The Pope Reads Dinesh D'Souza

Well, this is, at least for a relatively uninformed woman, the second attempt that I've seen in a week to set the groundwork for claiming that we should "placate" the terrorists by moving back towards their preferred method of exercising "power over". I've actually been expecting this for some time. The Western theocrats figure that if they can get the whole world subject to a monotheistic/father/angry/thunder/mountain/sky God, they can battle the Moslems later to determine exactly which Abrahamic cult obtains ultimate dominance. The Islamic theocrats, I imagine, think the same thing about the xians.

Earlier this week, Atrios reported on Dinesh D'Souza's treasonous assertion that:

the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America’s cultural left.

D’Souza shows that liberals—people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore—are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy—including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror—contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom—from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D’Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left’s attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.

Today, the NYT reports on Pope Ratzi the Nazi's speech that echoes D'Souza's insane theory.

In his homily, facing Vatican and Bavarian flags waved by an extraordinarily well-behaved crowd, he said that for all its benefits, the modern, secular world does not provide all the answers.

"People in Africa and Asia admire our scientific and technical prowess, but at the same time they are frightened by a form of rationality that totally excludes God from man’s vision," he said.

"They do not see the real threat to their identity in the Christian faith," he said, "but in the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom and that holds up utility as the supreme moral criterion for the future of scientific research."

While the pope did not mention Islam specifically, his comments echoed previous statements about how Muslims cannot comprehend how the West has divorced itself from faith. His comment on the "mockery of the sacred" seemed too to refer to the controversy earlier this year in which many Muslims took offense to cartoons in a Danish newspaper depicting the Prophet Mohammad, which were defended in the West as an exercise in free speech.

Ratzi the Nazi completely fails, of course, to cite even one Islamic author who has said that they see no threat from xianity, but, rather hate us for "the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers that mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom . . . ." Moreover, he, like everyone else who erects this strawman only to bravely knock him down, fails to provide an example of any serious modern politician or thinker who has "contempt for God."

This is precisely the same strawman that Katherine Harris erected to justify her insane assertion that separation of church and state is a lie. She claimed to be addressing the "commonly-held" misperception that "people of faith" shouldn't be involved in politics. Yet, she failed to cite even one example of this "commonly-held" misperception. That's because NO ONE is saying that "people of faith" shouldn't be involved in religion. EVERY SINGLE American president has (at least) claimed to be an xian. She's full of shit,

And so are D'Souza and Pope Ratzi. What all three of them, and hundreds of others of their ilk, actually hate is separation of church and state, which they hope to slyly turn into the equivalent of "contempt for god," or the persecution of "people of faith."

This bullshit is all of a piece with the suddenly-frequent labeling by certain xians of all sorts of thoughts and behaviors as "Pagan." You watch. "Pagan" is becoming the new gay. Before they're through, "pagans" will be for "science" and everyone else will be for theocracy. Weird reversal from the days when science was promoted as a way to "move away" from "pagan" beliefs, but, shit, it's not as if words have any real meaning for these madmen nor as if they see any need to keep their pronouncements consistent with what they were saying yesterday, last year, or a century ago.

I hate them.