Dark Ages

Several times in human history, a great civilization has flourished, made great technological, political, and other advances, and then collapsed into a Dark Age.  These dark ages seem to last for 800 to 1000 years, whereupon a completely different civilization, often with dim memories of the old one, may arise.  The two archetypical examples are the fall of Mycenae in around 1177 BC and the rise of Greece and its inheritor Rome, about 1000 years later, followed by the fall of Rome in 476 and the Renaissance, which began in around 1300.

What is a dark age?  Mostly, it is dark in comparison to what came before.   During civilization, the value of civilization seems obvious.  Trade is relatively unencumbered by banditry, roads are built, technological advances come frequently and spread fast.  Authority is relatively stable and widely respected.  Cities don't need to have walls.  During a dark age, travel is dangerous and banditry is expected.  There is little or no agreed authority and people and groups vying for power are constantly trying to kill each other.  Cities and the homes of wealthy people are strongly guarded, with walls and soldiers and those defenses are frequently tested.  Invention is still happening, but they tend to be isolated and advances spread relatively slowly.

Dark ages are never completely dark.  Writing was invented around the time of the fall of Mycenae and was constantly developed and improved during the ensuing dark age.  Much of the strength of the books that survive from those times is precisely that the newly literate peoples had a dim memory of the ancients, carried by oral traditions, and had enlarged and exaggerated the greatness of those old stories, until by the point they are written down, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Beowolf, David, King Arthur, and many others are impossibly great warriors with magical powers and frequent interactions with the gods.  Once they are written down, it's impossible for real people to match the great deeds, and during the dark age, the old civilization can only be conceived of as impossibly wonderful.  This hero worship tends to infect the dark age and makes it more difficult for the new civilization to emerge.

What causes dark ages?   Sometimes, there is an active decapitation:  after 1492, Europeans made their first successful footholds in the Americas.  They brought with them new types of weapons and tools, horses, and most significantly, new diseases which the natives didn't have defenses for, the most important of which was smallpox.  Less than 30 years after Columbus, Mexico was so devastated that Cortez was able to capture it and impose Spain's peculiar brand of fundamentalism, and 130 years later, the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts to discover cleared but empty fields and groups of natives too small to eke out a living on them and willing to teach the new settlers how to grow native crops in the new fields.  The native cultures were systematically destroyed. Smallpox did most of the work, but the survivors were made slaves and for the most part not allowed to participate in the new civilization unless they completely abandoned the old one.  The places that remain substantially native: the reservations in the US and the countless villages in Latin America, especially those which had Spanish fundamentalism imposed on them, are indistinguishable from their counterparts in dark age Europe.

Far more common is the local rise of religious fundamentalism.  Rome had been very multicultural and tolerant, and this was central to their success, but 100 years after they embraced Christianity, they began persecuting other religions and even small deviations from what Christian leadership determined was "correct" Christianity were persecuted.  There were other causes too, but the great historian Edward Gibbon argues persuasively that Christian Fundamentalism so weakened Roman culture that it could not survive.

Not long after Rome collapsed and not too far away, another great civilization was rising.  It was powered by Islamic expansionism but in a few places, most importantly Baghdad and Cordoba, great centers of learning were being established.  Like all great centers of learning, they embraced other cultures and religions enthusiastically and made many advances in many fields--mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy and many others.  They collected as much as they could of their recently deceased neighbor.  But they too collapsed because of religious fundamentalism, and much of their world continues to be held back by it--by the Wahabbi Saud family, by the Ayatollahs, the Taliban, and so forth.

The Renaissance arose where and when it did because dark age traders, mostly from Florence and Venice, were interested in Islamic cultures and traded with them--commercial products mostly, but also books.  Cosimo de Medici, one of the greatest bankers to ever live (he invented double entry bookkeeping) and the richest man in Italy that was not the pope, collected every book he could--bought it if possible, had it transcribed if he couldn't, and his heirs continued this legacy.  Many of the books were Arabic translations of Roman and Greek books whose originals had been lost or intentionally destroyed by the Christian fundamentalists. That this was happening just as Islamic fundamentalism was arising and so soon after the crusades gave the fundamentalists a target for their anger.

Western European culture that began with the Renaissance and expanded to North America appears to be embracing another round of fundamentalism and anti-multiculturalism.  It is being helped along by Russian trolls no doubt, but there would be no traction were there not a fertile opportunity,  Fundamentalism is the civilization killer.

Origins of Terrorists

The Tweeter in chief is claiming that the vast majority of terrorists since 9/11 come from outside the US.   That is simply false.  Most of the Islamic terrorists in the US were born here and all of those who were born elsewhere were radicalized after they were already here.  Apparently they discovered that the streets of the new country are no more paved with gold than those of the old country were.  All of these seem to be people who had mental health issues unrelated to Islam and chose rationalize their attacks with Islam.

A few examples:

Nidal Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, was born in Virginia.  It's pretty clear that he was having mental health issues that had little to do with his ethnicity, but that he used it to rationalize what he was doing.  He killed 13 with a gun.

Rizwan Farook, the 2015 San Bernardino shooter, was born in Chicago and grew up in Riverside, CA, not far from San Bernardino.  His wife, Tashfeen Malik, was born in Pakistan but had lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia.  Neither country is on Trump's proposed ban.  He seems to have had anger issues for most of his life and chose to marry a similarly inclined person that he'd met on the internet.  They killed 14.

Omar Mateen, the 2016 Orlando Night Club shooter, was born in Hyde Park, New York.  He seems to have had self-hatred over his own sexuality, exacerbated by misguided fundamentalist teachings and bullying over his heritage and his sexuality.  He targeted gay people in the night club and killed 49 of them

Naveed Haq brought two guns into a Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 and began shooting the workers there, all women.  One was killed.  Haq is of Pakistani descent but he'd gone to school in Kennewick, WA.  He was 30 at the time of the shootings.  He seems to have been bipolar and had been arrested for public exposure, and had anger towards both women and Jews.

John Muhammad, originally John Williams, committed the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks.  He was born in Baton Rouge and had converted to Islam at age 27.  He had fantasized about creating a terrorist training camp in Canada, but he had always had violence issues and was probably a psychopath.

Abdulhamid Mujahid Muhammad, the 2009 Little Rock shooter, was born in Tennessee as Carlos Bledsoe to a Baptist family and converted to Islam.  He killed one, injured one.  He seemed more angry at the military than at non-muslims.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, were born in Kyrgyzstan of Chechen and Kyrgyz ancestry, and brought to the US by their parents with their two sisters as small children.  Tamerlan enjoyed fighting and seems to have been radicalized as a teen, and pressured his younger brother to participate in the bombing.

