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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