Too Many Unanswered Questions

I was a part of a discussion recently about reparations being made for slavery in the US, and I objected to the idea based on the fact that a) the last person we can confirm was a slave in this country died sometime around 1958, and b) the last person we can confirm was a slave owner died a lot longer ago than that.  Its my feeling that the people who owe reparations are the people who perpetrated the crime, and they are owed directly to their victims.

Anyway, the most vocally person arguing for such things was using a lot of sneering derision when it came to white people, but when called on it told me that racism required power, therefore black people could not be racist.  And besides, this was about the legacy of slavery, not his feelings about white people.

Eventually, he stopped issuing his vile racist nonsense and actually started talking about the legacy of slavery, basically saying that he, personally, was owed millions of dollars because of ancestors who were slaves and that he was affected by its legacy and all that (despite not being able to actually pin down how he was affected).

So I asked him the following questions:  If, as he said, it was all about the legacy of slavery and not about his feelings of hatred for white people, then:

1.  How did his plan for reparations for slavery being paid by the "descendants of slave owners" to the "descendants of slaves" affect those descendants of white slaves in this country?  Because the original slaves in the colonies that would eventually become the United States were criminals, mostly white, from the United Kingdom who were sold into a lifetime of slavery on plantations in the colonies as a part of their criminal sentence.

2.  How did his plan for reparations for slavery being paid by the "descendants of slave owners" to the "descendants of slaves" affect those descendants of black slave owners in this country?  Because there were a not-insignificant number of black people in this country prior to universal manumission who owned and kept slaves for the exact same reason the white folk did:  to work their farms and plantations and to act as servants.

3.  How did his plan for reparations for slavery being paid by the "descendants of slave owners" to the "descendants of slaves" take into account those people who were not only the descendants of slave owners, but who were simultaneously the descendants of slaves?  Would such people be forced to pay reparations to themselves?  Or did his plan use some demented version of the "one drop rule" where, if even one of a person's ancestors was a slave owner, they count as a slave owner regardless of what the rest of the person's ancestry was?

4.  How did his plan for reparations for slavery being paid by the "descendants of slave owners" to the "descendants of slaves" take into account those people whose ancestors were neither slave nor slave owner?  It would be unfair to force people who were not involved in slavery at all to pay reparations, just as it would be unfair to grant reparations to people who did not deserve them.  And if you're assuming all white people (as this young man did) are responsible for slavery even when they did not actually own slaves, we're back to the subject of white slaves.

5.  What measures did his plan for reparations for slavery being paid by the "descendants of slave owners" to the "descendants of slaves" include for taking into account those people whose ancestors came to this country after slavery had ended, and who therefore had no hand in that institution?  Because it would be unfair to force people who were not involved to pay reparations, just as it would be unfair to grant reparations to people who did not deserve them.

Amazingly enough, he didn't have any answers for me.  He just kept beating the "white people are bad" drum, even if he dressed it up in fancy clothes.

Let's Talk About Christian Apologetics

Okay, let's start out with a quick explanation of just what Christian Apologetics is.  In a nutshell, Christian Apologetics is when someone defends the Christian religion by coming up with explanations for problems with Christian belief and Christian doctrine that rational thought and skeptical analysis bring up when such thought and analysis are leveled at Christianity.  The word "apologetics" has its roots in the Greek word apologia, meaning "a speech made in defense."  In Ancient Greece, it referred to a defense made during a trial.  After the accusation, the defendant was allowed to refute the charges against him with a reply to the accusation.  Up until the 1700s, the word "apologetics" was used to indicate any sort of intellectual defense made against accusations.  Right around the middle of the 18th Century, however, the word started to be applied only to the defense of religious doctrine and belief, and it is that narrower definition that continues to be used to this day.  Christian Apologetics is specifically the defense of Christianity.

So in a nutshell, that's Christian Apologetics.

The one thing to always keep in mind when discussing Christian Apologetics is that its basically made up nonsense.  The apologist relies on logical fallacy and semantic games to make his point, and counts on the general ignorance of science and the need of most unthinking Christians to have an easy answer to the "blasphemous" accusations made by the skeptical about their religion.  Supposedly, Christian Apologetics is based on "evidence," but the truth is that most of the so-called evidence is nothing more than personal opinion on the part of whatever "scholar" produced it in the first place.  (And producing this supposed "evidence" is a multi-billion dollar a year industry).

Two favorites of the apologist are Lee Strobel and his book The Case For Christ, and Josh McDowell and his book Evidence That Demands a Verdict.  It should be noted that both of these men are ministers.  Neither pretends to any scientific impartiality, objectivism, or unbiased opinions.  Oh sure, both make claims to objectivity, and claim to be looking at Christianity from the viewpoint of scholarly truth, but in practice they are as biased in favor of their own religion as any other believer, and are willing to make the most befuddling leaps of faith (pun intended) to support that religion as they find necessary.  The truth is, both men are snake oil salesmen selling a con game to the gullible.

But then, conning the gullible is the basic essence of religion.

Christian Apologists have nothing to support their personal opinions other than more personal opinion.  They have no access to documents written by Jesus (because no such documents exist), no museums full of Jesus artifacts (because no such artifacts exist), no supporting documents by other writers (because none such documents exist).  In short, they have nothing to support their words but logical fallacy, supposition, guesswork, and -- to put it bluntly -- their own ability to convince people that what they are saying isn't just a big pile of bullshit.  What they do have, though, is faith.  And its faith that not only keeps the pile of bullshit from falling over on itself, its what convinces the gullible to actually buy into it.

