Yesterday Politico’s Josh Kraushaar wrote this in response to Marco Rubio’s common sense observation that the Iranian people would have been better off if their divinely given right to bear arms in their defense had been respected:

Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio is the latest to make his own curious comparison drawn from the Iranian demonstrations — that the protesters would have more success if they had a constitutional right
to bear arms.

“I have a feeling the situation in Iran would be a little different if they had a 2nd amendment like ours,” Rubio tweeted on Sunday.

Not sure if Rubio was advocating an armed uprising from the otherwise peaceful protesters, but his follow-up tweet was a bit more dovish: “Hoping police and military in Iran will refuse to attack unarmed civilians if ordered to do so.”

Kraushaar seems to imply that the massacre of unarmed protesters by a theocratic regime is a more desirable outcome than an armed insurrection where the people could defend themselves from government paramilitary forces and allies, including Palestinians imported into Iran by the Mullahs because they knew Hamas thugs would be more brutal to the protesters.

As Ed Morrissey pointed out Rubio’s point is hardly “curious” and shouldn’t be controversial. The theocracy of Iran can only enforce its will on the people through its monopoly on arms. That monopoly on arms makes protesting pointless, as the savage barbarity of Baharestan Square makes clear:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEtVRgZ3Szw[/youtube]

According to Threats Watch 10,000 Basiji Militia waded into the protesters with axes, clubs, and of course, guns. The helpless protesters could do nothing but die in droves, unable to defend themselves from axe wielding thugs. There’s a picture of one of the dead with an axe wound at Threats Watch if you want to see the end result of civilian disarmament.

Kraushaar seems to think this outcome was better than the one Rubio and I and I’m sure any person with an ounce of compassion would want, which is a population who can resort to use of arms to prevent their loved ones from being hacked to death, their wives and daughters taken back to Palestine as Hamas war booty. Kraushaar is arguing that it is in some way immoral to wish that the Iranian people, like we Americans, had the resources with which to resist governmental tyranny.

Instead they cheer on the protests and the slaughter. They love to see Martyrs to the cause of Democracy, but they can’t abide heroes. They won’t support Iranian self-determination, or the Iranian people’s right to overthrow a regime that rules only through force. It would be easy to claim that for people who spent the last eight years pretending that they were fighting a fascist dictator through blogging on DailyKos seeing true heroic resistance to oppression, and the horrible consequences of civilian disarmament (a policy they support) too painfully exposes their own childish perfidy. But that’s not the reason the Kraushaars of the world find the idea of Iranians having the means to defend themselves abhorrent.

I maintain that to fully understand modern liberalism you have to understand it not as just a political ideology, but as a state worshipping pseudo-religion. In fact, modern liberalism is little more than secularized radical Christianity where God and Jesus have been replaced with “the common good.” Liberal thought posits that the world is divided into good and evil people. Where this bastard offspring of radical theology and academic Marxism truly perverts Judeo-Christian thought is in how good and evil is judged. In fact, the act of judging something or someone as evil is, to the Liberal cultist, evidence of not only the evil of whoever it is making that judgment, but of the victimization, thus the goodness, of the object judged. Victimhood is to the modern liberal what Sainthood is to the Christian.

Those who don’t want to be victims, those who seek the means to keep ourselves from being victimized, are not just rejecting liberal pacifism, but the entire cosmology on which that selective pacifism is based.  Kraushaar no doubt finds my personal gun ownership as “curious” as the wish for Iranians were armed. He would find the pepper spray my social worker mother habitually carried with her into rough areas of NYC, a practice that was illegal for much of my life in both NY and NJ, “curious” as well. Women carrying anything more than a “rape whistle” (and anyone who thinks that’s a good idea should read this) to prevent being victimized are no doubt met with the same naive disdain disguised as curiosity that Kraushaars showed Rubio.

