Report # 11 on David Carlin's Book

Report # 11 on David Carlin’s Book
Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?
Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007
Chapter 3
America’s Anti-Christian Party (cont’d) 57-65
There is a Culture War taking place in the United States today….
“The main division in the Culture War is a religious one; the conflict between religion and anti-religion lies at the bottom of it….
“Here, then is the fundamental issue at stake in the Culture War: whether old-fashioned religion, especially the old-fashioned Christianity of which traditional Catholicism is the exemplar, will continue to play an important role in American society, such as it has for nearly four hundred years, since the first settlement of British America. Secularists are bound and determined that it will not play this role.…

“It’s even true that to date the Republicans in Washington have given moral-religious conservatives little more than symbolic victories in Culture War battles (although these victories might eventually become more substantial now that President Bush has place two apparently conservative judges on the Supreme Court)….
“But think of the adage: ‘Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they are not out to get you.” Just because Republicans and conservatives are making political hay out of the alleged threat Democrats and liberals pose to Christian values, it doesn’t follow that the threat doesn’t exist. Many liberals believe that moral-religious conservatives are mostly boobs and nincompoops, and thus easily fooled; it’s no wonder to them that unscrupulous Republican leaders can succeed in tricking them into having intellectual hallucinations – for instance, that liberals are the enemies of Christianity….

“But no less essential are certain moral beliefs – that non-marital sex is wrong, for instance, and so are unmarried cohabitations, homosexual conduct, abortion, suicide and euthanasia. Thus when moral liberals defend such practices, they’re denying the legitimacy of traditional Christianity no less than if they had attacked the doctrine of Christ’s divinity. In either case, they’re waging metaphorical war against the old time Christian religion....
“Why do they (moral liberals) deny it? There are four answers to this question.
First, there are some moral liberals (a small minority) who hate Christianity and are deliberately out to destroy it, but they decided that a “stealth” campaign against the religion would have a much better chance of success than an open campaign….

“Second, the great majority of moral liberals are not consciously aiming at Christianity’s destruction or even at the defeat of Christian values and Christian morality. What they want is a society made safe for sexual freedom, abortion, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted-suicide, and so forth; how this might affect Christianity isn’t their concern….

“A third reason is that secularists and moral liberals generally have little understanding of Christianity…. How could any educated American be ignorant of Christianity? But religious ignorance among Americans – or rather, the ignorance of religions other than one’s own – isn’t confined to secularists; it’s pervasive among religious folks as well….
“Finally, while liberals don’t believe they are attacking Christianity, they do believe that Christianity is attacking liberalism…. Secularists and moral liberals view Christian belligerence rather as kind of imperialism…. to establish a theocracy.”
George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish.