Without God

Here's the recording:

Did anyone really doubt that it happened?

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"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell, 1984

It's time for the evasions and dissimulations to end.

Barack Hussein "America is not a Christian nation" Obama has edited God out of his rendition of the core passage of the Declaration of Independence. He has repeatedly refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance as Americans have learned it: with the phrase "under God" included. On at least one well-recorded occasion, he refused to salute the flag at all, his (and his wife's) hands held conspicuously over their crotches instead of their hearts. And anyone who remembers the 2008 campaign must remember Obama's flag-pinless-lapel, in contrast to every other candidate for any federal position in that year.

As president of these United States, Obama commands the "bully pulpit" afforded that position. It's a post of immense influence: over the attitudes of Americans and non-Americans alike. Inasmuch as he must be aware that the Gettysburg Address as Lincoln delivered it was reported to have included the phrase "one nation, under God," just as he must be aware that the Declaration attributes men's rights to having been "endowed by their Creator," and just as he must be aware that the Pledge has included the phrase "under God" since 1954, this cannot be either coincidence or a repetitious lapse of memory.

I've written before -- forgive me for not being able to produce the link; my Google Fu is a bit weak this morning -- that Obama cannot be either a Christian or a Muslim: either religion would require him to concede the existence of an Authority higher than himself. But while that might apply specifically to this business of always omitting references to God from traditional documents and oaths, there's a still deeper layer to the thing that Obama's recent indictment for having lied bald-facedly and repeatedly to the American people has starkly illuminated:

Obama resists the concept of objective truth.

Consider: If there is objective truth, there are objective facts: assertions about the universe, and the events that have occurred in it, that are independent of anyone's opinion. Leftists resent that notion terribly, as it obstructs their efforts to rewrite history. That's an imperative for the Left: to make their preferred brand of totalitarianism -- and all forms of totalitarianism are Leftist -- appear successful and benign, they must efface its real history and replace it with rosy fantasies. When a particular historical tragedy or atrocity is too well and widely known to be flensed from people's memories, Leftists will strive to alter, or at least becloud, the common understanding of its geneses, so as to avert the odium from their totalitarian creed.

Barack Hussein "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody" Obama is most certainly a man of the Left.

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In the Nazi leadership’s view, Rauschning (a one-time friend of Hitler’s) reports, “the more inconsistent and irrational is their doctrine, the better….[E]verything that might have gone to the making up of a systematic, logically conceived doctrine is dismissed as a trifle, with sovereign contempt.” “To all doubts and questions,” writes Rosenberg, “the new man of the first German empire has only one answer: Nevertheless, I will!” [Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels]

Beneath all convictions about cause and effect lies a postulate that few rational men have ever thought to question:

Reality has laws that cannot be broken.

The scientist struggles to learn what those laws are, in the greatest possible breadth and precision. The engineer wields the laws that are known to produce advances in human prosperity and well-being. The philosopher ponders why the laws are as they are, and what sort of worlds and peoples different ones might produce. And of course, the legislator strives to modify or repeal the laws by exertions of rhetoric.

The tyrant refuses to accept that there are any laws he cannot override by his omnipotent will: "Make it so!"

No, the tyrant seldom thinks about the nature of reality and the persistence of its properties. He has other things on his mind. However, to achieve his ends he will repeatedly act in a fashion that presupposes the superiority of his will to the laws of Nature, particularly those graven into the nature of Man. When those laws prove superior to his will, as they always have and always will, he is forced by his supreme arrogance to decree them removed from history: "Make it not so!" To the tyrant, the ultimate obstacle is the immutability of the past: that what has happened cannot be made to un-happen retroactively.

Barack Hussein "Yes We Can" Obama is a tyrant.

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"Without God, all things are possible." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

The theist believes that the laws of reality are as they are because God has ordained that they shall be thus. In a sense, God is Nature's enforcer, though of a sort different from any enforcer who labors within the veil of Time. Nature's laws cannot be broken; hence, there is no need to punish anyone for breaking them. The temporal enforcer has a more difficult and persistent task.

The atheist, though he rejects belief in God, is usually willing to concede that reality has laws he cannot break. Such an atheist won't be a practical problem for the theist, as long as he doesn't turn militantly hostile to theistic faiths. He and his theist friend might argue good-naturedly about religious conviction and its supports, but they're unlikely to come to blows over it. In short, despite their differences they can live and let live.

But there is a variety of atheist to whom the suggestion that there are immutable and unbreakable laws is inherently, irremediably offensive: the solipsist. A man who denies the laws of reality denies by implication that there can be any fact to which he refuses his assent, including reality itself.

But if all of reality is contingent upon his permission to exist, the solipsist has usurped the throne of God -- a Being in whom he refuses to believe and of whose existence he refuses to speak.

Barack Hussein "I Won" Obama is a solipsist.