Uncommon Commentary #448: A President with Precedent

One observation that I have made about Bill Clinton (though not here on the Doman Domain) is that he was not only a bad president but the worst kind of president that we could have had then.  The end of our Cold War foe the USSR in 1991, and that of the last previous recession 20 months before Clinton’s election, meant that the most pressing problem facing the USA at the time of his inauguration was one not of economic or foreign policy but rather of domestic policy: the collapse of Christian standards of morality.  What we needed in the 1990’s was a chief executive who would understand that we were in a moral crisis that endangered our civilization (as it still does), and who would have enough strength of leadership and personal integrity to pull Uncle Sam out of his swan dive into the Lake of Fire.  What did we get instead?  “Slick Willie”.
Just as Clinton was the worst kind of president that we could have had then, Obama is the worst that we could have now: a man who, while his country is at war versus Muslim terrorists, denies that there even is such a thing as a Muslim terrorist; and one who, while his country is running up a larger debt than any other in history, tells us that the way forward is for the US government to spend even more money than it already does.  One way to guarantee that the USA continues its decline is to keep choosing the wrong person for its highest office, and we the people seem determined to do precisely that.

Miscellaneous Musing #68: Not Founded on, but Confounded By

For years I’ve been wondering just where people got the idea that the United States of America was “founded on Christian [or “Judeo-Christian”] principles”.  Perhaps it has a quasi-historical basis; the Second Great Awakening is reckoned by some as a motivation for the Revolution, and some of the Puritan sects of the Seventeenth Century had a democratic character and therefore might be adduced as evidence of a connection between Christianity and our Revolution, which, however, was not really so “democratic” as people today think it was. (I say “quasi-historical” because, in my opinion, neither any Great Awakenings nor any Nonconformist denominations had any influence whatsoever upon the founding of the USA.  I might write more on this topic on another occasion.)  It could also be merely that readers of the founding documents of the USA make the same mistake that I did at approximately age 18.  Reading through the Declaration of Independence, I was impressed by the multiple mentions of God made therein; as I learned more of history and religion, though, I realized the significance of the fact that the Declaration nowhere mentions God simply as “God”, but always calls Him “Nature’s God” or “the Creator”; this betrays the opinion of Eighteenth-Century Deists like the document’s author, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that the Deity created the universe and established the physical laws by which it functions, but takes no further part in its operation.  This attitude is not atheism in the sense of a doctrine that God does not exist, but it’s not Christianity (or Judaism, or any other organized religion) either.
I know that those who write or say that the USA was “founded on Christian principles” are trying to fight the Culture War, and I sympathize with them; but I have a passion for the truth, and so it troubles me when people delude themselves, and there’s no question that this idea is a delusion; the founders of this country were products of their era, the misnamed Enlightenment, which was anti-Christian.  Furthermore, it’s hard to win any kind of war without waging it intelligently, and, unfortunately, the people who have heretofore led the effort to turn our country back toward God—the generals, so to speak, in the Culture War—have been super-patriots who seem to think that the solution to any problem facing the USA is to somehow “return to the principles of the Founders”.  What I’m trying to make people understand is that the principles to which we need to return are those not of the Deists and Freemasons whom we call the Founding Fathers, but those of the Church Fathers.

Uncommon Commentary #447: Don’t Snow on Our (“Victory”) Parade (Alternate Title: They've Also Established a Record Low for Ethical Standards)

Bostonians are probably wondering what they’ve done to deserve all these winter storms and record-low temperatures, but the answer is obvious: They cheated in football!

