The Masked Conservative

I came across a blog entry on the Net where I am criticized for criticizing Emergent Church kingpin Brian McLaren.

Foremost among the grievances rank alleged grammar errors and lapses in logic.

As to the grammar errors, perhaps so and frankly I don’t care because in light of the number of illegals that are going to be allowed to stay here in the coming years if so-called immigration reform passes, any English flowing from my pen is by default on par with Shakespeare.

When people start paying me a million dollars for these columns, I’ll waste what few years of eyesight I have left to ferret them out.

But the most comical thing about that criticism is that the allegation has been levied by someone that uses “i” rather than “I” throughout the entire blog entry. Isn’t the capitalization of “I” about one of the first rules of grammar one learns in first or second grade if one’s school has not been given over to wasting the scholastic day brainwashing students with viewings of “Brokeback Mountain” and the like?

Or maybe such a glaring mistake is deliberate and merely a manifestation of the rampant communalism infecting the Emergent Church movement.

For you see, “I” has traditionally been capitalized in the English language to denote the importance of the individual. However, in many of these churches, the congregations have been so beaten over the head about the dangers of individualism that they have begun to think of themselves only as members of the group or COMMUNITY and to forego personal recognition; unless of course you happen to be one of the bigwigs running one of these hovels of heresy. Then of course by all means you get to have your name up in lights and fritter across the countryside telling the troglodytes paying for your airfare why they are so evil for driving SUV’s and living in single family houses.

The second criticism is even more ironic than the first in that they accuse me of faulty logic.

For those not familiar with the tenets of the Emergent Church movement, it is the contention of this particular theological perspective that the genius of Christianity is not to be found in the LOGICAL or FACUTAL accuracy of its truth claims but rather in how warm and fuzzy its NARRRRRATIVE makes you feel.

And if some other system of thought floats you boat such as Hollywood style Buddhism or a particular doctrine of Christianity makes you uncomfortable such as those that reject Christ are sent to Hell, that’s no biggie either since in the end we’re all gonna get to Heaven anyway but that’s not important anymore either as the point of salvation is not to enjoy a splendid afterlife in the presence of the Almighty reunited with dearly departed loved ones but rather to have our income redistributed to a bunch of lazy bums unwilling to get off their rear ends and provide for themselves.

Besides, in this postmodern age, whose to say who’s right and who’s wrong?

Why the Emergent Church crowd of course, especially if you happen to disagree with one of their head honchos who are accorded a disturbing degree of deference for a movement claiming to be about tearing down traditional hierarchies.

If there is nothing more to religious expression than the thrill one gets from tooting one’s on horn, then why are they raising such a fuss if my column does not hold up to a correspondence theory of veracity? Haven’t the postmoderns in Emergent circles been the ones to popularize the notion that the only truth that matters is that which we ourselves hold?

Many works of speculative fiction employ a story element known as a MacGuffin device around which the plot develops. Usually this happens to be some kind of weapon of mass destruction.

However, the 2007 season finale of Smallville decided to take the concept in a decidedly different direction with interesting parallels to current biotechnical developments.

In the episode, Lex Luthor is bent on creating an army of enhanced soldiers to combat the growing menace of superpowered humans (as well as to no doubt line his own pockets and enhance his own political status).

Yet what makes this episode stand out is that it is revealed that the success of these experiments is linked to capturing a disembodied entity (a demon if you will) that escaped from the Phantom Zone, the netherworld utilized by the people of Krypton as a workaround of their stance against the death penalty for the planet’s worst criminals. For you see, the entity alters the genetic code of the human host it possesses and Luthor believes the alterations can be mass produced.

However, things do not work out as intended and the entity eventually gets a hold of Clark Kent’s DNA and morphs into what the creature itself describes as a “more bizarre version” of the Man of Steel. As the being flies off, coupled with that comment and the white powdery appearance that comes over its face in mid-flight, it is apparent the character is meant to be Bizarro.

Interestingly, in past incarnations of this warped version of Superman, he comes about as the result of a direct botched cloning. Those following developments in transhumanism where the Doctor Frankensteins of the early 21st century hope to meld all manner of creatures be they animal, human, or nonterrestrial together will no doubt note the parallels of this new interpretation in the episode to the events alluded to in Genesis about the mingling of distinct orders of being in the hopes of bringing about the elusive ubernmensch as the character is the result of the fusion of the biological and the extradimensional.

