INTOLERABLE TOLERANCE

Have you witnessed the fallout from the latest election -- how it has affected Liberals? It has unmasked them entirely.



They think religious people are stupid. Not just stupid, dangerous.



Make that Christians.  More specifically, make that Evangelicals.



The Left, the base of the Democratic Party, hail the virtues of tolerance and consider themselves to be THE tolerant citizens of America. In their touting of tolerance they express their obvious disdain for those whose views run contrary to that of enlightened Liberalism.



Dare to make a statement of conviction of any kind, and one of these Leftists will set down his cheese and wine, pause his lecture on the virtues of plurality and the absurdity of the belief in absolute Truth, and tell you your convictions -- everything you believe and hold dear -- are absolutely wrong. Where does he get his understanding that what you claim is "right" is actually not? Against what standard is this wrongness measured? He can't say. All he knows is that you're a bigot, you're intolerant, you're not worthy of being an American. In fact, you're not smart enough to understand what it means to be an American.



And not only are you dumb, you're dangerous. Fanatics like you don't belong in a "tolerant" culture like ours. You and your beliefs and the people who share them should not be allowed in our civilized society . . . or, at the very least, you should be denied the right to vote. Because when you vote, when you're politically active, you screw everything up.



People like you foist upon the world monsters like Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Antonin Scalia.



People like you are the most likely to attack America: you're no different than the Islamists who fly planes into buildings, suicide-bomb pizzerias, detonate car bombs in the middle of busy streets, and blow up buses. At least those Islamic terrorists had a reason: America, pushed by people like you, has oppressed the Arab world. Yes, you are the reason 3,000 Americans were killed on September 11.



Nowhere has your un-Americanism been more poignantly explained and demonstrated than on the New York Times opinion pages over the last two days. Need evidence? Here are portions of five opinion pieces that made it into the ever-so-prestigious (and self-righteous) newspaper of record.



#1 -- From "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out" by Garry Wills:



"The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.



"Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.



"It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs - as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated.



" The moral zealots will, I predict, give some cause for dismay even to nonfundamentalist Republicans. Jihads are scary things. It is not too early to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment."



#2 -- From "The Red Zone" by Maureen Dowd:



"The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.



"W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage."



#3 -- From "Two Nations Under God" by Thomas Friedman:



"Why didn't I feel totally depressed after George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, or even when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore? Why did I wake up feeling deeply troubled yesterday?



" hat troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do - they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.



" At one level this election was about nothing. None of the real problems facing the nation were really discussed. But at another level, without warning, it actually became about everything. Partly that happened because so many Supreme Court seats are at stake, and partly because Mr. Bush's base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president. I felt as if I registered to vote, but when I showed up the Constitutional Convention broke out.



" My problem with the Christian fundamentalists supporting Mr. Bush is not their spiritual energy or the fact that I am of a different faith. It is the way in which he and they have used that religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad. I respect that moral energy, but wish that Democrats could find a way to tap it for different ends."



#4 -- From "O.K., Folks: Back to Work" by Bob Herbert:



"Mr. Bush's victory on Tuesday was not based on his demonstrated competence in office or on a litany of perceived successes. For all the talk about values that we're hearing, the president ran a campaign that appealed above all to voters' fears and prejudices. He didn't say he'd made life better for the average American over the past four years. He didn't say he had transformed the schools, or made college more affordable, or brought jobs to the unemployed or health care to the sick and vulnerable.



"He said, essentially, be very afraid. Be frightened of terrorism, and of those dangerous gay marriages, and of those in this pluralistic society who may have thoughts and beliefs and values that differ from your own.



"As usual, he turned reality upside down. A quintessential American value is tolerance for ideas other than one's own. Tuesday's election was a dismaying sprint toward intolerance, sparked by a smiling president who is a master at appealing to the baser aspects of our natures."



#5 -- From "No Surrender" by Paul Krugman:



"President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the barriers between church and state. And thanks to a heavy turnout by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush has four more years to advance that radical agenda.



" Democrats are not going to get the support of people whose votes are motivated, above all, by their opposition to abortion and gay rights (and, in the background, opposition to minority rights). All they will do if they try to cater to intolerance is alienate their own base.



