Leftism as a religion?

[TheOldSchool]

There are tons of pro-life abortion videos on youtube as we speak. Prager’s must have been really twisted, probably inspiring hatred against abortion clinics and women who have had abortions.

Tell us what in this video no 12 year old should hear to justify its censorship.

Found it immediately on Youtube

It is filtered by YouTube as everything else pornographic is.

Why is it censored?

If it were then I wouldn’t be able to immediately find it without the slightest issue

You lied about them saying it was pornography. Did you do that because of your religion?

Here is the article on the law suit.

PragerU Takes Legal Action Against Google and YouTube for Discrimination

Youtube said that the content was "inappropriate for children", however, if you watch the videos you will soon find that this accusation is baseless.

There are tons of pro-life abortion videos on youtube as we speak. Prager’s must have been really twisted, probably inspiring hatred against abortion clinics and women who have had abortions.

Tell us what in this video no 12 year old should hear to justify its censorship.

Found it immediately on Youtube

Another pathetic dodge. They are in restricted status.

That video is not

 

[usmbguest5318]

Leftism as a religion?

If it were, who would be its immortally supreme being?


From the article:

Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the left, including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “left,”continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s religious mentor and close friend.

Really? I guess those must be the Americans who can't relate to having associates who have different mindsets about "whatever."

Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful, pro-life Catholics could vote for a health-care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions after opposing it up to the last day.

That quandary doesn't exist of one who refrains from ascribing to others one's own faith-based beliefs and externalities.

Nancy Pelosi’s belief in expanding the government’s role in American life

It's not at all clear that "expanding the government’s role in American life" is at all Pelosi's goal or that such a notion is causal to any of her proposals. What is clear is that some of her stances will result symptomatically in "expanding the government’s role in American life."

Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values from the Left more than from their religion.

Say what? Prager makes that statement as though "the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values" is demonstrably existential, when the reality is that for some folks it may be and for some it may not. Moreover, Prager does not so much as present an abductive, inductive or deductive argument to make that case that the above quoted premise has any degree of preponderant verity among so-called leftists, yet the remainder of his essay's/argument's validity -- that leftism is indeed a religion -- depends on that premise.

most Leftist Jews and Christians will counter that Leftist values cannot trump their religion’s values because Leftist values are identical to their religion’s.

Do they? Will they? I don't know. I do know that if one sets up a strawman about what others do or say -- that is, when one frames what other folks, particularly one's opponents, say rather than directly address what they in fact say -- it's not at all difficult to tear down the strawman of one's own erection.

I'm certainly in no position to attest to what most leftis "anybodies" will counter with regard to Prager's assertion that leftism is indeed a religion. I wonder how he comes to pontificate about what most such individuals might say.

if Christianity is, morally speaking, really Leftism, why didn’t Catholics and Protestants assert these values before 19th century European Leftism came along?

What kind of revisionist history does Prager think he can promulgate?

The validity of political themes has been supported by and equated to religiosity for as long as there have been politics and religion. Christianity became intermingled with politics the instant Constantine declared Christianity the state's religion. Pope Leo III's crowning of Charlemagne established the notion that kings were ordained by and drew their legitimacy from God, thus making crimes against the state be also heretical and blasphemous crimes against God. Even today, the Elizabeth II reigns as both the political monarch and as the head of the Church of England.

​

Why are almost no Christians and Jews who believe that God is the author of the Bible (or, in the case of Jews, the Torah) on the Left?

??? Prager really should "get out" more. The man need only visit black churches to find Christian political liberals who believe God is the Bible's author.
​

At that point in the essay, I'd had enough with Prager's attempts to depict as historic and current reality that which neither was nor is. I stopped reading.

 

[Weatherman2020]

Tell us what in this video no 12 year old should hear to justify its censorship.

Found it immediately on Youtube

It is filtered by YouTube as everything else pornographic is.

Why is it censored?

If it were then I wouldn’t be able to immediately find it without the slightest issue

Here is the article on the law suit.

PragerU Takes Legal Action Against Google and YouTube for Discrimination

Youtube said that the content was "inappropriate for children", however, if you watch the videos you will soon find that this accusation is baseless.

There are tons of pro-life abortion videos on youtube as we speak. Prager’s must have been really twisted, probably inspiring hatred against abortion clinics and women who have had abortions.

Tell us what in this video no 12 year old should hear to justify its censorship.

Found it immediately on Youtube

Another pathetic dodge. They are in restricted status.

That video is not

Dodge.

Restricted by YouTube

 

[Weatherman2020]

People either get their values from The NY Times or the Bible.
So yes, Leftism is a religion.

 

[Votto]

Leftism as a religion?

If it were, who would be its immortally supreme being?


From the article:

Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the left, including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “left,”continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s religious mentor and close friend.

Really? I guess those must be the Americans who can't relate to having associates who have different mindsets about "whatever."

Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful, pro-life Catholics could vote for a health-care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions after opposing it up to the last day.

That quandary doesn't exist of one who refrains from ascribing to others one's own faith-based beliefs and externalities.

Nancy Pelosi’s belief in expanding the government’s role in American life

It's not at all clear that "expanding the government’s role in American life" is at all Pelosi's goal or that such a notion is causal to any of her proposals. What is clear is that some of her stances will result symptomatically in "expanding the government’s role in American life."

Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values from the Left more than from their religion.

Say what? Prager makes that statement as though "the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values" is demonstrably existential, when the reality is that for some folks it may be and for some it may not. Moreover, Prager does not so much as present an abductive, inductive or deductive argument to make that case that the above quoted premise has any degree of preponderant verity among so-called leftists, yet the remainder of his essay's/argument's validity -- that leftism is indeed a religion -- depends on that premise.

most Leftist Jews and Christians will counter that Leftist values cannot trump their religion’s values because Leftist values are identical to their religion’s.

Do they? Will they? I don't know. I do know that if one sets up a strawman about what others do or say -- that is, when one frames what other folks, particularly one's opponents, say rather than directly address what they in fact say -- it's not at all difficult to tear down the strawman of one's own erection.

I'm certainly in no position to attest to what most leftis "anybodies" will counter with regard to Prager's assertion that leftism is indeed a religion. I wonder how he comes to pontificate about what most such individuals might say.

if Christianity is, morally speaking, really Leftism, why didn’t Catholics and Protestants assert these values before 19th century European Leftism came along?

What kind of revisionist history does Prager think he can promulgate?

The validity of political themes has been supported by and equated to religiosity for as long as there have been politics and religion. Christianity became intermingled with politics the instant Constantine declared Christianity the state's religion. Pope Leo III's crowning of Charlemagne established the notion that kings were ordained by and drew their legitimacy from God, thus making crimes against the state be also heretical and blasphemous crimes against God. Even today, the Elizabeth II reigns as both the political monarch and as the head of the Church of England.

​

Why are almost no Christians and Jews who believe that God is the author of the Bible (or, in the case of Jews, the Torah) on the Left?

??? Prager really should "get out" more. The man need only visit black churches to find Christian political liberals who believe God is the Bible's author.
​

At that point in the essay, I'd had enough with Prager's attempts to depict as historic and current reality that which neither was nor is. I stopped reading.

As you rightly point out, Constantine made Christianity into a political weapon as well. In fact, Constantine was not even a Christian as he continued to worship pagan gods, although it is rumored he later converted on his death bed.

And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves. This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide. But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

History is full of examples of various means to secure power. It used to be that our leaders would convince us that they were a god, but when that no longer worked they tried to convince us that they spoke for God, but when that no longer worked they tried to get us to believe that there is no God, thus making them the ultimate authority once again. I believe we are at this later stage where anyone who opposes them due to being not so politically correct is branded a heretic and outcast from society.

They seem to demagogue an ideology of sorts. Things like "social justice" and "saving Mother Earth" are all things they preach to us as being their moral code. However, upon closer inspection, we see these same people contributing to social injustice, much like Bill Clinton abusing women, and promote legislation to curb global warming that scientists tell us is akin to putting a band aid on a cancer, while they run around heating and cooling 8 or so mansions around the world while living a jet set life.

In short, they have no soul to speak of other than just obtaining power. The teaching of people like Marx seem to be the most favorable tool because in order to achieve "financial equality, the government must be able to micromanage our finances and redistribute it as they see fit. However, to do this requires the most potentially oppressive powers possible. We got a taste of this with the IRS targeting Conservative groups in the US.

 

[alang1216]

Leftism, the Religion | National Review

Is Lefitism a religion?

No. A religion determines your moral values whereas your moral values determine your politics.

If you include cults that is another matter. Cults are based on a charismatic individual and create splinter religions. Sounds like Trump and the GOP to me.

 

[Political Junky]

No

Do you find it curious that Orthodox Catholics and Jews are conservative, but those who basically don't practice are left winged?

It would seem to me that it is all about the ideology you sell out to that is the difference.

Link to Catholics and Jews voting republican?

 

[Votto]

No

Do you find it curious that Orthodox Catholics and Jews are conservative, but those who basically don't practice are left winged?

It would seem to me that it is all about the ideology you sell out to that is the difference.

Link to Catholics and Jews voting republican?

Most Orthodox Jews are Republicans and 11 other findings from Pew - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

How the Support of Catholics Helped Donald Trump’s Victory

 

[usmbguest5318]

Leftism as a religion?

If it were, who would be its immortally supreme being?


From the article:

Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the left, including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “left,”continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s religious mentor and close friend.

Really? I guess those must be the Americans who can't relate to having associates who have different mindsets about "whatever."

Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful, pro-life Catholics could vote for a health-care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions after opposing it up to the last day.

That quandary doesn't exist of one who refrains from ascribing to others one's own faith-based beliefs and externalities.

Nancy Pelosi’s belief in expanding the government’s role in American life

It's not at all clear that "expanding the government’s role in American life" is at all Pelosi's goal or that such a notion is causal to any of her proposals. What is clear is that some of her stances will result symptomatically in "expanding the government’s role in American life."

Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values from the Left more than from their religion.

Say what? Prager makes that statement as though "the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values" is demonstrably existential, when the reality is that for some folks it may be and for some it may not. Moreover, Prager does not so much as present an abductive, inductive or deductive argument to make that case that the above quoted premise has any degree of preponderant verity among so-called leftists, yet the remainder of his essay's/argument's validity -- that leftism is indeed a religion -- depends on that premise.

most Leftist Jews and Christians will counter that Leftist values cannot trump their religion’s values because Leftist values are identical to their religion’s.

