THEY REALLY, REALLY HATE US
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder
If you're an evangelical Christian, a Jew, a
Catholic or any kind of believer -- you have an
implacable enemy -- one who hates you and wants to
destroy you. When I say hate, I'm not talking about
pique, annoyance or a vague aversion. I mean hate
the way Nazis hated Jews, the way white supremacists
hate blacks, the way the Hutus hated the Tutsis.
Once you reach this realization, it gives you an
almost Zen-like clarity of vision and focus.
Because then you understand your enemy, what
motivates him, and what he is capable of. And you
begin to comprehend what you must do to defeat him.
Submitted for your disapproval, (to paraphrase Rod
Serling) one Timothy Shortell, professor of
sociology at Brooklyn College. Last Wednesday, Dr.
Shortell withdrew his name from consideration to be
the next chairman of his department -- a heavy blow
to higher education and learning generally.
With the endorsement of his departmental colleagues,
Shortell seemed a shoo-in, until certain of his
writings came to light.
As would be expected of a practitioner of sociology
(a smoke-and-mirrors social "science"), Shortell is
anti-capitalism, believes Bush is a war criminal,
thinks the proponents of Social Security reform are
"spewing lies knowing there is no consequence for
their mendacity," calls America a "fascist state"
and insists "the megalomania of the ruling elite is
paid for in working class blood."
With such views, it's a wonder they didn't make him
the president of Brooklyn College. But even in a
world dominated by giants like Ward Churchill, Noam
Chomsky and Nicholas De Genova (Mr.
I'd-Like-To-See-One-Million-Mogadishus), it's still
possible to go too far. A national outcry over
Shortell's diatribes against people of faith sunk
his candidacy.
In 2001, Shortell published an essay in an on-line
journal in which he described believers as "moral
retards."
"On a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying
-- like bad taste," the professor wrote.
However, "This immaturity (a belief in God)
represents a significant social problem because
religious adherents fail to recognize their
limitations. So, in the name of their faith, these
moral retards are running around pointing fingers
and doing real harm to others."
Warming to his subject, Shortell continued: "One has
only to read the newspapers to see the results of
their handiwork. They discriminate, exclude, and
belittle. They make a virtue of close-mindedness
and virulent ignorance. They are an ugly, violent
lot."
This is a typical elitist conceit -- If you disagree
with me, you're a drooling idiot, a cretin, a
slack-jawed, knuckle-dragger, the result of
inbreeding. Here -- shorn of euphemisms and
code-words, revealed for all to see -- is what
secularists really think of us.
Did not Marx instruct them that religion is the
"opiate of the masses" and Nietzsche that "God is
dead." For them, belief in a personal God --
especially one with commandments and absolutes -- is
the result of fear and superstition, and the root of
every anti-social attitude.
Thus the prof dismisses Thomas Aquinas, Thomas
Moore, Maimonides, Isaac Newton, George Washington,
Tolstoy, Doestoevsky, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Alexsandr
Solzhenitsyn and John Paul II as imbeciles and
nitwits.
Were he better educated, Dr. Shortell might
understand that representative government, human
rights and charity all rest on a foundation of
faith. Not for nothing did America's founding
document declare that men were "endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights" or John
Adams observe that, "Our constitution was made only
for a moral and religious people."
Ironically, in a round-about way, religion has given
Shortell a livelihood. The university originated in
Europe as a Christian institution. In America,
Harvard was started to train ministers for the
Puritan clergy.
Isn't it odd that there are no atheist medical
missionaries, or charities founded by agnostics. In
the American cemetery at Normandy stand row upon row
of crosses (with a Star of David here and there) but
no question marks. For over two centuries, millions
of Americans braved death bolstered by their faith
in God. (Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.)
Try to imagine Marines going into battle shouting:
"Give me The Humanist Manifesto II or give me
death!"