" Democrats mustn't give up the fight. What's at stake isn't just the fate of their party, but the fate of America as we know it."



Don't you get it, you rubes? You and your God and your morality are destroying America.



Hattip to HumanEventsOnline.com

FINALLY

Blogger has been down all morning so I wasn't able to post any new blogs so far today. I'm speaking in a local spiritual retreat tonight and tomorrow, and then returning to Charlotte on Sunday for two weeks. The National Conference on Christian Apologetics is next weekend in Charlotte. I highly recommend it for both hard-core apologists and for those who want to learn more about this branch of theology. Our speakers include Peter Kreeft, Hank Hanagraaff, Norm Geisler, and Ergun Caner. Check out the details here.

FEEL THE LOVE

Here are some of the ways the Democrats are seeking unity and common cause following the election:

From a column in today's Boston Globe...

"Some Kerry supporters were fairly bursting with anger yesterday. Jessica Johnson, 59, of Cambridge, who said she had volunteered for Kerry, said she was filled with optimism on Election Day, telling herself: ''When Kerry gets into the White House, this stone, this weight on my chest, will be lifted."

''He could have made a great president," Johnson said. ''Many Americans have nothing between their ears. Americans are fat, lazy, and stupid. I don't like this country anymore."

Or how about this concert by peace and unity performer, Joan Baez:

...the most remarkable and disturbing episode occurred halfway through the concert when Joan stopped singing and announced that she had "multiple personalities." One of her multiple personalities is that of a fifteen year old poor black girl named Alice from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. Baez decided to share with us Alice's views on the election. Amazed and horrified I watched a rich, famous, extremely white folksinger perform what can only be described as bit of minstrelsy—only the painted on blackface was missing. Alice, the black teenager from Arkansas Baez was pretending to be, spoke in a dialect so broad and thick that it would put Uncle Remus and Amos and Andy to shame. Baez' monologue was filled with phrases like, "I'se g'win ta" to do this that or the other and dropping all final "g's." Baez as Alice made statements like, "de prezident, he be a racist," and "de prezident, he got a bug fer killin'." Finally, since Bush won the election with 58.7 million votes to Kerry's 55.1 million, Alice observed, "Seems lak haf' de country be plumb crazy." Since Baez was reading Alice's notes, it is evident that she thinks that Arkansas' public schools don't teach black children to write standard English.

Once Joan finished her minstrelsy riff, the audience, in which I did not see a single black person, went wild with applause and hoots and hollers. I have never felt so embarrassed for a bunch of "liberals" in my life. I wonder where Baez got her notions of how poor black country folk talk—she couldn't be stereotyping, could she?

Or how about these words of grace from our friendly liberal bloggers (hat tip: Instapundit:

Marc Cooper: Could there possibly have been an incumbent more easy to knock-off than George W. Bush? A real-life opposition party would have been insulted to be matched with a such an unworthy and frail rival. The Democrats, by contrast, got their lights punched out.

Tbogg: I look at the big map and all of the red in flyover country and I feel like I've been locked in a room with the slow learners.

Andrew Northrup: The national Democratic Party needs to shift to the right, culturally, in order to compete nationally. No choice. Wah wah wah, I'm going to go vote for Nader, wah wah. You should have voted this time.

Jeff Jarvis: Good for you, Kerry, for conceding. Thank you.

Daily Kos: [I]t's clear the Democratic Party as currently constituted is on its deathbed. It needs reforms, and it needs them now. Quite frankly, the status quo simply won't cut it. Howard Dean for DNC Chair.

Oliver Willis: We're telling the world that we endorse the last four years, and give thumbs up to more evil. Sick.

Ezra Klein: I, like most of us, fell for the echo chamber. Daily Kos, MyDD, Steve Soto, Pandagon, and all the other blogs are run by good people with positive intentions, but if they're you're primary source for information, you're outlook is perverted by an overwhelming amount of good news and a general disdain for the factual accuracy of bad news. It perverts your perspective and, because the sample group is so totally different than most of America, it begins to twist your political predictions and assumptions of what works…

Kevin Drum: MOST IMPORTANT EVENT....RECONSIDERED… I'll plump for the Massachusett's Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage. The result was nearly a dozen initiatives across the country to ban gay marriage and a perfect wedge issue for Republicans. For the second election in a row, it looks like the president was chosen by the courts.