The primary source of the so-called "proof" that Apologists use to convince the general public that their arguments are sound that their storybook hero is real is the storybook itself.  The Bible is given the special privilege by these people of being able to confirm the truth of itself.  Unique among all other historical documents, Christians hold that the Bible is "historically reliable" simply because the Bible itself says that it is true.  Yes, that's right.  The Bible is true because the Bible says that it is true.  That's a handy little concession, isn't it?  Now, is there any sort of actual justification for this belief?  Does the Bible give accurate chronologies and verifiable facts about people, places, and things contained within it?  Are there avenues of research that clearly show that the Bible is accurate when it comes to the things it says?

Not at all.  Like any fictional story, the Bible describes a series of unlikely events using a plethora of characters and a mass of completely unverifiable fictional details to tell its story.  Oh sure, the setting for the story, Roman-ruled Judaea, was a real-enough place.  First Century Palestine certainly existed (you can, after all, hop a plane to Israel and visit the ruins).  But that said, fictional stories set in real-world locations do not cease to be fictional.

The central question is this:  Did a Jewish Carpenter walk on water, raise the dead, piss off the authorities, get crucified, and somehow get resurrected and taken up to heaven, just like the Bible describes?  Unfortunately for Christians, the only evidence -- the Biblical "facts", legends, history, and the vast number of "witnesses" -- we have saying that such a person really lived and did all those things are other characters in the same story giving testimony that the Jewish Carpenter in question actually existed.

As Dr. Kenneth Humphreys once put it, "This is rather like proving the existence of Batman by quoting the words of Robin the Boy Wonder."

Think about it.  As evidence of the "divine birth" of Jesus, we have the Book of Luke's testimony of the shepherds and the angels (Luke 2).  Never mind that Luke was written between 90 and 105 years after the supposed birth of Jesus.  The writer of Luke steps forward as a witness to dialogue quoted verbatim.  Jesus turning water into wine?  Well, we've got the writer of the Book of John as our key (and in fact, only) witness, writing his story nearly 140 years after the fact.  And who do we have to vouch for the resurrection?  Evidence for the "risen Christ" actually comes from Paul's testimony of "500 witnesses", none of whom are actually identified, the sightings of 12 apostles, and himself (1 Corinthians 15).  Of course, Paul's testimony contradicts the Book of Matthew, which only has two unidentified women and eleven of the twelve apostles.  The Book of Mark raises Matthews tally to three women and names them (Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome), two random passers-by, and the eleven apostles.  The stories don't even match up, but we are expected to take them as if they were unshakable truths, written in stone.  Sure.  Pull the other one.  The entire core belief of Christianity -- the resurrected savior -- rests on just under five hundred self-contradictory words written over a period of 180 years in an ancient and thoroughly discredited book.  Perhaps the writers of the Bible simply expected people to believe as they were told and never question anything.

In addition to the argument that the Bible is true because it says it is true, Apologetics also cite early Christian scholars as evidence.  No, I don't mean they cite the works of these early Christian fathers, they cite the existence of such people.  The supposed lives of these men are used as evidence supporting Christianity, not just what they put down on paper.  For example, Ignatius of Antioch, who lived some time between 50 AD and 115 AD (we're not sure, precisely) has become the lynchpin of the Roman Catholic claim to world mastery.  According to the story, Ignatius was martyred when Emperor Trajan (a man for whom an astonishingly large amount of historical records exist, and who was, in truth, a relatively benign and harmless man as far as Roman Emperors go) took offense to the man for some unexplained reason, and rather than having him tried and executed in Antioch sentenced him to be killed by wild beasts in the Colliseum of Rome.  (This is doubly odd, given that, if that's what Trajan wanted to happen, Antioch had a Colliseum of its own that they could have used.)

We are asked to believe that the Emperor, who was at the time assembling his armies for the coming war with Parthia, took time out of his war preparations to assign an entire battalion of soldiers to bring bring Ignatius to Rome by way of a long and circuitous land-route that gave Ignatius the opportunity to meet and greet notable Christians nearly every step of his way.  Supposedly along this four month long journey, Ignatius wrote fifteen letters to various individuals, including the Virgin Mary and a Christian bishop who wasn't even born by the time Ignatius supposedly died.  Miraculous!

Of course, the importance of these supposed letters is not to supply historical accuracy to the story, but to bolster Catholic doctrine.  Ignatius's letters are filled to the brim with Fourth Century orthodoxy, telling the faithful how they are supposed to live their lives under the benign rule of the Church, how they are supposed to follow the doctrine supplied by the church, and how they are supposed to live their lives as good Christians.  Note I saidFourth Century orthodoxy.  Coming from the supposed pen of a Second Century martyr.  Amazing how that happens.  In addition, Ignatius is used as the "connecting authority" between the early so-called "Christian Jews" and the first true Christians.  (The first Roman bishop to identify himself as "Pope", Anicetus (who reigned over the church between 156 and 166 CE) -- did so supposedly after being named as such by Ignatius.  Similarly, Clements, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus are all used in a similar manner to Ignatius, as if the fact that they existed at all validates Christian doctrine, as if, somehow, the fact that a person living in the Second or Third Century somehow proves that a person in the First Century actually existed.

