� Patriot Games: Jeb Bush Offers Another Answer To Iraq Question | Main | Overnight Open Thread (5-13-2015) � Leftism is Just Religion for the Godless, Continued If you've read Marx, and I've read him slightly, you'll notice that his ranting sounds a lot like an angry, bitter failure ranting at God, but, being an atheist, he can't rant at God. So instead he rants at something he calls Society (specifically, German society), a being with all the supernatural power that one usually attributes to God, that is, the power to decide one's fate, to reward one with heaven, or to punish one with hell. Two great articles today on this. First, from Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (she writes out her middle name today): The Left's Theodicy of the Federal Government. Whenever and wherever evil occurs in the world, questions of �theodicy� arise among some religious adherents. Theodicy attempts to defend God's goodness and omnipotence in light of the existence of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people, the question goes. (To which a Lutheran might reply, "Trick question! There are no good people!") There are various schools of thought and debate, rekindled with every hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, act of terror and mass shooting. ...

But what if journalists --some of whom just yesterday were admitting they know "close to zero" Christians-- don't have a religious or even non-political vocabulary for use in such tragedies? Perhaps we politicize everything in part because we have lost any understanding of the world as fallen and out of our control...

So instead of contemplating how fleeting and out of our control life can be, we instead begin with the question, "Why do bad things happen to good administrations?" ("Trick question!" the conservative or libertarian might respond. "There are no good administrations!") The theodicy of federal government requires an explanation that defends the goodness of government control or subsidies into the given sphere. So just as some religious groups might blame a weather event on insufficient fealty to the relevant god, some progressives blame -- before the National Transportation Safety Board has even shown up on site to investigate the cause of a crash -- insufficient fealty, sacrifice and offerings to the relevant god of federal government. And via Instapundit, Daniel Hannan discusses the failure of the left's Church Lady approach to public policy. The Left's error was its usual one: to assume a moral superiority, to treat conservatism as a kind of mental disorder, to define the campaign as a test of voters� �compassion�. As Ed Miliband kept putting it, "This election is about values�. Labour�s core vote lapped it up: plenty of Leftists define their ideology by whom they loathe. But others found it off-putting. In a column shortly before polling day, the actor Tom Conti explained why he had switched sides. "Labour, I realised, was built on hatred". ...

Re: the "Shy Tory" syndrome, wherein conservative leaning voters don't express their real views to pollsters, because of the massive public relations smear against them: But they don't just feel intimidated; they feel insulted. When Leftists attack the Tories, they�re not just having a go at 300 MPs, or 100,000 party members: they're scorning everyone who has contemplated supporting the party... When you adopt a bullying tone, you find that 1) voters don�t like it; 2) you solidify the other side�s core support; and 3) some people hide their voting intentions.

I've long called these people Religious Maniacs because, of course, they are. I always point out that you don't need a god to be religious maniac; you just need a dogma and a Devil. A friend of mine once said that, a long time ago: That the only thing a religion really needed was a Devil to hate. I don't know if he came up with that himself, or got it from Eric Hoffer or something. Actually, my friends got most of their witticisms from Amazon Women on the Moon. Maybe he got it from there.

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