Bob Dylan on war and religion

Oh, my name, it ain't nothin', my age, it means less 

The country I come from is called the Midwest

I's taught and brought up there, the laws to abide 

And that the land that I live in has God on its side

 

Oh, the history books tell it, they tell it so well 

The cavalries charged, the Indians fell 

The cavalries charged, the Indians died 

Oh, the country was young with God on its side 

 

The Spanish-American War had its day

And the Civil War too was soon laid away 

And the names of the heroes I was made to memorize 

With guns in their hands and God on their side

 

The First World War, boys, it came and it went 

The reason for fightin' I never did get 

But I learned to accept it, accept it with pride 

For you don't count the dead when God's on your side

 

The Second World War came to an end 

We forgave the Germans, and then we were friends 

Though they murdered six million, in the ovens they fried 

The Germans now too have God on their side 

 

I learned to hate the Russians all through my whole life 

If another war comes, it's them we must fight 

To hate them and fear them, to run and to hide 

And accept it all bravely with God on my side 

 

But now we've got weapons of chemical dust

If fire them we're forced to, then fire them we must 

One push of the button and they shot the world wide 

And you never ask questions when God's on your side 

 

Through many dark hour I been thinkin' about this 

That Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss 

But I can't think for you, you'll have to decide 

Whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side 

 

So now as I'm leavin', I'm weary as hell 

The confusion I'm feelin' ain't no tongue can tell 

The words fill my head, and they fall to the floor 

That if God's on our side, he'll stop the next war

 

~ Bob Dylan, "With God With God on Our Side," 1964

 

 

Joseph Sobran on changing moral fashions in 20th century America

Catholics "arrived" as Americans from the Thirties to the Sixties - between Al Smith and Jack Kennedy.  They made their mark as citizens, politicians, celebrities, moralists, intellectuals, and whatnot.  They helped set the tone of public life in all sorts of ways: think Notre Dame football, the Legion of Decency, the Knights of Columbus, Bing Crosby, Bishop Sheen, Cardinal Spellman, Joe McCarthy, countless movies featuring crusty-saintly Irish priests.  Catholic intellectuals like John Courtney Murray made their debut in secular society.  It was rather fashionable to be Catholic: tony converts wrote books like "The Seven-Storey Mountain."  It was easy to get the feeling that if you weren't Catholic, you were really missing something.  The secular world treated Catholicism with great deference.  And Catholics had clout.

This was the wave Kennedy rode to the White House.  But then it ended suddenly - and for Catholics, traumatically.  Catholicism suffered abrupt deflation and even some rough debunking.  Instead of converts' pious autobiographies, the best-sellers were memoirs of angry apostates.  The Church lost both political clout and moral glamour in the secular world.  Hollywood either ignored or ridiculed Catholicism: Catholic morality and sensibilities simple ceased to count for anything.

For Catholics, this was a painful loss of public respect.  We'd been riding high and assuming it would go on forever.  But, all the same, Catholics were still acceptable as citizens.  Their fall from secular grace didn't mean their rights were in question; nobody doubted a Catholic could get elected.  Only some of the grander Catholic moral pretensions had been rejected.

At about the same time Catholics saw their prestige and power decline, Jews arrived.  Israel's victory in the Six-Day War helped make it acceptable - even fashionable - to be openly and proudly Jewish.  "Passing," Anglicizing, converting, etc., were contraindicated.  The Holocaust (a new word for most of us) moved to the center of our sense of recent history.  "Anti-Semitism" became the deadliest of cultural accusations.  More movies about Nazis were made in this period than in all of World War II (most films at the time, lest we forget, featured gross Jap-bashing: it was only in retrospect that we decided we'd been fighting for racial justice).  Jewish intellectuals, entertainers, politicians all stressed their "ethnicity" (another new word): frank "Jewishness" replaced religious "Judaism" as the ticket to respectability.  Yiddish slang entered the language.  Jewish sensibilities were accorded special deference, and even became morally defining for gentiles.

The Jewish Moment is winding down now.  Maybe it's for no better reason than that moral fashions change like all others.  Be that as it may, certain exaggerated Jewish moral claims are being deflated.  The Holocaust doesn't seem unique since the revelations about Stalin and Pol Pot.  Loose charges of Anti-Semitism are arousing resentment.  Above all, Israel has become a moral embarrasment; even its defenders find themselves forced to do less boasting and more excusing these days.

[...]

In short, Jews are going through a pretty normal period of adjustment - the bumpy side of assimilation, as I sometimes call it.  Protestants and Catholics have both survived having their self-absorption punctured; so will Jews.  They'll be less special but more normal.

~ Joseph Sobran, letter-to-the-editor to The New Republic, reprinted in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, December 1990, pp. 11-12

Yuval Noah Harari on the Hamas attacks against Israeli civilians

The aim of the attack was really to sow seeds of hatred and violence for generations to come, to destroy all chance for peace.  What is, I think, very difficult for people in Europe to understand often is the mind frame behind this that there are people - and I know it because there are also people like that in my country [Israel] - there are people who just don't care about this world and about human suffering in this world because they are fixated on fantasies about another world.  In the Middle East this is politics.  This is the bedrock where everything starts.  And from the perspective of Hamas - not just slaughtering Israeli civilians - even the suffering of Palestinians does not count.  Because if a Palestinian is killed according to Hamas, they are martyrs, they immediately go to heaven, what's the problem?  We can not live, coexist, with such people holding immense military capabilities on our border.

~ Yuval Noah Harari, Zeit Online interview, 2:25 mark, October 19, 2023

James True on the Covid-19 religion

Covid-19 is a living god.  People are worshipping the Baal Corona.  Masks are his vestments.  Economies are his sacrifices.  PCR tests are his scripture.  $7 trillion is in his offering plate.  His acolytes are dancing nurses.  Fauci is his Pope.  People like me are the heretics.

~ James True, tweet, October 4, 2020

James Garfield on the church and taxation

The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.

~ James Garfield

Ambrose Bierce on religion

Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1906)

Alan Meltzer on capitalism and failure

Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin.

~ Alan Meltzer, economist

(Meltzer died May 8, 2017 at age 89.)

Lew Rockwell on the religion of environmentalism

Like socialism, environmentalism combines an atheistic religion with virulent statism. But it ups the ante. Marxism at least professed a concern with human beings; environmentalism harks back to a godless, manless, and mindless Garden of Eden.

~ Lew Rockwell, An Anti-environmentalist Manifesto, 1990

Sara Palin on the Iraq War

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan.

~ Sarah Palin , Governor of Alaska, June 8, 2008, speech before her congregation at Wasilla Assembly of God

(Source: "Palin's Church May Have Shaped Worldview," The Huffington Post, September 2, 2008)