The problem with this being that evidence of belief is not evidence of fact.  If the fact that lots of people believe something means that the belief is automatically true, then that would validate the Hindu gods a lot better than the Christian one, given that Hinduism pre-dates Christianity by three thousand years.

Then there's the "sheer quantity of documentation" argument.  It goes something like "There is only one manuscript copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars and that dates to the Tenth Century.  In contrast there are twenty thousand manuscripts of the gospels in various languages, dating from the Sixth through Twelfth Centuries.  Doesn't that PROVE the correctness of the New Testament?"  Uh, no, it doesn't.  A lie repeated a hundred times does not stop being a lie, and a truth told only once does not stop being a truth.  But what this does show is how few Christian manuscripts -- or even scraps of Christian manuscripts -- managed to survive from before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Whole libraries full of ancient wisdom and learning -- Pagan wisdom and learning -- were burned to the ground by Christians.  For centuries, by order of the Christian church, the only approved literature was the Bible.  Everything else was forbidden and destroyed.

And modern Christian Apologists have the brass balls to claim that this self-generated lack of documentation for anything other than Christianity is proof of their own religion.  That's sort of like a Nazi saying that the lack of Jewish art is proof of the supremacy of the Nazi cause.

The Apologetics argument that really gets my goat is the one where the Christian asks, "Why would the apostles of Christ have suffered and died for a fake religion?"  Are you kidding me with this nonsense?  Seriously?  People "suffer and die" because they are told lies every single day.  Tell me, Mr. Christian, if suffering and dying for your faith is evidence of the truth of that faith, does that mean the terrorists who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 go immediately to heaven, as the Koran said they would?  Even better, one early Christian king in what would become Germany is known to have tortured and murdered nearly ten thousand pagan Germans in an effort to force them to convert to Christianity.  Does the fact that they suffered and died prove the existence of Wotan and Thunor?

And that's ignoring the fact that there is precisely zero evidence that the "apostles of Christ" actually even existed, much less were tortured and murdered by the Romans.  At least not until the Christians started turning its attention to burning heretics at the stake.  Paul, for example, never refers to the execution of a single apostle.  Not once.  Though of course that does nothing to diminish the often repeated story of how the Emperor Nero "put Christians to the torch" in a pogram for which no historical evidence exists at all.  Religious-inspired murder proves nothing.

Now, normally, we could all just sit back and laugh at the gullible rubes who get conned into believing this nonsense.  Problem is, this is as rational as some Christians ever get.  And these people vote.

The thought of a truly Christian government in the United States scares me like no other nightmare scares me.

Alexander the Great vs. Jesus

As you guys already know, I've already written extensively on how there is simply no extra-Biblical evidence for Jesus. It just doesn't exist. What we have instead are a bunch of obviously edited documents, or documents written by people living hundreds of years after the fact. The sort of “evidence” we do have is what historians call “interesting, but not indicative”. There's enough noise there to maybe justify a belief that there might have been some mortal man who, over time, got turned into the Jesus myth, but no evidence whatsoever that turns this speculative opinion into a fact.

No evidence at all.

Anyway, there are a lot of Christians out there that try to cover up the fact that they are believing in a fairy tale by shifting attention away from the lack of support for Jesus and onto other historical figures. They claim that, if we cannot rely on the post-chronicle exegiesis of Jesus, then we cannot establish an actual historical foundation of historical figures like Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, Napoloeon Bonaparte, or even George Washington. Hell, I once saw someone try this trick with Thomas Edison of all people, despite the fact that Edison is a 20^th Century figure of whom we have a mountain of photographic, film, and recording evidence.

This sort of claim is the height of dishonesty, and to be honest its insulting to actual historians.

The point being that there is a vast, canyon-like difference between these historical figures and Jesus. In the case of all of these people, we have physical artifacts confirming their existence. We have their writings in their own hands. We have eyewitness accounts for these people from people who saw, met, talked to, and knew them during their lives.

We have nothing like this for Jesus.

So why do Christians think they can get away with this bullshit? Actually its pretty simple: they're making assumptions. Take Alexander the Great, for example. The Christians are assuming that since Alexander lived so long ago (he lived from 356 BCE to 323 BCE) that there just couldn't be any written primary sources about Alexander that survived to the present day, especially given the lack of contemporary writings for Jesus (who, remember, the Christians see as a much more important person than some jumped up Macedonian king).

Thing is, this assumption is incorrect. We have, for one thing, the Babylonian Royal Diary a book that was kept for millennia, to the point that there are several copies that survive to this day. All of the copies mention Alexander. In fact, it is the fact that all the copies we have say the same exact thing (something that cannot be said about all the copies of the Bible... nearly all the copies of the ancient Biblical text we possess show clear evidence of alteration and editing) are why we believe the Diary is authentic in its accounts. The diary records Alexander's birth into the household of his father, King Phillip II of Macedon, and records the precise date of Alexander's death (which the Diary calls “the day the King died”).


The Diary is an almost day-to-day account of the historical events that happened in and around Babylon. It is not a narrative story (like the Bible) but reads more like a timeline of history. On this day, this thing happened. On that day, that thing happened. It is not fictionalized at all. And it talks about “The King, Alexander” at great length.

