Fighting Apathy

This weblog has lain idle for a long time: for most of the period since Janalee went Further Up and Further In. I myself have not been entirely idle; for one thing, I have performed in a Renaissance Festival--though if it had been up to me, I would have forgone the festival and had Janalee healed. Anyway, here is my latest "Empowered For Freedom" article....


I'M NOT A JUROR, BUT I SEE FALSE WITNESSES


Aurora, Colorado, March 9, 2010: Imagine two things with me, please. Neither of them is that there's no Heaven.

First, imagine that someone says to you, "There's a right, and there's a wrong, and there's a God Who knows the difference." If you have the sense to know it, America's Founding Fathers, and all the saints of the Bible, would have heartily agreed with this plain statement. Even many agnostics would agree on the first part.

Second, imagine that you have written a book, and that you prepare a summary of its contents as a way to get readers interested. You have complete control of what goes into this summary, so that if it fails to be truly representative of the message of your book, this failure is no one's fault but your own.

Okay, hold those two thoughts, while we travel back in time to last spring--by chance, precisely to Cinco de Mayo of 2009, which has no bearing on this article. That just happened to be the day on which I was one of a crowd of summoned people at the Aurora courthouse, waiting to find out which of us would be selected for jury duty. On the waiting-room TV set was the left-wing talk show "The View;" this day they were discussing the issue of whether any Christian ideas can ever be mentioned in public schools, and likewise whether it's okay to speak definitely _against_ faith in public schools.

Joy Behar said something which, taken in isolation, was true and right, even laudable: "The solution to bad speech is not to silence speech; the solution to bad speech is good speech." This statement, applied with anything resembling honesty, would cut the legs out from under all movements to censor the media under the lying pretense of "protecting us from hate." Unfortunately, Ms. Behar was not clear, in this instance, about _which_ speech in school she regarded as the bad speech: a Christian student's expression of belief, or someone else attacking that belief. So I had to suspend forming any strong opinion about Ms. Behar; but I kept it in mind that someone on the left had admitted in principle that truth should be able to refute falsehood _without_ cheating by resorting to forcible censorship.

The year of hope and change proceeded. In July, getting less public attention than the healthcare issue, Senate majority leader Harry Reid was relentlessly promoting the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act. This bill was labelled with intentional and cynical dishonesty, reflecting the lies which had been circulated at the time of Matthew Shepard's murder. The young gay man's death had been loudly blamed on "Christian bigotry;" but in actual fact, the murderers had not been Christians at all, just ordinary thuggish goons. The hard-left media had as usual been selective in their outrage; another homosexual was murdered in the East around the same time as Shepard, but the killers in that case were black, and so that murder was not widely reported. The media establishment would not allow any nonwhites to be seen as bigots (unless the nonwhites were Christians). Reid knew perfectly well that his hate-crime legislation would not add _anything_ to the prevention of murders, because, well DUH, murder already was illegal. The real purpose, just as with the also-falsely-labelled Fairness Doctrine, was to silence Christians and moral conservatives.

Talkers and writers on the left were never worried about the censorship campaign, because they knew it was not aimed against them. It was around this time that an atheistic writer named Joel Grus was promoting his book, Your Religion Is False, which was aimed at "proving" that every sort of belief in the supernatural, with no exceptions, is not only mistaken, but ridiculous. Now, do you remember the second of the thoughts you were holding? That one comes in here. Joel Grus published online a summary of his book; here, he had complete power to present the parts he wanted to present, complete power to make his summary accurate and reflective of his intent. He wasted no time getting into his mockery, which he doubtless regarded as "fair" because he insulted ALL faiths (except his own humanist creed). The following is from the very beginning of his summary:

...you are probably familiar with religion, although –- depending on your circumstances -– you may know it as "why daddy is required to hit me with a brass fireplace poker when I fail to show him proper amounts of respect," or "those expensive skin-galvanometer sessions I submit to in order to further my show-business career," or "the reason the beautiful, beautiful act of a man making love to another man is in fact ‘an abomination.’ “

You can see a powerful hint of his self-serving motives here. He would call anyone who raised ANY objection to his apparent preference a "hatemonger;" but his concern about hate speech only runs in one direction; HE still is allowed to hate as he pleases. And, as if this were accomplishing anything to prove his points true, he had the cover of his book illustrated with a cartoonist's distortion of a famous painting of Jesus taken from the Cross. This is what C.S. Lewis would call Flippancy: acting AS IF you had already proven your opponents wrong, even if you haven't.

Grus' flippancy continues throughout his lengthy summary, seemingly preaching to the anti-choir, counting on a favorable response from cynics like himself who already _want_ God to be non-existent, and so will gladly treat a shallow joke as if it were an awesome intellectual proof, provided it "proves" what they wanted to believe anyway. Here's another bit:

Most of the religions we will show false involve some sort of “god,” a magical being who lives on a cloud in the sky and throws lightning bolts at his enemies and watches you while you’re showering.

You get the idea: by refusing a priori to allow for any possibility of a transcendent moral authority and source of life, he can _pretend_ that faith was proven false at some point in time, use ridicule as a substitute for organized reasoning, and proceed to his victory celebration without having fought the battle.

A weblog visitor challenged the caustic assertions Grus was making; and with a true leftist's faith in the all-purpose "You took me out of context!" defense, Grus raged at his challenger for forming an inaccurate impression due to not having read the whole book yet. But Grus had had every opportunity to make his excerpts truly indicative of the book's content; if anyone took him out of context, he took _himself_ out of context. Grus, in fact, was merely practicing the leftist double standard, giving himself license to say anything about anyone, but acting like a poor wounded victim if anyone talked back. I myself encounter this all the time, and I do mean ALL the time.

