In the midst of liberal triumph, liberal idols keep being shattered

Right in the middle of the global celebration of the man who said that we’re descended from apes and are not essentially different from apes, a Connecticut woman who had taken that lesson to heart lost control of her 200 pound enraged “pet” chimpanzee, which proceeded to bite off the hands and destroy the face of the woman’s friend.

Right in the middle of the biggest dhimmi outreach ever by a U.S. president to the Muslim world, a widely respected “moderate” U.S. Muslim in New York State who ran a TV station devoted to persuading Americans that Muslims are not extreme and dangerous, but are just like you and me, beheaded his wife.

Right in the middle of black America’s biggest sack dance ever, with the black U.S. attorney general telling white Americans in the arrogant words of a conqueror that they must do much, much more to acknowledge their racial guilt and must become much, much more open to blacks in their private lives and not just on the job, a white woman in Atlanta who had fully internalized that teaching let a 22 year old black man enter her apartment and he promptly bludgeoned her to death.

God keeps sending one horrible lesson after another, and the lessons keep getting more and more horrible, but man—liberal man—never gets it, because he’s too committed to his liberalism to see outside liberalism or imagine being different. How many lives must be destroyed by the liberal belief in equality, before liberalism dies?

- end of initial entry -

Since I have combined the lessons of three recent entries in this entry, I’m posting several comments on those separate posts here.

Ben W. writes:

“Paramedics say Charla Nash, 55, lost her nose, eyes and jaw as the crazed simian ate her alive in the driveway of her friend’s Stamford, Conn., home Monday.” [Daily News.]

LA wrote: “Secular reason rejects not just God, but human nature itself.”

Perhaps, from a transcendent perspective, the chimp tearing the woman’s face off was NOT AN ACCIDENT. Might it be God showing us in a very real way what happens to our human identity, our eyes and our face when the animal defines us? Notice when this incident happened—right at the time the media was full of celebration for Darwin’s “birthday.” Accidental? Think about it …

Ben continues:

The woman’s face was ripped—IDENTITY and PERSONALITY. Her eyes were destroyed—VISION. Her jaw was broken—SPEECH. Where did it happen? CONNECTicut. CONNECT the facts and the time (Darwin celebrations). Random? Chance? Accidental?

E. writes:

Excellent post on the Atlanta murder. Sort of murdered because of her foolish political correctness. The “dialogue on race” that Eric Holder would prefer we not have.

E. continues:

In 1978, when I was living in New York City, I returned home to my apartment and my friend with whom I shared the apartment told me proudly that, not only had he given a beggar money, but he had also invited him up to our apartment and given him some of our used clothes, because it was raining that day and the beggar’s clothes were soaked and dirty. He changed in our apartment and my friend threw his used clothes in the garbage can in the basement.

I hit the roof. I can no longer imagine how many swear words came out of my mouth. I told him in no uncertain terms that this must never happen again. I screamed at him that he was lucky we weren’t robbed and he was doubly lucky he wasn’t beaten up or murdered.

He eventually got the picture, but it took a about a year. I never cease to be amazed at how naive some people can be. He had lived in various urban areas. But he still didn’t understand that everyone did not share his upper middle class behavioral pattern.

David B. writes:

I have read your post about the Jeanne Calle murder. It was just the kind of situation you have written several posts about. Here is a story about her 57-year old boyfriend finding the body. Although her body was stuffed in the pantry with a gash on her head, Mr. Beaudrot did not at first think it was foul play. “I thought she slipped,” he said.

By the way, I had a strange experience on Thursday. I was driving up the interstate toward Nashville and I stopped to have lunch. It was a place that is a combination restaurant, motel, and truck stop. It was about 11:30 am. As I went in the front door, a white SUV was parked near it. Two black men were in the vehicle. One of them said, “God Bless you sir, could you lend us a few dollars to get to Alabama?” I said something like, “I don’t have much money,” and went inside. Do you think I should have walked around the car and taken out my billfold?

Mark P. writes:

You missed the most important paragraph in the article.

It’s not clear whether Thompson seriously intended to buy a home in Aqua or had the money to do so. Meadows said he suspects Thompson wanted to case the condos for valuables and didn’t realize beforehand that the first two were vacant.

This is a perfect example of the “robbery gone wrong” mantra. See, he just wanted to look at the places to rob, not realizing the others were vacant. See, the guy just wanted a TV; he did not realize the owner would get up.