There is also an administrative document from Bactria, written in Aramaic, that records the day and date of Alexander's arrival in Bactria in pursuit of the main assassin of Darius III, an usurper and self-proclaimed “king” who is known as both Artaxerxes and Bessus. In fact, this same document also records the day and date that Artaxerxes arrived in Bactria, for that matter.

But even better, while very few documents written by the man himself have survived, do not for a moment imagine that “very few” means “none at all”. We have treaties and diplomatic letters signed by Alexander's own hand, bearing his name and his own words and statements. Alexander's letter to Chios, a Greek city whose leaders tried to get out from under Alexander's rule by allying with his Persian enemies, is even written in first person and signed with Alexander's name, not his seal of office.

We have letters from Alexander to his teacher Aristotle. We have letters from Alexander to his mother. We have letters from Alexander to allied kings. And all of them were written by the man himself, and bear the man's own name signed in his own hand. These sources are all indisputable in their authenticity. Unlike Jesus, we really do have direct evidence demonstrating his existence.

But even if there wasn't any direct, first-hand evidence, there is a literal mountain of secondary-source evidence. There exist over two dozen cities founded by Alexander and named after him stretching from Egypt to India. We have coins bearing his name and likeness, all of which date back to the period of his reign. We have inscriptions on walls and temples bearing his name and likeness that date to the time of his reign. We have the accounts of his generals, many of whom would go on to become kings in their own right and found important dynasties of their own. We have the fact that Greek culture was spread throughout the Middle East and Near Asia, leaving a host of archeological evidence as a direct result of Alexander's conquests. The amount of secondary-source evidence supporting Alexander's existence is simply overwhelming.

And here is where it really does get fun. You see, even the teriary and quadriary evidence (that is, the stuff that is basically “heard it from a guy, non-contemporary, non-direct” evidence... which is basically where the Bible would be were there any source outside of the Bible supporting it) is more historically convincing than the Bible when it comes to historical support.

Let's play a game real quick. Let's take any one of the gospels – or all four of them for that matter – and compare it to Arrian's history of Alexander the Great's campaigns. For the record, Arrian of Nicodemia was a Greek historian who lived from some time around 86 CE to some time around 160 CE (we don't have specific dates, but we know he was alive and writing during this period). This means his history of Alexander's empire was written some 400 years after the fact.


Ordinarily, this would be enough to toss the history out the window as useless. But – and this is mildly important – Arrian's methods of historiography are so superior to the methods used by the authors of the gospels (if they used any at all) that the two are barely comparable. For example, Arrian compares his sources, which consisted of eyewitness written accounts from Alexander's generals, and cites his sources by name and page. He tells us why he is choosing one written account of a certain event over another. He tells us why they hold more weight, in his opinion. All of which are practices used by modern historians.


Even better, many of his sources are cited by other historians in other words. Its not just Arrian, for example, citing Ptolemy's account; references to Ptolemy are found all over the place, and they all refer to the exact same statements using the exact same words. If we had this sort of evidence for Jesus, there would be no question at all that the man actually existed. No question at all.

Robert C. Webb, one of my constant antagonists in this argument, has pointed out to me that we shouldn't expect the same level of evidence for Jesus as we do for Alexander, because (Webb argues) Alexander was a great ruler while Jesus was just an itinerant rabbi.


While this is true, it raises the question of why anyone would attempt to compare the two in the first place.

Bad Comedy: Conservatives and Small Government

Here is one solid truth that you can take to the bank:  No one with a lick of sense really wants a big, bloated, inefficient government that has been overrun with useless bureaucracy.

Nobody wants that, not even the liberals.

So the basic idea of a small, efficient government is a good one.  The thing is, when conservatives talk about "small government," and how they want to create one, they're basically lying to you.  They don't want a smaller government at all.  No, what both corporate and social conservatives really want is a big, big, BIG government that has its hands all over your life.

It's true.

Even though most literate conservatives (about 38% of the total number of conservatives in the US) are very wary of Thomas Jefferson and his ideals of personal freedom and liberty and the right of an individual to steer his own course, the conservatives have latched on to one Jefferson quote above all others and, if you listen to their rhetoric, made it into a religion:  "The government that governs least governs best."  Of course, Jefferson said that decades before he became president, realized that the idea of a small government was unrealistic, and went out and bought the Louisiana Territory from France without bothering to send Congress a note saying, "Hey, I've had an idea..."  Technically, Jefferson didn't have the authority to buy Louisiana on his own lookout, but you know what?  It doubled the size of the country and maybe quintupled the natural resources available to the still-infant United States.  It was a power-grab the likes of which we have only seen in the actions of the George W. Bush administration after the September 11 attacks.  And it was accompanied by the first really noteworthy enlargement of the government ever.

That's right, Mr. "Government that Governs Least" nearly tripled the size of the federal government overnight.

That was two hundred-some-odd years ago.  To this day, you'd be hard pressed to find a single American who would say that the Louisiana Purchase was a bad thing.  Even back then, when America was only a few hundred miles wide, had less than seven million citizens, enjoyed an economy smaller than the one enjoyed by the city of Cleveland, Ohio today, when "state-of-the-art weaponry" meant cast-iron artillery pieces, there was never a single hope of the United States having a small government.  It just wasn't possible.  There were too many things that needed looked after and managed.

