Anti Judeo-Christian

[QUOTE] Those conservative impulses are nearly universal across world religions and cultures. Secular liberals are the anomaly

Published by Papa Giorgio

A great insight and challenge to Liberal ideology (Townhall h/t):

(FT) ….I recently watched an overwhelmingly liberal audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival shift uncomfortably in its seats as Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, offered his own explanation. For several years Professor Haidt has probed what he calls the moral intuitions of liberals and conservatives. I find his conclusions compelling. It has come to this: you need a psychologist to make sense of US fiscal policy.

Prof Haidt finds that liberals are driven mainly by intuitions about fairness (who gets what) and harm to victims. Conservatives are guided by those intuitions too, but also by intuitions about loyalty, authority, and purity (including bodily purity). These are not views so much as deeply embedded moral impulses. They are often wrapped up in religion, or lack of it. Transgressing them is a kind of sacrilege.

In the US, differences in these moral-psychological foundations are very marked. The more progressive you are, the harder you find it to understand the claims of loyalty, authority and purity. The more conservative you are, the more indispensable those claims appear to be. This matters because US politics, especially at the conservative end, is powered by the energy at the extremes.

Why did the Aspen audience squirm? Because Prof Haidt also notes that the wider conservative spectrum of moral intuitions is the global norm. Those conservative impulses are nearly universal across world religions and cultures. Secular liberals are the anomaly…

[….]

These need to start flowing in both directions, but since I write from progressive Aspen I will press the point on liberals. You express elaborate respect for foreign cultures and religions, despite the exalted place they give to loyalty, authority, and purity. You do not despise Muslims. You do not laugh at Buddhists. Difficult as it may be, try extending a little of that courtesy to your neighbours, even if they are evangelical Christians.

…(read more)…

Correcting NYTs anti-Catholic Bias

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is point two of three found over at NewsBusters. While the other points are important, this is one I have been confronted with quite a bit in the past that I wish to post here in order to add to the readers and mine learning curve and accessibility: It is in regards to a Maureen Down article in the New York Times:

Dowd also repeated the oft-heard anti-Catholic lie that Pope Pius XII, the World War II-era pontiff, “remained silent about the Holocaust as it happened.”

This grossly false tale has been roundly debunked repeatedly:

In a December 25, 1941, editorial, the New York Times wrote, “The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas… he is about the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all… the Pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism … he left no doubt that the Nazi aims are also irreconcilable with his own conception of a Christian peace.”

An August 6, 1942, headline in the New York Times read, “Pope is Said to Plead for Jews Listed for Removal from France.”

In his book, Three Popes and the Jews, Israeli diplomat and scholar Pinchas Lapide has asserted, “The Catholic Church under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in saving lives of as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.” Lapide adds that this “figure far exceeds those saved by all other Churches and rescue organizations combined.”

Michael Tagliacozzo, “the foremost survivor on the October 1943 Nazi roundup of Rome’s Jews” and “a survivor of the raid himself,” said Pius’ actions helped rescue 80 percent of Rome’s Jews. Said Tagliacozzo, “Pope Pacelli was the only one who intervened to impede the deportation of Jews on October 16, 1943, and he did very much to hide and save thousands of us.” (Rabbi David G. Dalin, p. 83)

In the June 21, 2009, edition of the Boston Globe, Mordechay Lewy, Israel’s ambassador to the Holy See, is quoted, “It is wrong to look for any affinity between [Pius] and the Nazis. It is also wrong to say that he didn’t save Jews. Everybody who knows the history of those who were saved among Roman Jewry knows that they hid in the church.”

    So much for Dowd’s claim of Pope Pius XII “remaining silent.” There have been scores of books, research papers, and articles (list 1, 2) that outline what Pope Pius XII really did during World War II.

    …(read more)…

    Muslim Brotherhood=Christian Conservatives (Chris Matthews Update-Video)

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


    NewsBusters has this story:

    Daily Beast’s Aslan: Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt Like Christian Conservatives in U.S.

    The Daily Beast contributor who once insisted that there’s “no such thing as sharia law” is at it again, dismissing the threat of radical Islam presented by the political instability in Egypt.

    In a January 30 post at Washington Post/Newsweek’s “On Faith” feature yesterday, Reza Aslan dismissed fears that the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical group that could take Egypt in a theocratic direction should strongman Hosni Mubarak be forcibly ousted from power, even though members of the Brotherhood have expressed admiration for Osama bin Laden.

    Aslan, a creative writing professor at the University of California Riverside, particularly singled out two socially conservative Republicans who are rumored 2012 presidential contenders, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.):

    GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum is already drawing parallels between the young protesters calling for an end to the brutal and repressive Mubarak regime, and the popular protests that, three decades ago, brought down another despicable dictator and former American ally, the Shah of Iran. “We abandoned [the Shah] and what we got in exchange was… a radical Islamist regime,” Santorum said. Mike Huckabee, another GOP presidential hopeful, joined in the hysteria, warning Americans that, “if in fact the Muslim Brotherhood is underneath much of the unrest [in Egypt] every person who breathes ought to be concerned.”