Zale H Thompson attacked 4 New York police officers with a hatchet in 2014, killing one and injuring another before the cops killed him and injured an innocent bystander.  Thompson, a native New Yorker, had been active in various black power groups before converting to Islam.

Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi attacked a 2015 cartoon exhibit in Garland, Texas which had been organized by an Islamophobic group to display cartoons of the prophet Mohammad.  While images of the prophet are not banned by Islam, many fundamentalist groups regard them as blasphemous.   Simpson and Soofi didn't get many shots off before they were killed by police guarding the exhibit.  Simpson was born near Chicago and had converted to islam in high school, Soofi was born and raised in Dallas.

Muhammad Abdulazeez shot up two army recruiting centers in Chattanooga in 2015.  He'd been born in Kuwait and was brought to Tennessee as a 6 year old, 19 years before the shootings.  He'd been having drug problems and his parents had recently divorced.

Abdul Artan crashed his car into a crowd of people at Ohio State University in 2016, and then lept out and began attacking them with a knife.  He injured 11, mostly with the car.   He was killed by police who injured one or maybe two innocent bystanders.  Artan had been born in Somalia and had come to America with his family at age 8.  He is the only "Islamic Terrorist" in the US that I've been able to find that actually did come from one of the countries in Trump's ban. 

The September 11th attacks of 2001 were carried out by 19 Arabs, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia, 2 from UAE, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon.  None of these countries are on Trump's list.   All 19 of the hijackers had entered the US legally and most were still legal at the time of the attack, although a few had overstayed their visa.  They killed 2996 people including themselves, and injured about 6000.

The Third Commandment

Pennsylvania Representative Brian Sims observes that: "On the list of things that actually stop shootings in this country, I'm going to put Prayer somewhere down around pencil shavings and Ovaltine."  He later apologized to Ovaltine.  I think he's still giving prayer too much credit.

A lot of people think that Prayer does no harm, and it might do good.  God, after all, might be listening.  Of course if he believed that gun violence was something worth doing something about and had the power to do something, why would he need the prayer?  Is He such a jerk that he'll let thousands of innocents die each year and won't do anything about it unless we pray even more?

But of course it does do harm.   The idea that God responds to your prayers is an example of a gambling fallacy known as the hot-hand fallacy.  If your prayer works once or twice, a lot of people think that "luck is on their side", when really, it was something else...possibly random chance.  But it really discredits the hard work you might have put in to develop your skill at shooting the basketball, and it especially discredits the hard work your opponent did.  Perhaps most dangerous is that it might suck you into believing that the one-armed bandit is on your side.  Nearly all gambling is designed so that whether you win or lose is completely unrelated to how it went last time, and outfits like the Nevada Gaming Commission work hard to make sure this is really the case.  (Billiards and horse racing are exceptions, and to some extent counting cards in blackjack, but such exceptions are rare).

Moses understood this.  He gave us the third commandment, about not taking the Lord's name in vain.  This has nothing to do with offensive language.  If you think God might actually damn someone because you asked, if you think the reason you scored the touchdown or won the roulette roll is that you been praying for it, then you've implicitly decided that God is playing favorites and that you've been picked.  You are taking the Lord's name--and your whole relationship with Him--in vain.  The next step is thinking that prayer gives you special privileges: that because you pray a lot, it's ok to shoot other people, for example, or it's ok to not put in your fair share of the payment at dinner.

Prayer gives a lot of people solace.  If you spend some time, at the end of the day for example, thinking about your goals and what you've done towards or against them that day, it's potentially productive.  It doesn't matter if the abstraction you're talking to in your mind is God or a dead ancestor or something else, what matters is that you're thinking about this stuff, and trying to make yourself better.  Belief in yourself is helpful.  Believing that God might step in against shootings or to help you win the game or that promotion is taking the Lord's name in vain.

The Jesus Religion

Jesus (nobody knows his family name--he probably didn't have one), son of Joseph and Mary, possibly of Nazareth, started a Jewish cult during the Roman occupation of Judea.  There were a great many such cults, each with a charismatic leader.  The historian Josephus lists dozens of them, including several that strongly resemble the Jesus cult, but the one following Jesus is conspicuously absent¹.  So surely there were many more that were not listed.  Many of these leaders were declared Messiahs, most often by themselves.   "Christ" is a Greek word which means the same thing as Messiah--"Jesus Christ" simply means "Jesus the Messiah".  Apart from the Gospel, there is no primary source that refers to the Jesus cult or Christianity.  The earliest that's given any credence is from the historian Tacitus, writing in 116AD, who says that Nero tried to blame the great fire of Rome in 64AD on Christians, who were much hated and whose founder had been crucified by Pontius Pilate.  We can't tell if this is based on real involvement by Christians or a revisionist attempt to pin it on them 52 years later, either by Tacitus himself or by later copyists looking for reflected glory.   All four Gospels were written between 70 and 110AD, so it's entirely possible that Tacitus got everything he knew about Christianity from such later sources as these.  It's also entirely possible that the cultists Tacitus claimed were blamed for the fire had nothing to do with Christianity and subsequent copyists have enhanced Christianity's involvement.

The Romans were very accepting of the Religions of those they conquered.  As long as the Emperor joined your Pantheon and received due worship with its other members, your religion was welcome in the Roman family.  The only monotheistic religion in the region, Judaism, got into a little trouble over this--the Jewish king at the time of their conquest, Herod the Great, was perfectly willing to put a bust of Caesar into all local synagogues, which satisfied the Romans.  Where this ran into trouble was that a group called the Zealots felt that this relatively minor imposition was a slight to God² and became terrorists, killing Romans and any Jewish leaders that were willing to work with them.  This terrorism worked as well as terrorism ever has: it provoked the Romans to destroy the Jewish homeland completely and carry a large fraction of the population off in slavery.

Jesus may have been one of these terrorists.  The gospels do not tell us why the Romans wanted him dead, only that they did.  His crime and punishment, sedition and crucifixion, were pretty much reserved for traitors against the state, such as these terrorists, so whatever the crime was, it has apparently been purged from the story for the benefit of the (largely Roman) audience.  Nothing survives of this in the gospel apart from a bit of inter-factional rivalry.  The Romans wouldn't have killed a faction leader unless they they thought he might be provoking violence.  That Jesus doesn't make it, at all, into Roman records or the quite complete stories of Josephus, and that what little is known about him so flatly contradicts such a crime, suggests that the true story was either so inconsequential at the time to have not been noticed, or was somehow so embarrassing to later Christians that an unprecedentedly successful and complete revisionist purge was effected, or was entirely fictitious and made up by later people for some reason.

