I agree that he understands the secular left. He understands them as well as I do. He was a liberal, I was a liberal with leftist leanings. As a liberal I had a number of discussions with other liberals and almost invariably noticed the argument boiled down to "I believe this because I'm a good person, good people believe these beliefs, these beliefs are good, and believing these beliefs makes you a good person." A four-pillared circle that held itself up and was so strong it could support any belief, any attack, any refutation.
When I realized that I held my leftist beliefs because I assumed they were good, it didn't take me very long to dump them. But there are millions of Americans who still hold their political beliefs, sometimes goofy and irrational beliefs, but these are rock-solid beliefs because they confirm the holder's notions of good and evil, right and wrong, better and worse. (And yet these people are very likely to tell you that judgements of good and evil, better and worse, right and wrong, are always wrong.)
Now the mental block sets in. Have you ever argued with a Jehovah's Witness? They've been trained that you're in the thrall of the Devil himself, that all your thinking comes from the Devil, and that everything you could ever have to say comes from the Devil. In fact, they're taught that if they ever read the Bible without the accompanying Watchtower guidance literature, they'll likely pick up the Devil's teaching and fall into error. When you talk to them the glaze in their eyes isn't from stupidity or craziness nor even from religious fervor; it's a mental blockade they have set up to defend themselves from your erroneous teaching.
Liberals and leftists are the same way. They've heard from society around them that liberal is good, conservative is evil, liberals are good, conservatives evil. And the mental wall gets erected: everything liberals will say is given the benefit of the doubt, everything conservatives say probably came from the Devil. Quick! duck! let it fly over your head, it's evil.
Their good-bad-right-wrong worldview is so heavily reinforced by their culture and their party that they can never enter into any doubt of the moral rectitude of holding these beliefs. Liberals wake up knowing they're good people, they eat breakfast knowing they're good, they go to work knowing they're good, they rear good children, they drive good cars, almost every choice they've ever made has been a GOOD choice. They choose Good friends and they only listen to Good opinions. They don't choose their opinions for their soundness or validity, but based on whether they comport with the GOODNESS of liberalism. Their politics invade every aspect of their lives and inform their every knee jerk reflex.
And that's where their faith comes in. As Dennis knows and has said many times, liberalism of this kind is nothing less than the liberal's religion. If you don't know that, you haven't talked to many liberals, or you haven't had your mind engaged when you did. As a result of this amazing and unshakable faith in the goodness of their ideas and the goodness of people like themselves who hold them, many liberals have thrown off the notion that any other kind of goodness is necessary. Religious faith is not necessary in their lives. "I know what's good and bad without some stupid book written by an invisible sky fairy to tell me," says one, ignoring the fact that he learned what good and bad are from people who asked the "sky fairy" in the first place.
Now here comes the religious left with their rock-solid confidence in their own goodness and their utter faith in the goodness of their beliefs. What would bring them to a house of worship? After all, the atheist left has the same object of worship (their own Goodness) that the religious left have. Doesn't that suffice? If you ask them directly, they'll tell you they came to worship God. Probe a little deeper and you may hear something about "I was born a
But watch them for a few months, until they feel comfortable that they belong to this congregation, and you realize their politics informs their religion. As a member of their chosen church, they constantly run into rules that every liberal hates--don't have sex with everyone in sight, don't divorce, behave modestly, invest your money wisely, raise up your children in the ways of the Lord, little things like that. Every rule a liberal ever ran into that he didn't like, was immediately rationalized away. "We weave cloth with two different fibers in it nowadays and never fear we're going to hell for breaking that one, either."
No one has ever told them that God gave us those rules expecting us to live by them because they're Good for us. The liberal can't see anything he doesn't agree with as good for anyone, nor can he even consider such constraints as valid ("so out of date, three thousand years ago"), and therefore the rules must be done away with. Out goes the Bad rule, in comes the Good! The rules liberals love have more to do with not judging, not condemning, forgiving, spreading the wealth around, not drilling for oil, loving Your Mother the Earth, and pacifism. Stuff like what you'd expect if a committee of college students wrote out a new Ten Commandments for us all to obey: no smoking, never repress your natural feelings, man is just one species among the millions, it's wrong to impose your values on your children, take care of the poor, raise taxes, punish the rich, expand government.
Now, you'd expect people like this to want to find a denomination that already preaches such fluff, where they could all stand together and agree "We don't need a sky fairy to tell us what's right and what's wrong." (That's what they did in my first church after college, the Unitarian Church.) But no good liberal is ever satisfied when he sees error; instead he has to change it or exterminate it.
That's why so many liberals have been working hard to change, for one example, the Catholic Church. The church has always tried to keep the faith and keep it correctly. Sometimes they erred and went wrong, even they admitted it by calling their Vatican Councils to purge the errors they had gotten into. But that's not enough for liberals. Liberal Catholics try to change their church to agree with their political agenda. To a liberal, all faith is opinion not based on truth. In matters of religion especially, every man has his own interpretation of God so it's absurd to tell anyone what to believe about God.
When liberals finally realize the church isn't going to change, they either drop out of religion completely or they move to my church, the Episcopal Church, and start hammering away at that one. Leftists in my church have pushed and shoved until all the rules are gone, God is a fuzzy amorphous mess, Jesus is more of a Care Bear than the holy God who made the universe, rules on stuff like abortion, homosexuality, and divorce are made to be changed.
(Note to Dennis: Why does my church have so many nutty liberals in it? Probably because so many of them have been to college!)
"Of course I love God," they'll tell you. The meaning behind that is, "NO, I could never love a mean old God like the God of the Old Testament, that judgemental, warmongering bastard who was so obviously dreamt up by a warrior tribe who imagined this fierce, bloodthirsty warrior god into existence. MY god (now beaming with self-satisfied pride) is a loving God, the God of the New Testament, the god who said, "Blessed are the humble and meek."
You see the liberal vein here. These people are looking for more goodness to validate themselves, but it has to be Goodness as THEY define it.
Please don't try to tell me that conservatives have the same "My beliefs are right" attitude. Of course they believe their beliefs are right; who doesn't? If you thought your beliefs were wrong, wouldn't you change them? But it isn't the same. It isn't the "the enemy is evil and must be destroyed" and it isn't that four-pillared circle of righteous goodness the liberals have, nor does it give us license to eviscerate our opponents, only to debate them.
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