So why would anyone think that the modern United States, whose territory spans a third of the diameter of the globe, with 300 million citizens, an economy worth trillions of dollars that is the clearly most dominant economic force in the world, with tens of thousands of corporations getting into trouble around the globe, with a military numbering in the millions of persons with state-of-the-art weapons the likes of which would have been considered science fiction even 40 years ago, could possibly be managed by a small government?

Seriously, anyone who really, truly believes that needs to report back to High School to attend a remedial civics lesson.

Or maybe needs to report to the nearest psychiatry clinic.

Of course, the only people who would believe that are either social conservatives or libertarians.  Both liberals and corporate conservatives know full well that "small government" is just another form of conservative deceit, just like the idea of a "free market."

Once upon a time, the rich and powerful loved government.  Of course, this was back in the days of feudalism, when the king was the benefactor of the nobility, who were allowed free reign over the serfs and peasants living on their lands.  This was when government and Big Religion were permanently intertwined.  The combined behemoth of political/military power and religious authority controlled every facet of a person's life.  But then, all sudden-like, this new and radically different sort of government popped its head out of the grass, and this new form of government was all aboutWe the People... and all men created equal... and certain inalienable rights and other ideas that threatened to utterly demolish the whole wonderful system of the upper crust having its way and the commoners having to just suck it up and suffer in silence.

A just democratic government stands for the people -- all of the people, not just the rich and powerful.  It stands for the minority against the might of the majority.  It protects all of the people, not just the treasured few.  This ought to be self-evidence for anyone who has the slightest clue as to what America is all about, but surprisingly sometimes those people are really thin on the ground.  It turns out that some Americans really don't much like the whole "democracy" thing, and would like to hijack it if they could in order to bring us back to the days of the rich ruling having ultimate power over the poor.

We call those people "conservatives."

And here I mean both the wealthy, powerful corporate conservatives and the sometimes-loveable, sometimes-not mush-for-brains self-delusional idiots known as social conservatives, who somehow have convinced themselves that their corporate colleagues on the right actually give a shit about them.

These conservatives see the government as "being in their way."  And so is born the idea of shrinking the government.  As tax-dodging felon and conservative cult leader Grover Norquist once said, "I want a government so small we can drown it in the bathtub."  But just like the "free market" that corporate conservatives proffer as the savior of the economy is actually a rigged market, so too the "small government" that the conservatives envision is actually a dragon hiding its true nature by disguising itself as a rosy-cheeked child.

Here is the truth.

What the conservatives really want to do is simultaneously strip the government of its means to protect the common man against the predation of the rich and powerful, while simultaneously maximizing the government's ability to control and coerce the common man.

Think about this:  conservatives have never once supported a budget which reduced military spending by a single penny.  The United States of America spends more than the rest of the world's military forces combined every year.  There are billions and billions of dollars that could be saved simply by removing the bloat from the military budget.  We could make it all more efficient by simply streamlining the process by which military production contracts are handled, and by eliminating overly-expensive and needless boondoggles.  But the conseratives won't accept a single copper penny being cut from the military's budget.  In addition, the conservatives cheerfully advocate and support military adventurism all over the globe.  After all, we've got this gigantic military toybox, we might as well play with the toys, right?

On what planet is this "small government?"

I ask, because this is Earth, where such a system requires a bloated government.

The military-industrial gravy train rolls on, year after year, decade after decade.  In addition, most American military adventurism is nothing more than the promotion of US business interests by way of violent force.  Hiding behind the clarion call to defend America against the boogeyman of fascism, communism, terrorism, or whatever the latest "ism" happens to be is the conservative desire to utterly control and dominate the world economically.  In the cases of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the hatred of communism teamed up with a keen determination to protect and preserve American access to southeast Asian resources and trade markets.  American invasions of the Middle East are driven more by the desire to control the greatest single supply of petroleum in the world than it is the desire to "put a stop to terrorism."

Big business like this requires big government, if for no other reason than to settle the legal disputes the various corporations find themselves constantly engaged in with each other.  Beyond that, Big Business loves government regulations and red tape, because such things make it difficult for newcomers, small fry, and less-dexterous competitors to compete.  And of course, the more bloated and corrupt the government, the more Big Business is able to purchase people inside the government who will work toward the best interests of Big Business instead of the best interests of We the People...  

A small, lean government just wouldn't be able to serve these important functions at all.  A huge and complex governmental system crawling with paid lobbyists and bought politicians -- precisely what the average Joe would describe as "big government" - is absolutely ideal for corporate conservatives.  The average citizen has not a single lobbyist.  The oil industry alone employs thousands of them.

Meanwhile, some of the biggest schemes of the corporate conservatives involve the vast natural resources that are held in trust for We the People... by the federal government.  This land, this air, this water, these minerals, these trees, these animals, all belong to We the People... but Big Business wants and needs them.  A small, efficient government might effectively protect these precious resources.  A big, clumsy, corrupt government can hide all manner of shenanigans, allowing Big Business to get its claws on We the People's... property.  From Warren G. Harding's Teapot Dome scandal, to Ronald Reagan literally giving thousands of acres of old growth forest away to the lumber and paper industries for free, to George W. Bush's attempt to steal the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from We the People..., conservatives within the government are always looking for new, creative ways to steal natural resources from the public and transfer them to the hands of private corporations.

