The Federalist has an article stating that for the Left, their God is Caesar, that is to say, the State, that is to say, themselves.

After a disaster or lost battle, the Jews of old said it was it is the punishment rightfully delivered for not being faithful enough to Jehovah, not giving him what he demanded for their good: an upright heart and pure more sacred to him than any ritual sacrifice.

After every crime-spree or disaster or terrorist attack by persons who never turn out to be white rightwingers, the Left says that it is the punishment rightfully delivered for not being faithful enough to Caesar, not giving him what he demanded for our good: not giving Caesar enough power, property and control over our minds and souls to solve the problem.

Mollie Hemmingway for the Federalist writes as follows:

http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/03/the-left-prays-after-san-bernardino-shooting-to-its-god-of-government/

At least 14 people were killed and 17 others injured in San Bernardino, California, by Syed Farook and Tafsheen Malik, a couple who later died in a shootout with police. As with the tragic rampage in Colorado just a few days prior, there’s a frustrating lack of details. Many in the media at first focused, as they tend to do during mass shootings, on their anger with the National Rifle Association, a large gun rights and gun safety organization. Some focused on the fact that the shooting took place about a 25-minute walk from a Planned Parenthood facility. Really. Progressive and liberal politicians called for gun control. And other politicians prayed for the victims and their families while waiting for more information. That’s when things got super weird. For some reason, much of the media began mocking the efficacy of prayer. This was happening while victims of the shooting were actually asking people to pray. I mean, the critiques were everywhere. An editor at ThinkProgress said, and I quote, “Stop thinking. Stop praying.” There’s a bumper sticker for you! Here’s how The Huffington Post put it: Stunning. “Public officials are the people society trusts to solve society’s ills?” Their “useless” thoughts and prayers?

She goes on to say:

blasphemously, the New York Daily News attempted to get page clicks with this cover, seemingly stolen straight from the progressive echo chamber but amped up a notch: I’m honestly not sure what possessed all of these media types to choose “people who pray” as the target of their anger. It was really weird and revealing.

My comment: while Leftism has much in common with a mental illness, it is not a mental illness. The sick behaviors of the Left are affixed to certain topics of thought, not to the machinery of thought. Nor can it be explained as stupidity, or ignorance, or innocent lack of knowledge.

One might ask: how many people will the Muslims have to shoot before the Left realizes that the Muslim doctrines telling them God wants them to shoot people is the source of the problem, and not the lack of a government-enforced static global climate system? How long until they wake up?

(I am assuming that those who oppose climate change are in favor of climate stasis, with no change to the weather ever to be permitted again, but none have ever openly said so. By what means they will control the weather is never specified, albeit I have it on good authority that such things were done in Camelot, at least in the musical version.)

I am not kidding about Global Warming/Cooling/Unstasis being cited as the cause of worldwide Islamic terrorism. See cf http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/260210-sanders-doubles-down-climate-change-causes-terrorism

and

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-nye-climate-change-paris-terrorism_565ccdebe4b079b2818b810b

How long until the Left wake up? The answer is: NEVER.

The Left will never wake up to reality for precisely the reason that Leftism is a mental system of excuses and psychological tricks and traps meant to allow the Leftist to escape from reality.

That is what all their rigmarole, jabberwocky, lies and evasions, all their complex obfuscations, and penning endless tomes of endless nonsense from Marx to Keynes to Al Gore, all their riots, marches, protests, sit-ins, think-tanks, media moguls, money laundering, awards shows, convulsions, antics, stunts, clamor, libel, slander, and cacophony is for: Reality avoidance.

That is all that it is for.

It was not always thus. Perhaps a generation ago, there were Leftists who joined the Democrat Party for what were political reasons, to promote labor unions, impose regulation on banks and businesses in response to some threat, real or imaginary, posed by the free market, or to encourage the welfare state to help the poor.

Perhaps two generations ago, there were real Marxists who really believed that socialism was more efficient and more productive of human wealth than the free market. But after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, no honest person can maintain that socialism is more efficient at encouraging wealth and creating and distributing goods and services than a free market.

All socialism produces are mounds of corpses in mass graves, and gulag-states surrounded by barbed wire, with all guns pointed inward.

Even Bill Clinton, a weasel without an honest bone in his body, announced the era of big government to be over, and took the first step to dismantling the American version of Marxism, Johnson’s Great Society. If he saw socialism as a failure, anyone can see it.

And so the criticism changed strategy. In the shadow of the Holocaust of Jews by the Nazis, where Nazism became the synonym for evil in a world which has ceased to speak of the Devil, racism was identified as the main scourge and flaw of the West, and attempts to eradicate racism by means of embracing multiculturalism became the norm.