Fans will also enjoy typical season finale hijinks and as usual will be left wondering all summer whether Lana or Chloe will survive their annual excursions to death’s door and just whose side Lionel Luthor is really on.

With the reassertion of the monopoly of the Democratic Party over Maryland politics which for the previous four years had been what amounted to a party-and-a-half system, the jurisdiction jokingly referred to as “the Free State” is well on its way to becoming a socialist nightmare where only the hyper-rich or the fashionably impoverished having suppressed their own dignity to enjoy a life of entitlement program luxury will be able to eke out an existence there.

In my column “People’s Republic Of Maryland Taxing Its Subjects Into Submission”, I wrote about plans to enact legislation that will end up costing motorists about $2000 more just to purchase an automobile so that new vehicles in the state will be in compliance with California emission standards Now plans are being announced to sock residents even harder in the gut all in the name of protecting the environment.

According to the Green Fund Proposal, developers would be accessed a fee of $0.25 per square foot for any impervious surface that water cannot percolate through such as a roof or driveway. And the fee can go up as high as $2.00 per square foot for structures built outside of designated growth areas. Theoretically those in the market for a new home could be levied a fee as high as $20,000 according to a Match 6, 2007 Maryland Daily Record article titled “Debate Heats Up Over Green Fund Fee”. One does not have to hold an endowed professorship in Economics to realize that developers are not going to absorb this fee out of their own sense of philanthropy but rather pass it along to homebuyers.

Those favoring this kind of nonsense locked away in their gated communities or on their palatial estates will condescendingly snort that, even if the fee is as high as $20,000, it is a small price to pay for environmental restoration (the latest bureaucratic euphemism for spending increases as the monies will go to pay farmers to plant winter cover crops and to further bloat agencies such as the state departments of agriculture and the environment). Of course, it might not seem so much when you make in a week what the average person makes in a year but it is a significant chunk of change when you are saddled with a 30 year mortgage on a house pushing nearly $500,000.

With taxes in some Maryland counties pushing $3000 a year and projected to go as high as $6000 by 2010, one must ask what in Sheol’s nomenclature is being done with all that money. Isn’t it about time tax revenue went for actual needs such as this alleged crisis of restoring the Chesapeake Bay rather than for things that should be private sector expenses such as “Shakespeare In The Park” festivals paid for from funds provided by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, the City of Hyattsville, and the Hyattsville Community Development Corporation (all entities having the same people unfortunate enough to reside in their respective jurisdictions) and African vacations euphemistically categorized as “trade missions” for petty yet self-important local officials that in the end are about transferring still more resources out of the United States into the hands of deceitful bureaucrats and even more maniacal tyrants.

There is more of course to the exorbitant extraction of revenue to fund questionable government programs or even to transfer resources from those deemed by the elite to have to those alleged to have not. For whenever social engineers invoke what they have labeled the lofty goal of income redistribution, is has nothing whatsoever to do about elevating the downtrodden but about dragging the average American down to that level of destitution.

Though they need to stop and think who will be left to do their menial labor for them unless the next phase of their grandiose development plans include massive relocation camps where laborers will be imported from abroad and warehoused sight unseen away from the lords of the new order like human livestock and beasts of burden, those once considered parts of the working and lower middle classes will find virtually no place in the brave new Maryland on the drawing board. For example, in Hyattsville, Maryland planners are conniving to shed the municipality’s image as a suburban haven just outside Washington, DC for blue collar tradesmen and low level government functionaries to that of a hovel for artists (with government subsidized housing for those types insisting upon smearing elephant dung on portraits of the Virgin Mary, submerging crosses in jars of urine, or other assorted blasphemies and obscenities that would not otherwise find support in a free marketplace and claiming its fine art) and cramped townhouses pushing half a million dollars for the uppercrust that get a buzz living in squalor sheek all the rage these days among the effete.

Communist revolutions around the world came into power promising to create a classless society. However, what they put into place was a system where all but a tiny elite were suppressed equally. Back then, such regimes accomplished their diabolical agendas through violence and fear.