Of course, Joel Grus was only one of a legion of hard leftists who knew perfectly well that hate-crimes legislation would never be invoked to censor _their_ hatred. An editorialist for my own local newspaper, the Aurora Sentinel, expected to be taken seriously when he claimed that protestors against the Marxist takeover of all health care were terrorists. This man doubtless would have gone ballistic if anyone had called the war protestors of the Sixties terrorists--yet it was _their_ movement that generated riots, and even acts of targetted violence which really did qualify as terrorism, _unlike_ the Tea Party rallies now held by law-abiding citizens INCLUDING ME.

(The Associated Press, meanwhile, was shamelessly making partisan use of loaded language in supposedly objective reporting of the healthcare debate: calling members of Congress "recalcitrant" if they didn't blindly follow the Democrat Messiah in his campaign to federalize every last aspirin tablet.)

Now it's time to bring forward the first thought I asked you to hold: the thought of someone saying, "There's a right, and there's a wrong, and there's a God Who knows the difference."

The revisionist cable-TV series of "Battlestar Galactica" already made it the murderous Cylons who talked about believing in a single God instead of the multiple gods the humans believed in. But now, in 2010, we have the spin-off prequel series "Caprica" making the earlier God-bashing seem subtle by comparison. In "Caprica," those words about right, wrong and God were spoken by a _human_ character....who was recruiting for a _terrorist_ force called "Soldiers of the One." So it isn't just the Cylons; the writers ruthlessly insist that _anyone_ believing in a single Supreme Being is, by that very fact, a dangerously warped lunatic. That's right, Mother Teresa was no different from Osama bin-Laden. And the _only_ really happy and functional household I've seen depicted in "Caprica" is a bisexual group-marriage commune; so even the _temporal_ norms associated with the Biblical God are to be scorned as inferior if not outright harmful.

The directors and writers working for the SyFy Channel have no fear at all that "hate speech" rules will be invoked against them for any of this; they, too, know that the censorship movement is intentionally selective.

Hard-core leftists, if seeing this column, are likely to miss the point on purpose, and to try to dismiss me by saying, "Conservatives criticize liberals as often as liberals criticize conservatives, so quit complaining." If they say this, they will be proving themselves (depending on the individual) either ignorant or deliberately dishonest. When we conservatives criticize liberals, we are NOT simultaneously working through the judicial and legislative processes to gag and censor our opponents with the force of law. The liberals ARE trying to gag and censor us--as witness brat-actor Sean Penn saying that reporters should face legal penalties for calling Venezuela's Hugo Chavez the socialistic dictator he is. I'm not aware of Mr. Penn ever getting on the case of Democrats who yelled "Bush is Hitler!" (Not idealizing Bush, but he WAS on the receiving end of this double standard.)

I eventually found an answer to the question of whether Joy Behar is fair and impartial. She showed her true colors when Rush Limbaugh got to be a judge at the 2010 Miss America pageant. When Mr. Limbaugh was introduced, and was loudly applauded, Ms. Behar insisted that he was being booed by the audience. She may have had pals seated near her who did boo, but they were a tiny minority at most; nonetheless, she _wanted_ it to be true that Mr. Limbaugh was being rejected and repudiated. My Tea Party friends need to understand that my bringing up Mr. Limbaugh does NOT mean that I regard him as meeting all our standards; but understand further that for someone like Ms. Behar, anyone even _slightly_ aligned with true moral conservatism is an enemy to be smeared, the way Carrie Prejean got smeared last year. What Ms. Behar did to attack Mr. Limbaugh's reputation, she would just as enthusiastically do to any more genuine conservative you care to name.

The previous could have been an adequate wrap-up for my return to real column writing; but there's always more. Just the other day, at a Big Lots store selling books, I encountered a novel whose motivation is again explainable in terms we were given by C.S. Lewis. In the same book where he discussed flippancy, Mr. Lewis pointed out that people tend to guard against imaginary dangers while ignoring the real ones; he called this "rushing about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under."

The novel, A Pagan's Nightmare by Ray Blackston, depicts on its cover the Christian fish symbol altered into the likeness of the menacing shark from "Jaws." Blackston portrays a worldwide Christian dictatorship, in which non-Christians are treated as badly or worse than black Africans were treated under apartheid. If this author has ever lived on the surface of the Earth, on an inhabited continent, he _knows_ that right now there are plenty of groups and factions far more likely to create such a dictatorship than modern Christians are; but he feels free to slander us, precisely because he _also_ knows (however much he pretends to be afraid of the "menace"we represent) that we _won't_ issue fatwas calling for his death. In other words, Christian-bashing is a cheap and easy way to flatter yourself that you're "taking a daring stand" when you know you're not really being the least bit brave.

Some people not at all friendly to Ray Blackston, or to Sean Penn, or to Joel Grus, or to Joy Behar, are gleefully taking advantage of the political correctness which focusses on gagging Christians and patriotic Americans. I know from direct dialogue with fundamentalist Muslims that they claim the right to have territory (notably Mecca) reserved for Islam alone; but they don't want anyone _else_ to come even close to having the same right. Thus, when the Mayor of Lancaster, California said in January that his town was "a Christian community," the pro-jihadist organization C.A.I.R. jumped on him furiously, pretending to believe that this was "hate speech." Of course they would be just as furious in their denials if _they_ were accused of hate speech for their _more_ aggressive statements about "a Muslim cantonment."

So the race is on between two forces of tyrannical censorship which are not really compatible with each other, but which are briefly allied because they both want to shut up the testimony of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Sports fans, place your bets: will America's domestic neo-Marxists be first to make open Christian witness illegal as "hate speech," or will imported Islamists pull ahead on the turn and make open Christian witness illegal as "Islamophobia"?


Praying for America,
Joseph Richard Ravitts

Ut fidem praestem in difficultate!