This is ironic. Tribalism, racism, and the presumed superiority of one’s own bloodline over any foreigners is the norm of human existence, and only the Christian religion gives anyone any reason to condemn it. Here in the West and here alone is anyone even concerned at calling it evil or trying to eliminate it. It would be like the West trying to wipe out polygamy, when we are the only ones whose culture rejects polygamy. No one else sees it as wrong.

Be that as it may. Multiculturalism is not a doctrine, it is an attitude: the attitude is to praise inferior and savage societies in any ways in which they differ from Christendom, and to blame, scold, vilify and upbraid Christendom for any ways in which we differ from Utopia. It is the attitude of a nagging wife unwilling to divorce a hard-working husband and provider she hates and loathes. Multiculturalism is nagging.

The nagging is based on the idea that all cultures are equal, and all equally provide for human liberty and human happiness. Skyscraper and yurt: the same. Cathedral and igloo: the same. Wright Brothers and the Cargo Cult of Melanesia: the same. American cosmetics industry and pre-Western Chinese practice of breaking the bones in baby girls’ feet for footbinding: the same. Western abolition of slavery and Hindu caste system: the same. Medical Doctors and Witch-Doctors: the same. Scientific agriculture and Maori cannibalism: the same. Progress and stagnation: the same. Christian martyr and Muslim suicide bomber: the same. Jesus and Mohammed: the same.

See how it works?

The Christian West, with our industrial and scientific revolutions (the byproduct of our Christian metaphysics, university system and Christian individualism) not to mention our legal and juridical advances are held by hypothesis not to have made any particular advances in human liberty and happiness.

Any use of discriminatory judgment between the cultures of, say, the British Empire and he Aztec Empire is the product of bigotry, bias, or race-hatred.

After 9/11, it became clear that not all cultures equally provide for human liberty and happiness. Indeed, it is clear enough to any honest observer that come cultures are productive of vast misery and vast oppression, especially oppression of women, of children, of the weak and helpless. The growing slave trade in underage boys used as catamites by the Muslim is a clear enough sign of this, as well as the rape statistics that follow Muslim migrants entering Europe.

In recent years, with the cult of multiculturalism dead, and Marxism rightfully tossed into the crematorium of dead yet stupid ideas, the only thing left for the Left to do was to break all ties with honesty.

Political Correctness has its roots in Stalinism, and is as old as Marx himself, as old as the first lie every told by a snake in Eden. But since 9/11, with both their idols of multiculturalism and socialism smashed, the press and the Left generally expelled their less extreme elements from their midst, or shamed them into silence, and embraced falsehood as the source and summit of all good.

This is what I call ‘the Unreality Principle’ which is the principle that a lie is better than the truth because to lie and to believe a lie proves one’s loyalty. To lie and believe lies is morally superior than to tell and believe the truth, and the more outrageous the lie, the greater the moral superiority one can award oneself.

The Chinese have an epigram for this, as they have for most things political and practical.

It is written this way: 指鹿為馬 (zhi lu wei ma). Literally translated, the four characters mean ‘point deer, make horse’.

The word 為 for ‘make’ also means ‘to transform’ or ‘to serve as’ or ‘to make believe.’ So the epigram means ‘Calling a deer a horse.’

As with all Chinese epigrams, there is a story behind it:

Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Emperor but called it a horse. The Emperor laughed and said, “Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?” Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly.

(hat tip to https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/the-purpose-of-absurdity/ quote is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Gao#Calling_a_deer_a_horse)

You see how the Unreality Principle works. Bringing in a pony and calling it a horse won’t do. Someone might honestly mistake a horse for a pony. Only lies that are breathtakingly stupid, things no sane person could say or believe, are sufficient to show where one’s loyalty rests.

It is for this reason that Hillary Clinton announced that acts of terrorism carried out by Islamicists in the name of Islam as defined, promoted and commanded by Islam now and for all centuries past not only had nothing to do with Islam, but, in her words, ‘nothing whatsoever to do with Islam.’

Islam is not the enemy. The deer is a horse.

The problem with loyalty to the Unreality Principle is that in order to be truly loyal, you have to believe, actually to believe, nonsense you should know is nonsense.

I have wasted endless hours debating to what degree the various followers of the Unreality Principle are complicit in their own self-deception, and have finally resigned from the debate in disgust. The question is a paradox. When a man is trying to deceive himself, he is his own victim, deceiver and deceived at once. And successful self deception results in his not knowing himself to have successfully deceived himself: so arguing that he really does not know better is merely to say he is skilled at something akin to auto-hypnosis.

If any Leftist is being deceived about what Leftism truly is or truly says, it is deception by invitation.

