(From Creeping Sharia)

Continuing our series on the beginnings and early development of Christianity, we look in this essay for possible and plausible sources of the Idea that launched the new religion.

The first four essays are: A man named Jesus or something like that (September 23, 2011); The invention of Christianity (October 28, 2011); Tread on me: the making of Christian morality (December 22, 2011); St.Paul: portrait of a sick genius, (January 7, 2012).

Our contention is that the whole vast, towering, ornate, gorgeous, powerful, many-winged edifice of Christianity was started on the flimsiest of foundations: the fantasies of an obscure, wandering, sex-obsessed liar and genius whose real name nobody knows.

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The seed that grew into the Christian religion was the Idea that a certain crucified Judean rebel leader [1], whom a sect of Jews claimed was the prophesied Messiah (Christ in Greek), was a divine redeemer, Son of the One God worshipped by the Jews.

By “redeemer” was meant one who had died for the benefit of mankind, but rose again bodily and reigns forever with his Father in heaven, thus composing a deity consisting of two gods in One.

The earliest known documents that tell us where the Idea came from are the letters of St. Paul, so it may be assumed that he thought of it himself. Of course he might have picked it up from someone else, but it was he who posted about the Roman Empire trying to convince as many people as he could that the Idea was true. And he claimed it as his own, that it had come to him as a revelation from the resurrected divine redeemer himself [2].

But, granted it was his confection, from what sources might its elements really have derived? 

His birthplace, Tarsus [3], the capital of Cilicia, was a splendid pagan city where Persian emperors had built a magnificent palace [4]. It had a school of philosophy that “surpassed those of Athens and Alexandria”. [5]. It was also an important center of trade and religion. Unless Paul had left it when he was a mere infant, he would inevitably have witnessed pagan rites that were publicly and grandly celebrated there.

The city was named for Baal-Taraz, a god who annually died and rose again. Iconic representations of the Baal of Tarsus show that “there was a pair of deities, a divine Father and a divine Son“. [6]

Also in Tarsus, in the first century, the death and resurrection of the god Attis was ritually enacted every year. Attis – the son of a virgin mother – “died” in a ceremony of pain and blood. He was hung in effigy on a pine tree at Eastertide, the spring equinox, and priests sacrificed to him by castrating themselves. After three days his return to life was joyously celebrated. Both Baal-Taraz and Attis were fertility gods whose death and resurrection were believed to be for the good of humanity in that they ensured the rebirth of nature. In this sense they could be said to have suffered and died for mankind.

Nowhere in his known letters [7], or in the putatively biographical Book of Acts, is it recorded that Paul himself actively participated in these rites. (He claimed to have been born a Jew, but was more probably a convert to Judaism. [8]) But the religious belief that a god – Attis – came to earth in the form of a man, suffered execution by being hung on a tree for the good of humanity, and rose again, must have been familiar to him; and it is highly likely that it influenced his thinking about the crucified man he called “Jesus”, and whom a sect of Jews believed had risen bodily from the dead. [9] The Father and Son pair of deities worshipped in Tarsus may also have been in Paul’s thoughts when he called him “the Son of God”. (But when, later on, Christians endowed Jesus with a virgin mother, Paul had nothing to do with it. He never mentions Jesus’s birth. If the birth-myth of Attis influenced Christian thinking at all, it was almost certainly not through Paul.)

Ever since Alexander the Great conquered (between 334 and 323 BCE) most of the world known to the Greeks, goods of all sorts including ideas had moved freely about the lands of his empire. Greek culture continued to flourish after the Romans conquered Greece in the second century BCE. Religions and philosophies from Persia, North Africa, Asia Minor, Greece itself, even from as far away as India into which Alexander had briefly penetrated, were by that time gloriously intermingled in what one might call a salad of ideas. (The French word for a salad, macédoine, derives from the name of Alexander’s home state, Macedon, perhaps because his empire was a colorful mixture of cultures.)