Do they? Will they? I don't know. I do know that if one sets up a strawman about what others do or say -- that is, when one frames what other folks, particularly one's opponents, say rather than directly address what they in fact say -- it's not at all difficult to tear down the strawman of one's own erection.

I'm certainly in no position to attest to what most leftis "anybodies" will counter with regard to Prager's assertion that leftism is indeed a religion. I wonder how he comes to pontificate about what most such individuals might say.

if Christianity is, morally speaking, really Leftism, why didn’t Catholics and Protestants assert these values before 19th century European Leftism came along?

What kind of revisionist history does Prager think he can promulgate?

The validity of political themes has been supported by and equated to religiosity for as long as there have been politics and religion. Christianity became intermingled with politics the instant Constantine declared Christianity the state's religion. Pope Leo III's crowning of Charlemagne established the notion that kings were ordained by and drew their legitimacy from God, thus making crimes against the state be also heretical and blasphemous crimes against God. Even today, the Elizabeth II reigns as both the political monarch and as the head of the Church of England.

​

Why are almost no Christians and Jews who believe that God is the author of the Bible (or, in the case of Jews, the Torah) on the Left?

??? Prager really should "get out" more. The man need only visit black churches to find Christian political liberals who believe God is the Bible's author.
​

At that point in the essay, I'd had enough with Prager's attempts to depict as historic and current reality that which neither was nor is. I stopped reading.

As you rightly point out, Constantine made Christianity into a political weapon as well. In fact, Constantine was not even a Christian as he continued to worship pagan gods, although it is rumored he later converted on his death bed.

And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves. This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide. But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

History is full of examples of various means to secure power. It used to be that our leaders would convince us that they were a god, but when that no longer worked they tried to convince us that they spoke for God, but when that no longer worked they tried to get us to believe that there is no God, thus making them the ultimate authority once again. I believe we are at this later stage where anyone who opposes them due to being not so politically correct is branded a heretic and outcast from society.

They seem to demagogue an ideology of sorts. Things like "social justice" and "saving Mother Earth" are all things they preach to us as being their moral code. However, upon closer inspection, we see these same people contributing to social injustice, much like Bill Clinton abusing women, and promote legislation to curb global warming that scientists tell us is akin to putting a band aid on a cancer, while they run around heating and cooling 8 or so mansions around the world while living a jet set life.

In short, they have no soul to speak of other than just obtaining power. The teaching of people like Marx seem to be the most favorable tool because in order to achieve "financial equality, the government must be able to micromanage our finances and redistribute it as they see fit. However, to do this requires the most potentially oppressive powers possible. We got a taste of this with the IRS targeting Conservative groups in the US.

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge​

it is rumored he later converted on his death bed. And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves.

Did you watch the video I included in my post? You wouldn't have had to watch far into it to get to the part that addresses Constantine and how he used Christianity to his political advantage.

Constantine converted well before he was on his death bed. That said, there is no question, and the attached video

This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution

??? The reason we observe the current Pope remarking on global warming and the virtues of wealth/income redistribution is that the man who is Pope believes those are ideas worth supporting. It's no surprise that he does: (1) huge quantities of Roman Catholics live in areas that will disappear if/when become manifest climate science's predictions about rising sea levels and (2) huge quantities of Roman Catholics are poor. Inasmuch as most Roman Catholics live in states other than the Vatican, thus affording the Pope no public policy action he can take, there's little else the Pope can do but to advocate for policies that will benefit his faith's adherents. In that dimension, the Pope is no different than is anyone else who has a platform from which they can be heard by many, but who also have no formal political/jurisdictional authority to enact public policy.

This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide.

In a complex world beset by myriad complex issues, were I faced with (a) getting on my soapbox about a matter about which I've already stated my dogmatically unequivocal position and of which there's really nothing more to say or (b) getting on my soapbox to advocate for an issue that affects the very state of planet regardless of what goes on with the former issue, I too would prioritize my remarks to the latter rather than former. For whatever one thinks about abortion, the risks it presents pale in comparison to the risks presented by the types of changes in the planet's environment that climate science findings portend.

Before there was the mall, there was the ocean.
-- Whoopi Goldberg​

But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

??? Say what? Are you not aware that Hitler and the Nazis persecuted Roman Catholics too?

• Have you read "Mit Brennender Sorge?" Pius XI's encyclical, written in response to Nazi regime's disregard of a 1933 concordat the Vatican signed with the Reich whereby Pius XII sought to protect the Church's rights in Germany, criticized the Nazi regime and Hitler himself for espousing ideological values rather than Christian values. Cardinal Pacelli, later Pius XII, helped write Mit Brennender Sorge. On September 20, 1938, Pius XI declared the material commiseration of Judaism with Christianity on the basis of Christians having a spiritual kinship with Semites.
  • "It is not possible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are spiritually Semites.” (Source)
• Cardinal Clemens von Galen, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in 1941, on behalf of the church's congregation and leadership in Germany said/wrote:
  

  There are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfil even if it costs us our lives. Never under any circumstances may a human being kill an innocent person apart from in war and legitimate self-defence. On July 6, I already had cause to add to the pastoral letter the following explanation: for some months we have been hearing reports that, on the orders of Berlin, patients from mental asylums who have been ill for a long time and may appear incurable, are being compulsorily removed. Then, after a short time, the relatives are regularly informed that the corpse has been burnt and the ashes can be delivered. There is a general suspicion verging on certainty, that these numerous unexpected deaths of mentally ill people do not occur of themselves but are deliberately brought about, that the doctrine is being followed, according to which one may destroy so-called 'worthless life,' that is, kill innocent people if one considers that their lives are of no further value for the nation and the state. (Source)

  When I learned of the intention to transport patients from Marienthal in order to kill them, I brought a formal charge at the State Court in Münster and with the Police President in Münster by means of a registered letter which read as follows: "According to information which I have received, in the course of this week a large number of patients from the Marienthal Provincial Asylum near Münster are to be transported to the Eichberg asylum as so-called 'unproductive national comrades' and will then soon be deliberately killed, as is generally believed has occurred with such transports from other asylums. Since such an action is not only contrary to the moral laws of God and Nature but also is punishable with death as murder under section 211 of the Penal Code, I hereby bring a charge in accordance with my duty under section 139 of the Penal Code, and request you to provide immediate protection for the national comrades threatened in this way by taking action against those agencies who are intending their removal and murder, and that you inform me of the steps that have been taken. (Source)

  
  Galens made those remarks during a sermon, and for them Martin Bormann sought to have Galen executed. Hitler and Goebbels reasoned that doing so would make Galen a martyr and therefore countermanded Bormann's directive.

As goes Pius XII's silence regarding the Holocaust, I suggest you read former Israeli Consul Pinchas E. Lapide's Three Popes and the Jews. There's more to that than meets the eye -- or more precisely, that doesn't meet the ears -- of the cursory examiner of history.

• The Catholic Church under Pius XII was instrumental in saving 860,000 Jews from Nazi death camps. (p. 214)
  
• According to Lapide, the concentration camp prisoners did not want Pius to speak out openly. (p. 247)
  
• one jurist from the Nuremberg Trials said on WNBC in New York (Feb. 28, 1964), "Any words of Pius XII, directed against a madman like Hitler, would have brought on an even worse catastrophe... [and] accelerated the massacre of Jews and priests." (p. 247)
  
• Albert Einstein refers explicitly to the Roman Catholic Church's actions and position against the Nazis using essentially the same language he did in Time magazine. (p. 257)
• Quite simply the Nazis did not tolerate any protest and responded severely. As an example, the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht in July 1942 protested in a pastoral letter against the Jewish persecutions in Holland. Immediately the Nazis rounded up as many Jews and Catholic non-Aryans as possible and deported them to death camps. (p. 246)

Pius XII knew that every time he spoke out against Hitler, the Nazis may have, in turn, retaliated against Catholics and/or Jews; thus he construed that his best attack against the Nazis was subtly worded public remarks, quiet diplomacy, and behind-the-scenes action. According to The 1996 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (V8.01) under Pius XII, "Wishing to preserve Vatican neutrality, fearing reprisals, and realizing his impotence to stop the Holocaust, Pius nonetheless acted on an individual basis to save many Jews and others with church ransoms, documents, and asylum."

That said, the man wasn't completely silent either. Read his 1941 and 1942 Christmas messages. To prevent retaliation against Roman Catholics, he did not refer to Nazism by name, but people of that era yet understood his remarks referred to the Nazis, and Nazis were among the people who knew quite well it was they to whom he referred. Indeed, Israel Zolli, Rome's rabbi, was so moved by Pius XII's efforts to help Jews and Catholics who suffered under Hitler's regime that upon his conversion to Christianity, he took the name Pius.

Then there's one of modern history's most famous agnostic's, Albert Einstein's, now famous remarks in Time magazine :

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks...

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly. (Source)​

Now, I'm not of a mind to chide you for not knowing the information noted above. Truth be told, until I'd read Lapide's book, I didn't know many of those details. That said, from what little I recall of high school history class, I did at least know that Nazis weren't keen, to put it mildly, on Roman Catholics. Hell, though I don't know a damn thing about Roman Catholicism in modern Germany, I recall that Martin Luther was German, and that alone would inspire me to suspect that Germans, period, in the 1940s, weren't all that "into" Roman Catholics. Whether that was so, I have no idea, but were I going to assert that to be so, I'd at least find out before publicly doing so. With the Internet at one's disposal, it's just not but a minute or two's worth of effort to do that.

I would hope that going forward, when you are of a mind to remark upon events from history, you at least exercise enough integrity to go a bit beyond popular conceptions of history and confirm whether what you know about the matter(s) aligns factually and contextually with what truly happened. The simple fact that Catholics were no favorites of the Nazis -- something that anyone who actually took history classes would know or at least surmise -- should have alone inspired you to, before posting it, confirm the veracity of the statement you made that catalyzed my writing the remarks in this section of this post.

Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.
-- Talmud​

 

[Votto]

Leftism as a religion?