Bill Carpenter writes:

Many liberals would rather die than give up their liberalism. Increasingly, they have the chance to do that.

Ronald D. writes:

Ben W. wrote:

“Perhaps, from a transcendent perspective, the chimp tearing the woman’s face off was NOT AN ACCIDENT.”

It’s legitimate to draw analogies, but Ben goes too far. This poor woman is a (so far) living, breathing human being, who as far as we know did nothing whatsoever to deserve this. Presumably, she has a family and/or friends; do you really wish them to read that you believe that God chose her to be mutilated and partially eaten alive as some kind of sign?

Even if you believe this to be true (how you could believe it is a mystery to me), Augustine warned us not to use the truth to hurt others.

Please re-think your statements, sir. There are other ways of making the same point which are not so grotesque and possibly distressing to the loved ones of the victim.

LA replies:

Did the 3,000 killed at the World Trade Center deserve what happened to them? Did the people who went to work one morning and ended up leaping a thousand feet to their deaths from the upper floors of the North Tower deserve what happened to them? Does that change the fact that the 9/11 attack was the most dramatic possible lesson about the danger of freely admitting Muslims into America? Did the many Muslim females who have immigrated into the West and were influenced by the Western way of life and ended up being ‘honor-murdered” by their male relatives deserve what happened to them? Did the young American Nick Berg who went to Baghdad to seek work in 2003, and was captured and had his head sawed off by the fiend Zarqawi, deserve what happened to him? Did Anne Pressly, who was raped and had every bone in her face pulverized and was killed by a black thug who entered her home and attacked her in her bedroom, deserve what happened to her? (In fact, others had seen the thug stalking white women, and had not reported it to the police.) Did Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, the victims in the Knoxville Atrocity, deserve what happened to them?

Such “lessons,” which are happening all the time, are not always finely tuned. The lesson or punishment doesn’t only fall on the people responsible. That’s not the way the lessons of history, or the lessons of experience, or chastisements of Providence, work. Punishments fall on a society for its bad or foolish actions, and therefore individuals who are in that society get hurt, regardless of their individual responsibility. But the lessons are there nevertheless for us to learn from them.

Roland replies:

While I realize the comments were by Ben W., not by you, I nonetheless believe these comment to be outside of the bound of civilized discourse, and ask that you consider not publishing them. Let Ben publish them wherever he pleases, but don’t give this nonsense your imprimatur.

As for the people killed on 9/11 and the other events you mention, these are all awful things, and I agree with you that Islam (which I consider to be a destructive political ideology, not merely a religion) and what’s left of Western civilization are mutually incompatible, always have been, and always will be. We are of one accord in this regard.

You write:

Such “lessons,” which are happening all the time, are not finely tuned. The lesson or punishment doesn’t only fall on the people responsible. That’s not the way the lessons of history, or the lessons of experience, or chastisements of Providence, work. Punishments fall on a society for its bad or foolish actions, and therefore individuals who are in that society get hurt, regardless of their individual responsibility. But the lessons are there nevertheless for us to learn from them.

Which, while true, has nothing to do with this poor woman who has been so horribly mutilated and disfigured—unless you mean that keeping wild animals as pets is a bad idea, a sentiment I share.

Yes, one can make analogies with allowing those hostile to Western interests to nestle in the very bosom of the West as they seek to destroy it, and in fact, you’ve already done so, in this case. Ben’s comments, and the follow-up comments on this new post, however, exceed the boundaries of both taste and simple human decency.

There’s no need to cite in graphic detail the injuries of this poor woman in some kind of extended analogy with the recently-resumed clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. It’s gratuitous, unnecessary, and bespeaks a lack of compassion towards this lady and her loved ones.

She and her family and friends need our prayers, not our sophistry.

LA replies:

But I also referred to the horrible Connecticut attack, with some description, in the initial entry. Was it wrong for me to do that?

I understand that there was a graphic, and almost gleeful, element to Ben’s comment that could seem grotesque and deeply offensive. But I felt he was making a larger point that was valid and insightful, seeing this horrible event as symbolic of modern Western man’s destruction of his identity as Western man, and of his degradation of his very being as man.

Roland replies:

You write: “Was it wrong for me to do that?