Paul was literate and to an extent educated, and would have been aware of, if not well-informed about, many of those ideas. Philosophies and religions, both the popular and the esoteric, borrowed myths, rites, and beliefs from one another. So while the Attis cult may have been most vivid in his memory, and Judaism was the faith he was instructed in, other religions from near and far could have contributed to Paul’s invention. Some certainly did. They have left their traces in his writing.

There can be no doubt that Gnostic ideas were in his head. Most of the known Gnostic cults arose after Paul, and though deriving their elaborate cosmogonies in the first place from Greek philosophy, were also strongly affected by Christian theology; but one Gnostic cult at least was contemporaneous with him, the one that the Church Fathers believed to have been the first: that of Simon Magus, whom they called “the father of all heresies”. The Gnostic elements in St. Paul’s mysticism may have come from Simon, though it is possible there was a common source which both Paul and Simon knew but is entirely lost.

What are these Gnostic elements in St. Paul’s writings? Paul lamented that to live in this world was to be condemned to exist in spiritual darkness, and to be oppressed by “principalities and powers” (10]; and he spoke of a multiplicity of heavens [11], and “the god of this world” [12] –  all of which chimes with Gnostic doctrine.

Gnostics held that a lesser god, a “demiurge” who was just but not merciful, had created, and continued to rule over, the material universe and mankind. St. Paul does not assert this, nor does he echo the Gnostic belief that the great true God, the Primal Father who was all good, was too far off in his highest heaven to be known to mortals, except by a small minority gifted with intuitive knowledge (“the gnosis”). However, in Simon Magus’s system, a divine redeemer descended to earth from the highest heaven on a mission of salvation. Paul might well have heard Simon Magus preach that he, Simon himself, was the divine redeemer through whom alone mankind could hope for spiritual salvation.

Simon claimed that his own divine origin was the Godhead, the Source of all things. His lady consort too, he taught, derived from there. She was Ennoia, the First Thought of the Source, incarnate on earth as Helen of Troy. As Helen she had been suffering for long ages, but now that Simon had descended to redeem all mankind from this evil world, she would be restored to her place in the highest heaven. All this Simon spun from Greek philosophy, which had long before him conceived of a Godhead consisting of three beings, or “hypostases’, variously named; for instance, an unknowable source of all things called the Depth, Bythos in Greek; his First Thought, the Nous or Ennoia; and his Word, the Logos.

Was this the origin of “the Trinity”, the three-in-one god of Christianity? Probably – but not through St. Paul. It is found in the gospel of “Matthew”, probably as a late addition to the original text. [13] And the writer of the first verse of the gospel of “John” declares that “the Logos” – the Word – was the beginning of creation. [14] It is a direct borrowing from Greek philosophy, and inseparable from the philosophical idea of a triune Godhead. It was written some forty to sixty years after St. Paul’s letters, and cannot be traced back to him. Nothing in the letters, or in anecdotes in the Book of Acts, distinctly shows Paul to have conceived a Trinitarian God. As he did not explicitly formulate the idea of a Christian three-person Godhead, he cannot be either credited with or accused of the invention of “the Trinity”. [15]

Paul’s Idea was One God, Two Persons, and though it makes no rational sense, it was the idea that began Christianity. By the time the Christian God came to be described as a three-person deity, two-in-one had already been swallowed, and it could not have been much harder for the same people to accept three-in-one, however illogical and even downright insane it strikes non-believers. (But the idea of the “Holy Trinity”, did in fact remain a difficult one for believers to grapple with, giving rise to tortuous intellectual puzzles that have pestered Christian theologians right up to the present day.)

Numerous notions from pagan and heretical sources accumulated in the mythology and doctrines of the Christian Church after St. Paul’s time. [16] But a centrally important doctrine and ritual that began with him was the eucharist (meaning the “thanksgiving”), a rite in which “Christ’s flesh” is devoured and “his blood” is drunk. From where (other than by revelation from Christ as he claimed [17]) did Paul derive it? Did he invent it in the hope of winning over worshippers of Dionysus? If the savage Dionysian rite of intoxicated acolytes eating raw flesh and drinking blood in order to get the incarnated god inside them [18] was still being practiced in Paul’s time, it was surely not by such large numbers that he felt compelled to find a way to draw them into his faith. Yet to do so would have been consistent with his proselytizing method: to integrate ideas already sacred to his audiences and adapt them to his evolving doctrine.

