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By Lee Duigon
July 11, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

Arguing with a liberal is like arguing with a bath mat or a fence-post. You won’t get anywhere. Still, there might be someone listening or reading who may profit from your argument. So we try.

For the benefit of those who have not yet made up their minds, let’s make it clear what “liberalism” or “progressivism” really is.

It is a religion. It rests on two pillars that are faith statements. Liberals will object to this, but they’ll object to anything you say, so ignore them. It’s your job to teach a youngster, or an adult who hasn’t paid much attention until now, what those two pillars are.

First, liberalism is a faith, a belief, that man is perfectible by man. If only the government is made big enough, and powerful enough; if only enough money is raised by taxation; if only the right experts (the liberals themselves) are put in charge, and everyone obeys them: well, then, everything is going to be hunky-dory. Note: because this is a faith, liberals are impervious to facts. It doesn’t matter how many examples you trot out to prove this formula has never worked. They remain committed to it.

Consider this bilge from “The Humanist Manifesto II,” one of the sacred scrolls of liberalism:

“Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our life-span, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.”

Quite a sales pitch, isn’t it? Why, there’s nothing that a bunch of really smart politicians, scientists, lawyers, movie stars, and college profs can’t do! Don’t you want an abundant and meaningful life? They’ll make sure you get one—just give them the power to do what must be done.

They’ll get it done by the magical means of government, which is spelled “c-o-e-r-c-i-o-n.” The fact that these enterprises, when pursued vigorously, always seem to end up with piles of dead bodies and miles of barbed wire fouling up the landscape makes no impression on progressives. But the uncommitted person may want to take a long, hard look at history.

The second pillar of liberalism is that there is no God, or, at best, a God who is not involved in earthly doings and doesn’t mind if we ignore Him. The Humanist Manifesto explicitly rejects God, the Bible, prayer, and the afterlife. That hasn’t stopped a passel of liberal churchmen from signing onto it. They want to be seen as “smart.”

To say there is no God, or only a totally ineffectual God, is to make a religious statement, a statement of faith. Liberalism, atheism, statism, call it what you will, is religion without God.

God’s throne being vacant, the progressive wants to sit on it and do God’s job. The God of liberalism is man, and the great work of man is the almighty, and presumably all-knowing, government. For the liberal there is no lord higher than Pharaoh. As promised by the serpent in the Garden of Eden, man becomes as God, determining good and evil for himself.

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This belief, that above man and the state is nothing greater, no authority to whom the rulers must account, explains much. Believing as they do, that they are as close to being God as anything can get, libs feel perfectly competent to trash tradition, ignore history, violate constitutions, redefine basic human institutions like marriage and the family (that’s how they “significantly modify our behavior” and “direct the course of human evolution”), and even defy such obvious natural boundaries as “gender” (“You can be a boy today and a girl tomorrow, depending on how you feel,” is what the gender coach teaches your kids in public school). Their rank as gods, and their stated aim to create utopia, excuse anything they say or do. It’s all for a good cause!

Christians believe this world is a fallen world, to be saved only by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. But to the liberal the whole world is a work in progress, a vast lump of clay for them to mold until they get it right.

You won’t talk them out of thinking so. It’s their religion. But God help us if we are unable to explain to the next generation precisely where these puffed-up worldly saviors are coming from.