopedia of
belles letters.
Other genuine intellects who were president, whether or not they were also
book authors, include John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln,
FDR, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy. But, out of nowhere,
Beschloss claimed that Obama was superior to them all? WTH???
Of course the prize for religious conversion in a political context was the
committee of the Nobel Peace Prize who, in 2009, awarded Barack Hussein
the world's most prestigious medal -for doing precisely nothing!
All of this was ridiculous beyond belief, but it happened anyway. The only
rational explanation is that we were witnessing a mass religious
phenomenon.
By far most of the participants were not members of churches -although
some were, which only goes to show you that a good number of people
who are so sure that their religious faith is rock solid actually are in a
sort
of limbo, not entirely convinced despite the apparent sincerity of their
beliefs
There also is the factor of social conformism, pressures to run with the
herd,
and susceptibility to psychological appeals.
.
In any case, these are also, to judge from anecdotal evidence, people who
disdain the behavioral sciences, who don't see any connection between their
decision making and the lessons of sociology, social psychology, and
various
forms of psychology per se. And so they can be led by the nose, oblivious
to the fact that their emotions are being manipulated, something they would
not dream of studying because they don't have time for such "fluff" or
because of biases of long standing inherited from childhood, against
anything to do with psychology or culture.
.
Or because their system of values will not allow it, a system predicated on
the presumed fact that making money is the supreme value and nothing else
really matters all that much.
.
Or because of distrust of academic subjects like social science since,
as libertarians believe, these fields have been captured by the Left and,
anyway, all you need is praxeology, a pseudo science which is unknown
to everyone but libertarians because it has no real world value. Not that
the Left has not "taken over" social science departments at most
universities,
that is not in serious question, but so what? If you are capable of
independent
thought there is no reason why the necessary lessons of the social sciences
cannot be mastered and put to good use -not least of all in understanding
what happens to you in times of mass delusion when such things as
stampedes,
crowd panic, or mass enthusiasms for dubious causes persuade multitudes
to take leave of their senses.
.
Hence such questionable social phenomena on the Left as "Negrophilia,"
love of all things Negro, denial of all flaws of black people, worship of
people
of African background as if they are heroic on the basis of their skin
pigmentation,
and still other such things. This view was not invented by David Duke or by
the Ku Klux Klan, but by Petrine Archer-Straw, a black woman scholar from
Jamaica. Her 2000 book, Negrophilia, Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture
in the 1920s, describes this phenomenon, something she was as objective
about
as she could get because, as she knew full well, it had counterparts in any
number of nationalisms of the past, whether the excesses of
Germanocentrism,
Japanocentrism, American nativism, or anything else. It simply is ethnic
bias raised
to the status of an ideology; it is based not on merit but on group
identity.
What makes Negrophilia different is that, while black people can be and
sometimes
are Negrophiles, its main appeal is to white people in a sort of reverse
snob appeal.
Its origins, however, derive from the failure of upper class
European-derived
culture to prevent the horrors of WWI. By the 1920s that culture had been
rejected by masses among the young, especially the intelligentsia and
wannabe
cultural leaders, who turned to Africa, especially the arts of France's
black
colonial peoples, as a global alternative to white culture.
It was then exported to the United States, arriving during the time of
the Harlem Renaissance when African-American artists, especially in music
and drama, were first making their mark. Gradually Negrophilia grew
in popularity on the Left as one way to justify the Civil Rights movement
to other white people. But then it took on a life of its own, anything like
objectivity went out the window, and it became full fledged mass delusion,
elevating black people sui generis to undeserved high status, disregarding
every
legitimate criticism that might be made of a population susceptible to
crime
at inordinate rates, susceptible to the effects of poor education
fostered
by an anti-intellectual system of values, and on raw emotionalism
almost without any trace of self-criticism.
The culmination took place in 2008 and then 2012.
To be sure, this critique does not apply to a minority among African-
Americans,
nor to all Leftists, but the phenomenon is real enough and has had effects
that have done no-one the least good. Hence America was saddled with
an incompetent black president for 8 years, hence Islam was allowed to
make inroads in American society, hence a mental illness, homosexuality,
was "normalized" at the highest levels of government, hence the Supreme
Court was packed with Leftists, and hence nihilistic culture was advanced
beyond the wildest dreams of nihilists themselves, and, as an added bonus,
the United States now has the worst national debt in the nation's history,
almost $20 trillion, dwarfing even the reckless spending of George W. Bush.
But, hey, if you study STEM subjects and business nothing else really
matters?