What is certain is that Greek religion and philosophy were brought to bear, in the first instance through the mind of one man, on events of the Jewish rebellion, and on Jewish beliefs and Jewish prophecy, to bring a new, initially passive, ominously sentimental religion into the world. Christianity was fathered by a vulgarized Hellenism upon a demoralized Judaism.

Despite his awareness of how his Roman-Greek contemporaries thought and felt, Paul offered them a religion that fitted poorly with the virile values of the age, and its appeal was chiefly to women and slaves. It might have faded away quite soon had not a volcanically disruptive historical event helped to sustain it: the fall of the Temple in 70 CE, a climax of the war the Judeans had been fighting against the Romans. The probability is that no one remained in Jerusalem after that who could actually remember the executed rebel leader and what he taught; no one who could credibly contradict Paul’s and the gospel-writers’ fictions. Paul could allege anything he liked about Jesus’s chosen disciples “Peter” and “John” and “James”; that they encouraged him to be Jesus’s “apostle to the gentiles”; that “Peter” allowed the dietary laws to be considered outdated; that converts need not be circumcised. He was rid of the bothersome need to deceive and conciliate the old men who constituted the Jewish connection with the man he called “Jesus” (though Jewish sects – Nazarenes and/or Ebionites – that believed he was the Messiah and would return to complete his earthly mission, continued to exist in lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean for some centuries).

Within a hundred years after the destruction of the Temple, the greater part of the Jewish nation was scattered through the world. Bound together only by their religion, they held to an adjusted orthodoxy, it being impossible any longer to obey all the 613 laws of their Temple-centered faith. Jewish proselytizing ceased, while Christian proselytizing intensified. So the historic catastrophe of the Jews allowed Pauline Christianity to outlive its inventor; and as it rolled on it gathered myths and legends, doctrines and rituals, institutions of administration, and eventually power.

By the beginning of the 4th century, about 10% of the people under Roman rule had been drawn into the new religion. By then Christians were no longer thought of by the Roman rulers as a sub-sect of the Jews. When the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 as a result of a superstitious bargain [19], strong-minded men began to look hard at the religion and find formidable intellectual difficulties in what it claimed for its truths. They felt a yearning for orthodoxy; a need to straighten it all out, clarify the muddles it was born with, lay down a correct dogma. But that was to prove an endless, arduous, emotionally charged, utterly impossible task. It was to extend combatively through centuries, darkening them with ignorance, fear, and intense suffering, while uncountable numbers of lives were destroyed in Christian wars, massacres, martyrdoms, and persecutions.

Jillian Becker   February 26, 2012

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NOTES

[1]  It is a curious fact that scholarship cannot discover the parent-given names of either the inventor of Christianity who became “St. Paul”, or his Jewish “Christ” whom he called by the Greek name “Jesus”.

[2] Acts 9:3-5

[3] St. Paul claimed to come from Tarsus, and there is no obvious way in which his lying about this would have served any purpose.

[4] The city and palace are described appreciatively in Xenophon’s Anabasis.

[5] & [6] J.G.Frazer, The Golden Bough: Adonis, Attis, Osiris Volume 1

[7] Most scholars now believe that only 7 of the 13 letters attributed in the New Testament to the authorship of St. Paul were written (at least for the most part) by him: Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.

[8] Apart from persuasive evidence deducible from his letters and the Book of Acts that he was not born a Jew, there is an apparent confession that he only pretended to be one in 1 Cor 9:20, “And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews.”

[9] As on other subjects in Paul’s writings, there is an ambiguity to be found in what he says about bodily resurrection. He certainly believed that “Christ” had “risen”, and that the “redeemed” would “live” with God, but whether in the body or the spirit he was not clear. Attempting explanation, he confounds confusion (1 Cor 15).