No, neither in this entry nor in the earlier entry on the Connecticut incident. I don’t consider it wrong or gratuitous. Perfectly within the bounds of civilized discourse, and both you and other correspondents made cogent points in that particular entry and its follow-on comments. I agree with the sentiments you express in it, and with the reader comments you posted to the thread, as well as the general tone.

But whether or not I agree with the larger point you and they attempt to make in the comments by Ben W. (and I largely do), it’s simply beyond the pale, in my opinion.

Yes, macabre crimes like 9/11 and Muslim beheadings take place, and yes, they should be described and condemned for the atrocities they are, rather than being swept under the rug—and you do an excellent job of presenting the unstinting facts and explaining them in the larger context of the clash of civilizations. However, there are other, more effective and persuasive ways to express those sentiments which do not descend into the macabre in the service of mere rhetoric, as I believe Ben’s comments do, in this particular case.

Roland continues:

You write: “But I felt he was making a larger point that was valid and insightful, seeing this horrible event as symbolic of modern Western man’s destruction of his identity as Western man, and of his degradation of his very being as man.”

There are ways to point this out, minus the grotesqueries.

I’ll even go a step further—I’ve known people who kept dangerous dogs, poisonous snakes, etc., and I’ve always thought there was a deeply disturbing psychosexual undertone in their makeups, a repellent admixture of hybristophilia and non-sexual zoophilia. Everything I’ve read about the chimp’s owner gives the same impression. There’s an analogy to be drawn there between the jaded, late-sensate popular culture of the West and the perverse thrill-seeking of those who, lacking a spiritual and moral center, derive satisfaction from such perversities.

VFR is your site, and you can do as you please with it. But I think it’s in poor taste to publish Ben W.’s statements without asking him to edit them in the service of simple human decency.

LA to Roland:

Ok, I’ve posted our whole exchange.

Roland replies:

As always, many thanks for the honest and open discourse, sir.

Richard H. writes:

Such a cynical individual you are. I’m sure you would protest that you are merely being realistic, but you have no heart for the poor liberal who is only trying to establish peace and justice on the earth. You know we can make omlets without breaking eggs. (Sarcasm off.)

It is frustrating that leftists (I refuse to call the “liberals” seriously) refuse to recognize what they are doing or what has been tried. They still think Socialism was never tried in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Most should probably be placed in a rubber lined room for their own safety, and ours, alas. Maybe if we get socialized medicine we can at least keep them on their medication.

Andrea C. writes:

Here are two more “happenings” with interesting timing:

1) We’re all doing our taxes now with the fresh knowledge that a tax cheater is the Sec. of the Treasury—not to mention the waste and abuse in the new HR-1.

2) Did you hear about Stephen Fowler on Wife Swap show? I just learned all about it yesterday from a post at HotAir.com. It’s amazing, a true to life caricature of the SF liberal. He completely exposes the liberal San Francisco mindset and its pathology—at one point wearing a shirt that says “tree hugger” while he is cruel and abusive to the Missouri woman staying in his home and telling her she’s uneducated but we need people like her to feed the military. These are the San Franciscans whom Obama told that Americans “cling to guns and religion” etc.

I think the timing is very good.

Maureen C. writes:

Cher Lawrence,

Interesting. I noticed the chimp-attack article but I immediately connected it in my mind to the story running concurrently about the woman who was battered by her boyfriend, whereas you, not being a woman, immediately saw the relevance of the attack to the deluded, suicidal mantras of liberalism. My immediate response was clearly gender-based. Most men have difficulty grasping the wary expectation of male violence with which women—Muslim women in particular—learn to live. In case my “feminist” response leaves any doubt, I found your analogy brilliant.

See the story about Rihanna, beaten by Chris Brown, here, at Story #2.

And this is from the February 19 AP story:

Medics describe horror of Conn. chimp attack

By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN STAMFORD, Conn. (AP)—Her hands looked like they were wrecked by a machine. Eyes wounded, hair yanked out. Face and scalp injuries so extensive, all the blood obscured whatever parts were left.
Two of the first medical workers to treat the woman mauled by a chimpanzee in Connecticut this week described her nightmarish injuries Thursday as she was transferred to the Cleveland hospital that performed the nation’s first face transplant….

“This was a beast taken out of his element and put into our world,” Ackley [Bill Ackley, one of the medical workers who helped the woman] said. “What he did was essentially what they do in the jungle.”