The modern Cult of Liberalism, an anti-theist doctrine that searches for cultural rather than personal salvation, seeks to achieve heaven on earth through class, race and gender warfare. This warfare, which has never fully erupted, needs a soldier that is willing to tear down entire classes, races and genders. It needs people who are not only victims, but people “stuck” in their victimization. Stuck in the anger, resentment and fear victimization breeds. Victims are kept by modern liberalism in a state of perpetual co-dependency, and encouraged to continually define themselves as victims. They are never encouraged to use their victimization to learn how to protect themselves. Victim status is fetishized and sought after, making examples of of people refusing to be victims, or ideas which would ensure people can’t be victimized, greeted with the same enthusiasm Christians would greet a heresy.

The Utopia the Kraushaars of the world envision is one in which the individual is completely reliant on the state. The State Will Provide will be the new mantra of the non-Jesus freaks, assured that a benevolent all-encompassing and ever watchful state will feed, clothe, shelter and protect them while they revert to a child-like existence of pure innocence, worrying only about nothing more important than what trendy restaurant to eat at. Their fantasy ignores reality as it is. If the outcome of the protest, now massacres, in Iran would have been more positive by people owning weapons and defending themselves, then their faith is undermined. It is better for liberals to claim that the act of being killed is superior to killing to defend yourself.

The Iranians will pay in blood for this leftist hubris, and all they will get in return is some theatrical hand-wringing and and some talk about how brave the dead were. But like Darfur, Burma and dozens of other outrages, the Iranian government will suffer no consequences for the slaughter, and those who will continue to suffer for the next few years as these crackdowns continue will be left impotent martyrs to the long abandoned cause of freedom, whose throat was slit long ago by the “the common good.”

It is perhaps the worst part of the secularization and perversion of Christian doctrine that is modern liberalism. You must die for their beliefs, because if you as an individual can resist victimization you will have undermined their foundational mythology. There can be no Liberal Heaven on Earth if there are still men and women who can care for themselves, and desire their freedom more than a false sense of safety provided by weapon restrictions. Those of us willing to fight and die for our lives and our families, and worse yet kill for them, are truly the Fallen in the modern liberal’s view, and must be sacrificed on the altar of The Common Good.

Governor Bobby Jindal voiced what is a perfectly patriotic position for many, that he hoped the policies and Ponzi schemes being peddled by Barack Obama fail. Predictably, Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs has a case of the vapors at the GOP’s “alienating and losing the support of the vast middle” etc.

At some point during this post, Bobby Jindal was referred to as “Creationist Bobby Jindal” and you could almost hear the disdain dripping from their inner voices as Charles Johnson’s cult of anti-Religionists curled their lips disgustedly at the idea of a person having beliefs they disagree with.

That Bobby Jindal’s opinion of how reality is structured is irrelevant to the point of the post is obvious to all but the most bigoted “lizards” for whom religiosity is akin to incest or necrophilia in both its unseemliness and undesirability in modern society. That being assured that there is an invisible hand at work in the creation of the uncountable multitudes of stars and planets in our universe has no bearing on the question presented by LGF, whether saying you want Obama to fail is a good political strategy. So why is it in there?

Because for the Charles Johnsons of the world simple belief, devotion, or faith in an idea or doctrine is enough to dismiss you as a person, enough in fact to deny your humanity at all. Atheism is not, as many will tell you, the absence of religion. Atheism is itself a quasi-religion that has a set dogma, a theology and most important its own demonology. For the Atheist the believer, of any faith, is like a character from the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. We who believe are all similar beings that need be controlled and feared by rational people lest we spread our corruption throughout their pristine and random creation. The Atheist does not simply disbelieve in some form of divinity in the world, he or she seeks the total annihilation of religion and the religious.

I’ve often thought his anti-religious bigotry was at the root of his most hostile attacks on Pamela Geller from Atlas Shrugs and Robert Spencer form Jihad Watch. Despite the fact that clearly Pamela Geller isn’t a neo-Nazi Charles Johnson branded her one based on the same biased and unreliable, and atheist, source he used to brand English blogger Lionheart a neo-Nazi. Lionheart is a born again Christian, Robert Spencer is Catholic I believe and Pamela is Jewish. It is clear to any observer that Charles Johnson and his Internet cult wanted to believe the worst of these people, and I would put forward it is because they are religious he was pathologically driven to attempt to destroy their reputations.