[10] Rom 8:38

[11] 2 Cor 12:2

[12] 2 Cor 4:4

[13] Matth 28:19

[14] John 1:1

[15] St. Paul spoke of the Holy Spirit as something that a human being could be filled with or accompanied by: a spirit of holiness, eg. “Do you not know that that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God …?” (1 Cor 6:19); “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” [ 2 Cor 3:14]. And when he says, “They that are in the flesh cannot please God, but ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you” (Rom 8:9 ), the “Spirit” has more in common with the inner spark of holiness which is cognate with “the gnosis” in the Gnostic systems, the spark by which a mortal might be saved from his entombment in the flesh, than with the Greek philosophical idea of a divine hypostasis.

[16] Among such alleged influences is the cult of Mithraism, centered in Rome and popular with the Roman army in Paul’s lifetime. Although it took the name of its god Mithras from the Persian god Mithra, it developed its own arcane rites. Little is known about its doctrines or practice. Some theologians, mythologists, and historians of religion assert that Mithra/Mithras had a virgin mother (though others say that icons prove he was born out of a rock); that three Magi (Zoroastrian grandees or priests) brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh for the new-born god; that Mithras celebrated a “last supper” with twelve disciples; that he was crucified, laid in a rock tomb, and rose again at the spring equinox. It is not known when these stories were attached to Mithraism, but it is most probable that they were taken over from Christian beliefs, rather than that the borrowing happened the other way about. It is possible that the choice of Sunday as the Christian Sabbath was taken from Mithraism. The only certain borrowing was the choice of December 25th as the birthday of Christ on earth. The date was deliberately chosen by the Catholic Church towards the end of the second century, because it was already being celebrated as the birthday of Mithras. In any case, of the alleged similarities in the two mythologies only a “last supper” (1 Cor 11:23-26), crucifixion and resurrection were included in Paul’s teaching; the rest came into Christianity years later.

[17] 1 Cor 11:23-25

[18] From Wikipedia: “Cultic rites associated with worship of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus (or Bacchus in Roman mythology), were allegedly characterized by maniacal dancing to the sound of loud music and crashing cymbals, in which the revellers screamed, became drunk and incited one another to greater and greater ecstasy [a state of being outside oneself]. The goal was to achieve a state of enthusiasm [the god being inside one] in which the celebrants’ souls were temporarily freed from their earthly bodies and were able to commune with Bacchus/Dionysus and gain a glimpse of and a preparation for what they would someday experience in eternity. The rite climaxed in a performance of frenzied feats of strength and madness, such as uprooting trees, tearing a bull (the symbol of Dionysus) apart with their bare hands, an act called sparagmos, and eating its flesh raw, an act called omophagia. This latter rite was a sacrament akin to communion in which the participants assumed the strength and character of the god by symbolically eating the raw flesh and drinking the blood of his symbolic incarnation. Having symbolically eaten his body and drunk his blood, the celebrants became possessed by Dionysus.”

[19] Just before a clash of arms known as the Battle of Milvian Bridge in a war with his co-emperor Maxentius, Constantine saw a light in the sky in the form of a cross. He swore that if he won the battle he would convert to Christianity. Tragically, he won.

The only thing they [the left-biased questioners in the GOP debates] don’t ask Republican candidates about much is economic questions and debt questions. Instead they ask horribly slanted, often irrelevant questions designed to make them look bad and help Obama. … Newt’s rise was because of the way he attacked the media and Obama in the debates because of the stupid and obviously planted questions. So, what would happen if the mainstream media treated Barack Obama the exact same way they treat Republicans?

Jeff Carter at Townhall asks the questions that the mainstream media will never ask Barack Obama, but should. From his list of 15, we’ve selected these:

1) Numerous Mexican citizens and an American citizen have been murdered with weapons knowingly provided to criminals by our own government during Operation Fast and Furious. If Eric Holder was aware that was going on, do you think he should step down as Attorney General? Were you aware of Fast and Furious and if so, shouldn’t you resign?  

2) In 2010 you said Solyndra, a company that donated heavily to your political campaign, was “leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.” Today, Solyndra is bankrupt and the taxpayers lost over $500 million on loans that your administration knew might never be paid off when you made them. How do you respond to citizens who say this is evidence of corruption in your administration?  