    […]

    [H]owever the current uprising in Egypt turns out, there can be no doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood will have a significant role to play in post-Mubarak Egypt. And that is good thing.

    Despite the wide array of political and religious views on display on the streets of Cairo, Giza, Alexandria, and Suez, the one thing about which the overwhelming majority of Egyptians agree – 95 percent according to a 2010 Pew Research Center poll – is that Islam should play a role in the country’s politics. At the same time, a similar Pew poll taken in 2006 found that while the majority of the Western public thought democracy was “a Western way of doing things that would not work in most Muslim countries,” pluralities or majorities in every single Muslim-majority country surveyed flatly rejected that argument and called for democracy to be immediately established, without conditions, in their own societies.

    For Huckabee and Santorum, as well as for a large segment of the American public, these two polls present a contradiction. How could Egyptians want both a democracy and a role for religion in their government? After all, in the United States it is axiomatic that Islam is inherently opposed to democracy and that Muslims are incapable of reconciling democratic and Islamic values. Never mind that the same people who scoff at the notion that religion could play no role in the emerging democracies in the Middle East are the same people who demand that religion must play a role in America’s democracy. Ironically, one of the most vocal proponent of religious activism in politics is Mike Huckabee himself, who has repeatedly called Americans to “take this nation back for Christ” and who, while running for president, proudly declared that “what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards.”

    In fact, when it comes to the role of religion in society, Americans and Egyptians are pretty well in agreement. An August 2010 Pew poll found that 43 percent of Americans believe that churches should express political views and play an active role in politics, while 61 percent agreed that “it is important that members of Congress have strong religious beliefs.”

    There is no doubt that giving religiously inclined organizations and politicians a seat at the political table poses risks. And certainly, problems can arise when religion becomes entangled with the state, as those who recall the Bush administration’s evangelistic foreign policy can attest. Nevertheless, since a state can be considered democratic only insofar as it reflects its society, if the society is founded upon a particular set of values, then must not its government be also?

    …(read more)…

    Of course Aslan (different from CS Lewis’ Azlan) is a radical in disguise. For instance, Jihad Watch has this story of Prof. Aslan calling Ahmadinejad a “liberal reformer.” I have posted on UC Irvine in the past, and since then the Muslim Student Union was suspended for their blatant antisemitism. Below is another event that went wrong at UC Irvine:

     

    Jared Loughner Opposed the Iraq and Afghanistan~Of Course (LR & Townhall.com h/t)

    Published by Papa Giorgio


    This from Libertarian Republican:

    This from Lindgren’s article, “Jared Loughner’s Anti-War Views”:

    On July 7, 2010, Loughner posted his assertion that the war(s) in Iraq and Afghanistan “is a war crime from the Geneva Convention articles of 1949”:

    There was help with cleaning the uranium from the Iran and Iraq war in the 1980’s?

    Summation of Jared's Beliefs:
    As we all know, the Tea Party movement is teeming with Bush-hating, 9/11 truther, antiwar, Christian-hating, “Left-wing pothead” zealots

    Article 33 of the Geneva Convention is the prohibit of pillage.

    All military invasions with armed forces into a foreign country are war crimes in the Geneva Convention articles of 1949.

    The Iraq and Afghanistan war of 2010 is a military invasion with armed forces into a foreign country.

    Therefore, Iraq and Afghanistan war of 2010 is a war crime from the Geneva Convention articles of 1949.

    Ouch! For the thoughts of war.

    Lindgren also discovered Loughner rejected free market economic principles. Loughner posted support for:

    “the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.”

    …(read more and see original links)…

    At another source — TownHall.com — we find this:

    As we all know, the Tea Party movement is teeming with Bush-hating, 9/11 truther, antiwar, Christian-hating, “Left-wing pothead” zealots:

    On July 7, 2010, Loughner posted his assertion that the war(s) in Iraq and Afghanistan “is a war crime from the Geneva Convention articles of 1949”:

    There was help with cleaning the uranium from the Iran and Iraq war in the 1980’s?

    Article 33 of the Geneva Convention is the prohibit of pillage.

    All military invasions with armed forces into a foreign country are war crimes in the Geneva Convention articles of 1949.

    The Iraq and Afghanistan war of 2010 is a military invasion with armed forces into a foreign country.

    Therefore, Iraq and Afghanistan war of 2010 is a war crime from the Geneva Convention articles of 1949.

    Ouch! For the thoughts of war.

    In a thread on unemployment, Loughner quotes with seeming approval, portions of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserting “the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity” and “the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.”

    And then there are his frequent attacks on religion and Christianity, e.g.:

    Crap on God!

    Crap on God!

    Crap on God!

    Indeed, Loughner was so inspired by the (“overwhelmingly” right-wing) “climate of hate” that he didn’t vote in 2010, and is a registered independent.

    …(read more)…