For the moment, the ideological heirs of those that believe the flames of liberty must be extinguished and the aspirations of the individual curtailed for the alleged good of humanity have grown more sophisticated in their methods of getting the people to comply with their agenda. However, as Americans draw ever closer to the breaking point of just how much they are willing to put up with as frankly we are fast approaching the threshold where there is precious little left for the state to steal, we must ask with concern will the aspiring despots among us resort to the violent tendencies of their philosophical progenitors in the attempt to bring about socialism’s ultimate triumph.

Since we are all individuals marred by the stain of sin, at one time or another all of us eventually fail to practice what we preach. Normally, this isn’t too big of a problem as most of us don’t have that much influence beyond that of our own friends and families. However, when this tendency endemic to the species manifests itself among the ostentatiously affluent craving power, it can become a social danger as these elites attempt to assuage their consciences by extracting penance from the masses that the well-to-do are not willing to subject themselves to.

In an interview posted at Beliefnet.com titled “John Edwards: My Faith Came Roaring Back” by David Kuo, the former vice presidential nominee turned presidential-hopeful discusses the role his faith has played in his public life. When asked what aspects of American life he thought Jesus would be disappointed with, Edwards did not respond about the 4 million unborn children butchered each year through abortion (an issue predictably ignored by a Democrat despite thou shalt not kill [especially innocent noncombatants] being a major theme of the Good Book) but rather with “our selfishness”, our “resorting to war when it’s not necessary” and our “ignoring the plight of those around us who are suffering and our focus on our own selfish-short term needs”.

Strategic propriety of operations in Iraq aside as one cannot make a silk purse out of a sows ear and I suppose there can’t be much done to civilize a bunch of savages that would rather go about killing each other than aspire to a decent standard of living as that is another issue. No doubt so high from the makeup and hair spray seeping into his skin that he’s succumbed to brain damage, perhaps Senator Edwards should be reminded that it was the radical Islamists that instigated the war on terror with the 9/11 attack. And while one may debate the best way to neutralize the terrorist threat in a constitutionally appropriate manner, even more disturbing is the remainder of Edwards’ response to this interrogatory.

Concern over what might be perceived as selfishness and “ignoring the plight of those around us who are suffering” might sound forward thinking to some. However, what Edwards really means, ladies and gentlemen, is that you who are considered members of the middle class are not paying enough in taxes and need a greater percentage of it confiscated for redistribution to those unwilling to lift a finger to provide for themselves despite being of strong body.

Of course, Edwards does not apply his condemnation to himself. When asked about the hypocrisy of making a big to-do over what he perceives as selfishness and recently acquiring a 28,000 square foot house complete with a separate recreation building for activities the rest of us enjoy on a smaller scale in our basements (no doubt one of the numerous domiciles owned by the Senator unless he commutes daily between North Carolina and the Washington DC area), Edwards basically responds that he, on the other hand, deserves to live in such luxury because (in a manner similar to the way Al Gore justifies his own lavish levels of consumption while expecting you to adopt a lifestyle on a level of squalor that would make an African bushman living on the savannah feel deprived) of all the work he has done for the impoverished around the world.

Like most thoroughgoing Democrats, it seems Senator Edwards suffers from a touch of liberal White guilt (referred to in previous eras as the White man’s burden) but apparently not so much that he’s not going to hand over that spacey pad of his so that the downtrodden might have a roof over their heads, divert the vast majority of his fortune to feed the hungry without turning it into a self-congratulatory media event that would make Little Jack Horner’s ego look miniscule in comparison, or forfeit his occupational station to someone of a minority group. That ladies and gentlemen, especially the Caucasian gentlemen among you who are the Senator’s social lessers, is an obligation to be passed on to and imposed upon you.

While willing to use religion in general and Christianity in particular to beat more money out of you into the tax coffers, Senator Edwards exhibits the typical leftwing squeamishness about acknowledging that most of what makes America worth living in derives in one way or the other from ideas originating in divine revelation or somehow deducible from it. When asked if he thought America was a Christian nation, while relenting there was a powerful religious thread running through American history, he was bothered (meaning ashamed) of the word “Christian” and would rather think of America as a “nation of faith”.