3) Unions invested a lot of time and money in helping to get you elected. In return, unions gained majority control of Chrysler, the taxpayers lost $14 billion dollars on General Motors, and General Motors received a special $45 billion dollar tax break. What do you say to people who view this as corruption on a scale never before seen in American history?

4) Through dubious means you and your Democrat allies in Congress managed to force through an incredibly unpopular health care bill that helped lead to the worst election night for the Democratic Party in 50 years. Since the bill has passed, many of your claims about the bill have proven to be untrue. …  Many large companies (that donate to Democrat political campaigns) have received special exemptions from the health care plan. Since the majority of the American people have rejected your health care reform and it doesn’t do what you said it would, shouldn’t you work with the Republicans to repeal it?0

5) When you took office, the national average for one gallon of gas was $1.89 per gallon. Since then, you’ve demonized the oil industry, dramatically slowed offshore drilling, blocked ANWAR, and rejected the Keystone Pipeline. Now, gas is $3.54 per gallon and rising and is expected to reach $5 per gallon by May of this year. How much higher do you anticipate driving gas prices?

6) Occupy Wall Street has been protesting against Wall Street and the richest 1 percent in America. You are in the top 1 percent of income earners in America and you have collected more cash from Wall Street than any other President in history. So, aren’t you exactly the sort of politician that Occupy Wall Street wants to get rid of?

7) How do you decide which foreign leaders to submissively bow towards and why do you think that’s appropriate for an American President? …

10) America lost its AAA credit rating for the first time under your watch. What do you think you should have done differently to have prevented that historic failure? …

12) Back in July, you said, “Nobody’s looking to raise taxes right now. We’re talking about potentially 2013 and the out years.” Since you plan to raise taxes if you’re elected and you’ve had kind words for a value added tax, shouldn’t every American expect a tax increase if you’re reelected?

13) Why should the American people reelect you when your 10 year budget saddles America with more debt than all previous Presidents combined?

14) Your stimulus bill cost more in real dollars than the moon landing and the interstate highway system combined. Many prominent economists have concluded the stimulus plan was a total failure. What do we have to show for all of that money spent?

15) Members of your administration promised that the trillion dollar stimulus would keep unemployment under 8 percent. Instead, we’ve had 35+ months of 8% and above unemployment. Doesn’t that mean …  a trillion dollars [were wasted] on nothing?

To hear those questions asked … to watch Obama’s stumbling attempts to answer them … wouldn’t it be luverly ?

Here’s a new scandal in the on-going climate change drama.

It concerns a now disreputable scientist, Peter Gleick, who “studies the hydrological cycle” and “serves as president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, Calif.” Or did so serve.

The Washington Post – sympathetic to warmism – reports:

The battle over climate science continues to escalate. The latest skirmish culminated in the admission Monday night by Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and author, that he assumed a fake identity to obtain documents that would expose the inner workings of a climate skeptic group. 

The “climate skeptic group” is the Heartland Institute. Gleick (and the Washington Post, no doubt) hoped the stolen documents would expose something shady about that honest institution, but they didn’t. So in the interests of manmade global warming’s higher truth, Gleick found he had to forge a document to fulfill his hope.

Here’s what the Heartland Institute President Joe Bast has to say about Peter Gleick, the theft and the forgery. He names the scandal “Fakegate”.  (Video from Watts Up With That?):

And this commentary is from RedState:

The preliminary steps of removing Peter Gleick from positions of authority and respect have begun: he’s ‘resigned’ from his position with the National Center for Science Education, and his scientific ethics task force chairmanship(!) for the American Geophysical Union. One wonders whether groups like the MacArthur Fellows Program and NAS will insist that Gleick cut all ties from them, as well. Nobody’s really expecting the Pacific Institute to join in, of course: it’s a well-known reliable quote machine for the American Left.

