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...from www.spectator.org

"The moral of the story is that what people believe about God is more important than we usually imagine. The rise of Islam, a counterpoise to the modern decline of Christianity, should concentrate our minds on this important subject. Allah, as Muslims view him, is omnipotent, above logic and reason, unrestrained by natural law. He can decree at any moment that evil is good and that two and two make five. People are subject to his arbitrary and tyrannical rule and can do little more than plead for mercy. Nations who worship such a God, it turns out, are themselves governable only by a tyrannical ruler. My guess is that democracy is about as likely to establish the rule of law in Araby as it is to achieve the egalitarian communalism of Moyers' dreams."


Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator. This article appeared in its March issue.
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=6424


This ended an American Spectator essay bashing Bill Moyers as a dark malcontent and contrasting him with Garrison Keillor, saying Keillor "is a liberal of sorts, but his faculty of appreciation, his love of traditional hymns, and the contentment he derives from describing the world, show conservative tendencies."

If I'm following this, Bethell thinks that liberals hate the world and everything in it but conservatives wax poetic in describing the paradise in which we live. He's hitting his muscle relaxants a bit hard.

In conclusion, he dips into xenophobia by claiming Muslims cannot achieve a democracy because their god is a tyrant. I hope he'd be honest enough to admit that the best one could say about the Christian god is that he is a benevolent dictator. Why would we expect any Christian nation to ever enjoy a democracy? Maybe that's why so many neo-conservatives like Bethell are working so hard to produce an oligarchy, or even a monarchy, of the rich and powerful. Maybe his theory is right. We get in the end exactly what we worship.

Maybe that's why the majority of our founding fathers fought hard to keep religion separate from civil government. Maybe they knew this principle. It worked as long as we had that wall of separation, but as that wall has crumbled in recent years we see our nation moving toward a government ruled by rich political contributors rather than a broad coalition of the ruled.

Bethell throws labels around in a careless manner. I can't see a dark side to Moyers or to being liberal, at least to what I understand that label to mean. Bethell apparently views wealth as an entitlement for anyone who has it. Wealth brings personal merit with it, I guess. He seems to be saying that anyone who has achieved wealth or who has been handed wealth is worthy of the privileges and advantages that come with it. The flip side is that anyone without wealth and suffering from the disadvantages that come with poverty deserves those conditions as well. What a dark philosophy.
posted by Unknown at 5:09 PM

 
This is a disturbing article. I thought all we were fighting for were the basic rights and freedoms underlying our own nation. What we may have here is a battle against a conspiracy for world domination.

The opportunity for a Pax Americana is very real. The collapse of the Soviet Union presented us with the very real opportunity to crush remaining overt resistance to American interests and enforce our will on the world.

We know that from the beginning of our country we've had a portion of the population that is opportunistic and imperialistic. As the industrial revolution came to maturity we know that certain successful corporate leaders proved themselves to be demagogues and tyrants. This same mindset still exists today. It runs across a spectrum from powerful people who firmly believe in privileges but who still maintain feelings of benevolence to the "rest" of society, to the powerful people who clearly view their successes as entirely deserved and entitlements to them as chosen and blessed members of our species. This Machiavellian extreme of the spectrum would naturally believe that given an opportunity for domination one should take that opportunity.

The higher opportunity before us as we stand as the greatest military power the world has ever seen is to stand firm on the side of shared power, shared decision making and a rule of law rather than rule by military might.

If we want effective international law, a global forum for decision making at the structural level of a government, we must offer to the rest of the world a portion of our sovereignty in exchange for a portion of their sovereignty and share a global governmental federation.
posted by Unknown at 10:50 AM