If it were, who would be its immortally supreme being?


From the article:

Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the left, including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “left,”continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s religious mentor and close friend.

Really? I guess those must be the Americans who can't relate to having associates who have different mindsets about "whatever."

Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful, pro-life Catholics could vote for a health-care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions after opposing it up to the last day.

That quandary doesn't exist of one who refrains from ascribing to others one's own faith-based beliefs and externalities.

Nancy Pelosi’s belief in expanding the government’s role in American life

It's not at all clear that "expanding the government’s role in American life" is at all Pelosi's goal or that such a notion is causal to any of her proposals. What is clear is that some of her stances will result symptomatically in "expanding the government’s role in American life."

Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values from the Left more than from their religion.

Say what? Prager makes that statement as though "the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values" is demonstrably existential, when the reality is that for some folks it may be and for some it may not. Moreover, Prager does not so much as present an abductive, inductive or deductive argument to make that case that the above quoted premise has any degree of preponderant verity among so-called leftists, yet the remainder of his essay's/argument's validity -- that leftism is indeed a religion -- depends on that premise.

most Leftist Jews and Christians will counter that Leftist values cannot trump their religion’s values because Leftist values are identical to their religion’s.

Do they? Will they? I don't know. I do know that if one sets up a strawman about what others do or say -- that is, when one frames what other folks, particularly one's opponents, say rather than directly address what they in fact say -- it's not at all difficult to tear down the strawman of one's own erection.

I'm certainly in no position to attest to what most leftis "anybodies" will counter with regard to Prager's assertion that leftism is indeed a religion. I wonder how he comes to pontificate about what most such individuals might say.

if Christianity is, morally speaking, really Leftism, why didn’t Catholics and Protestants assert these values before 19th century European Leftism came along?

What kind of revisionist history does Prager think he can promulgate?

The validity of political themes has been supported by and equated to religiosity for as long as there have been politics and religion. Christianity became intermingled with politics the instant Constantine declared Christianity the state's religion. Pope Leo III's crowning of Charlemagne established the notion that kings were ordained by and drew their legitimacy from God, thus making crimes against the state be also heretical and blasphemous crimes against God. Even today, the Elizabeth II reigns as both the political monarch and as the head of the Church of England.

​

Why are almost no Christians and Jews who believe that God is the author of the Bible (or, in the case of Jews, the Torah) on the Left?

??? Prager really should "get out" more. The man need only visit black churches to find Christian political liberals who believe God is the Bible's author.
​

At that point in the essay, I'd had enough with Prager's attempts to depict as historic and current reality that which neither was nor is. I stopped reading.

As you rightly point out, Constantine made Christianity into a political weapon as well. In fact, Constantine was not even a Christian as he continued to worship pagan gods, although it is rumored he later converted on his death bed.

And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves. This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide. But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

History is full of examples of various means to secure power. It used to be that our leaders would convince us that they were a god, but when that no longer worked they tried to convince us that they spoke for God, but when that no longer worked they tried to get us to believe that there is no God, thus making them the ultimate authority once again. I believe we are at this later stage where anyone who opposes them due to being not so politically correct is branded a heretic and outcast from society.

They seem to demagogue an ideology of sorts. Things like "social justice" and "saving Mother Earth" are all things they preach to us as being their moral code. However, upon closer inspection, we see these same people contributing to social injustice, much like Bill Clinton abusing women, and promote legislation to curb global warming that scientists tell us is akin to putting a band aid on a cancer, while they run around heating and cooling 8 or so mansions around the world while living a jet set life.

In short, they have no soul to speak of other than just obtaining power. The teaching of people like Marx seem to be the most favorable tool because in order to achieve "financial equality, the government must be able to micromanage our finances and redistribute it as they see fit. However, to do this requires the most potentially oppressive powers possible. We got a taste of this with the IRS targeting Conservative groups in the US.

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge​

it is rumored he later converted on his death bed. And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves.

Did you watch the video I included in my post? You wouldn't have had to watch far into it to get to the part that addresses Constantine and how he used Christianity to his political advantage.

Constantine converted well before he was on his death bed. That said, there is no question, and the attached video

This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution

??? The reason we observe the current Pope remarking on global warming and the virtues of wealth/income redistribution is that the man who is Pope believes those are ideas worth supporting. It's no surprise that he does: (1) huge quantities of Roman Catholics live in areas that will disappear if/when become manifest climate science's predictions about rising sea levels and (2) huge quantities of Roman Catholics are poor. Inasmuch as most Roman Catholics live in states other than the Vatican, thus affording the Pope no public policy action he can take, there's little else the Pope can do but to advocate for policies that will benefit his faith's adherents. In that dimension, the Pope is no different than is anyone else who has a platform from which they can be heard by many, but who also have no formal political/jurisdictional authority to enact public policy.

This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide.

In a complex world beset by myriad complex issues, were I faced with (a) getting on my soapbox about a matter about which I've already stated my dogmatically unequivocal position and of which there's really nothing more to say or (b) getting on my soapbox to advocate for an issue that affects the very state of planet regardless of what goes on with the former issue, I too would prioritize my remarks to the latter rather than former. For whatever one thinks about abortion, the risks it presents pale in comparison to the risks presented by the types of changes in the planet's environment that climate science findings portend.

Before there was the mall, there was the ocean.
-- Whoopi Goldberg​

But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

??? Say what? Are you not aware that Hitler and the Nazis persecuted Roman Catholics too?

• Have you read "Mit Brennender Sorge?" Pius XI's encyclical, written in response to Nazi regime's disregard of a 1933 concordat the Vatican signed with the Reich whereby Pius XII sought to protect the Church's rights in Germany, criticized the Nazi regime and Hitler himself for espousing ideological values rather than Christian values. Cardinal Pacelli, later Pius XII, helped write Mit Brennender Sorge. On September 20, 1938, Pius XI declared the material commiseration of Judaism with Christianity on the basis of Christians having a spiritual kinship with Semites.
  • "It is not possible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are spiritually Semites.” (Source)
• Cardinal Clemens von Galen, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in 1941, on behalf of the church's congregation and leadership in Germany said/wrote:
  

  There are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfil even if it costs us our lives. Never under any circumstances may a human being kill an innocent person apart from in war and legitimate self-defence. On July 6, I already had cause to add to the pastoral letter the following explanation: for some months we have been hearing reports that, on the orders of Berlin, patients from mental asylums who have been ill for a long time and may appear incurable, are being compulsorily removed. Then, after a short time, the relatives are regularly informed that the corpse has been burnt and the ashes can be delivered. There is a general suspicion verging on certainty, that these numerous unexpected deaths of mentally ill people do not occur of themselves but are deliberately brought about, that the doctrine is being followed, according to which one may destroy so-called 'worthless life,' that is, kill innocent people if one considers that their lives are of no further value for the nation and the state. (Source)

  When I learned of the intention to transport patients from Marienthal in order to kill them, I brought a formal charge at the State Court in Münster and with the Police President in Münster by means of a registered letter which read as follows: "According to information which I have received, in the course of this week a large number of patients from the Marienthal Provincial Asylum near Münster are to be transported to the Eichberg asylum as so-called 'unproductive national comrades' and will then soon be deliberately killed, as is generally believed has occurred with such transports from other asylums. Since such an action is not only contrary to the moral laws of God and Nature but also is punishable with death as murder under section 211 of the Penal Code, I hereby bring a charge in accordance with my duty under section 139 of the Penal Code, and request you to provide immediate protection for the national comrades threatened in this way by taking action against those agencies who are intending their removal and murder, and that you inform me of the steps that have been taken. (Source)

  
  Galens made those remarks during a sermon, and for them Martin Bormann sought to have Galen executed. Hitler and Goebbels reasoned that doing so would make Galen a martyr and therefore countermanded Bormann's directive.

As goes Pius XII's silence regarding the Holocaust, I suggest you read former Israeli Consul Pinchas E. Lapide's Three Popes and the Jews. There's more to that than meets the eye -- or more precisely, that doesn't meet the ears -- of the cursory examiner of history.

• The Catholic Church under Pius XII was instrumental in saving 860,000 Jews from Nazi death camps. (p. 214)
  
• According to Lapide, the concentration camp prisoners did not want Pius to speak out openly. (p. 247)
  
• one jurist from the Nuremberg Trials said on WNBC in New York (Feb. 28, 1964), "Any words of Pius XII, directed against a madman like Hitler, would have brought on an even worse catastrophe... [and] accelerated the massacre of Jews and priests." (p. 247)
  
• Albert Einstein refers explicitly to the Roman Catholic Church's actions and position against the Nazis using essentially the same language he did in Time magazine. (p. 257)
• Quite simply the Nazis did not tolerate any protest and responded severely. As an example, the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht in July 1942 protested in a pastoral letter against the Jewish persecutions in Holland. Immediately the Nazis rounded up as many Jews and Catholic non-Aryans as possible and deported them to death camps. (p. 246)

Pius XII knew that every time he spoke out against Hitler, the Nazis may have, in turn, retaliated against Catholics and/or Jews; thus he construed that his best attack against the Nazis was subtly worded public remarks, quiet diplomacy, and behind-the-scenes action. According to The 1996 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (V8.01) under Pius XII, "Wishing to preserve Vatican neutrality, fearing reprisals, and realizing his impotence to stop the Holocaust, Pius nonetheless acted on an individual basis to save many Jews and others with church ransoms, documents, and asylum."

That said, the man wasn't completely silent either. Read his 1941 and 1942 Christmas messages. To prevent retaliation against Roman Catholics, he did not refer to Nazism by name, but people of that era yet understood his remarks referred to the Nazis, and Nazis were among the people who knew quite well it was they to whom he referred. Indeed, Israel Zolli, Rome's rabbi, was so moved by Pius XII's efforts to help Jews and Catholics who suffered under Hitler's regime that upon his conversion to Christianity, he took the name Pius.

Then there's one of modern history's most famous agnostic's, Albert Einstein's, now famous remarks in Time magazine :

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks...