The completely fictitious version and the inconsequential version amount to the same thing.  Whatever it was, the promulgators picked a completely inconsequential cult and elevated it.  Most likely they did this to serve as a foil against some turmoil of the day.  There were many issues that such a cult could be used to calm: Women had very few rights and Slaves had even less.  Rome had been very accepting of residents of any of the colonies; it was traditional for free food to be provided to any Roman resident.  All of these groups and more had banded together to demand more rights at one time or other.  The Roman system of private armies was a complication too.  Many, especially those from the colonies, would fight for whoever would pay them best.  Rome was a constant, seething battleground of peoples feeling oppressed, and lots of them had weapons.

The philospher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca (5BC-65AD) once said "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." The invention of Christianity may have been the ultimate expression of that idea.  Christianity is perfectly devised to appeal to all the disenfranchised groups: Women, Slaves, colonists, especially Jews and the followers of the Greek "Mystery" religions³.  All are equal in the sight of God, Jew or Greek, free or slave, man or woman (Gal 3:28 and many others).  Jesus tells us to ignore insults and even violence, and love your neighbor and even your enemy.  To honor your debts and your leaders, and not try to scam folks.  Just exactly what a religion aimed at quelling rebellions needs to be.

Nothing gets people to band together quite so effectively as persecution and the many persecutions of Jews and Christians probably created more converts than they killed.  That may have been the intent.  The reason for the persecutions is obscure and the evidence of most of them, such as that of Eusebius of Caesaria, has largely been debunked.  The strongest problem seems to be that Christians were often more tied to their church than to their families or the national interest.  They were accused of all sorts of wicked deeds from devil worship to cannibalism and human sacrifice...and rumor mills will be rumor mills, and lynchings and stonings did occur.  It seems to have reached a peak around 299AD.

A few years later, Constantine, inspired by his mother Helena, who had previously converted to "The Women's Religion", included a banner with a cross on it in his retinue at the battle of the Milvian Bridge.  This battle won him the Emperorship and in gratitude he legalized Christianity.  Told that it was a religion of the book, he asked for a copy.  This was a problem.  Every group had its own book, and they often conflicted⁴. Constantine, now Emperor,  ordered them to get together and work it out.  On his orders, the conference of Nicea was convened in 325.  The two leading factions were led by Athanasius and Arius.  The Athanasians believed that Jesus was immaculately conceived and had been resurrected after his crucifixion.  The Arians believed that Jesus was a divinely inspired mortal man who had died on the cross and remained dead.  The leading Arian faction was mysteriously detained on the road from Alexandria and missed the conference, deciding its outcome.  Arianism remained popular for about a century but Nicea gave the Athanasians the upper hand.   By the time of Augustine, writing around 425, Arianism was too weak to survive and what little was left was killed off by the Augustinian Heresy.   Like many religious fanatics⁵, later Christians set about purging the historic record of anything that doesn't fit their own ideas of religious purity.   They didn't quite completely succeed but mostly.


¹There was an attempt, apparently made by a German copyist at some point during the Dark Ages, to edit such a description in.  But the style of the language is conspicuously different and copies lacking these suspicious extra passages have survived.
²The Roman demand that Caesar be treated as a God is entirely consistent with Jewish theology, so what the Zealots were angry about was much ado about not very much, and the Jewish leadership, Herod the Great in particular, understood that.  There are lots of entities recognizable as demigods--Archangels, such as as Gabriel and Michael, for example.
³The Greek Mystery Religions are interesting.  Paul seems to have embraced them and integrated their important ideas into Christianity.  Later Christians actively suppressed them and most of what we know is indirect.  The mystery God (each of dozens of sects had their own) is immaculately conceived and interacts with people as if one of them.  He is later killed and seen by everybody to be dead, but miraculously comes back to life to continue his worldly mission.  The Lazarus story may be a nod to this notion, but Paul wanted more.  He seems to have had a dispute with Jesus' brother James, who insists that Jesus was a divinely inspired mortal man.  This dispute was ultimately decided, under suspicious circumstances, in Paul (and Athanasius') favor at Nicea.  I've always suspected that James might have been the older brother although I have no evidence of this.
⁴Each of these books was individually hand-made.  Wood-block printing existed but wasn't used for text until 500 years later, in China.  Movable type for printing was devised by Gutenberg 1127 years after Milvia.  Some of the purged texts survive as "apocrypha" and a few of the purged groups do too, such as the Gnostics in Egypt.  Most are probably lost.
⁵The most tragic example of this are the repeated sackings of the Library of Alexandria, twice by Romans, in 48BC and 273AD, at least partly by accident, once on purpose by Christians in 391, and again on purpose by Muslims in 642.  Ironically,  the 273 battle was against Palmyra, some of the ruins of which have been recently destroyed by ISIS/DAESH for exactly the same reason.  The suppression of Paganism, the mystery religions, Arianism, Pelagianism, the fates of Hus, Bruno, Galileo and countless rural healers as "Witches".  It goes on and on.

Further Reading
http://www.amazon.com/Unriddling-Christian-Origins-Joel-Carmichael/dp/0879759526
http://www.amazon.com/Zealot-Life-Times-Jesus-Nazareth/dp/0812981480
http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-War-Revised-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140444203
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/14/the_right_gets_jesus_all_wrong_9_reasons_why_everything_you_know_about_jesus_is_a_myth/

 

Inequality and Islamic Terrorism

This week's monstrous acts in France have left a lot of people wondering if there's something wrong with Islam that leads to Islamic terrorism.  I think this is a naive misunderstanding.  The acts stem from poverty and inequality in the Islamic world, both in the middle east and in Europe.

In the 8th through 12th centuries, the Islamic countries were the most advanced in the world.  A lot of this was the result of enlightened leadership, in the parts of the Abbasid and Umayyad dynasties and in no small part the wisdom and inspiration of prophet Muhammad himself.  These leaders were at once aggressively expansionist, and exceptionally tolerant of the groups that they incorporated; Jews and Christians of several sects were not just tolerated, but given extraordinary intellectual and commercial freedom.  Meanwhile China had entered an isolationist period, while Western Europe had effectively abandoned civilization in favor of religious extremism.