Quick background: last week … a variety of documents appeared that purported to show that there was some sort of nefarious global warming ‘denialist’ (that’s what a Lefty calls somebody who has noticed that, hey, the temperature’s not actually rising the way that people told us it would) conspiracy centered around the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute was not amused by this, and has been making it clear that at least one document was a pathetic forgery. This latter point has generally been conceded by all the players, if tacitly, and the great walkback is beginning. …

But let’s go back to what got revealed, for a moment. The documents can be grouped into two categories: a variety of materials that global warming advocate (and lecturer on ethics) Peter Gleick admitted stealing from Heartland; and the aforementioned pathetically faked document. Since we now know that not even Gleick is standing by the provenance of said document, let us ignore it completely… So, what’s in those [stolen] documents?

• Fundraising plan – confidential budget and fundraising information that has nothing to do with Heartland’s positions on climate change policy (thus, not germane). Also, this was a general fundraising plan, not one specifically concentrating on climate change.

• 2012 Budget -…Umm, it’s their general budget. No line items for Sooper Sekret Globeal Wharming Projekt here. Just salary/line item information that’s nobody’s business except Heartland’s.

• January 17, 2012 Director’s Agenda – They read a bunch of reports at that one. Which happens at every meeting, everywhere, and will continue to do so until the end of time, amen.

• Notice of January 17, 2012 – I assume that it’s here to get more phone numbers into the internet stream.

• IRS Tax forms …

• October 18, 2011 Director’s meeting …

• Board of Directors contact list – Hey, let’s make sure that Heartland staffers get a lot of personalized hate mail/stalkers/harassment! Smooth move there, Peter Gleick.

In other words? Nothing. No conspiracies, no nefarious plans, nothing really of particular interest to outsiders – except, of course, for contact information for Heartland’s top staff, which is provided in handy-dandy format for the Left’s near-psychopaths to use to try to make a bunch of climate “denialists’” lives miserable. Which is really the point to this sort of thing; it’s not actually about the climate, and it’s not even really about the politics. It’s about shutting people up.

*

The term “warmther” has come into use to describe an Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) devotee; on the analogy of “truther” to describe the obsessive who believes fantastic lies about 9/11.

The Cult of Warm doesn’t accept that there is a debate. As far as they are concerned, the debate never happened because it never needed to happen because they were always right. They can’t intelligently address dissent, because their science is not based on discovering the evidence needed to lead to a consensus, but on insisting that there is a consensus and that accordingly there is no need to debate the evidence. …

So Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page.

Here are some more quotations that we like:

If you believe that freedom is at the core of what it means to be human, then the Warmists and what they stand for are instinctively repulsive to you. On the other hand, if you believe that human society must be organized into a moral collective for the betterment of all, then the Warmist idea provides a wake up call compelling us to form into ranks and goose step in recycled rubber boots into the green future. …

The Cult of Warm has no use for science except as a totem to wave over the crowd. They don’t want to be the seekers for knowledge, but the exclusive possessors of absolute truths. And that isn’t how science works. …

Global Warming has gotten too big to fail. Too many prominent names have committed to it. Too many serious people have nodded their heads and accepted it as an obvious truth, who would be unacceptably embarrassed if it were proven that the whole thing was nothing more than a giant prank. Too many business leaders and governments have invested serious money into it to just shake it off. And much of American and European policy-making is now routed through Global Warming. …

[But] Global Warming is not just a failure of a sizable chunk of the scientific establishment to put theory before ideology, it represents a failure of the entire process by which the West has been governed … It is a demonstration of how a handful of people in prominent positions can push through otherwise unacceptable measures by manufacturing a crisis and pipelining it through business and government. It’s a hack of our entire system of government.

Fortunately, economic realism compels a continuing reliance on fossil fuels, always argues for freedom, and in the long run must win the debate.

Communism and Christianity are ideologically identical in a fundamental assumption: that ultimate virtue lies in the sacrifice of the individual to the supposed good of the community.

There are other salient resemblances between them, vivid in their histories; most notably a reach for totalitarian control and the punishing of dissent; but what they similarly do, for the Party or for the Church, is always in the name of their similar communitarian ethic.