But faith in what, pray tell? But I guess in the creedless, non-doctrinaire nation of Senator Edwards prayer would be too strong a word with non-specific mental emanations towards unspecified entities would be a more acceptable way of putting it.

Like guns in America before it was emasculated and sissified by trial lawyers such as the Senator, there use to be a time when those that claimed to believe in Christ had no problem saying they were a Christian. Yet nowadays, every kind of deviancy either gets a handout from the government or a parade through our city streets while the devout are made to feel as if they are afflicted with one of the last recognized mental perversions.

Senator Edwards might talk a faith worthy of a Hallmark Card, but when it comes down to it, he offers us no more of a sure foundation than the secular humanism that has plagued the Western world for much of the past century or more. When asked his opinion of the Ten Commandments being displayed in local courthouses, Edwards responds, “How would Muslims feel if they went into that courthouse, and how would people of other faiths feel, Hindus, if they were in the same circumstances?”

Senator Edwards might be a whiz when it comes to peddling snake oil, but a discerning intellect he apparently is not. Technically, there isn’t all that much in the Ten Commandments a Muslim ought to object to as they see themselves as the corrected completion of both Jewish and Christian revelation, referring to these fellow monotheistic traditions as “People of the Book”. And even if they did not like it, why should we really care?

Shouldn’t those from exotic lands researched our traditions and history before coming half-way around the world to settle here only to discover they can’t stand this place? After all, we Christians were here first and the ones that opened up the shop.

Those like the Senator placing sensitivity over survival wail at the impropriety of Christians migrating to heathen lands and expecting the natives to abolish their own customs. Interesting how cultural relativism --- the erroneous idea that it is uncouth to criticize other ways of life in their respective zones of habitation --- protects every other nation on earth except the United States of America.

It should also be pointed out to the Senator from North Carolina that it is in nations such as the United States that acknowledge and retain a Judeo-Christian heritage primarily Protestant in its orientation in that ecclesiastical power is not concentrated in a single denominational authority that those holding to alternative religious viewpoints enjoy the most liberty. For example, where in the Muslim world are Christians permitted to worship freely without fear of harassment. And even in Europe where the Biblical basis of culture has been abandoned and forgotten, the native populations have to walk around on eggshells for fear of on the one hand offending Third World interlopers who will resort to violence at the drop of a hat to get their way and hypersensitive socialistic bureaucrats ready to impose hate speech penalties upon those daring to question the humanistic hegemony.

If we are to remove the Ten Commandments as the recognized foundation of Western and American law for fear it may offend outsiders, on what grounds should we even care if such people are offended? For it is only on a solid theistic foundation that we are able to criticize anything the government or social institutions do.

Don’t care for those mass killings that went on under Hitler or Stalin (feel free to take your pick as for some reason radical statistits tend to view one as the devil and the other a hero depending upon the political orientation in question even though each was pretty much a mirror image oft he other)? That’s too bad. For if one is going to say that law is nothing more that a statutory mechanism agreed upon by the members of a particular COMMUNITY, who are you to criticize either tyrant since you, free thinker, are not a member of their respective regime or nation.

Interestingly, often those wringing their hands the most over how all of us live too high on the hog are the ones --- to use the language we commoners constantly have our noses rubbed in --- giving the least back to the COMMUNITY in terms of useful work. Maybe if John Edwards had done something in his life other than becoming an ambulance chaser amassing from that a fortune surpassing even George Bush and Dick Cheney, the Senator would not feel so guilty that he feels the necessity to drive the rest of us into the impressment of mandatory voluntarism or whatever other schemes are boiling behind that mascaraed face of his.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have pretty much blown it in regards to religion in general and Christianity in particular. Thomas Jefferson is credited with saying that the government that governs best governs least because the people govern themselves. Instead of standing back and allowing faith founded on the Word of God to set the human spirit free, such profound ideals in the hands of both parties have become little more than just another reason to bash us over the head as to why we should have a silly grin plastered all over our faces while our pockets are being picked to finance questionable aims and agendas we might not otherwise agree with.

A few years back a popular slogan asked, “What would Jesus Do?” In conclusion, it is my contention I doubt He would get a $400 haircut.