Actually, unless we get culture right, unless we get education right,
unless
we get values right, any and all successes we might achieve through
advances
in the STEM professions or business can only be dust in our mouths.
We don't have a society worth living in unless we get culture, education,
and values right, this is what is most basic and most necessary.
.
Where we find ourselves today is in a colossal mess. What can we do about
it?
First of all we need to stop fooling ourselves into thinking that we can
make
the right decisions without serous research. As things are opinion is
king,
no research necessary, just go with the flow, swim with the current,
and all will be well.
.
This approach is as dysfunctional as anything gets. It justifies, whether
you
realize it or not, the decisions of elites in business, in entertainment,
and
in the media. Adopt that attitude, "go along to get along," and you make
yourself the intellectual slave of special interests, its as simple as
that.
.
Nothing makes this more clear than the way that the homosexual movement
has succeeded in the years since 1973. Each and every supporter of the
cause
of normalization of a mental illness is following a script created in the
early
1970s by such homosexuals as Alan Bell, Martin Weinberg, and Harry Hay,
to change the terms of public discussion of homosexual pathology into
one of civil rights, one of "simple justice," and one of brave opposition
to an invented mental affliction called "homophobia."
The strategy worked like a charm. With the rise of anti-war protests in
the
late 1960s a method had been developed consisting of mass demonstrations
backed by violence, everything masked by appeals to American democracy.
About which there is copious documentation. For a book written from
the perspective of homosexuals themselves see Dennis Altman's 1982 opus,
The Homosexualization of America. For the viewpoint of a Christian lawyer
and damned good researcher, see O. R. Adams' 1998/2001 volume,
As We Sodomize America.
In other words, if you pride yourself on how open minded you are, what
a decent sense of justice you have, and how au current your ideas are,
in tune with enlightened opinion, you are a dupe for homosexuals of
the 1970s and 1980s who set out to change society for their benefit, to
redefine
the terms of the debate, and to discredit their opponents by calling them
"homophobes" -as if speaking the truth about a psychopathology was
morally reprehensible. That is, you don't have a valid argument, you are a
mouthpiece
for anti-social homosexual interests.
.
Once the homosexuals captured the news media and the entertainment industry
there was little to stop them. If you have the opinion that homosexuality
is
a civil rights issue, a question of basic fairness and freedom, you are,
after all,
expressing views that are the opposite of the greats of psychology you have
never read, no less than Freud himself in his Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
plus the views of Erich Fromm , Karen Horney (hor-nye), Irving Bieber,
Charles Socarides, Anna Freud, Abram Kardiner, and many others. You are
opposing political leaders of the past whom millions continue to respect,
in America no less than Thomas Jefferson, George Washington,
Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, et. al., including Martin Luther
King.
And you are opposing every philosopher who ever wrote on the issue before
about 1970, starting with Plato (especially in The Laws), and including
Aquinas
and Immanuel Kant. You are also opposing religious figures of many
descriptions,
from the Bible to Martin Luther and most theologians well into the 20th
century, but including Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, Confucians, Zoroastrians
and still others.
That is, you have been sold a bill of goods and are proud of it.
It takes courage, actual courage, to speak up against elites. However,
all the courage in the world won 't avail you anything at all unless you
also are
well informed. Which most Christians, by far, refuse to become. For them
the be-all and end-all of the discussion are the words of the Bible -a
book that
few ever read critically, and, moreover, don't even study in any depth
to find out just how uncompromising the Holy Book actually is in its
denunciations of sodomy. There are, it should be pointed out, no less than
30 passages in the bible that unequivocally condemn sodomy, such as
Matthew 11: 20-24, words said to be Jesus' own, not even to consider
repeated condemnations by the Apostle Paul.
In terms of a strategy for opposing homosexuals, Christians could not
possibly
have been more ineffective.
As crusaders for sexual sanity and social well being, Christians -with few
exceptions- have been a joke. They don't know what in hell they are doing
and,
it has been my experience despite years of trying, they aren't interested
in help
from anyone else. One of the (very) few counter-examples is how Liberty
University has employed an Orthodox Jewish scholar and psychologist,
Judith Reisman, in its social studies program. Reisman's voice in criticism
of homosexuality, criticism of nihilism, and criticism of Kinsey's horribly
flawed
research, nonetheless remains unusual among Christians. Most of the time,
Christians prefer only one course of action, "pray harder," as if that kind
of approach can possibly produce meaningful results in the real world.
News flash: While miracles should never be discounted as
once-in-a-blue-moon possibilities, at the 99% level you need to do something
else. Like
actual study,
so that you know what it is that you are taking about.
--
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Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
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