By the way, this includes the public airwaves that conservatives have used so effectively to dominate the media, as well as the internet, Medicade, and the Social Security fund.  They see these things as ripe fruit ready for picking.

So corporate conservatives want and need a big government in order to get away with robbing We the People... blind.  They need a pliant, easily manipulated and purchased government willing to follow directions.  When they wax eloquent about "small government," it's just code for wanting to dismantle all the elements of the government that stand in the way of their exploting the people and the natural resources of the United States.

The eventual goal of some of the more hardcore corporate conservatives is complete corporate control over society.  Anyone who has studied history knows there is a word for this goal.

That word is Fascism.

Pure and simple.  Fascism.  An end of government "of the people, for the people, and by the people" and a beginning of government "of the corporations, for the corporations, and by the corporations."  An end to America as we know it.  And while this seems far off, it really isn't.  Just take a good, long look at certain Supreme Court decisions.  You know, the ones that grant corporations status as a human being, and religious rights, and free speech rights.

Such a government isn't "coming."  Its already here.

The United States: Not a Christian Nation

The United States is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, a Christian nation.

Period.

Even if the Fundamentalists get their way and manage to not only take over but manage to install a theocratic Christian government, it wouldn't be the United States of America.   It would be a zombified imposter pretending at the name.

There is no Christian ideology (or even Biblical ideology) to be found in America's founding ideals.  None of it, not the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the subsequent Amendments to the Constitution, the laws that have been generated since then, and our system of government derived therefrom has anything to do with Christianity or the Bible.  If anything, the American system is a radical and emphatic rejection of Biblical ideas regarding laws and government.

The Bible, in case you missed it, promotes the so-called "Divine Right of Kings" and theocratic dictatorship.  These two ideals are at the core of the Abrahamic governmental tradition, and America just isn't about that sort of thing.

Diametrically opposed to the idea of a God-appointed King and a set of laws that commands you to revere one particular religion (thankfully), the legal system of the United States of America was instead based on English common law, as established primarily by the Magna Carta in 1215, the British Constitution of 1657, the Habeus Corpus Act of 1679, and the English Bill of Rights of 1689.

None of these drew from Biblical government philosophy, either.

Instead, they were based on a pair of pagan legal philosophies:  Greek  democracy (which promoted the idea that citizens got a say in how the government did things) and Roman civil law (that promoted the idea that the law treated everyone under it in the same non-prejudicial way).  Other important inspirations for the American system of government were obtained from philosophers of the Enlightenment Period, principle among them John Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.  There is also some evidence that Benjamin Franklin brought ideas from the Iroquois Confederacy's form of democracy into the mix, particularly the idea that each state would be an autonomous unit bound to a larger federal whole.

If the founding fathers had intended the United States to be a Christian nation, you'd think they might have included the words "Jesus," "Christ," "Bible," or "Christian" somewhere in the Declaration or the Constitution.  But they didn't.  What, do you think they did that accidentally?  No, not at all.  On the contrary, they intentionally left religion out, and did so for some very, very, very good reasons.

The first reason was that a lot of the founding fathers simply were not Christian.  Along with other great thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment, people like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Adams, James Monroe, and many others were rethinking long-held ideas regarding religious doctrine, religious dogma, and religious "tradition" and were finding much of it contrary to their sense of justice, morality, and spirituality.  They found that some of the most widely-held religious dogma stood in direct opposition to the ideals of freedom and equality for all.  The rise of modern scientific thought had begun to undermine the Bible's simplistic (and utterly incorrect) teachings regarding how the world worked, and as a result these learned men began questioning.  If the Bible was wrong about so many things, what else was it wrong about?  Thomas Jefferson went so far as to publish his own version of the Bible, one that left out everything he personally disagreed with.  It ended up being a comparatively short, rather compact volume.

Many of the founding fathers identified themselves as Deists.  Not Christians.  Not even theists.  But Deists.  They still believed in a god, but refused to believe that god would break his own laws of nature to interfere in human affairs.

The second reason was that the founding fathers were very aware of the disasters caused when religion and government mixed, as had occurred in England and throughout the rest of Europe, as well as in the early American colonies where, for example, being a Quaker in Massachusetts was to court being tried for "heresy" and put to death by hanging.  The founders had absolutely no intention of adhering to "traditional Christian values" of treating those who you disagreed with in a brutal, bloody, and barbaric manner.  They could look at the history of Christian vs. Christian violence that had ravaged Britain and Ireland and Europe during the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, and the continual "Troubles."  Now would they countenance anything like a government-sponsored religious crusade against "infidels" like the heathen Cherokee or the Catholic French.

As such, the founding fathers made the extremely wise choice to wholly and utterly exclude religion from the government.  Any religion could flourish freely, and hopefully peacefully, in co-existance with all other religions, but would lack any sort of public support or institution.  In the United States, you could be an Anglican or a Quaker or a Catholic or a Muslim or a Hindu or even an Atheist and not be compelled into obedience of anyone else.  It was a brand new concept called "freedom of religion,", though it could easily enough also be called "freedom from religion."  Any way you want to look at it, this freedom is one of the central pillars of our society and is one of the most important building blocks in our collective awareness of what freedom means.

