Friday, August 03, 2007

The Religion of the Left


John Kekes, a secular conservative philosopher who has influenced me a lot, is joined by David Gelernter of the AEI in assessing the Left as a form of religion. I share this viewpoint, which is why I rarely try to argue with liberals. I know that when I was a liberal, I could not be argued out of it.

"This left-liberalism is no mere political ideology. It is beyond doubt a religion, and has been since the 1930s. (There is no God in the left-liberal religion, but the same holds for other accepted and acknowledged religions.) Religious beliefs are ones that you take on faith, that you cannot be talked out of, that show you a broad, comprehensive, high-level picture of the world. They are doctrines you believe for internal spiritual reasons, not external factual ones.

Today's left-liberal faith despises the Bible, Judaism and Christianity, family life, and "the patriarchy." It believes in a "globalism" that holds divisions within nations (race and class divisions) to be terribly important and divisions among nations to be trivial. It believes in multinational government and (naturally) hates patriotism on principle, just as it does Christianity, with all the fervent hatred that new faiths reserve for older ones. Its fundamental principle is that men and women are not just equal but interchangeable."

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