Joseph C. writes:

Regarding your exchange with Roland, if ever America is to get back on its feet, people must stop subsuming the truth and their very survival instincts under the blanket of compassion. The point is not what “this woman and her family need right now.” The point is she willingly put herself in a dangerous position with her own ignorance, and got what was to be expected—deserved or not.

In this exchange, Roland is acting like many liberals. They avoid facing facts for as long as possible. Then, when the facts assert themselves—like the stubborn things that they are—Ronald et al tell us that we should sugar coat them in the name of compassion and understanding. For liberals, reality should not be discussed at the time when an issue is relevant and pressing, and later it should not be discussed because “the damage is done and we need to show compassion.” In short, reality should not ever be discussed.

Ken Hechtman writes:

Regarding Roland’s criticism of Ben’s comment and your defense of it, let’s say there’s a wrong tone to take. You can say “This horrible individual tragedy was the predictable consequence of doing a stupid thing” and that’s fair and factual and a bit unsympathetic but not excessively so.

But if you say “The supreme being and creator of the universe deliberately made this individual tragedy happen in a particularly horrible way in order to illustrate a broader philosophical point” then you’ve crossed a line. Ben W. obviously can’t know for sure that what he said was true but his tone suggests that he wants it to be true simply because he agrees with the broader philosophical point.

Just as an aside, I used to have a friend who was in a network of exotic animal collectors and breeders—specializing in various species of big cats, from bobcats up to jaguars and leopards. They understood very well that domestication is a process that takes generations of selective breeding. You can fake it in an animal’s early life by taking it from its mother prematurely and bottle-feeding it. But that kind of fake domestication doesn’t last. As an infant, the animal thinks it’s your baby, when it’s young it can still be your pet. But after it’s fully-grown, you don’t have a pet anymore, you have a wild animal living in your house. It has not-fully-bred-out instincts to roam and hunt and if you keep it cooped up in a house in the city it will inevitably get frustrated and attack you. This is the point where stupid people will say “I don’t know what happened. I treated him like one of the family and he just turned on me.”

What these people would do before that point was sell the cat to some other member of the network who owned land up north. And again, that guy wouldn’t have a pet lynx or whatever it is. He’d have a lynx that lives on his land that roams and hunts whenever it wants but isn’t afraid of humans.

LA replies:

I certainly don’t think that I know that the supreme being ordered any event. I don’t think in those terms. It’s a way of talking that conveys the sense that actual events in the world frequently impress on people, the sense that there is a larger order, a larger destiny working itself out through events in a meaningful way, the results of which we can see, but the “how” of which, the causality, we cannot see. For an example of how such experiences can deeply impress themselves on a sensitive and rational mind, which then forms rational conclusions about the meaning of such experiences, read my analysis of the theme of Providence in George Washington’s first inaugural address.

Now Ben said of the horrible event in Stamford: “Might it be God showing us in a very real way what happens to our human identity, our eyes and our face when the animal defines us?”

I understand how that seems shocking and offensive. But let’s think further.

First, Ben wasn’t saying that God did this. He was asking a purely speculative question to which there is no answer.

Second, as I pointed out above, to say that God did this is a manner of speaking, expressing the sense of some larger meaning and truth working itself out through events. If someone said in a dogmatic way that God did this terrible thing, I would totally reject that. But that wasn’t what Ben was saying. He was saying that there is an order of things. If people violate that order, bad things will happen. It’s not that God as a person is making them happen, it’s that we have brought them on ourselves. And as I said in a previous reply to Roland, the consequences don’t always fall just on the individuals who are most responsible. That’s an obvious observation from human experience. Were all Germans responsible for Hitler? Yet all Germans suffered collectively from the destruction of Germany that Hitler brought on.

Third, there is a distinction in theology between God’s purpose and God’s will. God does not will evil. But, given the evil that exists in the world, and God’s purpose which is to lead man to good, God’s purpose allows for the working out of evil through events. The classic example is the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph’s brothers committed a terrible crime, selling their brother into slavery. But this crime ultimately resulted in their being saved by Joseph, their acknowledgment of their crime, and his forgiveness of them. God, working through the events of this world in a mysterious way, turned evil to good, a great blessing. God’s purpose puts imperfect and wicked human beings in situations that lead them to something higher.