Not only is the idea that the United States is Christian a false one, the idea that we used to be more religious than we are now is also false.  At this time, about 60% of the population of the United States self-identifies as religious (and that's counting all religions).  Religious affiliation as a percentage of the population actually peaked in the 1980s.  In 1800, that figure was only 9%.  During the Civil War, the number of people who identified themselves as religious was only about 20%.  And today its nearly 60%.  So no, we weren't more religiuous in the past.  For the record, the percentage of people who identified as religious has been dropping steadily every year since 1983.  People who do not go to church and who identify with no religion at all are the fastest growing segment of the population.  The number of non-believers currently stands at 20% of the population.  Last year it was 14%.  If things keep going the way they're going, next year it might be 35%.  Pretty soon we'll be right back at the 9% religious population of the founding fathers.

Obviously, a "Christian America" never existed, nor was it ever intended to be created.

But for the sake of argument, let's play a game of "Let's Pretend."

Let's suspend all common sense and fantasize for a moment that America really was supposed to be a Christian nation.  Let's ask ourselves just what exactly that would mean?

What precisely is a "Christian nation?"

What other nations can we hold up as examples of such a government?  Byzanium under Constantine?  Italy during the Renaissance?  Jean d'Arc's France?  Henry VIII's England?  Martin Luther's Germany?  The Denmark portrayed in William Shakespeare's Hamlet?

Which version of Christianity are we going to base our "Christian nation" on?  There are hundreds of distinct variations of Christianity, and some of them hate each other with a rage that burns as hot and bright as a supernova.  Will our Christian nation be Catholic?  Orthodox?  Anglican?  Evangelical?  Episcopalian?  Mormon?  Pentecostal?  Quaker?  Or maybe something really obscure like Milleritism or Cooneyitism?

Would our Christian nation be based on the love, forgiveness, and pacifism of Jesus Christ?  Or on the bloody violent crusader mentality that came along later?

And who gets to choose all these things?  Would we vote on which kind of Christianity we followed every four years, in the same years we voted for a new president?  Might we swing from the "love thy neighbor as thyself, feed the poor, turn the other cheek" kindly Christianity to the "kill them all for God will know their own" bloody violent Christianity overnight when the Christian-Republicans win out over the Christian-Democrats?  Would we be open and accepting of other religions, or would be lynch the unbeliever and heretic from the nearest lamp-post as a warning to the devil-worshipping heathens that their ways will not be tolerated?

Its all very vague.  Just like the real meaning of the phrase "Traditional Christian Values."

The United States is a Nation of Liberals

Yeah, it's true.

The United States of America is a nation of Liberals.  It was founded by Liberals.  Based on Liberal values.  The founding of this nation was a radically Liberal experiment, and the country that was created in that experiment has become progressively more and more Liberal ever since.  All Americans who truly love their country and try to live up to its ideals and believe in the principles it was founded upon are Liberals.  They believe in freedom for all people, and that, folks, is a huge, huge Liberal ideal.

Conservatives do not share this ideal, and in fact have actively opposed it in the past and still oppose it to this very day.

Back in the 1860s, in fact, the Conservatives hated this ideal so much they committed treason en masse and declared war on their duly elected government.  The Conservatives lost that one.  They've pretty much lost the other wars they've fought in an attempt to preserve freedom as the exclusive property of the Select Few.  And yet, even after their dogma of only granting freedom to a handful has been overturned and refuted time and time again, they still follow a compulsion to deny freedom and equality to some section of the population.  Thankfully, statistical research has shown that these dinosaurs are getting closer and closer and closer to becoming extinct.

Ugly truth time.

This is going to shock some people, but it is absolutely true:  Most people who self-identify as "Conservative" aren't really all that Conservative.

Oh sure, they might talk about "Conservative values," but somehow when you ask them to list these so-called "Conservative values," they always seem to talk about things like liberty and justice and the pursuit of happiness.  In other words, good old fashioned Liberal values.  Now, it is true that many Americans consider themselves to be religious, as well as frugal and prudent, and thus think of themselves as Conservative.    This is how they convince themselves that the myth that America is a Conservative country is true.  Thing is, religious devotion, frugality, and prudence are not exclusively Conservative traits.  A person can be extremely Liberal and yet still be frugal and devout and prudent.

Don't believe me?  I got two words for you:  FRED ROGERS.

The point being that the United States is way, way more Liberal than it is Conservative, even if the Conservatives refuse to admit it.  Anyone who truly believes in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is a Liberal.  Anyone who believes in equal justice and fair treatment for all is a Liberal.  Anyone who believes that, as a people, Americans are all in the same boat together, as in We the People... as in E Pluribus Unum, then you're a Liberal.

It's as simple as that.

On the other hand, if you distrust people who are different from you, or who believe in different political ideals than you, or follow different religious beliefs than you do, and you'd really like to impose your will on them to make them conform, and you do not want them to be allowed to live their lives enjoying the same freedom to live life as they choose that you enjoy, if you want to return to some mythical Leave It to Beaver style old-timey America that you think (falsely) actually existed at some point in the past, if you actually like the old traditions of inequality, dominating hierarchies, and instituted prejudice, and wish to see them continued, if you really do think that an accident of your birth makes you superior to other human beings, or that a person's economic level determines a person's moral strength, and think that this is the way it always has been and always should be, then congratulations, you're a Conservative.

