I am always bemused by the supposed confusion of those on the Left toward religion. Chris Matthews spent time on his show Hardball complaining about how religious Republicans are. This is always a problem when you have competing true believers of what is the correct faith. And Chris Matthews and much of the Left have a faith in the government that leaves no room for any other version of belief.
Analyzing their approach to life, reveals how they have substituted their faith for their ideology. First, they have belief in an amorphous being called the "Government" which exists at all levels of their life. This superior being is able to bring all that they desire should they simply proffer the appropriate offerings, usually in the form of taxes and submission to regulatory bodies. This belief is not necessarily based on facts. In truth, it is often that they feel betrayed by their deity in such things as Katrina or failure to promptly implement universal health care and prevent global warming. These failures are more due to their own and their fellow citizen's lack of true belief in the deity. Failure of the deity to deliver can only be cured by more striving for perfection in what is offered to the deity to secure the desired results.
And like all great religions, they have to deal with those apostates who refuse to acknowledge the deity. These are usually called Republicans or conservatives. These apostates must be silenced, lest they contaminate the weaker members of the true believers. This is accomplished by their acolytes through attempts to bring back the oxymoronic "Fairness Doctrine" and the labeling of all non believer communications as "hate speech."
The one serious advantage that their religion has over others, is the ability to coerce tithings from non-believers. Just imagine how jealous other religions must be of the government's ability to bring guns, courts and jails to their ability to extract offerings from even non-believers to the higher power.
The deity has a system of a priestly class that helps to interpret what the deity wants from the believers, and acts as an intermediary in their pleas for beneficience from the same. These are called bureaucrats. Armed with the arcane knowledge of how to communicate with the deity, they are different from other believers because they have the inside track on what it is that the deity wants. Their decisions can only be appealed through the ecclesiastical courts of higher bureaucracy. This priestly class is assisted by the High Priests and Priestesses of the deity, known as politicians. Armed with certainty and campaign donations, but not necessarily knowledge, they interact with the lower class bureaucrats in providing the miracles that only the deity can deliver. The High Priest class will always assume the credit should the deity deliver, but will transfer the blame for failure onto the non-believers and occasionally the bureaucrats. But the deity is never to be questioned, for to do so would be heresy.
We are just now entering the modern equivalent of the 30 Years War, with the division of territory according to the Prince's of each of those territories designating whether their territory is to be of the One True Faith, or the apostasy of small government.
Personally, I think that we need another modern day Martin Luther and a new Reformation.
2 comments:
This is an interesting, if not inspired, analogy you have written.
The Cult of Man comes out of the French Revolution, an event that has debilitated French society and much of Europe to this very day. Back then, it was called the Temple of Reason, but it was run by essentially the same bureaucrats and politicians you describe today.
The primary difference between the new religion and the old religion was worshiping an idol in the form of a king versus an invisible god called the Government, or in this particular case, an entity called the National Assembly. It might have only looked like a mob of shopkeepers and lawyers and assorted spouters, but in fact, taken as a whole, they channeled the thoughts and wishes of the invisible god.
The only hope for Western Civilization is that this new religion will be short lived, as has been the case with most cults over the last 3000 years.
Next: Steve attacks this religion called belief in the "Free Market"{
an organized approach to human spirituality which usually encompasses a set of narratives, symbols, beliefs and practices, often with a supernatural or transcendent quality, that give meaning to the practitioner's experiences of life through reference to a higher power or truth.
Sounds like Friedmanism to me.
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