The United States of America was founded on an opposite fundamental principle: that the individual is of paramount importance; that each should be free to act in his own best interests provided only that he does not impinge on the freedom of his fellow citizen. Those words are not used in the Constitution, but it is what the Constitution is all about, establishing a rule of law to protect individual liberty. That is what the rule of law is for. Where the individual citizen is free to strive lawfully for his own welfare, the nation as a whole flourishes and prospers. That was what was visualized by the founders, and they were proved right. (The paramountcy of individual freedom does not of course preclude necessary co-operation, to keep foreign enemies of the nation at bay with a strong military, or to provide conveniences that large numbers of citizens need in their particular localities such as street lighting, sewerage, transport. Nor does it exclude voluntary philanthropy.)

The United States of America came to embody the ideal of freedom. But the ideal seems to be fading. President Obama is a Communist by upbringing and choice, and has manifestly tried to turn America towards Communism by means of government-enforced wealth redistribution.

The apparent alternative to Obama at this point in the presidential election year is Rick Santorum. The picture at the top of this article suggests that this ardent Catholic stands more than anything else for Communism’s twin ideology, Christianity.

If that is the case, we need to ask: is there no one who will stand for freedom?

Life in Gaza city

The British Conservative James Delingpole, with whom we usually agree, writes at the Telegraph about the dismal view he takes of the Republican Party candidates in this year’s presidential election.

His assessment of them is so dismal that he thinks that letting Obama, “the POTUS from hell”,  wreck the country for another four years would be a better choice than electing any of them.

We cannot wholly agree with him this time because we think no one on the political horizon could be worse for America than Obama, but we like his article and see his point:

Let’s get one thing clear: Obama unquestionably ranks among the bottom five presidents in US history. In terms of sublime awfulness he’s right up there with our late and extremely unlamented ex-PM Gordon Brown – which is quite some doing, given that Brown singlehandedly wrought more destruction on his country than the Luftwaffe, Dutch Elm Disease, the South Sea Bubble, the Fire of London and the Black Death combined.

Agreed: the damage President Obama has done to the US economy with everything from Ben Bernanke’s insane money-printing programme, to his cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, to his ban on deep-water drilling to his crony capitalism hand-outs to disaster zones like Solyndra to his persecution of companies like Gibson is incalculable. And, of course, if he gets a second term the damage he and his rag-bag of Marxist cronies at organisations like the Environmental Protection Agency manage to inflict on the US small businessman trying to make an honest buck will make his first term look like Calvin Coolidge on steroids.

So why do I think this would be preferable to a presidency under Mitt Romney? Simple. Because I’ve seen what happens, America, when you elect yet another spineless, yet ruthless, principle-free blow-with-the-wind, big government, crony-capitalist RINO squish. His name is Dave Cameron – and trust me, the cure is far worse than the disease.

Of course it may not seem that way at first. You’ll be so busy dancing round in circles singing “Ding Dong the witch is dead!” that euphoria and relief will completely overwhelm your intellect and your powers of observation. You’ll read endless articles by David L Brooks, the New York Times’s pet pretend-conservative, telling you how Romney is just the kind of uniting, post-partisan, pragmatic POTUS America needed. And you’ll believe it because you’ll want to believe it. This may last for some considerable length of time. In Britain, many Cameroon conservatives … continue to perform this auto-lobotomisation even now.

But then, little by little, something rather unpleasant will begin to dawn on you. The label on the can may have changed but the contents taste remarkably similar. Similarly emetic, that is.

Yes, I know from the other side of the pond David Cameron may look just the kind of stand-up conservative you’d like running the US. But that’s only because the stories you hear about him are extremely selective. For example, I’m constantly surprised by US talk show hosts telling me how tough on militant Islam Cameron is because of some speech they heard Dave give once about the problems of multiculturalism.

But surely we should judge our political leaders by what they actually achieve rather than (Tony Blair-style) by what they tell us they are achieving.

Here are some of David Cameron’s achievements so far:

He has prolonged the economic crisis …

He has urged quotas for women in the boardroom, apparently in the belief that the State has either the knowledge or the right to decide how business conducts its affairs.

He has presided over a massive wind-farm building programme which, besides destroying the British countryside and enriching his father-in-law, is causing energy bills to soar to the point where old people are dying of hypothermia.

He has surrendered at almost every turn to the Carthaginian terms offered to Britain by the European Socialist Superstate.

