This week we conclude our discussion of contrasts between the left and the right on various issues.
16/Illegitimate children. Left/It is great to see the tyranny of the Christian morality be broken. The nuclear family is a way to keep women under the control of a vicious male patriarchy. The state has an obligation financially to support women having children out of wedlock.
Right/Most on the right believe the destruction of the nuclear family to be a great tragedy, and a very bad thing for the illegitimate children living without a father in the home. It is bad also for the men and women having the children. The welfare state’s subsidizing of illegitimacy is foolish and destructive of our entire civilization.
17/Free speech. Left/The left has lost faith in free speech as a concept. The left tries to believe that free speech is good, but hate speech is so horrible and so widespread that the left has begun to try to silence such hate speech by any means necessary, including by violence. The left-leaning media is in vast sympathy with the attempt to silence evil voices on the right, so that they find it difficult to criticize even those who use violence to shut down those speaking hate.
Right/Most on the right continue to believe that free speech is a good thing. They note with apprehension the left’s increasing willingness to silence any voices with which the left is in disagreement. “Hate speech” is usually just a self-indulgent term describing ideas with which the left is in disagreement; usually “hate speech” has nothing at all to do with hate, but a lot to do with trying to speak truths with which the left is uncomfortable. The media’s acquiescence in the violence of those trying to shut down speakers is an example of the media’s moral blindness and moral corruption.
18/The media. Left/The media has an obligation to manipulate people to think in the correct fashion. News should be slanted, because otherwise people may be tempted to believe wrong things, which would be especially dangerous in a democracy where people have the vote, and might be tempted to vote incorrectly.
Right/The media should tell the truth. The media assumes its own leftist leanings are obviously correct, with almost no understanding that other opinions might be closer to reality. The media is dishonest. A few on the right believe that the only way the leftist media can be defeated is to be replaced with a type of media which loves and speaks the truth. But very few on the right have the stomach for this type of battle. Much of the “respectable” right spouts cliches as readily as does the left.
Now for some sort of summary. This exercise has been, for me, more encouraging than I expected.
Leftism is powerful. But it is really powerful only because we on the right are so compromised. When we have high principles and stick to them, we on the right have great advantages over the left. The left’s view of how life is put together is so wildly out of touch with reality that it can offer no long-term competition to goodness and truth. We on the right shoot ourselves in the foot because we often act in ways that are leftist. The left are warmongers. Well, that’s nutty, but far too many on the right are warmongers. The left wants to steal the property of others via taxation. Well, we on the right don’t mind stealing the property of others in order to pay for our Social Security, our Medicare, our public education. And so forth. It is never the left that is strong morally, it is always the right that deserts our principles in order to act like practical leftists. So all we have to do is stop thinking and acting like leftists, and suddenly we have much more solid ground on which to stand. Of course, in practice it ain’t easy to live up to our principles. But it can be done, and when/if we do, leftism can’t compete. Leftism hates goodness, hates reality, hates children, hates kindness, hates God. It is a morality of hate, of envy, of theft, of self-righteous virtue signalling.
As a group, leftists cannot really be helped. They have chosen to live in a fantasy world, have chosen to close their minds to truth. However, they are people made in the image of God, and I am quite confident that many of them can be brought out of the darkness into the light. The Holy Spirit can change people. Many have already been changed, and have rejected leftism after having been part of it–not as many as we hope for, but still many.
Moreover, the Holy Spirit can use individuals on the right to reach individuals on the left. Especially Christians have a great opportunity to reach people. We can love people–we can love even people we hate and despise. I remember one Christian family where the young daughter prayed for Barack Obama. Barack Obama is one of the most despicable people the world has ever known. But that young lady was on the right track. Pray for people, even for vicious people. Leave the results in the hands of God.
We can love our enemies. In fact we are instructed to do so! (Matthew 5:44-45) This is actually logical. We were enemies of God until He regenerated and converted us. We in fairness ought to be willing to love our enemies. Often we can’t like them. But we can love them.
By love I don’t mean some sort of gooey “all you need is love” John Lennonish drivel. I mean love as the Bible defines love. That will mean learning what the Bible teaches about how to treat people. We need to learn to think the way the Bible teaches us to think. It will also mean, most emphatically, that we stop doing idiotic and evil things ourselves. Practical wisdom is hard. But there is no other way to preserve Christian civilization. Jesus Christ is not going to come out of the sky and rescue us. (Dispensationalism is horribly confused.) God is in control, and will work for us, but we also are expected to fight on His side rather than fight against Him. When Christians acquiesce in evil preemptive wars that kill and cripple foreigners (leaving aside our own thoughtless, poorly taught young people), we are fighting on the side of Satan rather than on the side of God. What kind of witness is that to leftists living in their fantasy world? It is a wretched witness, and can only confuse them and give them a plausible excuse to continue in their own warmongering.
One thing this five-part survey has shown me is that left and right are not as far apart as one might imagine. But the solution to our separation is not unity. Unity is only good if the unity is in good things. We need to move further to the right, toward God. Then we give the leftists something good to ponder about. We have let the left down, by our compromises with the truth. The more we become what we should be, the more chance that individuals on the left will have to come out of the darkness into the light. We on the right, Christian and otherwise, need to do a lot better job in the way we think and live. Leftism is widespread, but shallow. It is also obviously ridiculous. Look at the things they advocate. Look at the consequences of their policies. The welfare state destroys lives–but the left keeps calling for more of the welfare state. We have seen the nuttiness on the left, on many issues–as discussed in the contrasts above. The right may be numerically weak, right now, but the worldview of the right is closer to how reality is put together than the worldview of the left. But we on the right need to do a lot better. We are pretty rotten ourselves, as this brief five-part series makes clear.