Uncommon Commentary #446: Moore v. a Moron

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore recently made an appearance on CNN, concerning his defiance of a federal judge’s order to flout the State constitution by granting marriage licenses to homosexuals.  He said “… our rights contained in the Bill of Rights do not come from the Constitution; they come from God.”  Anchorman Chris Cuomo replied: “Our laws do not come from God, Your Honor, and you know that; they come from man.” (At least he didn't say "humans".  See UC #1.)  The anchorman said “laws” whereas the Chief Justice had used the word “rights”, but it seems probable that Cuomo, who is likely a leftist regardless of whether he’s related to the odious gubernatorial dynasty that shares his name, is proceeding from the left-wing conceit that what we have is owed to secular government rather than to the deity from Whom, as Romans 13:1 tells us, all secular authority comes.  If so, he’s wrong; unhappily, though, so is Moore.

Innate rights come from God—It was reportedly the Roman Catholic Church that came up with the idea that we are born with rights as unique creations of God, although, as I explain below, the concept of “human rights” is greatly abused in our time—but, remember: Moore said that “… our rights contained in the Bill of Rights … come from God.”  Let’s look at the Bill of Rights, which is a name for the first ten articles of, or amendments to, the US Constitution.  The very first one ordains that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion; we therefore have a constitutional right, which, according to Moore, comes from God, to worship a deity of, e.g., Hinduism.  In the First Commandment, however, God tells us not to worship any god but Him.  Does Moore hold that He gives us a right to disregard His commandment?

The idea that God gave us the privileges that we enshrine in our constitutions as “rights” is not only presumptuous; it has also had a harmful effect.  If one sets a precedent by claiming a divine justification for what cannot be inferred from Christian sources (viz., the New Testament, writings of Church Fathers, canons of Church councils, the magisterium, and perhaps post-biblical revelation) or from any other religion, what is to prevent someone else from simply inventing human “rights”?  The United Nations has actually declared gun control (not gun ownership) to be a human right; many of my countrymen think that they have a natural right to wed someone of the same sex, which is the very reason why Chief Justice Moore was on CNN.

The founders of the USA remind me of the Pharisees whom Christ criticized for passing off human innovations as if those innovations were of divine origin.  Why not just reserve the enumeration of rights to the Church, which is responsible for the concept?

Uncommon Commentary #445: Love and Like Are Unalike

One often hears people say such things as “I like this one, but I love that one”; “love”, however, is not the superlative of “like”.  To like somebody merely means to get along with him, to enjoy his company; to love somebody is to care about that person, and so it’s quite possible to like someone without loving him and to love him without liking him.  The importance of this distinction is more than academic.  Another thing that one will hear people say, as a way of justifying themselves to those who try to save them from the consequences of their sins, is “God loves me just the way I am”.  He does love you just the way you are, but that doesn’t mean that He approves of what you are.  Being Christian doesn’t mean that you have to like people, but it means that you have to love them.

Vital Link #5: Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition to Be Fair!

Again saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, Emperor Nerobama seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to liken our Christian forebears to the homicidal maniacs of the Islamic State.  He said, in part:

… unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place -- remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ ….  So [sic], it is not unique to one group or one religion; there is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.

In addition to being inapt, this latest apology for militant Muslims is historically inaccurate.  You can learn the truth about the Crusades here.  I can’t link you to any similar resource regarding the likewise-maligned Inquisition, but I know that scholars have written books which prove that the negative modern view of it is almost entirely a product of disingenuous Protestant propaganda; if you try, you can find such a work without any help from me, although you probably won’t find any that have the nifty title of this u.c.

Uncommon Commentary #444: This Might Simply Make You Ashamed of Your Comrades

The following sentence appears on page 563 of Sidney Harcave’s Russia: A History: “In November, 1920, it [Soviet Russia] legalized the performance of abortions, at the same time denouncing abortion as an evil which would in time be eradicated.”  Half a century later, proponents of legally induced abortion here in the USA would likewise present fœticide as a necessary evil, whereas now they behave as if it were a violation of their rights merely to have to defend their position on this issue.  I don’t know if pro-choicers ever view the Doman Domain, but, if you who are reading this u.c. are among their number: How do you feel to learn that even the Bolsheviks, who massacred the Romanovs and who created the Red Terror, had a higher regard for the most vulnerable human lives than you do?