Matthew Yglesias: With a majority of the popular vote and expanded margins in the House and Senate, we're going to see Bush Unleashed -- something that will probably be much crazier than what we've seen over the past four years.

Andrew Sullivan: George W. Bush is our president. He deserves a fresh start, a chance to prove himself again, and the constructive criticism of those of us who decided to back his opponent.

I feel their love. How 'bout you?

FOUR MORE YEARS!

I am exhausted but exhilerated by this election. The roller coaster of emotions has finally stopped at TRUIMPH! This was a singular win for the Religious Right of the Republican Party. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the moral campaign issues trumped all the other issue, including the economy, healthcare reform, social security, terror, etc.

Now we need to keep the pressure on our conservative legislators to use this clear mandate to reverse the damage done to our nation by a half century of liberal domination of the government. We cannot sit back. We much confront the error of their thinking with sound rational thought. One of the first things we must do is replace liberal activist judges with conservative judges who will enforce constitutional law.

Another obvious consequence of this landmark election is the powerful signal sent to the advocates of anarchy and terrorist. The American people do not go to war lightly. However, when they do we want to win. This is a clear vote of confidence for our military forces and our friends around the world who seek freedom and liberty from the fear and oppression of terror and tyranny. We are in a war on terror and Iraq is an integral part of that war.

There is more to be said but I hope you will gather with friends and fellow believers tonight in your home and churchs to offer our God prayers of thanksgiving and praise for His grace and mercy.

WISHFUL THINKING GONE BAD

The Democrats are suffering from a severe case of wishful thinking gone terribly bad. The liberal bloggers are calling for anarchy in the streets. So far I'm thankful that the Kerry/Edwards campaign are just challenging the vote count. When that fails will they turn to the thousands of kool-aid drinking lawyers. When that fails, will they unleash their brute squad to rough-up the white-haired ladies who voted against them?

As I've said many times in this blog, the Democrats have no choice but to cling to the only political power they have left, their activist judges of the federal Judiciary. The clear fact is that every legal pundit I've read this morning from both sides of the aisle agrees that Kerry doesn't have grounds in the courts.

Please join me in prayer that today Senator Kerry will concede the President's overwhelming victory in both the popular and electoral college elections.

MORALS MATTERED

It early the morning of Wednesday, November the 3rd, and the media still refuses to declare President Bush has won reelection. Despite their biases, the internals of the election are providing some interesting insights into what motivated voters to turn out in such large numbers.

The number one issue that moved voters to go to their polls was moral issue. Moral issues like same-sex marriage, abortion, and embryonic stem cell research were declared by voters in the exit polls to be more important that the economy and terrorism. ABCNews just credited the margin to the huge turnout of black and white evangelical Christians voting their values. Remarkably, the voters in each of the 10 states that had one man-one woman marriage amendments on the ballots passed those issues overwhelmingly.

Praise God! It has been the prayer of many of us that the huge sleeping giant of the evangelical church has been awakened at last. Now we need to leverage the influence we have earned in the Republican party into real legislative action that will reverse the damages to our culture for nearly half a century of liberal political activism.

God heard our prayers!

IS THE IRAQ WAR JUST?

We were afterglowing following our Bible study tonight and the question was asked, "Is there scriptural evidence that supports Bush's preemptive war in Iraq? This is an important question for Christians to dig into the word of God for the truth.

We must start by asking another question. What is the biblical function of civil government? A cursive examination of scriptures reveals that civil government is established by God to punish evil and reward good. Civil societies are mandated to protect it's interests with force when necessary. Officials are neither commanded to turn the other cheek nor to go the extra mile. That is the biblical mandate to the church.

This is a very important fact that is often misunderstood by well-meaning Christians. The church is the Body of Christ and is limited in membership to born again believers. Biblical civil societies are institiutions designed by God to protect the legitimate interests of all members of that society, including all races, all religions, and all genders. Civil society is open and inclusive.