The Islamic enlightenment ended the same way the Greek/Roman one did: religious zealotry undermined the multicultural unity, opening the door for ruthless warlords to vandalize and steal the fruits of its intellectual advances, while reversing many of them and making it nearly impossible for new ideas to flourish.   Simultaneously, the Mongol invasions from the east and growing unification in the west in the form of Charlemagne's empire and the Crusades, further reduced range and influence of the once-advanced Islamic culture.

The Renaissance started in Islam's close neighbor and trading partner Italy, and was in no small part inspired by and benefited from the Islamic enlightenment, but left the Islamic world far behind.  When the period we call the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution came along, the Islamic countries were too far behind, and the gross inequities of what remained of their culture prevented the benefits from reaching them, in most cases opening them up to colonization.   The Ottoman Empire, for 600 years the great power in the region, collapsed in a morass of corruption, punctuated in the aftermath of World War I with the Sykes-Picot treaty drawing political boundaries that had no reference to national identities of the time, installing royalty which had no connection at all to the states that they were governing apart from a thin, albeit plausible family connection with the prophet Muhammad and assistance to the allies in World War I.  Except for in Arabia, the rich and powerful had no connection at all with the people they were governing.  Except in Jordan, these Hashemite kings were all deposed within 30 years of their installation and replaced with people who were even more vicious and money grabbing.

The bottom line is that the Islamic world has been almost completely left behind by the intellectual and technological developments of the last 300 years, and the resulting societies are desperately poor and badly educated.  The former colonizers are sympathetic, but at the same time they are still trying to extract what they can...so many of them have allowed large amounts of immigration from these impoverished places.  But they're post-enlightenment countries, so they don't feel they can impose their religions and ideas onto the new immigrants.  So the immigrants tend to develop enclaves where they are slightly better off than in the old country, but are still desperately poor and ignorant, still very much living in the pre-enlightenment world.

So they lash out.  The worst violence is committed not by the desperately poor, but by people who have an affiliation with them (through religion in this case) and are acting in sympathy with them.  The truly desperate don't have the resources to do even that.  This was how 19 middle class Saudi guys, with sponsorship from one of the richest people in the world, committed one of the most horrific acts of our time.   It's how a handful of reasonably comfortable Algerian/French guys (it's still not quite clear how many at this point) committed a horrific act in the name of their prophet which was in direct violation of his teaching.  And so on. 

The driving force behind Islamic terrorism, and most other kinds too, is inequality.  Certain Islamic peoples feel, with some justification, that they are trapped on the bottom rung of the ladder, and can't get up.  Immigration didn't work.  Oil wealth didn't work.  These things just heightened--and highlighted--the inequality.

The solution is to reduce inequality.   That's not the real target--the real target is the terrible desperation of the impoverished--but it's the best handle we have.  We need to give these peoples (and the Muslims are not the only ones) a hand up, out of poverty.  Meaningful universal education is the most effective.  So are programs which help people to live their lives more easily, such as small business loans, improved water supplies, more efficient cooking, secure places to live, universal medical care.  All of these things provide what economists call liquidity.  They make it easier to live, and to better yourself, even if you are desperately poor.

We need for it to be easier to live in poverty.   People who start successful businesses--be they a small farm or an industrial giant--are not worried about where their next meal is coming from.  The way to reduce the problems of inequality is to give people a comfortable floor which they can't fall below, no matter how bad things get, and to give them a hand up to the next level: Education and things like microlending.

The Most Harmful Philosopher

I've read the works of quite a few philosophers and people who think of themselves as philosophers.  All, I think, mean well,  but quite a few had ideas which can be taken to justify people doing really harmful things, often flatly contradicting the intent of the philosopher themselves.

Socrates, Aristotle, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Kant and the other ontological philosophers really don't rate as harmful.  Socrates objection to elective democracy has been borne out by the corruption of the western countries in the last few decades.  His suggested improvement was benevolent dictators. A few dictators have been benevolent but mostly not.  Many of the others wrote about politics too, but their ideas have been predominantly used for good, with a few exceptions.

Locke and his heirs are responsible for the ideology that led to the American political system that worked so well for two centuries.

Descartes, Berkeley, Hegel, Sartre and the other epistemological philosophers are even less harmful.  They're interested in how we understand things.  Their direct effect on the world is pretty minor, although the consequences on how we think about things can be profound.  Newton, for example, figured out what we call the Scientific Method, which is an approach to proof and elimination of confirmation bias.  Heidegger was a big booster of the Nazis, but his own philosophical ideas were irrelevant to their project.

Finally we come to the political and religious philosophers.  There are surprisingly few important ones.   The Abrahamic arc includes Moses, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Mohammed, etc.  The modern political arc starts with Locke and includes many of his disciples, such as Jefferson, as well as other thinkers, such as Nietzsche.  The economic arc includes Smith, Marx, Keynes, Hayek, Rand.

Moses and Jesus were very much men of their time, recognizing what was wrong and advocating ways to improve it.  Both stood against religious institutions being exploited for profit, and were wholly well intentioned and it's hard to find positions in their thought which were directly used for evil.  But their subsequent disciples incorporate some bad thinking...Paul's silliness with the afterlife, and Augustine's with universal conformity--by force if necessary--led to many of the worst atrocities of all time.  The inquisition, the crusades, and much more, including the Nazi horror to some extent, stem directly from Augustine.

Locke, I think, was wholly well intentioned and most of his disciples were too.  American political theory almost entirely stems from his thought, and while there has been lots of corruption, I think it is the opposite of stemming from his or his disciples thought.

Nietzsche is interesting.  Like Socrates, he's an elitist.  Like Socrates, he's deeply interested in the welfare of society, even to the cost of some of its members, including eugenics and a number of other controversial ideas.  Hitler used the germ of his thinking to rationalize his eugenic programs, but he didn't really understand Nietzsche, and Hitler's elites were what Nietzsche would have regarded as lowbrow thugs. An imaginary version of Nietzsche played a role in the Nazi origin fantasy, no more real than Siegfried or the Valkyries or other heroic Germanic fantasies.