He has proved himself incapable of expelling the Islamist hate-preacher Abu Qatada. [See our post The tale of a Muslim terrorist parasite, January 18, 2012.]

The list is by no means exhaustive. I would go on but, actually, this was never meant to be a “collected examples of the unutterable crapness of David Cameron” blog. Rather, it’s supposed to be a more generalised warning about the dangers of short-termist thinking.

Yes, of course, conservative/libertarian America, I fully understand how desperate you are to rid yourself of the POTUS from hell. But what you need to ask yourselves – and I don’t believe many of you are: you’re a bit like an hysterical woman who’s just had a tarantula drop on top of her in the bath, you just want to GET RID OF IT NOW! – is what ultimately you’re trying to achieve.

I’m presuming what you really want is stuff like: smaller government; a genuine – as opposed to an illusory, QE-driven – economic recovery; sensible environmentalism (ie conservation but not eco-fascism); liberty; an end of crony capitalism; a diminution of the power of Wall Street; a resurgence of American greatness; a renewed sense of confidence and purpose.

You’re not going to get any of that from a Romney administration.

But you will, provided you’ve got the patience, get it in 2016 from President West or President Rand Paul or President Palin or President Ryan.

Only it might be TOO LATE.

(Hat-tip Andrew M)

Poor George Washington. His birthday, spontaneously celebrated since the Revolution and formally declared a holiday in 1879, has slowly morphed into the insipid Presidents Day you’ll hear about today.

This is from the Heritage Foundation, celebrating the greatest President. His actual birthday, they remind us, is on Wednesday, but “let us remember why he deserves a national holiday”:

George Washington, the “indispensable man” of the Revolution who was rightly extolled for being “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” has now been lumped together with the likes of James Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Franklin Pierce and John Tyler.

Worst of all, with Barack Obama.

It gets worse. Washington’s good name and great legacy are now shamelessly invoked to justify positions that he would never have envisaged.

In a Time Magazine special edition on George Washington currently in newsstands, historian Joseph Ellis matter-of-factly remarks: “He began the political tradition that produced a Union victory in the Civil War, the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, Medicare and, more recently, Obamacare.”

!?

Washington, who called on Americans to display “pious gratitude” for their Constitution and warned against any “change by usurpation,” is now a partisan of the sprawling welfare state and the unprecedented individual mandate. Ellis even has the gall to hail Washington – the man who gracefully and voluntarily relinquished power after two terms when he could have stayed on for life–as the father of “strong executive leadership” and the precursor to FDR, who stayed in office for an unprecedented 12 years!

The true Washington still has much to teach us, in particular when it comes to the presidency, foreign policy and religious liberty. Although much has changed in the past two centuries, his sage advice and conduct in office have lost none of their relevance, anchored as they are in the timeless principles of the Founding and a sober assessment of human nature.

Washington, like every President after him, swore the followingoath upon taking office: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Unlike many presidents in the past 100 years, however, Washington took the oath seriously and did not try to place himself above the Constitution.

He understood himself to be the President of a Republic in which the people, through their elected representatives in Congress, make laws – not some visionary leader who must define what Progress requires and lead the unenlightened masses there.

Washington took care “that the laws be faithfully executed”. … He did not try to make the laws himself, either by issuing executive orders that circumvented Congress or by regulating what could not be legislated. He left behind no “signature” legislative accomplishments as we would say today. He only used his vetotwice–once on constitutional grounds and once in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief.

Washington gave, on average, only three public speeches a year while in office – including the shortest ever inaugural address. And, of course, he had to be persuaded to serve a second term.

As a President who took his bearings from the Constitution, Washington devoted considerable attention to foreign policy. Our first President sought to establish an energetic and independent foreign policy. He believed America needed a strong military so that it could “choose peace or war, as our interest guided by justice shall Counsel.” …

No survey of Washington’s legacy would be complete without acknowledging his profound commitment to religious liberty. Many today seem to have lost sight of the crucial distinction he drew between mere toleration and true religious liberty. As he explained in the memorable letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport:

“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”

But what would he have done about creeping sharia?