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly. (Source)​

Now, I'm not of a mind to chide you for not knowing the information noted above. Truth be told, until I'd read Lapide's book, I didn't know many of those details. That said, from what little I recall of high school history class, I did at least know that Nazis weren't keen, to put it mildly, on Roman Catholics. Hell, though I don't know a damn thing about Roman Catholicism in modern Germany, I recall that Martin Luther was German, and that alone would inspire me to suspect that Germans, period, in the 1940s, weren't all that "into" Roman Catholics. Whether that was so, I have no idea, but were I going to assert that to be so, I'd at least find out before publicly doing so. With the Internet at one's disposal, it's just not but a minute or two's worth of effort to do that.

I would hope that going forward, when you are of a mind to remark upon events from history, you at least exercise enough integrity to go a bit beyond popular conceptions of history and confirm whether what you know about the matter(s) aligns factually and contextually with what truly happened. The simple fact that Catholics were no favorites of the Nazis -- something that anyone who actually took history classes would know or at least surmise -- should have alone inspired you to, before posting it, confirm the veracity of the statement you made that catalyzed my writing the remarks in this section of this post.

Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.
-- Talmud​

You are all over the map here. First you claim that Constantine used Christianity as a tool for his political advancement and then claim he was a Christian? Whatever. Here is a man who had both his wife and own flesh and blood murdered, a man devoid of any outward evidence of being a Christian and still worshiped pagan gods as I have said. Even Hitler claimed to be a Christian. So what?

As for the Catholic church, I don't doubt that those in the Catholic church helped fight the Nazi movement in various ways. My complaint is their tight rope walk in trying not to outright condemn the Nazi regime for their Holocaust for fear that they may risk all of their precious Vatican and treasures therein. I think an outright condemnation of the Nazi regime in a country who largely identified as Christian would have provided more problems for the Nazi regime that may have helped end the war sooner, thus saving more lives.

But that is a side note. The fact is that the Catholic church has the official position that an unborn child is human and that abortion is murder. But instead of making speeches about that the Pope instead focuses on preaching about how building walls is evil?

There is no excuse for this obvious hypocrisy that is driven by Left winged fanaticism.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Leftism as a religion?

If it were, who would be its immortally supreme being?


From the article:

Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the left, including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “left,”continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s religious mentor and close friend.

Really? I guess those must be the Americans who can't relate to having associates who have different mindsets about "whatever."

Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful, pro-life Catholics could vote for a health-care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions after opposing it up to the last day.

That quandary doesn't exist of one who refrains from ascribing to others one's own faith-based beliefs and externalities.

Nancy Pelosi’s belief in expanding the government’s role in American life

It's not at all clear that "expanding the government’s role in American life" is at all Pelosi's goal or that such a notion is causal to any of her proposals. What is clear is that some of her stances will result symptomatically in "expanding the government’s role in American life."

Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values from the Left more than from their religion.

Say what? Prager makes that statement as though "the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values" is demonstrably existential, when the reality is that for some folks it may be and for some it may not. Moreover, Prager does not so much as present an abductive, inductive or deductive argument to make that case that the above quoted premise has any degree of preponderant verity among so-called leftists, yet the remainder of his essay's/argument's validity -- that leftism is indeed a religion -- depends on that premise.

most Leftist Jews and Christians will counter that Leftist values cannot trump their religion’s values because Leftist values are identical to their religion’s.

Do they? Will they? I don't know. I do know that if one sets up a strawman about what others do or say -- that is, when one frames what other folks, particularly one's opponents, say rather than directly address what they in fact say -- it's not at all difficult to tear down the strawman of one's own erection.

I'm certainly in no position to attest to what most leftis "anybodies" will counter with regard to Prager's assertion that leftism is indeed a religion. I wonder how he comes to pontificate about what most such individuals might say.

if Christianity is, morally speaking, really Leftism, why didn’t Catholics and Protestants assert these values before 19th century European Leftism came along?

What kind of revisionist history does Prager think he can promulgate?

The validity of political themes has been supported by and equated to religiosity for as long as there have been politics and religion. Christianity became intermingled with politics the instant Constantine declared Christianity the state's religion. Pope Leo III's crowning of Charlemagne established the notion that kings were ordained by and drew their legitimacy from God, thus making crimes against the state be also heretical and blasphemous crimes against God. Even today, the Elizabeth II reigns as both the political monarch and as the head of the Church of England.

​

Why are almost no Christians and Jews who believe that God is the author of the Bible (or, in the case of Jews, the Torah) on the Left?

??? Prager really should "get out" more. The man need only visit black churches to find Christian political liberals who believe God is the Bible's author.
​

At that point in the essay, I'd had enough with Prager's attempts to depict as historic and current reality that which neither was nor is. I stopped reading.

As you rightly point out, Constantine made Christianity into a political weapon as well. In fact, Constantine was not even a Christian as he continued to worship pagan gods, although it is rumored he later converted on his death bed.

And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves. This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide. But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

History is full of examples of various means to secure power. It used to be that our leaders would convince us that they were a god, but when that no longer worked they tried to convince us that they spoke for God, but when that no longer worked they tried to get us to believe that there is no God, thus making them the ultimate authority once again. I believe we are at this later stage where anyone who opposes them due to being not so politically correct is branded a heretic and outcast from society.

They seem to demagogue an ideology of sorts. Things like "social justice" and "saving Mother Earth" are all things they preach to us as being their moral code. However, upon closer inspection, we see these same people contributing to social injustice, much like Bill Clinton abusing women, and promote legislation to curb global warming that scientists tell us is akin to putting a band aid on a cancer, while they run around heating and cooling 8 or so mansions around the world while living a jet set life.

In short, they have no soul to speak of other than just obtaining power. The teaching of people like Marx seem to be the most favorable tool because in order to achieve "financial equality, the government must be able to micromanage our finances and redistribute it as they see fit. However, to do this requires the most potentially oppressive powers possible. We got a taste of this with the IRS targeting Conservative groups in the US.

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge​

it is rumored he later converted on his death bed. And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves.

Did you watch the video I included in my post? You wouldn't have had to watch far into it to get to the part that addresses Constantine and how he used Christianity to his political advantage.

Constantine converted well before he was on his death bed. That said, there is no question, and the attached video

This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution

??? The reason we observe the current Pope remarking on global warming and the virtues of wealth/income redistribution is that the man who is Pope believes those are ideas worth supporting. It's no surprise that he does: (1) huge quantities of Roman Catholics live in areas that will disappear if/when become manifest climate science's predictions about rising sea levels and (2) huge quantities of Roman Catholics are poor. Inasmuch as most Roman Catholics live in states other than the Vatican, thus affording the Pope no public policy action he can take, there's little else the Pope can do but to advocate for policies that will benefit his faith's adherents. In that dimension, the Pope is no different than is anyone else who has a platform from which they can be heard by many, but who also have no formal political/jurisdictional authority to enact public policy.

This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide.

In a complex world beset by myriad complex issues, were I faced with (a) getting on my soapbox about a matter about which I've already stated my dogmatically unequivocal position and of which there's really nothing more to say or (b) getting on my soapbox to advocate for an issue that affects the very state of planet regardless of what goes on with the former issue, I too would prioritize my remarks to the latter rather than former. For whatever one thinks about abortion, the risks it presents pale in comparison to the risks presented by the types of changes in the planet's environment that climate science findings portend.

Before there was the mall, there was the ocean.
-- Whoopi Goldberg​

But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

??? Say what? Are you not aware that Hitler and the Nazis persecuted Roman Catholics too?

• Have you read "Mit Brennender Sorge?" Pius XI's encyclical, written in response to Nazi regime's disregard of a 1933 concordat the Vatican signed with the Reich whereby Pius XII sought to protect the Church's rights in Germany, criticized the Nazi regime and Hitler himself for espousing ideological values rather than Christian values. Cardinal Pacelli, later Pius XII, helped write Mit Brennender Sorge. On September 20, 1938, Pius XI declared the material commiseration of Judaism with Christianity on the basis of Christians having a spiritual kinship with Semites.
  • "It is not possible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are spiritually Semites.” (Source)
• Cardinal Clemens von Galen, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in 1941, on behalf of the church's congregation and leadership in Germany said/wrote:
  

  There are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfil even if it costs us our lives. Never under any circumstances may a human being kill an innocent person apart from in war and legitimate self-defence. On July 6, I already had cause to add to the pastoral letter the following explanation: for some months we have been hearing reports that, on the orders of Berlin, patients from mental asylums who have been ill for a long time and may appear incurable, are being compulsorily removed. Then, after a short time, the relatives are regularly informed that the corpse has been burnt and the ashes can be delivered. There is a general suspicion verging on certainty, that these numerous unexpected deaths of mentally ill people do not occur of themselves but are deliberately brought about, that the doctrine is being followed, according to which one may destroy so-called 'worthless life,' that is, kill innocent people if one considers that their lives are of no further value for the nation and the state. (Source)

  When I learned of the intention to transport patients from Marienthal in order to kill them, I brought a formal charge at the State Court in Münster and with the Police President in Münster by means of a registered letter which read as follows: "According to information which I have received, in the course of this week a large number of patients from the Marienthal Provincial Asylum near Münster are to be transported to the Eichberg asylum as so-called 'unproductive national comrades' and will then soon be deliberately killed, as is generally believed has occurred with such transports from other asylums. Since such an action is not only contrary to the moral laws of God and Nature but also is punishable with death as murder under section 211 of the Penal Code, I hereby bring a charge in accordance with my duty under section 139 of the Penal Code, and request you to provide immediate protection for the national comrades threatened in this way by taking action against those agencies who are intending their removal and murder, and that you inform me of the steps that have been taken. (Source)

  
  Galens made those remarks during a sermon, and for them Martin Bormann sought to have Galen executed. Hitler and Goebbels reasoned that doing so would make Galen a martyr and therefore countermanded Bormann's directive.

As goes Pius XII's silence regarding the Holocaust, I suggest you read former Israeli Consul Pinchas E. Lapide's Three Popes and the Jews. There's more to that than meets the eye -- or more precisely, that doesn't meet the ears -- of the cursory examiner of history.