Smith and Keynes were scientists, and with Marx and Newton, the only ones on this list.  They figured out how a lot of the economy works and came up with the beginnings of a system to make it work better. Smith was opposed to laissez faire--he understood that a too-free market will promptly be corrupted.  Something similar is the case with Marx: he was primarily a sociologist but he came to a new understanding of the social dynamics of the forces at work in the economy.  One of his lesser ideas has been taken to be the mainstream of his thought and many societies have purportedly been based on it.  It's not really fair to tar Marx with the harm that the ideology derived from this has caused, but Augustine didn't mean ill either.

Friedrich von Hayek was considered an economist by a lot of people, including many bankers and political conservatives.  He was a pretty bad one though...in the face of lots of empirical data, his theories have pretty much flunked.  He wrote an influential book called "The Road to Serfdom" which suggests that political liberalism will lead inevitably to government control of everything and ultimately the enserfment of almost everybody, and that the unregulated free market is the only solution.  As Smith pointed out, the unregulated free market leads only to corruption and monopoly--a much more direct path to serfdom than via liberalism. 

Hayek's contemporary Ayn Rand wrote a series of fantasy novels which have been taken as economic gospel by an amazing number of people, especially on the far right.  Their appeal is mainly to teenagers, desperate to break from parental and societal control. Alan Greenspan was a particularly devoted admirer and through dishonesty, corruption and a great deal of schmoozing, was one of the major causes of the economic crisis of 2008.  Rand's world has no particular bearing on reality and the characters are totally unrealistic.  In particular, in her world, Gresham's Law does not hold and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis does--the opposite of reality.

My ranking:

Nietzsche's ideas were a tiny part of the Fascist horror that killed tens of millions--but being incredibly generous I can only give him 5% credit or so, so he ranks in a distant 4th place.

Ayn Rand and Hayek have killed tens of millions so far and have ruined the lives of hundreds of millions and will kill lots more before they are done.   I give them a solid third place with a real chance to move up.   It's important to recognize that their followers are applying their ideas as they were intended, which is wholly different than what's going on with Nietzsche and Marx.

Marx was only a small part of the communist ideology that's killed about 100 million, and more appropriately applied in Sweden and Cuba and other places, those same ideas have saved millions.  But places like North Korea, and Cuba to a lesser extent are still misapplying his ideas and will kill plenty more before they are through.

St Augustine's ideas have been behind over half of the religious wars that have occurred since his lifetime, 1600 years ago.  He's in effect killed hundreds of millions, in the hands people following a fairly literal version of his ideology.  Lots of others--Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist fanatics, have behaved in ways that fit his ideas.  The Augustinian Heresy: that you must believe as some authority demands or die, is easily the most harmful idea. Augustine himself would have been horrified, and I'm sure would have reversed course had he comprehended.

Killing Someone in Ferguson

There aren't many reasons for killing someone, I think. Basically, if you have extremely good reason to believe that the someone is so likely to commit an act of severe violence, so imminently that this is the last opportunity to stop them.  So, let's say you're a cop and a very large, strong guy reaches into your car and tries to take your weapon from you.  It's certainly plausible that the large guy will try to kill you with the gun once he's got it, so using deadly force in such a struggle might be justified--depending a lot on how the struggle arose and how it seems to be going.  Once the strong guy has given up the fight and is trying to get away, the justification for deadly force is completely gone, although shooting him in the leg or something to try to arrest him may make sense.  No matter what he's done before, shooting a guy that's 35 feet away, has several of your bullets in him already and has his hands up and is saying "don't shoot" as several witnesses have said, is murder.   Since it was in the heat of action, maybe only second degree murder, but murder it was.  If there's any evidence that the cop paused for a moment during his barrage of shots, even if it was to get out of the car to get a better angle, then it's first degree.

Essentially, this question boils down to "self defense".  Self defense is always a justification for killing someone and it extends to protection of loved ones or others under your protection--the whole community in the case of a cop.  But there's that whole thing about imminent threat:  if you think there will be a good chance to stop the bad guy in some non-lethal way before he does his violent thing, then deadly force is not appropriate.

One of the things for which deadly force is the most inappropriate is if you are trying to get someone to convert to your religion.  If you find yourself or someone else thinking it might be necessary, then you really need to question the validity of such a religion.  Such conversions under duress can never be credible.  There's a subtle but important difference between defeating an enemy in battle and them seeing the light and converting, and simply forcing.  I'm against both things, but one makes a little more sense than the other.

I'm against the death penalty.  It has never been applied equitably, and I'm pretty sure that under our present social order and legal system, it can't be--not to mention the rather alarming rate at which DNA evidence has exonerated convicted death row inmates.  It's certainly not a cost saving: housing and trying death capital cases costs the state between 4 and 20 times what life without parole cases do.  Over the last few years virtually every advanced country except ours has come out firmly against it.  Essentially all physicians refuse to take part: they regard participating as a violation of their Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.  This includes those physicians involved in the manufacture of the anesthetics used to do "lethal injection".  Consequently all such drugs are unavailable and those who would continue to use lethal injection have been experimenting, without competence, with other things.   We need to cut it out and join the civilized world.

There's one case other than self defense where killing someone is appropriate, and that is if the victim has decided that it's the right thing to do.  For example, if someone has a painful, debilitating, incurable terminal disease, they may decide that there's no point in continuing to suffer.   Painless euthanasia is clearly better than months or years of insoluble misery--as long as it's up to the victim, with no coercion.  Death row inmates may take a similar position,   Gary Gilmore and Ted Bundy both did this: they decided that the best solution was ending a life which had become intolerable to them.  They went about it in different ways.  I think this ok. I would prefer to try to cure them, or at least find out what made them tick. but they have the right to make such decisions about their own lives.  Gilmore chose the drama of a firing squad, Bundy chose to trap himself where he'd be given the electric chair.

There is a group of people who think that all abortion is murder.   Legally and biologically this is not correct.  The courts have consistently ruled that if the fetus is not viable then it is not murder, although several states have used Roe v Wade's latitude to decide that non-viable second trimester fetuses are protected too.  The court also determined that severe medical risk to the mother is also cause for abortion, even if the fetus is viable.  Basically this is the same as the self defense argument.  It would be nice if there were no unwanted pregnancies, but that is not the world we live in.  There is a large societal need which will be met, whether it is legal or not.  Thousands used to die every year from illegal abortions and many still do in the places they are hard to obtain.  Legal medical abortion is a simple, fairly safe procedure.   There are very few people seeking abortions who have not weighed it very, very seriously.  Anybody who thinks otherwise does not have a credible opinion--very much like the people forcing religious conversion through violence.  Such people are terrorists, pure and simple.  The sidewalk outside an abortion clinic is not the place to provide such information, especially wrong information, as such people are wont to provide.  The doctor or social worker inside is a much better resource.