In response to public outrage over his screed,
Shortell: 1) Whined that his academic freedom was
being violated (poor thing!) and 2) Declared that in
rejecting religion, he was in "the company of such
esteemed social theorists as Karl Marx, Sigmund
Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche... company I will gladly
keep."
What can one say of an academic ideologue who's
proud to be in the company of Karl Marx -- a man who
inspired an ism which led to the deaths of 100
million human beings, from the murder of the Kulaks,
to the Stalinist purges, to the Cultural Revolution
to the Killing Fields of Cambodia? One and a half
million Vietnamese boat people didn't flee a regime
founded on the worldview of Norman Vincent Peale or
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.
But Shortell forgot some other "esteemed social
theorists" in whose company he finds himself --
Robespierre, the Marquis de Sade, Lenin, Stalin, Mao
("Religion is poison"), Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Kim
Jong Il and Adolf Hitler.
In his Table Talk, the Fuhrer commented,
"Christianity is an invention of sick brains," also
"The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural
death."
The architect of genocide reportedly told his friend
Herman Rauschnig: "We are fighting the perversion of
our healthiest instincts...That devilish: Thou
shalt! And that stupid: Thou shalt not... We
commence hostilities against the so-called Ten
Commandments; the tablets from Sinai are no longer
in force. Conscience, like circumcision, is a
mutilation of man."
As they burned down synagogues on Kristallnacht, the
Hitler Youth sang, "We have no need of Christian
virtue. Our leader is our savior. The pope and rabbi
shall be gone. We shall be pagans again."
Besides their hatred of God, modernity's ideological
killers showed us what a world without God is like.
It is a world without moral absolutes, a world where
human beings are crucified in the name of humanity
-- a world of guillotines, planned famines, firing
squads, torture cells, reeducation camps, gas
chambers and crematoria.
On a more mundane level, consider the degeneration
of American society as we've moved to a public
square sanitized of expressions of faith, as we've
replaced Biblical morality with the ethos of secular
humanism -- 1.3 million abortions annually, millions
of cohabiting couples, illegitimacy rates of over 80
percent in the inner cities, soaring rates of
venereal disease, rampant addiction, girls from
middle-class families losing their virginity at 14,
pharmaceutical companies getting rich selling
prescription drugs for peace of mind and a
pornographic culture.
Shortell gave the game away when he condemned
believers for "running around pointing fingers" for
being closed-minded and discriminating, excluding
and belittling -- in other words, for making moral
judgments.
Doestoevsky wrote, "without God, all is permitted."
That's precisely what secularists want -- a world
where all is permitted: premarital sex,
extra-marital sex, sex with adolescents,
homosexuality, sex without commitment or
consequences, the elimination of inconvenient life
(through abortion, doctor-assisted suicide and
euthanasia), legalization of so-called recreational
drugs and the forced social-acceptance of deviancy.
They hate us for standing in the way of their grand
utopian vision -- for spoiling their fun.
Don't for a minute imagine that Timothy Shortell is
part of a lunatic fringe. Rather, he is the vanguard
of the cultural elite. Hollywood, the news media,
public education, academia, politicians raving about
the religious right, and activist groups from the
ACLU and People for the American Way to the National
Organization for Women -- all reflect Shortell's
venomous hatred of believers, even if their rhetoric
is more discreet and couched in euphemisms.
All of our most contentious political battles (over
abortion, stem-cell research, the killing of the
disabled, homosexual marriage, sex education, the
public display of the Ten Commandments, even the
fight over judicial nominations) involve the clash
of two cultures -- Judeo-Christian and militantly
secular. One was first revealed at Sinai, the other
forged in the fires of the Reign of Terror. One
finds its highest _expression in noble sacrifice for
the common good -- the other in sacrificing others
to one's vanity and lust.
The answer is not to hate in return, but to
understand that this isn't -- you should pardon the
_expression -- an academic debate. In Timothy
Shortell's vision of the future, there's no place
for you and me. Fight as if your life depended on
it. Quite literally, it does.
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