• The Catholic Church under Pius XII was instrumental in saving 860,000 Jews from Nazi death camps. (p. 214)
  
• According to Lapide, the concentration camp prisoners did not want Pius to speak out openly. (p. 247)
  
• one jurist from the Nuremberg Trials said on WNBC in New York (Feb. 28, 1964), "Any words of Pius XII, directed against a madman like Hitler, would have brought on an even worse catastrophe... [and] accelerated the massacre of Jews and priests." (p. 247)
  
• Albert Einstein refers explicitly to the Roman Catholic Church's actions and position against the Nazis using essentially the same language he did in Time magazine. (p. 257)
• Quite simply the Nazis did not tolerate any protest and responded severely. As an example, the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht in July 1942 protested in a pastoral letter against the Jewish persecutions in Holland. Immediately the Nazis rounded up as many Jews and Catholic non-Aryans as possible and deported them to death camps. (p. 246)

Pius XII knew that every time he spoke out against Hitler, the Nazis may have, in turn, retaliated against Catholics and/or Jews; thus he construed that his best attack against the Nazis was subtly worded public remarks, quiet diplomacy, and behind-the-scenes action. According to The 1996 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (V8.01) under Pius XII, "Wishing to preserve Vatican neutrality, fearing reprisals, and realizing his impotence to stop the Holocaust, Pius nonetheless acted on an individual basis to save many Jews and others with church ransoms, documents, and asylum."

That said, the man wasn't completely silent either. Read his 1941 and 1942 Christmas messages. To prevent retaliation against Roman Catholics, he did not refer to Nazism by name, but people of that era yet understood his remarks referred to the Nazis, and Nazis were among the people who knew quite well it was they to whom he referred. Indeed, Israel Zolli, Rome's rabbi, was so moved by Pius XII's efforts to help Jews and Catholics who suffered under Hitler's regime that upon his conversion to Christianity, he took the name Pius.

Then there's one of modern history's most famous agnostic's, Albert Einstein's, now famous remarks in Time magazine :

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks...

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly. (Source)​

Now, I'm not of a mind to chide you for not knowing the information noted above. Truth be told, until I'd read Lapide's book, I didn't know many of those details. That said, from what little I recall of high school history class, I did at least know that Nazis weren't keen, to put it mildly, on Roman Catholics. Hell, though I don't know a damn thing about Roman Catholicism in modern Germany, I recall that Martin Luther was German, and that alone would inspire me to suspect that Germans, period, in the 1940s, weren't all that "into" Roman Catholics. Whether that was so, I have no idea, but were I going to assert that to be so, I'd at least find out before publicly doing so. With the Internet at one's disposal, it's just not but a minute or two's worth of effort to do that.

I would hope that going forward, when you are of a mind to remark upon events from history, you at least exercise enough integrity to go a bit beyond popular conceptions of history and confirm whether what you know about the matter(s) aligns factually and contextually with what truly happened. The simple fact that Catholics were no favorites of the Nazis -- something that anyone who actually took history classes would know or at least surmise -- should have alone inspired you to, before posting it, confirm the veracity of the statement you made that catalyzed my writing the remarks in this section of this post.

Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.
-- Talmud​

You are all over the map here. First you claim that Constantine used Christianity as a tool for his political advancement and then claim he was a Christian? Whatever. Here is a man who had both his wife and own flesh and blood murdered, a man devoid of any outward evidence of being a Christian and still worshiped pagan gods as I have said. Even Hitler claimed to be a Christian. So what?

As for the Catholic church, I don't doubt that those in the Catholic church helped fight the Nazi movement in various ways. My complaint is their tight rope walk in trying not to outright condemn the Nazi regime for their Holocaust for fear that they may risk all of their precious Vatican and treasures therein. I think an outright condemnation of the Nazi regime in a country who largely identified as Christian would have provided more problems for the Nazi regime that may have helped end the war sooner, thus saving more lives.

But that is a side note. The fact is that the Catholic church has the official position that an unborn child is human and that abortion is murder. But instead of making speeches about that the Pope instead focuses on preaching about how building walls is evil?

There is no excuse for this obvious hypocrisy that is driven by Left winged fanaticism.

My complaint is their tight rope walk in trying not to outright condemn the Nazi regime for their Holocaust for fear that they may risk all of their precious Vatican and treasures therein.

Please provide some credible evidence that not risking "all of their precious Vatican and treasures therein" was a reason for the two Piuses actions during late 1930s and early to mid 1940s.


In my post, I asserted that the reason for the Pope's subtle approach to decrying the Nazis was his concern over recriminations, likely violent, by the Nazis were he to do so, and I provided at least five references that indicate as much, including first hand statements as well as historical and contemporaneous analysis and illustrations of the WWII Popes' specific remarks against Hitler and the Nazis. I also shared examples of the Popes' direct actions to help prisoners whom the Nazis unjustly held and murdered. Hell, I even included the text of specific messages and a Papal encyclical.

So, if you're going to make a claim about a WWII Pope's motivations for anything they did or didn't do, the least you could do is support it with something comparably credible to the references to which I linked.

Now as for why the Pope declared the Vatican a neutral country in the WWII conflict, well, the reason for that likely had little to do with "precious Vatican and treasures" and damn near everything -- Christian values notwithstanding, however much among the reasons they were -- to do with being completely surrounded by Italy (!), which allied with Germany, and the Vatican's having had no standing army that could have remotely successfully opposed German or Italian forces were the Vatican not to have been neutral.

When pontificating and sharing your analysis, providing citations that point readers to your underlying research will help convince them that you have thought seriously about the matter under discussion.
-- Thomas G. Krattenmaker​

I think an outright condemnation of the Nazi regime in a country who largely identified as Christian would have provided more problems for the Nazi regime that may have helped end the war sooner, thus saving more lives.

Based on the contemporaneous remarks provided and referenced in my post, the people of the day, including the Pope, felt differently. Perhaps they did because, like Switzerland, the Vatican was a neutral country in the conflict. In order to maintain their neutrality, there really wasn't much the Pope could say as openly as you'd have had him say.

The Catholic church has the official position that an unborn child is human and that abortion is murder. But instead of making speeches about that the Pope instead focuses on preaching about how building walls is evil?

There is no excuse for this obvious hypocrisy

Yet again in this thread you make claims that upon even the most cursory examination into their veracity, simply do not hold true. Dude, are you aware that the Vatican has issued multiple encyclical against abortion? Do you know what an encyclical is?

• John Paul II -- Evangelium Vitae
• Paul VI -- Humanae Vitae
• Benedict XVI
  • Caritas in Veritate
  • Deus Caritas Est
• Pius XI -- Casti Connubii
• Vatican II -- Constitution of the Church in the Modern World

The catechism of the Roman Catholic Church is also clear on the matter and has been for as long as such a thing as abortion has been possible. The whole world, for all intents and purposes, is well aware of the Vatican's, the Pope's and the Roman Catholic Church's position on abortion. That awareness has been known since at least 1930 when Pius XI remarked on it. The Vatican and Popes have been "on about" and against abortion for over 80 years! Quite simply, absent a new and unequivocal discovery about the nature of a fetus, there's not more about abortion for a Pope to say.

 

[LoneLaugher]

Geez. Did the OP wake the neighbors with his turning gears as he came up with this one?

 

[Wacky Quacky]

Found it immediately on Youtube

It is filtered by YouTube as everything else pornographic is.

Why is it censored?

If it were then I wouldn’t be able to immediately find it without the slightest issue

There are tons of pro-life abortion videos on youtube as we speak. Prager’s must have been really twisted, probably inspiring hatred against abortion clinics and women who have had abortions.

Tell us what in this video no 12 year old should hear to justify its censorship.

Found it immediately on Youtube

Another pathetic dodge. They are in restricted status.

That video is not

Dodge.

Restricted by YouTube

I searched the first video that PragerU said was "Restricted", and it came right up and started playing on Youtube. Maybe do a little research before posting every batshit crazy conspiracy you find online.

"Restricted" mode on Youtube is off by default on every account. Nothing will prevent someone from watching PragerU videos unless they go into their account settings and turn on Restricted mode. And restricted mode isn't just limited to conservative videos, like all paranoid conservatives seem to think. About a year ago Youtube was slammed because Restricted mode was filtering out pro-LGBTQ videos.

 

[Wacky Quacky]

Leftism, the Religion | National Review

Is Lefitism a religion?

Just as much as "Rightism" is a religion that worships Reagan as some conservative messiah.

 

[Mac1958]

It could be argued that both hardcore partisanship and religion are ideologies, so they'd be similar in that way.

Trying to communicate with someone in either camp can be an exercise in futility, depending on how devout they are.

 

[David Dennisson]

Leftism, the Religion | National Review

Is Lefitism a religion?

I've had a few women who have made me see God. Like Stormy. Jesus!

Religious people love me. They can see I've been close to God many times.

 

[Votto]

Leftism as a religion?

If it were, who would be its immortally supreme being?


From the article:

Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the left, including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “left,”continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s religious mentor and close friend.

Really? I guess those must be the Americans who can't relate to having associates who have different mindsets about "whatever."

Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful, pro-life Catholics could vote for a health-care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions after opposing it up to the last day.

That quandary doesn't exist of one who refrains from ascribing to others one's own faith-based beliefs and externalities.

Nancy Pelosi’s belief in expanding the government’s role in American life

It's not at all clear that "expanding the government’s role in American life" is at all Pelosi's goal or that such a notion is causal to any of her proposals. What is clear is that some of her stances will result symptomatically in "expanding the government’s role in American life."

Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values from the Left more than from their religion.

Say what? Prager makes that statement as though "the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values" is demonstrably existential, when the reality is that for some folks it may be and for some it may not. Moreover, Prager does not so much as present an abductive, inductive or deductive argument to make that case that the above quoted premise has any degree of preponderant verity among so-called leftists, yet the remainder of his essay's/argument's validity -- that leftism is indeed a religion -- depends on that premise.

most Leftist Jews and Christians will counter that Leftist values cannot trump their religion’s values because Leftist values are identical to their religion’s.

Do they? Will they? I don't know. I do know that if one sets up a strawman about what others do or say -- that is, when one frames what other folks, particularly one's opponents, say rather than directly address what they in fact say -- it's not at all difficult to tear down the strawman of one's own erection.

I'm certainly in no position to attest to what most leftis "anybodies" will counter with regard to Prager's assertion that leftism is indeed a religion. I wonder how he comes to pontificate about what most such individuals might say.

if Christianity is, morally speaking, really Leftism, why didn’t Catholics and Protestants assert these values before 19th century European Leftism came along?