The Ten Commandments

Many of the Ten Commandments are good ideas for keeping a civil society.  The problem is that many things have been attributed to them that are simply bogus.  First of all, they are not the first code of laws: Hammurabi pre-dates Moses by at least 500 years, and Hammurabi’s code is well enough developed it seems likely he got it from somewhere else.  Given the historical relationship of the Israelites and the Babylonians, it seems pretty clear where the Israelites got the idea.

Another problem is the idea that there’s something special about that particular code of laws.   Clearly not, since they were just the first ten.  Exodus and Leviticus go on and on with hundreds more.  Moreover most Christians have explicitly rejected the second and fourth, as well as a rather high percentage of the Mosaic legal code—and well that they have, for much of it is poor law, and a lot of it is nonsensical and/or cruel.   Jesus himself spoke on this point extensively.  For example, Mosaic law advocates vengeance, but Jesus realized that the feuds that this provoked solve nothing and create more problems than they solved.  Codes of laws are undeniably a good idea, but it’s been nearly four thousand years since Hammurabi, and we’ve learned a lot since then. 

Here are the Ten Commandments as they appear in Exodus 20 in the King James translation.  I’ve stripped out some of the supporting text for brevity.    As you can see, quite a few of them are not particularly relevant to a modern, civil society:  The first four are purely about religion, and have no place in the legal code of a free society.  Notice, significantly, that the third is not about foul language, but instead about using God’s name for personal vanity, for example thanking him for helping you score a touchdown. The fifth, seventh and tenth are certainly good advice, but have not survived codification as law.  That leaves three:  killing, stealing, and bearing false witness.   30% is not a passing grade on most tests, "Judge" Moore.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

Jonathan Edwards

The first Jonathan Edwards was a philosopher and theologian, and one of the earliest great American intellectuals.  Born in 1703 in Connecticut, he became interested in the works of John Locke, Isaac Newton, and many others.  He is most famous for shaping the First Great Awakening, which had a very profound legacy in American Evangelism, although not of the intellectual sort he would have hoped for.  He died in 1758 of smallpox.

The second Jonathan Edwards was a popular musician, born 1946.    He had a really big hit in 1971: "Sunshine (Go Away Today)".  It was a protest song--against the Vietnam war and the draft, but it's a catchy tune.  He's still out there, writing songs, recording and performing, but hasn't had another hit so big.

The third Jonathan Edwards (born 1966) is the greatest triple jumper ever.  He's held the world record for almost 19 years and has 4 of the best 6 jumps ever, including two Olympic medals, silver in 1996, gold in 2000.   Today, he's a TV presenter for the BBC, mostly on track and field subjects. He was born to a very religious family and for a time, refused to compete on sunday.  After retiring as an athlete, he did a lot of preaching.  However, in recent years, he says he has lost his faith completely.  He refuses to talk very specifically about it.

John Edwards (not quite the same name) was an American politician from North Carolina, who was a US Senator and came very close to becoming vice president in 2004 (it is known that there was a lot of election fraud in that election--it's entirely possible that he won).  A few years later, he managed to completely destroy his career with an extramarital affair, conducted while his wife was ill with cancer.  He's still alive, but his political career isn't.

Three of these four at one time purported to be very religious.  The fourth, the musician, played a preacher in a movie.  What he (and the politician) actually think about religion is unclear.  There are numerous other Jonathan Edwards (10 of them famous enough be in wikipedia's disambiguation page).  Wikipedia lists 20 politicians named John Edwards

Takers and Followers

Broadly speaking, I think, people can be put into three categories:  Takers, Followers, and everybody else.

Followers are people who, through lack of imagination, inculcation through school, church or parenting, do what they are told.  Period.  Psychologists refer to this as having an Authoritarian Personality.  I'm pretty sure this is a majority of the population: nearly all political conservatives and moderates (except for a small group I'll describe later) and even a large number of otherwise fairly progressive people are followers. Even if they know better, they believe that morality comes from a given authority, usually someone who purports to speak for a deity.  They believe that only through obedience can there be social order.   I'm pretty sure most of them started out with a mind of their own, but it was driven out of them over time.

The second group are the Takers.  These are people who will will take advantage of whatever situation they see or can construct for themselves, never mind the consequences to other people.  Most of these are simply thieves, but a lot of them understand how to manipulate Followers to do their bidding.  Mitt Romney is a defining example.  The welfare parasites that Romney alluded to in the "47%" comment are takers, although they are only a tiny fraction of those who collect government benefits and pay low or no income taxes.  These are people who wouldn't take a job if one was available, but have found some scam to live on.  They are at most 1% of the people who collect some sort of welfare.   Welfare frauds cost a negligible amount of money, but they do a lot of harm because they give credence to monsters like Romney, Pete Peterson, the Kochs, and Fox News. Most evangelist preachers are takers, and I'm pretty sure all televangelists are, although a few seem to have good intentions to go along with their rapacity.  Bernie Madoff is a taker, and so is Jamie Dimon.

The final group is the rest of us.  Utilitarianism demonstrated that the vast majority of Judeo-Christian, Buddhist or any other,  morality can be derived from very basic principles, mainly the golden rule.  We don't need to follow anybody, we just need to recognize that not hurting each other is important.  Many of us aren't utilitarians, but you don't need to be.  School is good at teaching this stuff, and it could be better.  Religion could be too...but it has been co-opted by Takers.

We all fall into the temptation to be followers.  If the leader has good intentions, this can be harmless.  But we must always be aware that the Takers are out there.

Where Does Religion Come From?

Back in the dim, prehistoric past, we were animals.  We're still animals, but since we've learned to speak, we have some social, cooperative and practical skills that other animals lack.  Animals, including other social animals like wolves and bees take what they need from others, including killing them, and don't worry about consequences beyond immediate self-defense during the actual act.   Within the pack, wolves may fight over who gets the choicest bits, but they ultimately try to make sure everybody has enough to eat.

Prehistoric people were this way too, but as they became more specialized and tool-based, the need to generalize the basic fairness within the tribe became important.  Tribes that respected internal property rights tended to have less internal fighting, greater specialization, and better cooperation, resulting in better survival.   This is the basis of our notions of right and wrong, good and evil.  Stealing from and killing each other is bad.  Stealing from other groups or animals, not so much.  It's practical, and there's evolutionary pressure to see that we do it.  But young people sometimes have a hard time seeing the big picture, so they have to be taught how to behave.  Most people get the point fairly quickly.   Some do not.  By stealing from their friends, they can give themselves a small advantage, and by hiding it, they may be able to get away with it.  In a small group, they can't hide for long, and eventually they're caught, and appropriate punishments were dealt out. 