But this doesn’t mean that anyone claims to have knowledge of God as an anthropomorphic decision-maker up in the heavens saying, “Let this happen, now let that happen.” This is the atheists’ denigrating parody of God. The funny thing is, believers don’t claim to have direct knowledge of God’s inner nature and functioning; but anti-theists claim to! They knowledgeably describe God in bigoted, absurd, and offensive terms, and on that basis reject him.

Ben W. writes:

Two “comments” concerning the controversy I raised regarding the Connecticut chimp and the act\lessons therein:

1. Shakespeare (from “As You Like It”):

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts …

2. Isaiah 45:7:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

LA replies:

But theology and biblical interpretation are needed to resolve apparent contradictions between different biblical passages. Which is why the notion of the “literal” meaning of the Bible is false. Statements always need to be interpreted. When God in Isaiah 45:7 says that he creates evil, does that mean that he deliberately brings evil into the world and makes evil things happen? When paramilitary thugs in Liberia or Sierra Leone chop off children’s hands, did God make that happen? If that were literally true, then God is evil and no one could believe in and follow such an evil God. Therefore, since God makes it clear he wants us to love and follow him, that cannot be the meaning of the passage, “I create evil.”

And this is where the distinction I discussed beween God’s will and God’s purpose comes into play. God does not will evil, he wills only good. He has created a universe with human beings who he wants to be good. But in order for them to be truly good, they must choose of their own will to be good, which means they must have the power to choose evil as well. Thus God creates a world in which the possibility of human evil exists. That’s part of his plan, his provision of the universe. In order for man to be a free being who freely choses the good, he must have the possibility of choosing evil. But God does not will evil; he wills only good.

February 22

Ben W. writes:

The quote from Isaiah was juxtaposed with the quote from Shakespeare. The intent was to show that God creates evil, not for the sake of doing mischief, but to show us in a tangible way what evil is “on stage” so to speak. If the whole world is a stage, then events are staged for a purpose—to teach us. In that sense God can create evil. Paul says that God hardened Pharoah’s heart so that Pharoah would go to the nth degree in persecuting the Hebrews out of which would emerge a view of God’s acts at the extreme boundaries. So God creates the evil in Pharoah for a purpose. Out of which we get the full extent of the Exodus.

The two women in Connecticut played their roles according to Shakespeare independently of our compassion for them. We can still feel compassion for what occurred while viewing with a dispassionate eye the lesson.

Why can’t God create evil for pedagogical purposes? Touch a hot stove and you learn not to touch it again. Take a full draught of Darwinism, and you learn not to let the animal tear you apart and so define you.

Ben W. writes:

The question then becomes did God create Darwinism? Why not? What if God has his primary truth and then he created a bunch of alternate theories for us to consider in juxtaposition to the real truth. So he lets us experience socialism and Communism and liberalism and whatever “on stage.” Of course, just like he needed a character in a role such as Pharoah, he created this Darwin character to play his role. Now we see the inadequacies of Darwinism but that would have to have been pointed out to us by The Pedadgogue. In other words this world is a stage and we are all players in it with our roles, entrances and exits. We learn by comparison and contrast, through juxtaposition and experience. In that sense God creates evil with a purpose. As he says he creates light and darkness, both so that the darkness makes us see the light for what it is. The Psalmist says that the alternations of light and darkness speak to God’s glory and beauty.

Robert B. writes:

Ben W. seems to be stuck in the same way that an awful lot of Catholics are—that whatever happens in this world is “God’s Will”—this is patently false, it is man’s will. That is the gift God gave to us, which you have pointed out. Thus, it is only God’s Will in a very limited sense—in that He created man and gave man free will to do as he pleased on this earth and on this plane of being.

Angels do not have free will and my guess would be that our souls do not have complete free will when on the same plane as God. The original Hebrew (and thus Christian) belief in this area was that souls were free to return to earth and this plane (ala reincarnation) as many times as they wished to purify their souls before the end of time here. The more they returned, they purer their souls might become. When the end comes, the soul is forever at what ever state of grace it has attained—this is what I have come to see as what Jesus meant when he said “My Father’s mansion has many rooms”—that those rooms represent the various stages of the soul’s spiritual growth. The highest being that the soul will sing the chorus of God’s Love for all eternity. Angels do not have that choice, our souls do.

Good discussion, as always, Lawrence. Take care and God Bless you.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 21, 2009 12:58 AM | Send