What kind of revisionist history does Prager think he can promulgate?

The validity of political themes has been supported by and equated to religiosity for as long as there have been politics and religion. Christianity became intermingled with politics the instant Constantine declared Christianity the state's religion. Pope Leo III's crowning of Charlemagne established the notion that kings were ordained by and drew their legitimacy from God, thus making crimes against the state be also heretical and blasphemous crimes against God. Even today, the Elizabeth II reigns as both the political monarch and as the head of the Church of England.

​

Why are almost no Christians and Jews who believe that God is the author of the Bible (or, in the case of Jews, the Torah) on the Left?

??? Prager really should "get out" more. The man need only visit black churches to find Christian political liberals who believe God is the Bible's author.
​

At that point in the essay, I'd had enough with Prager's attempts to depict as historic and current reality that which neither was nor is. I stopped reading.

As you rightly point out, Constantine made Christianity into a political weapon as well. In fact, Constantine was not even a Christian as he continued to worship pagan gods, although it is rumored he later converted on his death bed.

And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves. This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide. But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

History is full of examples of various means to secure power. It used to be that our leaders would convince us that they were a god, but when that no longer worked they tried to convince us that they spoke for God, but when that no longer worked they tried to get us to believe that there is no God, thus making them the ultimate authority once again. I believe we are at this later stage where anyone who opposes them due to being not so politically correct is branded a heretic and outcast from society.

They seem to demagogue an ideology of sorts. Things like "social justice" and "saving Mother Earth" are all things they preach to us as being their moral code. However, upon closer inspection, we see these same people contributing to social injustice, much like Bill Clinton abusing women, and promote legislation to curb global warming that scientists tell us is akin to putting a band aid on a cancer, while they run around heating and cooling 8 or so mansions around the world while living a jet set life.

In short, they have no soul to speak of other than just obtaining power. The teaching of people like Marx seem to be the most favorable tool because in order to achieve "financial equality, the government must be able to micromanage our finances and redistribute it as they see fit. However, to do this requires the most potentially oppressive powers possible. We got a taste of this with the IRS targeting Conservative groups in the US.

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge​

it is rumored he later converted on his death bed. And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves.

Did you watch the video I included in my post? You wouldn't have had to watch far into it to get to the part that addresses Constantine and how he used Christianity to his political advantage.

Constantine converted well before he was on his death bed. That said, there is no question, and the attached video

This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution

??? The reason we observe the current Pope remarking on global warming and the virtues of wealth/income redistribution is that the man who is Pope believes those are ideas worth supporting. It's no surprise that he does: (1) huge quantities of Roman Catholics live in areas that will disappear if/when become manifest climate science's predictions about rising sea levels and (2) huge quantities of Roman Catholics are poor. Inasmuch as most Roman Catholics live in states other than the Vatican, thus affording the Pope no public policy action he can take, there's little else the Pope can do but to advocate for policies that will benefit his faith's adherents. In that dimension, the Pope is no different than is anyone else who has a platform from which they can be heard by many, but who also have no formal political/jurisdictional authority to enact public policy.

This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide.

In a complex world beset by myriad complex issues, were I faced with (a) getting on my soapbox about a matter about which I've already stated my dogmatically unequivocal position and of which there's really nothing more to say or (b) getting on my soapbox to advocate for an issue that affects the very state of planet regardless of what goes on with the former issue, I too would prioritize my remarks to the latter rather than former. For whatever one thinks about abortion, the risks it presents pale in comparison to the risks presented by the types of changes in the planet's environment that climate science findings portend.

Before there was the mall, there was the ocean.
-- Whoopi Goldberg​

But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

??? Say what? Are you not aware that Hitler and the Nazis persecuted Roman Catholics too?

• Have you read "Mit Brennender Sorge?" Pius XI's encyclical, written in response to Nazi regime's disregard of a 1933 concordat the Vatican signed with the Reich whereby Pius XII sought to protect the Church's rights in Germany, criticized the Nazi regime and Hitler himself for espousing ideological values rather than Christian values. Cardinal Pacelli, later Pius XII, helped write Mit Brennender Sorge. On September 20, 1938, Pius XI declared the material commiseration of Judaism with Christianity on the basis of Christians having a spiritual kinship with Semites.
  • "It is not possible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are spiritually Semites.” (Source)
• Cardinal Clemens von Galen, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in 1941, on behalf of the church's congregation and leadership in Germany said/wrote:
  

  There are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfil even if it costs us our lives. Never under any circumstances may a human being kill an innocent person apart from in war and legitimate self-defence. On July 6, I already had cause to add to the pastoral letter the following explanation: for some months we have been hearing reports that, on the orders of Berlin, patients from mental asylums who have been ill for a long time and may appear incurable, are being compulsorily removed. Then, after a short time, the relatives are regularly informed that the corpse has been burnt and the ashes can be delivered. There is a general suspicion verging on certainty, that these numerous unexpected deaths of mentally ill people do not occur of themselves but are deliberately brought about, that the doctrine is being followed, according to which one may destroy so-called 'worthless life,' that is, kill innocent people if one considers that their lives are of no further value for the nation and the state. (Source)

  When I learned of the intention to transport patients from Marienthal in order to kill them, I brought a formal charge at the State Court in Münster and with the Police President in Münster by means of a registered letter which read as follows: "According to information which I have received, in the course of this week a large number of patients from the Marienthal Provincial Asylum near Münster are to be transported to the Eichberg asylum as so-called 'unproductive national comrades' and will then soon be deliberately killed, as is generally believed has occurred with such transports from other asylums. Since such an action is not only contrary to the moral laws of God and Nature but also is punishable with death as murder under section 211 of the Penal Code, I hereby bring a charge in accordance with my duty under section 139 of the Penal Code, and request you to provide immediate protection for the national comrades threatened in this way by taking action against those agencies who are intending their removal and murder, and that you inform me of the steps that have been taken. (Source)

  
  Galens made those remarks during a sermon, and for them Martin Bormann sought to have Galen executed. Hitler and Goebbels reasoned that doing so would make Galen a martyr and therefore countermanded Bormann's directive.

As goes Pius XII's silence regarding the Holocaust, I suggest you read former Israeli Consul Pinchas E. Lapide's Three Popes and the Jews. There's more to that than meets the eye -- or more precisely, that doesn't meet the ears -- of the cursory examiner of history.

• The Catholic Church under Pius XII was instrumental in saving 860,000 Jews from Nazi death camps. (p. 214)
  
• According to Lapide, the concentration camp prisoners did not want Pius to speak out openly. (p. 247)
  
• one jurist from the Nuremberg Trials said on WNBC in New York (Feb. 28, 1964), "Any words of Pius XII, directed against a madman like Hitler, would have brought on an even worse catastrophe... [and] accelerated the massacre of Jews and priests." (p. 247)
  
• Albert Einstein refers explicitly to the Roman Catholic Church's actions and position against the Nazis using essentially the same language he did in Time magazine. (p. 257)
• Quite simply the Nazis did not tolerate any protest and responded severely. As an example, the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht in July 1942 protested in a pastoral letter against the Jewish persecutions in Holland. Immediately the Nazis rounded up as many Jews and Catholic non-Aryans as possible and deported them to death camps. (p. 246)

Pius XII knew that every time he spoke out against Hitler, the Nazis may have, in turn, retaliated against Catholics and/or Jews; thus he construed that his best attack against the Nazis was subtly worded public remarks, quiet diplomacy, and behind-the-scenes action. According to The 1996 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (V8.01) under Pius XII, "Wishing to preserve Vatican neutrality, fearing reprisals, and realizing his impotence to stop the Holocaust, Pius nonetheless acted on an individual basis to save many Jews and others with church ransoms, documents, and asylum."

That said, the man wasn't completely silent either. Read his 1941 and 1942 Christmas messages. To prevent retaliation against Roman Catholics, he did not refer to Nazism by name, but people of that era yet understood his remarks referred to the Nazis, and Nazis were among the people who knew quite well it was they to whom he referred. Indeed, Israel Zolli, Rome's rabbi, was so moved by Pius XII's efforts to help Jews and Catholics who suffered under Hitler's regime that upon his conversion to Christianity, he took the name Pius.

Then there's one of modern history's most famous agnostic's, Albert Einstein's, now famous remarks in Time magazine :

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks...

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly. (Source)​

Now, I'm not of a mind to chide you for not knowing the information noted above. Truth be told, until I'd read Lapide's book, I didn't know many of those details. That said, from what little I recall of high school history class, I did at least know that Nazis weren't keen, to put it mildly, on Roman Catholics. Hell, though I don't know a damn thing about Roman Catholicism in modern Germany, I recall that Martin Luther was German, and that alone would inspire me to suspect that Germans, period, in the 1940s, weren't all that "into" Roman Catholics. Whether that was so, I have no idea, but were I going to assert that to be so, I'd at least find out before publicly doing so. With the Internet at one's disposal, it's just not but a minute or two's worth of effort to do that.

I would hope that going forward, when you are of a mind to remark upon events from history, you at least exercise enough integrity to go a bit beyond popular conceptions of history and confirm whether what you know about the matter(s) aligns factually and contextually with what truly happened. The simple fact that Catholics were no favorites of the Nazis -- something that anyone who actually took history classes would know or at least surmise -- should have alone inspired you to, before posting it, confirm the veracity of the statement you made that catalyzed my writing the remarks in this section of this post.

Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.
-- Talmud​

You are all over the map here. First you claim that Constantine used Christianity as a tool for his political advancement and then claim he was a Christian? Whatever. Here is a man who had both his wife and own flesh and blood murdered, a man devoid of any outward evidence of being a Christian and still worshiped pagan gods as I have said. Even Hitler claimed to be a Christian. So what?

As for the Catholic church, I don't doubt that those in the Catholic church helped fight the Nazi movement in various ways. My complaint is their tight rope walk in trying not to outright condemn the Nazi regime for their Holocaust for fear that they may risk all of their precious Vatican and treasures therein. I think an outright condemnation of the Nazi regime in a country who largely identified as Christian would have provided more problems for the Nazi regime that may have helped end the war sooner, thus saving more lives.