We're also animals that like stories and like to tell stories, and we're curious about how things got to be the way they are.  So naturally, we made up stories about that, and passed them on.   Some of them made more sense than others, and some of them were better stories than others.  Many of the ones that survived had a "moral", a broader point that the listeners would be able to learn from and adapt to their own lives.  Until the invention of writing about 5000 years ago, we couldn't write the stories down, so there were a lot of these stories being passed around orally.  Like other things, which stories survived was subject to some evolutionary pressure.  Among the ones that survived were ones that leaders realized helped the social order and made it easier to do their job.

Many of these stories had a powerful person. Sometimes this was a chief or king, but sometimes this person was more powerful than any real person could ever be.  The Babylonian hero Gilgamesh is one example. These superheros over time developed a new name.  We call these beyond human superheros "Gods".  In many stories, these superheroes never really died, but were out there in the stars or the forest somewhere, helping us along.

Somewhere along the line, somebody had the bright idea to connect punishment for bad behavior to these stories.  Since the superheroes rarely actually came back to punish wrongdoers, there is need for some alternate reality in which wrongdoers get theirs.  Since some sort of afterlife is a common element of these stories, it was convenient to use that:  even though you managed to hide your crimes from us, you can't hide from the superheroes, and they'll punish you in the afterlife.   For most people, this was unnecessary.  But for a few of the wrongdoers, it did work.  Since it was impossible to distinguish a wrongdoer who was effective at hiding from a rightdoer, it was important to try to convince everybody of their validity.  It didn't completely work, of course: some bad people didn't believe in the stories, and some bad people didn't care. But lots of good people didn't believe in the stories either.  As long as they didn't do anything to undermine the system, there was no harm in that.  Lots of people see the larger point, which is to behave in ways that don't undermine the social fabric, without needing the stories to keep them in line.

Over time, some of these social groups grew bigger, and a shared group of stories was often part of the social fabric that bound larger communities together.  Prior to the development of writing, about a thousand people was the practical limit, but after that, much larger groups became possible.  In a small group, it was very difficult for a bad person to stay hidden for long.  But as groups grew larger, it became much easier for a determined bad person to hide their misdeads.   One response to this was specialized policing.  A certain number of bad people would get caught this way, but criminological and judicial skills were still pretty primitive, and a lot would get away with it.  A lot of leaders came to believe that the only solution was to force people to believe in the whole afterlife with punishments for the wrongdoers schtick, and that not believing in it was just as bad a crime as real crimes, like stealing.  It didn't help much, but that didn't keep them from trying.

Wise leaders through history have realized that allowing people to have their own belief systems, including skepticism, is the best policy, and many of the greatest scientific and political advances have come out of these societies.  Periclean Athens, early Imperial Rome, Andalusia, late colonial New England, late 19th century Vienna and Budapest, and many more, have mostly had an official religion, but were completely tolerant of others, and achieved great things because of it, and didn't suffer from higher crime rates at all.  Many of these enlightened periods ended with religious fanatics taking over and destroying not just religious freedom, but the successful society as well.

Rebutting "20 Obvious Truths"

In an astounding little bit of ignorance, conservative blogger John Hawkins  posts "20 Obvious Truths that will Shock Liberals".  The title should have been "20 blatant lies that will make liberals snicker":

1) The Founding Fathers were generally religious, gun-toting small government fanatics who were so far to the Right that they'd make Ann Coulter look like Jimmy Carter. 
Not even close to true.  There were some religious people among them, but it should be observed that Thomas Paine repeatedly and explicitly denied the existence of God, and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington both overtly and conspicuously rejected conventional church observance.  When the Continental Congress decided that they needed to have an invocation while they were working on the Declaration, it was John Adams they selected to give it.  Adams was a deacon in what church?  He was a Unitarian.  Adams wasn't an atheist but many Unitarians today are.  After they were out of office, Adams and Jefferson had a long exchange of letters that have come down to us, in which they came to agree on an idea known as "Deism", which is the belief that if there is a God, He doesn't participate in the day to day activities of the universe in any way.   Jefferson was one of the few gun advocates among the founders.  Very few Americans owned firearms until the civil war.  getting enough guns was a big problem during the revolution.  Read about Eli Whitney and the Springfield Armory.  Remember that a gun was a huge, heavy, expensive object in the 1770s.  You had to be very rich to own one and it was totally unrealistic to carry one around much. 
 

2) The greatest evil this country has ever committed isn't slavery; it's killing more than 50 million innocent children via abortion.
That's just silly.  Slavery and its aftermath killed at least that many, and most of them were or had been children who actually were wanted. 

Did you know that aborting a viable child is still illegal even after Roe vs Wade, except in certain very rare circumstances?

Unhygienic abortion killed hundreds of thousands of innocent women and girls every year, and still kills more than 200 every day, mainly due to the work of idiots like you.  Women who had lives, and were wanted by their families.  Sometimes their pregnancy was their fault, but usually it was someone else's.  Unwanted children are a leading cause of poverty and crime.  You cannot stop abortion.  It is a necessary evil, like chemotherapy.  But you can make it safe, and you can minimize the causes of unwanted pregnancy.   But you're opposed to doing either.

3) Conservatives are much more compassionate than liberals and all you have to do to prove it is look at all the studies showing that conservatives give more of their money to charity than liberals do.

the link shows that Red states have a higher percentage of people that give to charity.  Blue states have a higher percentage of people living in poverty and can't afford to give, so this is a specious comparison.  you're going to have to find better evidence than that.   Remember also that giving to churches is considered charity in this country, even when the churches are blatantly profit making enterprises.

4) When the Founding Fathers were actually around, there were official state religions and the Bible was used as a textbook in schools. The so-called "wall of separation between church and state" has absolutely nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with liberal hostility to Christianity.

Yes, the founders were very aware of the damage religion had caused in the past and were determined to avoid it.  Article VI of the constitution says there shall never be a religious test for public office, and the first amendment bans state imposition of religion.  Yes, the constitution does impose a wall of separation.