Therefore, to me, it is a meaningless question to ask whether President Obama or anyone else ‘actually’ believes that Global Warming causes terrorism, or ‘actually’ thinks we should not pray for the victims of a mass shooting because Caesar is more potent than God. There is no ‘actually’ with these people: there is nothing below the surface appearance.

The surface appearance, by design, is all that there is. Intellectual honesty and introspection are what their mental system is designed to avoid.

So, yes, the Left ‘actually’ believes (1) if only given control over the economy, that the State has the power to stop the weather from ever changing again and (2) the fact that weather changes makes Muslims (but not Christians or Jews living in the same villages, same area, same clime) plan and carry out large-scale sneak attacks against random innocent civilians and (3) we, and not Mohammed, are responsible for what Mohammedans think, say, believe and do.

From this, the Left ‘actually’ conclude that, ergo, if only we gave Caesar more control over our money, time, property, speech, press and inward thoughts, then Caesar would force us to do the right things and say the right things, and then the Mohammedans, who are actually controlled by us, would all become yuppie Democrats as peaceful as campus protesters and race rioters and occupy anarchists and the KKK and whatever other movement Democrats have started and maintained.

These are not beliefs in the sense that you and I believe that Washington crossed the Delaware, or that Proxima is the nearest star, or that the square built on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the combined areas of the square built on the remaining legs of the triangle, or that infanticide is evil, or that all men are created equal. Those beliefs are based on historical witness, on scientific observation, on geometric deduction, on moral and political reasoning.

No, their belief that gun control solves rather than encourages gun violence, their belief that junk science overrules real science, their belief that minimum wage laws diminish rather than promote poverty, their belief that a diversity in cultures and races benefits rather than erodes social bonds, their belief that gay marriage is the same as marriage, their belief that throwing petrol on a fire quenches it, this and countless others are beliefs taken on faith.

This is not the time-tested and endlessly proven faith of the Christians, mind you, but a blind faith in the wisdom and candor of anonymous pundits in the press or entertainment industry.

The most narrow-minded Christian can point to the specific passage in the catechism or the scripture to justify what he takes on faith, for he can say in whom he has faith, on whose testament he is relying, or name the martyrs whose witness convinced him or convinced his ancestors.

But the allegedly broadminded Leftist cannot name a single experiment or observation on which their belief in Global Warming is based, or any of their beliefs.

Do not be deceived by their willingness to quote sources. It is never worth your time to follow the paper trail of a Will-o’-the-Wisp.

It was a revelation if not an apocalypse to me when I discovered the footnotes in Marx’s allegedly scientific research in DAS KAPITAL did not support the points he was making. It was make believe research; junk science.

I have found this in my own life, when a Leftist links to an article of mine in order to prove the point about how horrible I am for having said some quote, only the quote either is not present in what I wrote, or when taken in context means the opposite.

If they do this to an author whose writing I know, namely me, why should I assume their quoted authorities, extracts, summaries, and whatnot actually say what they say they say? Like the Constitution, for them, all documents are living documents. Like Humpty Dumpty, words mean what they say they mean, nothing else.

Leftism has more in common with conspiracy theories about faked moon landings than it does with any economic theory or political policy.

Leftism is a convenient way for postchristians to signal to the warren that they are virtuous: by screaming about imaginary danger, hunting witches, and ignoring real dangers, they show their utmost loyalty to unreality, and their absolute defiance of their enemy.

Their enemy is reality.

Their enemy is nature, is the cosmos, is the world, and the author whose hand created nature, the cosmos, and the world.

Why else would they be jealous of prayers directed toward heaven, and not at their idol? Why else such disdain? Why else such scorn?

We are at war. The Islamic terror masters, the Imams of Iran and the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia is only the visible, open, violent arm of the enemy war machine. We have barbarians within the gates already, for years, who are not only within, but are our elite leaders, social and political.

The riots and commotions on our campuses, the Occupy Wallstreet movement, the Obama-inspired race riots and cop-killings, the disgusting treachery of our Supreme Court, and the flaccid laxity of our Congress, the corruption in the Justice Department and the IRS, and on and on, are the visible manifestations of an invisible war.

The invisible war is spiritual, and it is wages with principalities and powers, dominions and angels loyal to the Prince of this World and all his false glamours.

Prayer is your weapon in the invisible war just as bucks and ballots are your weapon in the culture war, and bombs and bullets your weapon in the shooting war.

The enemy wants to make it costly, eventually illegal, to use campaign contribution or votes to influence the culture. Hence the furor over campaign finance laws and voter ID laws.

The enemy wants you not to be carrying a firearm when a jihadist or the BATF shows up to shoot you and your loved ones. Hence after every mass shooting, there are more calls to disarm the victims even more.

Of course the enemy wants you not to pray. This is war. What did you expect?