But that is a side note. The fact is that the Catholic church has the official position that an unborn child is human and that abortion is murder. But instead of making speeches about that the Pope instead focuses on preaching about how building walls is evil?

There is no excuse for this obvious hypocrisy that is driven by Left winged fanaticism.

My complaint is their tight rope walk in trying not to outright condemn the Nazi regime for their Holocaust for fear that they may risk all of their precious Vatican and treasures therein.

Please provide some credible evidence that not risking "all of their precious Vatican and treasures therein" was a reason for the two Piuses actions during late 1930s and early to mid 1940s.


In my post, I asserted that the reason for the Pope's subtle approach to decrying the Nazis was his concern over recriminations, likely violent, by the Nazis were he to do so, and I provided at least five references that indicate as much, including first hand statements as well as historical and contemporaneous analysis and illustrations of the WWII Popes' specific remarks against Hitler and the Nazis. I also shared examples of the Popes' direct actions to help prisoners whom the Nazis unjustly held and murdered. Hell, I even included the text of specific messages and a Papal encyclical.

So, if you're going to make a claim about a WWII Pope's motivations for anything they did or didn't do, the least you could do is support it with something comparably credible to the references to which I linked.

Now as for why the Pope declared the Vatican a neutral country in the WWII conflict, well, the reason for that likely had little to do with "precious Vatican and treasures" and damn near everything -- Christian values notwithstanding, however much among the reasons they were -- to do with being completely surrounded by Italy (!), which allied with Germany, and the Vatican's having had no standing army that could have remotely successfully opposed German or Italian forces were the Vatican not to have been neutral.

When pontificating and sharing your analysis, providing citations that point readers to your underlying research will help convince them that you have thought seriously about the matter under discussion.
-- Thomas G. Krattenmaker​

I think an outright condemnation of the Nazi regime in a country who largely identified as Christian would have provided more problems for the Nazi regime that may have helped end the war sooner, thus saving more lives.

Based on the contemporaneous remarks provided and referenced in my post, the people of the day, including the Pope, felt differently. Perhaps they did because, like Switzerland, the Vatican was a neutral country in the conflict. In order to maintain their neutrality, there really wasn't much the Pope could say as openly as you'd have had him say.

The Catholic church has the official position that an unborn child is human and that abortion is murder. But instead of making speeches about that the Pope instead focuses on preaching about how building walls is evil?

There is no excuse for this obvious hypocrisy

Yet again in this thread you make claims that upon even the most cursory examination into their veracity, simply do not hold true. Dude, are you aware that the Vatican has issued multiple encyclical against abortion? Do you know what an encyclical is?

• John Paul II -- Evangelium Vitae
• Paul VI -- Humanae Vitae
• Benedict XVI
  • Caritas in Veritate
  • Deus Caritas Est
• Pius XI -- Casti Connubii
• Vatican II -- Constitution of the Church in the Modern World

The catechism of the Roman Catholic Church is also clear on the matter and has been for as long as such a thing as abortion has been possible. The whole world, for all intents and purposes, is well aware of the Vatican's, the Pope's and the Roman Catholic Church's position on abortion. That awareness has been known since at least 1930 when Pius XI remarked on it. The Vatican and Popes have been "on about" and against abortion for over 80 years! Quite simply, absent a new and unequivocal discovery about the nature of a fetus, there's not more about abortion for a Pope to say.

So the Catholic church faced extermination as well as other Catholics if they rose up against Hilter?

Well so did Churchill and the entire British empire, yet he stood anyway.

And that is what it takes to stand against evil. It takes standing for what you know is right and knowing that there is a higher power to back you and that even if you lose your very life in the process, it will all work out for good in the end and be worth it.

This is something the Pope obviously did not share.

I find it interesting that you did not post a quote from the current Pope regarding abortion. Is he ignoring the mass genocide?

In the US, they have aborted well over 50 million children. Hitler never came close to these types of numbers.

Is the Catholic church as afraid of Leftists as they were Hitler?

Sometimes I wonder.

 

[David Dennisson]

I've donated money to pro-abortion Democrats many times. Many times, believe me. I have donated more money to pro-abortion Democrats than I have to Republicans. Millions. Millions and millions of dollars, folks. Even the Clintons.

But I had to so I could make more money!

Jesus forgives me for aiding and abetting the killing of babies since I profited from it. If you can get richer by donating money to baby murderers it's okay. It says so in the Bible. Two Corinthians, I think. Right?

 

[usmbguest5318]

If it were, who would be its immortally supreme being?


From the article:

Really? I guess those must be the Americans who can't relate to having associates who have different mindsets about "whatever."


That quandary doesn't exist of one who refrains from ascribing to others one's own faith-based beliefs and externalities.


It's not at all clear that "expanding the government’s role in American life" is at all Pelosi's goal or that such a notion is causal to any of her proposals. What is clear is that some of her stances will result symptomatically in "expanding the government’s role in American life."


Say what? Prager makes that statement as though "the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values" is demonstrably existential, when the reality is that for some folks it may be and for some it may not. Moreover, Prager does not so much as present an abductive, inductive or deductive argument to make that case that the above quoted premise has any degree of preponderant verity among so-called leftists, yet the remainder of his essay's/argument's validity -- that leftism is indeed a religion -- depends on that premise.


Do they? Will they? I don't know. I do know that if one sets up a strawman about what others do or say -- that is, when one frames what other folks, particularly one's opponents, say rather than directly address what they in fact say -- it's not at all difficult to tear down the strawman of one's own erection.

I'm certainly in no position to attest to what most leftis "anybodies" will counter with regard to Prager's assertion that leftism is indeed a religion. I wonder how he comes to pontificate about what most such individuals might say.


What kind of revisionist history does Prager think he can promulgate?

The validity of political themes has been supported by and equated to religiosity for as long as there have been politics and religion. Christianity became intermingled with politics the instant Constantine declared Christianity the state's religion. Pope Leo III's crowning of Charlemagne established the notion that kings were ordained by and drew their legitimacy from God, thus making crimes against the state be also heretical and blasphemous crimes against God. Even today, the Elizabeth II reigns as both the political monarch and as the head of the Church of England.

​

??? Prager really should "get out" more. The man need only visit black churches to find Christian political liberals who believe God is the Bible's author.
​

At that point in the essay, I'd had enough with Prager's attempts to depict as historic and current reality that which neither was nor is. I stopped reading.

As you rightly point out, Constantine made Christianity into a political weapon as well. In fact, Constantine was not even a Christian as he continued to worship pagan gods, although it is rumored he later converted on his death bed.

And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves. This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide. But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

History is full of examples of various means to secure power. It used to be that our leaders would convince us that they were a god, but when that no longer worked they tried to convince us that they spoke for God, but when that no longer worked they tried to get us to believe that there is no God, thus making them the ultimate authority once again. I believe we are at this later stage where anyone who opposes them due to being not so politically correct is branded a heretic and outcast from society.

They seem to demagogue an ideology of sorts. Things like "social justice" and "saving Mother Earth" are all things they preach to us as being their moral code. However, upon closer inspection, we see these same people contributing to social injustice, much like Bill Clinton abusing women, and promote legislation to curb global warming that scientists tell us is akin to putting a band aid on a cancer, while they run around heating and cooling 8 or so mansions around the world while living a jet set life.

In short, they have no soul to speak of other than just obtaining power. The teaching of people like Marx seem to be the most favorable tool because in order to achieve "financial equality, the government must be able to micromanage our finances and redistribute it as they see fit. However, to do this requires the most potentially oppressive powers possible. We got a taste of this with the IRS targeting Conservative groups in the US.

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge​

it is rumored he later converted on his death bed. And that is the rub here. The most successful religions are created by the state by mean who wish to secure power for themselves.

Did you watch the video I included in my post? You wouldn't have had to watch far into it to get to the part that addresses Constantine and how he used Christianity to his political advantage.

Constantine converted well before he was on his death bed. That said, there is no question, and the attached video

This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution

??? The reason we observe the current Pope remarking on global warming and the virtues of wealth/income redistribution is that the man who is Pope believes those are ideas worth supporting. It's no surprise that he does: (1) huge quantities of Roman Catholics live in areas that will disappear if/when become manifest climate science's predictions about rising sea levels and (2) huge quantities of Roman Catholics are poor. Inasmuch as most Roman Catholics live in states other than the Vatican, thus affording the Pope no public policy action he can take, there's little else the Pope can do but to advocate for policies that will benefit his faith's adherents. In that dimension, the Pope is no different than is anyone else who has a platform from which they can be heard by many, but who also have no formal political/jurisdictional authority to enact public policy.

This is why we see a left leaning Pope give sermons on global warming and the virtues of government redistribution, but seem to ignore issues like abortion, even though according official church theology it is genocide.

In a complex world beset by myriad complex issues, were I faced with (a) getting on my soapbox about a matter about which I've already stated my dogmatically unequivocal position and of which there's really nothing more to say or (b) getting on my soapbox to advocate for an issue that affects the very state of planet regardless of what goes on with the former issue, I too would prioritize my remarks to the latter rather than former. For whatever one thinks about abortion, the risks it presents pale in comparison to the risks presented by the types of changes in the planet's environment that climate science findings portend.

Before there was the mall, there was the ocean.
-- Whoopi Goldberg​

But then, the Catholic church was also silent during the Holocaust due to political expediency as well, which only drive home further my point.

??? Say what? Are you not aware that Hitler and the Nazis persecuted Roman Catholics too?