Therefore, it is appropriate and within the scope of the biblical mandate for civil governments to organize, maintain, and extend military force (the sword) against any threats to its citizenry, its property, or its national interests. The question we need to explore is whether Iraq under Saddam was a real and viable threat to America's ligitimate interests?

This is a bit more challenging to answer. There is abundant evidence that the Saddam regime and al-Qeada had frequent contacts priort to and following 9/11. The exploits of the Jordanian terrorist al-Zarchawi in Iraq are illustrative of those relationships. There is however no evidence linking Saddam to the planning or the execution of the 9/11 attacks.

Having said that, it is also clear that Saddam did not limit his WMD terroism to attacking the Kurds, the Shiites, the Kuwaitis, and the Iranians. He also regularly supplied weapons, funds, and material to Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza. Saddam also provided "reward" funds to the families of the homicide bombers in Israel. Saddam has a long history of exporting and supporting terrorism throughout the Middle East, and had exploited the UN's Food For Oil program through illegal oil deals and kickbacks to key European allies to undermine Western solidarity against terrorism.

One of Saddam's primary objectives in the Middle East has been the destruction of Israel. Saddam saw himself as the new King Nebucanezzar of Babylon to rid the Muslim world of the curse of the Jews. During the first Gulf War Saddam launched missles at Israeli cities. His vicious attacks on Iran and Kuwait were further evidence of his murderous intentions to dominate the region.

As the only democratic state in the Middle East (oops, forgot Afghanistan and, the Lord willing, Iraq), Israel is a strategic ally of the United States. As allies, both nations are committed through treaties and agreements to come to the defense the other against attack. In other words, an attack on Israel is an attack on the vital national interests of the United States. This alliance is critical because of the strategic geo-political issues of the Middle East. The last thing the United States wants is for Israel to unleash its formatible war machine against the oil-producing Muslim nations of the region.

Therefore, was Saddam an imminent threat to the US interests in the Middle East? Yes. Was the United States government within the biblical mandate to act with force against the Saddam regime in Iraq? Yes. Is the Iraqi war a part of the international war on terror? Yes. Should Christians support the Iraq war as a just war? Yes.

A GRATEFUL AMERICA

Tonight is the appropriate time to give the Swift Boat Vets and the Vets for Truth a blogosphere STANDING OVATION for their courage, determination, and fidelity in the face of heavy enemy fire from the Kerry Kamp during this elect. These true brothers-in-arms have fought the good fight on behalf to reclaim the honor, respect, and admiration of the nation they so bravely defended.

The clarity and integrity of your valiant stand for honor and truth in the face of three decades of silence and, for some, shame was the highlight of this campaign for me, and I suspect for thousands of others Americans. Thank yoy for awakening your brothers and sisters out of the awful slumber of defeatism spawned by the lies and distortions of the Vietnam era.

I am proud to call you neighbors, friends, and co-defenders of the legaacy of this great nation. May God richly bless you for your stand and may he wipe away the tears of pain, sorrow, and despair from your eyes.

A COOL RESPONSE TO A HOT TOPIC

The New York Times is once again fanning the flames of global catastrophe, however, a recent article by Thomas Sieger Derr in the November 04 issue of First Things magazine does an excellent job of fisking the hype about the "proven" science of global warming. Following are several excerpt:

The consensus holds that we are experiencing unprecedented global warming and that human activity is the main culprit. The past century, we are told, has been the hottest on record, with temperatures steadily rising during the last decades. Since human population and industrial activity have risen at the same time, it stands to reason that human activity is, one way or another, the cause of this observed warming. Anything wrong with this reasoning?

The article continues by pointing out the fallicies in thinking and reporting that have driven the global warming warning to page one headlines.

In sum, what we learn from multiple sources is that the earth (and not just Europe) was warmer in the tenth century than it is now, that it cooled dramatically in the middle of our second millennium (this has been called the "little ice age"), and then began warming again. Temperatures were higher in medieval times (from about 800 to 1300) than they are now, and the twentieth century represented a recovery from the little ice age to something like normal. The false perception that the recent warming trend is out of the ordinary is heightened by its being measured from an extraordinarily cold starting point, without taking into account the earlier balmy medieval period, sometimes called the Medieval Climate Optimum. Data such as fossilized sea shells indicate that similar natural climate swings occurred in prehistoric times, well before the appearance of the human race.