This lashing out at the faithful is at the core of Atheism, which is so bereft of legitimate criticism of religion in general that these days they spend most of their time ripping off LaVeyian Satanism. Richard Dawkins’ much lauded book The God Delusion is essentially a plagiarization of Celsus’ Discourse Against the Christians with a smattering of Satan Speaks thrown in to spice up what would otherwise be a book as mind-numbingly dull and childishly nihilistic as atheism itself. Likewise LGF in its anti-theism incarnation has little to offer adherents besides a false sense of intellectual superiority based on mocking the misunderstood beliefs of others.

Creationists are often the targets of their ire even though the average big bang theorist has no more understanding of astrophysics than they do of the metaphysics they mock. Like the devoutly Christian Jindal, the “Lizard” from LGF accepts the creation of the universe ex nihilo and could no more explain to us how the big bang happened and what matter was in existence before the big bang than a Christian can explain where his God lived prior to creating the universe. Both views require a certain amount of faith, but whereas the Christian is consoled by faith in his or her God, the only consolation for the Atheist’s anti-faith is that their existence is essentially meaningless.

Which is both the allure of Atheism for many, and the driving force behind the evangelical fervor atheists have in trying to discredit religious ideas of objective truth and morality. I know many atheists and most happen to be bad people. That’s not to say that they are criminals or child rapists, but they simply aren’t particularly good in the philosophical sense.They are not honest, hard working or charitable. Except that I wouldn’t know if Johnson works particularly hard, I’d say that description fits him and his “Lizard” army.Their dealings with Spencer and Geller certainly prove they are neither honest nor charitable.

Atheists believe in a subjective morality. For example they believe that the reason it’s wrong for a 40-year-old to be sexually active with a child is because it’s illegal and society has ruled that it shouldn’t happen. Some may believe that it can be psychologically damaging for the child, or that it’s exploitative and deviant. But none believe that it is evil. They can’t because they don’t believe that anything can be, objectively, evil.

None of the atheists I know believe that people who rape children are choosing to do evil to satisfy themselves. They explain the abuse of children as a “sickness” which implies that it can be cured and is something that the perpetrator cannot control or truly be responsible for. These same people also happen in dozens of minor venal ways to exploit others. Just as they pass no moral judgment on the most evil amongst us they expect, and will accept, no moral judgment by others on them or how they choose to live. The heart of an atheist is a hopeful one, hopeful that there is no divine power that will weigh them and find them wanting.

I am not a Christian, though having my academic background in Comparative Religion I have a basic understanding of Christian theology. There are legitimate criticisms of general Christian dogma and specific denominations’ creeds that make decent dinner table conversation.The idea that being a Christian makes one less deserving of civility and respect isn’t one of them. It is uncivil at best to mock a man’s faith, but in reality it is the mark of a small minded bigot who has cut him or herself off from the basic search for knowledge all people must pursue.

I believe in a vast and unknowable universe, alive with beings that to us are gods and perhaps even these gods have gods. I believe that the divine can be seen within the natural world and I have experienced it in the warm winds that whisper through trees that danced in time with the coming thunder storm. There is a music that you can hear when you are alone in the woods that I believe is the Call of the gods themselves. But more importantly I believe in good and evil, something I share with most Christians, and I don’t believe in subjective morality. I believe that you will pay for the evil you do and atheists cannot allow themselves to believe this is true.

So they lash out at the religious because we remind them of what they fear the most, the divine and their separation from it. That’s the truth about atheism, it holds no comfort for people, only fear and loathing and a lifetime of trying to convince others that we’re wrong if only to convince one another that they are right. And underneath the pettiness and bile there is the longing for the comfort and faith that they deny themselves.