5) The biggest problem with our economy today is Barack Obama. His demonization of successful people, his driving up gas prices, his regulatory overload and threats to increase taxes have terrified businesses into hunkering down, refusing to spend money, and declining to hire new people. Replacing him would do more than any government policy to spur economic growth.

Name one time that Obama has demonized success.  He has frequently spoken to just the opposite position.  He named Immelt and Geithner, both very pro-big business guys, to important cabinet level positions. He has cut taxes beyond even what Bush had done, his regulations are less than what existed during most of the Clinton administration and far less than during Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, when the economy was booming.  The biggest problem with the economy are people who think austerity is a solution to our problems, and those that think that financial regulations are unnecessary.

6) Not only are conservatives more patriotic than liberals, but most American liberals "love" America in about the same way that a wife-beater loves his wife.

I think you've got that one almost exactly backwards.  Progressives, conservationists, egalitarians and other actual patriots want to preserve what's good about America, while exploiters, retrogressives like you, and jingoistic symbol worshipers want to steal what they can, damn the consequences.   Many conservatives think they're somehow more patriotic than others, but they don't know enough history or science to understand that that's not true, nor do they understand the consequences of a lot that they do.  But I don't say they're anti-patriots in some way, just that they're mistaken about some of their practices and beliefs.  What you say is offensive and ignorant.

7) Out of every 100 cries of “Racism” you hear these days, 99 are motivated by nothing other than politics.

It's true.  about 90% of the racism I hear these days is people talking about some guy they think is a Kenyan socialist.  They've learned to not say anything about ordinary black people, but since this is politcal, they figure he's fair game.

8) Anyone paying income taxes is certainly paying his “fair share" -- and then some -- compared to the people who pay nothing.

Most of the people who pay nothing have almost no income.  A few have enough income they can afford to buy politicians.  

9) You don't have a "right" to anything that other people have to pay to provide for you.

Roads, police, military, schools? 

10) If we can ask people to present an ID to buy alcohol, drive a car, or get on an airplane, then asking them to present identification to vote is a no-brainer.

Except the identification you speak of is contrived to disenfranchise large groups of people, most of whom tend to vote for democrats. There is no evidence that the problem it purports to solve is significant (one study of the 2008 national election found 12 cases of voter fraud, of over 128 million voters.   at least a million votes were swung toward the republicans by election fraud, mostly perpetrated by elections officials.  At least 5,000 democrat voters were disenfranchised by election fraud in Florida in 2000 (caging), and possibly as many as 100,000.  Bush won this election by 500 votes)

11) There's absolutely nothing that the government does smarter, better, or more efficiently than the private market with roughly equivalent resources.

The police department?  roads?  public education?  financial regulation?  all of these are things have been tried privately.  a few have worked on a small scale but failed, in some cases spectacularly, when done privately.

12) The biggest problem with education in this country is liberals. They fight vouchers, oppose merit pay, refuse to get rid of terrible teachers, and bend over backwards to keep poor kids trapped in failing schools.

The biggest problem with education is underfunding it.  Yes, there have been problems with union abuse, but there's far more trouble caused by starving the beast.

13) Fascism, socialism, and communism are all left-wing movements that have considerably more in common with modern liberalism than modern conservatism.

Liberalism is a form of moderation.  look up the word in a dictionary.  Some fascists started out as socialists but became right wingers when that was obviously failing. Hitler and Mussolini, for example.  Both were tools of the big corporations, just like you.  Communism is a left wing movement.  Liberalism is a centrist movement.  Fascism is very much a right wing movement.

14) The Democratic Party was behind slavery, the KKK, and Jim Crow laws. It was also the party of Margaret Sanger, George Wallace, and Bull Connor. It has ALWAYS been a racist party. Even today, white liberals support Affirmative Action and racial set-asides because they still believe black Americans are too inferior to go up against whites on an even playing field.

The civil war was seen in the south as having been provoked by a Republican president, Lincoln, and for a century they held a grudge against all republicans.   So they supported democrats.  When the southern Democrats weren't racist enough for them, they founded a few parties of their own, such as the Dixiecrats, George Wallace's American Independent Party, and others.  Lyndon Johnson was widely regarded as a race traitor for supporting the civil rights act, so many of them switched sides in protest.

Ted Bundy was active in Republican politics.  By your reasoning, the republicans are behind sex murderers.  I'm not accusing you of that, but you're doing the identical thing to non-rightwingers.
 

15) A man with good morals who falls short and becomes a hypocrite is still a far better man than a liberal who can never be called a hypocrite because he has no morals at all.

Again, that's just stupid, ignorant and offensive.  A man with good morals is generous, considerate and thoughtful.  conservatives are none of these things.

16) The most dire threat to America's future and prosperity in the last 150 years hasn't been the Nazis, the Soviets, or Al-Qaeda;, it's the spending and overreach of our own government.

You're right that none of these things is a particularly big threat to America's future, and only the Nazis ever were.  Greed, austerity and narrowmindedness are big threats to America's future.

17) Greed isn't someone wanting to keep more of what he earns; it's people demanding a greater share of money that someone else earns.

Good point.  Tax financial profits higher than income gained through work.  right now they're taxed at about half the rate.

18) Most of the time in American politics, the liberal "victim" is really a bad guy who is absolutely delighted by the opportunity to pretend to be "offended."

I can't think of a single example of this.  Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe built their entire careers on it.

19) Jesus Christ was not a conservative, a liberal, or a politician. He was also not a capitalist or a socialist. Still, you can say this: Jesus drew sharp lines about what's right and wrong, he wasn't tolerant of what the Bible categorizes as sinful behavior, and there's absolutely no question that he would adamantly oppose abortion and gay marriage.

Not true.  Birth Control and after-birth "exposure" were common practices during Jesus's time and he spoke not a word on the subject.   There's one tiny passage in the old testament about homosexuality and it's surrounded by much more extensive and explicit passages promoting slavery and how bad it is to handle the flesh of a pig (think football).   If Jesus ever considered these things at all, it hasn't come down to us.  Even if you were right about these being sins, a big part of his mission was compassion for sinners.  Didn't you know?

20) When you demand that other people fund your sexual escapades by buying your contraception, your sex life becomes their business.

Huh? I think you're talking about health insurance paying for birth control.  virtually all doctors regard birth control as a necessity.   Many women take the hormones for health reasons--they may not be having sex at all.   Even if you have sex only occasionally, you still need to take it regularly for it to work at all.  Because some crackpot in Rome thinks it's abhorrent doesn't give them the right to override the doctor's orders.