Here's another nasty truth.

The American people don't really want their government following a truly Conservative agenda.  As I said, the American people aren't all that Conservative as a whole.  Oh sure, there are large patches of the nation that might agree with one or two of the usual Conservative crap, and there are isolated pockets of true Conservatives here and there, and sometimes these throwbacks actually win elections and turn back progress a notch or two.  But sooner or later, their ideas fall under the wheels of Liberal-driven progress, and society gets moving again.

To truly become a Conservative country, the United States would have to literally dismantle itself, starting with the removal of the Constitution.  I say starting with the Constitution, because a more Liberal document regarding governmental process you cannot find.  This document actually puts limits on governmental power!  That's unheard of!  And the principles of democracy, freedom, and liberty enshrined within it are all Liberal values.  Just what do you think the founding fathers meant when they ratified a document that says, "all men are created equal" and that all people possess "certain inalienable rights?"  What do you think they had in mind when they ratified a Constitution that says, in the opening paragraph, that its purpose is to "promote the general welfare?"

And since the time of the founding fathers, the United States has only grown as a result of the Liberal ideals that created it.  The Louisiana Purchase doubled the country's size.  The emancipation of the slaves not only ended a crime against humanity but nearly tripled the nation's population of voting citizens overnight.  Universal suffrage, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, national parks, environmental protection, civil rights, the Interstate Highway system, universal electrification, the space program, the end to smallpox, safe drinking water, clean air, non-toxic materials in our houses, clean food, an advance in scientific knowledge unmatched in the annals of human history, all in a constant pursuit of "a more perfect union."

Everything I just named was the result of a Liberal idea being put into practice that has improved the lives of the American people.  And every single one of them, bar none, was venomously opposed by Conservatives.

On the other hand, Conservative thought has led to witch-burnings, the Tories, the stealing of land and territory from Native American tribes, the Civil War, Jim Crow, lynchings, the Great Depression, the crime-promoting mistake that was Prohibition, McCarthyism and anti-Communist fear-mongering, international military adventurism, crony corporatocracy, out-of-control military spending, the steady erosion of civil rights, blatant homophobia-based discrimination, and the decline of scientific knowledge and learning in this country.  All of these things can be lain at the feet of Conservative Thought.

As I type this, Conservatives are actively trying to deny equality and liberty to union members, gays, lesbian and transgender people, Muslims, Hispanics, and, of course, atheists.  (Ahem.)  Most Conservatives call themselves "Christian," and yet they insist on acting in such a way that ignores Jesus's Great Commandment...

Quick digression.  The "Great Commandment" reads as follows:

"And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with your strength.  And you shall love thy neighbor as yourself.  There is no other commandment greater than these." -- Matthew 12:30-31

Instead of following the teachings of their own religion, they direct their hearts, souls, minds, and strength to loving the hierarchy of only the riches of the rich and the most powerful of the powerful.  You know, the very ones that Jesus said has as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle?

Conservatives have warped the meaning of patriotism so badly that, in their minds, patriotism requires loyalty to those same corporations who have stolen us blind, polluted our air and our drinking water, shipped jobs overseas, and relocated their headquarters to a post office box in Bermuda so as to avoid having to pay their fair share of taxes.  Yeah, Conservatives love those guys.

Thing is, most Americans don't agree with them.  They don't swear blind allegiance to the rich, or to big businesses, or even to the idea of a "free market."  Rather, they want a fair market.  They want their kids to go to decent schools.  They want safe working conditions at their jobs.  They want to take drugs that actually work and don't poison you.  They want to have clean food and water, and breathe clean air.  They support Social Security and Medicare and the idea of a social contract in which we, as a population, are responsible for taking care of our least fortunate members because its the right thing to do!  They like the fact that the government supports artists and musicians and scientific research without asking artists and scientists to adhere to a particular political dogma.  They believe in the government helping out in time of natural disaster.  They think for themselves and do not fear change.  They elected people like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt (three times), Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and even stunned the entire freaking world by voting a black man with a Muslin name into the office of president TWICE!

In other words, most Americans are far more Liberal than they are Conservative.

Fox News anchor Britt Hume said it quite succinctly when he said:

"This tells us something about moderates.  A lot of people who call themselves moderate are actually more liberal than any of us thought.

You got that right, Britt.

And this is where Conservatives really lose their shit.  They know that they've lost the so-called "culture war."  That's why Conservatives are so damned angry and afraid all the time.  The problem is, Conservatives think they lost it recently, and thus think that there's a chance that this loss can be reversed.  But that's simply untrue.  The "culture war" was lost over two hundred years ago, when this country was created by a bunch of free-thinking Liberals who had this great idea for a new nation that would be based on the founding principle that no one is better than anyone else, and that everyone should get a fair shake.

More than any other group of people, Conservatives are utterly oblivious to their own history.  Instead, they view things through rose-colored glasses, imagining that once upon a time there existed an America in which their own Conservative ideas were the rule instead of the exception, and if only we could roll the clock back to those days, America could be strong again.  They can't actually say when this so-called "Golden Age of Conservatism" actually happened, and they cannot actually describe what an America that was "strong again" would be like.

All they can really say is that it wouldn't be so damned Liberal.