So much for the anthropogenic model of climactic change that is the keystone of the global warming religion. Yes, I said religion. A religious belief is based on faith and the high priest of global warming are pushing a brand of religion that requires you to ignore and suspend truth in favor of their twisted perspective on the future.

What, then, is the cause of the current warming trend? As everyone has heard, the emission of so-called "greenhouse gasses," mostly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, is supposed to be the major culprit in global warming. This is the anthropogenic hypothesis, according to which humans have caused the trouble. But such emissions correlate with human numbers and industrial development, so they could not have been the cause of warming centuries ago, nor of the nineteenth-century rewarming trend which began with a much smaller human population and before the industrial revolution. Nor is there a very good correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and past climate changes. Thus, to many scientists, the evidence that greenhouse gasses produced by humans are causing any significant warming is sketchy.

No one denies that the earth's surface temperatures have and do continue to fluctuate significantly over time. The BIG QUESTION is whether man's presence on earth is a curse or a blessing. The global warming crowd would have you believe that man is a virtual cancer on the planet, and the climactic, societal, economic, and enviromental problems all result from the misuse and mismanagement of the earth's fragile and limited resources. That is the story dominating the "sciences" of our public education system from kindergarten to grad school.

This brings us to the second part of the answer, which concerns the political and economic consequences of the policy argument. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a UN body and reflects UN politics, which are consistently favorable to developing countries, the majority of its members. Those politics are very supportive of the Kyoto treaty, which not only exempts the developing countries from emissions standards but also requires compensatory treatment from the wealthier nations for any economic restraints that new climate management policies may impose on these developing countries. Were Kyoto to be implemented as written, the developing countries would gain lots of money and free technology. One need not be a cynic to grasp that a UN body will do obeisance to these political realities wherever possible.

In 1997 the US Senate passed a bipartisan resolution, the Byrd-Hagel anti-Kyoto resolution, by 95-0 (a fact rarely recalled by those who claim that America’s refusal to sign on to the treaty was the result of the Bush administration’s thralldom to corporate interests).

Finally, there is a fourth cause: a somewhat murky antipathy to modern technological civilization as the destroyer of a purer, cleaner, more "natural" life, a life where virtue dwelt before the great degeneration set in. The global warming campaign is the leading edge of an environmentalism which goes far beyond mere pollution control and indicts the global economy for its machines, its agribusiness, its massive movements of goods, and above all its growing population. Picking apart this argument to show the weakness of its pieces does not go to the heart of the fear and loathing that motivate it. The revulsion shows in the prescriptions advanced by the global warming alarmists: roll back emissions to earlier levels; reduce production and consumption of goods; lower birth rates. Our material ease and the freedoms it has spawned are dangerous illusions, bargains with the devil, and now comes the reckoning. A major apocalypse looms, either to destroy or, paradoxically, to save us—if we come to our senses in the nick of time.

In reality, the earth was created by God for mankind to steward and develop. Buckminster Fuller's zero sum analogy of spaceship earth is false. The earth is a positive sum growth system in which resources and wealth can be created and expanded. Oil is the classic example. Two centuries ago natural oil deposits were considered valueless. It wasn't until humans figured out that oil is a cornicopia of uses from plastics to fuels. Suddenly oil became a highly valuable resource. Where did oil's value come from? From the mind of man. Therefore, is oil the most valuable resource on the earth? No. The mind of man is because man is uniquely created in the image of the Creator. And the Creator's purpose or design for man was to lovingly and wisely care for all of creation.

However, the global warming evangelists preach a far different gospel. They see man as a curse rather than a blessing to the earth and to be managed and limited to fit their warped worldview of death. Man, particularly God-fearing man, is the greatest threat to the world. Far greater than a handful of terrorist who are justified in their violence as a reaction to their oppression. That is the worldview that dominates much of the leadership of the Democrat Party, particularly the Kerry-Edwards ticket. They must be defeated on Tuesday.