• Have you read "Mit Brennender Sorge?" Pius XI's encyclical, written in response to Nazi regime's disregard of a 1933 concordat the Vatican signed with the Reich whereby Pius XII sought to protect the Church's rights in Germany, criticized the Nazi regime and Hitler himself for espousing ideological values rather than Christian values. Cardinal Pacelli, later Pius XII, helped write Mit Brennender Sorge. On September 20, 1938, Pius XI declared the material commiseration of Judaism with Christianity on the basis of Christians having a spiritual kinship with Semites.
  • "It is not possible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are spiritually Semites.” (Source)
• Cardinal Clemens von Galen, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in 1941, on behalf of the church's congregation and leadership in Germany said/wrote:
  

  There are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfil even if it costs us our lives. Never under any circumstances may a human being kill an innocent person apart from in war and legitimate self-defence. On July 6, I already had cause to add to the pastoral letter the following explanation: for some months we have been hearing reports that, on the orders of Berlin, patients from mental asylums who have been ill for a long time and may appear incurable, are being compulsorily removed. Then, after a short time, the relatives are regularly informed that the corpse has been burnt and the ashes can be delivered. There is a general suspicion verging on certainty, that these numerous unexpected deaths of mentally ill people do not occur of themselves but are deliberately brought about, that the doctrine is being followed, according to which one may destroy so-called 'worthless life,' that is, kill innocent people if one considers that their lives are of no further value for the nation and the state. (Source)

  When I learned of the intention to transport patients from Marienthal in order to kill them, I brought a formal charge at the State Court in Münster and with the Police President in Münster by means of a registered letter which read as follows: "According to information which I have received, in the course of this week a large number of patients from the Marienthal Provincial Asylum near Münster are to be transported to the Eichberg asylum as so-called 'unproductive national comrades' and will then soon be deliberately killed, as is generally believed has occurred with such transports from other asylums. Since such an action is not only contrary to the moral laws of God and Nature but also is punishable with death as murder under section 211 of the Penal Code, I hereby bring a charge in accordance with my duty under section 139 of the Penal Code, and request you to provide immediate protection for the national comrades threatened in this way by taking action against those agencies who are intending their removal and murder, and that you inform me of the steps that have been taken. (Source)

  
  Galens made those remarks during a sermon, and for them Martin Bormann sought to have Galen executed. Hitler and Goebbels reasoned that doing so would make Galen a martyr and therefore countermanded Bormann's directive.

As goes Pius XII's silence regarding the Holocaust, I suggest you read former Israeli Consul Pinchas E. Lapide's Three Popes and the Jews. There's more to that than meets the eye -- or more precisely, that doesn't meet the ears -- of the cursory examiner of history.

• The Catholic Church under Pius XII was instrumental in saving 860,000 Jews from Nazi death camps. (p. 214)
  
• According to Lapide, the concentration camp prisoners did not want Pius to speak out openly. (p. 247)
  
• one jurist from the Nuremberg Trials said on WNBC in New York (Feb. 28, 1964), "Any words of Pius XII, directed against a madman like Hitler, would have brought on an even worse catastrophe... [and] accelerated the massacre of Jews and priests." (p. 247)
  
• Albert Einstein refers explicitly to the Roman Catholic Church's actions and position against the Nazis using essentially the same language he did in Time magazine. (p. 257)
• Quite simply the Nazis did not tolerate any protest and responded severely. As an example, the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht in July 1942 protested in a pastoral letter against the Jewish persecutions in Holland. Immediately the Nazis rounded up as many Jews and Catholic non-Aryans as possible and deported them to death camps. (p. 246)

Pius XII knew that every time he spoke out against Hitler, the Nazis may have, in turn, retaliated against Catholics and/or Jews; thus he construed that his best attack against the Nazis was subtly worded public remarks, quiet diplomacy, and behind-the-scenes action. According to The 1996 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (V8.01) under Pius XII, "Wishing to preserve Vatican neutrality, fearing reprisals, and realizing his impotence to stop the Holocaust, Pius nonetheless acted on an individual basis to save many Jews and others with church ransoms, documents, and asylum."

That said, the man wasn't completely silent either. Read his 1941 and 1942 Christmas messages. To prevent retaliation against Roman Catholics, he did not refer to Nazism by name, but people of that era yet understood his remarks referred to the Nazis, and Nazis were among the people who knew quite well it was they to whom he referred. Indeed, Israel Zolli, Rome's rabbi, was so moved by Pius XII's efforts to help Jews and Catholics who suffered under Hitler's regime that upon his conversion to Christianity, he took the name Pius.

Then there's one of modern history's most famous agnostic's, Albert Einstein's, now famous remarks in Time magazine :

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks...

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly. (Source)​

Now, I'm not of a mind to chide you for not knowing the information noted above. Truth be told, until I'd read Lapide's book, I didn't know many of those details. That said, from what little I recall of high school history class, I did at least know that Nazis weren't keen, to put it mildly, on Roman Catholics. Hell, though I don't know a damn thing about Roman Catholicism in modern Germany, I recall that Martin Luther was German, and that alone would inspire me to suspect that Germans, period, in the 1940s, weren't all that "into" Roman Catholics. Whether that was so, I have no idea, but were I going to assert that to be so, I'd at least find out before publicly doing so. With the Internet at one's disposal, it's just not but a minute or two's worth of effort to do that.

I would hope that going forward, when you are of a mind to remark upon events from history, you at least exercise enough integrity to go a bit beyond popular conceptions of history and confirm whether what you know about the matter(s) aligns factually and contextually with what truly happened. The simple fact that Catholics were no favorites of the Nazis -- something that anyone who actually took history classes would know or at least surmise -- should have alone inspired you to, before posting it, confirm the veracity of the statement you made that catalyzed my writing the remarks in this section of this post.

Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.
-- Talmud​

You are all over the map here. First you claim that Constantine used Christianity as a tool for his political advancement and then claim he was a Christian? Whatever. Here is a man who had both his wife and own flesh and blood murdered, a man devoid of any outward evidence of being a Christian and still worshiped pagan gods as I have said. Even Hitler claimed to be a Christian. So what?

As for the Catholic church, I don't doubt that those in the Catholic church helped fight the Nazi movement in various ways. My complaint is their tight rope walk in trying not to outright condemn the Nazi regime for their Holocaust for fear that they may risk all of their precious Vatican and treasures therein. I think an outright condemnation of the Nazi regime in a country who largely identified as Christian would have provided more problems for the Nazi regime that may have helped end the war sooner, thus saving more lives.

But that is a side note. The fact is that the Catholic church has the official position that an unborn child is human and that abortion is murder. But instead of making speeches about that the Pope instead focuses on preaching about how building walls is evil?

There is no excuse for this obvious hypocrisy that is driven by Left winged fanaticism.

My complaint is their tight rope walk in trying not to outright condemn the Nazi regime for their Holocaust for fear that they may risk all of their precious Vatican and treasures therein.

Please provide some credible evidence that not risking "all of their precious Vatican and treasures therein" was a reason for the two Piuses actions during late 1930s and early to mid 1940s.


In my post, I asserted that the reason for the Pope's subtle approach to decrying the Nazis was his concern over recriminations, likely violent, by the Nazis were he to do so, and I provided at least five references that indicate as much, including first hand statements as well as historical and contemporaneous analysis and illustrations of the WWII Popes' specific remarks against Hitler and the Nazis. I also shared examples of the Popes' direct actions to help prisoners whom the Nazis unjustly held and murdered. Hell, I even included the text of specific messages and a Papal encyclical.

So, if you're going to make a claim about a WWII Pope's motivations for anything they did or didn't do, the least you could do is support it with something comparably credible to the references to which I linked.

Now as for why the Pope declared the Vatican a neutral country in the WWII conflict, well, the reason for that likely had little to do with "precious Vatican and treasures" and damn near everything -- Christian values notwithstanding, however much among the reasons they were -- to do with being completely surrounded by Italy (!), which allied with Germany, and the Vatican's having had no standing army that could have remotely successfully opposed German or Italian forces were the Vatican not to have been neutral.

When pontificating and sharing your analysis, providing citations that point readers to your underlying research will help convince them that you have thought seriously about the matter under discussion.
-- Thomas G. Krattenmaker​

I think an outright condemnation of the Nazi regime in a country who largely identified as Christian would have provided more problems for the Nazi regime that may have helped end the war sooner, thus saving more lives.

Based on the contemporaneous remarks provided and referenced in my post, the people of the day, including the Pope, felt differently. Perhaps they did because, like Switzerland, the Vatican was a neutral country in the conflict. In order to maintain their neutrality, there really wasn't much the Pope could say as openly as you'd have had him say.

The Catholic church has the official position that an unborn child is human and that abortion is murder. But instead of making speeches about that the Pope instead focuses on preaching about how building walls is evil?

There is no excuse for this obvious hypocrisy

Yet again in this thread you make claims that upon even the most cursory examination into their veracity, simply do not hold true. Dude, are you aware that the Vatican has issued multiple encyclical against abortion? Do you know what an encyclical is?

• John Paul II -- Evangelium Vitae
• Paul VI -- Humanae Vitae
• Benedict XVI
  • Caritas in Veritate
  • Deus Caritas Est
• Pius XI -- Casti Connubii
• Vatican II -- Constitution of the Church in the Modern World

The catechism of the Roman Catholic Church is also clear on the matter and has been for as long as such a thing as abortion has been possible. The whole world, for all intents and purposes, is well aware of the Vatican's, the Pope's and the Roman Catholic Church's position on abortion. That awareness has been known since at least 1930 when Pius XI remarked on it. The Vatican and Popes have been "on about" and against abortion for over 80 years! Quite simply, absent a new and unequivocal discovery about the nature of a fetus, there's not more about abortion for a Pope to say.

So the Catholic church faced extermination as well as other Catholics if they rose up against Hilter?

Well so did Churchill and the entire British empire, yet he stood anyway.

And that is what it takes to stand against evil. It takes standing for what you know is right and knowing that there is a higher power to back you and that even if you lose your very life in the process, it will all work out for good in the end and be worth it.

This is something the Pope obviously did not share.

I find it interesting that you did not post a quote from the current Pope regarding abortion. Is he ignoring the mass genocide?

In the US, they have aborted well over 50 million children. Hitler never came close to these types of numbers.

Is the Catholic church as afraid of Leftists as they were Hitler?

Sometimes I wonder.

So the Catholic church faced extermination as well as other Catholics if they rose up against Hilter?

Well so did Churchill and the entire British empire, yet he stood anyway.

??? What part of "the Vatican had no standing army of note" did you not understand? What part of that reality's significance is lost on you? What about the duality of choices a literally defenseless nation has are you missing?

Surely you realize that England had a very formidable military, one that for part of the war, for all intents and purposes, singularly in Western Europe, and in and around its various empire outposts, fought against Germany.

I find it interesting that you did not post a quote from the current Pope regarding abortion.

Why am I not surprised that's something you'd find interesting...?

 

[IsaacNewton]

No debate, the general belief in myth and fantasy is a conservative gene. They find 'god' on potato chips and toast.