Today at lunch, Don Quixote and I ended up talking about predestination and free will.  Along the way we touched upon whether prayers are necessary (if God is omniscient, doesn’t he already know what we want?) and funerals (definitely for the living, although one doesn’t want to disrespect the dead).  We also talked about the Christian concept of Grace, and the Puritan ethos of living a “holier than thou” lifestyle so as to make it clear to the neighbors that one had indeed embraced Christ and, presumably, been embraced right back.  (I know that’s a bit facetious and facile, but I’m assuming you all are reasonably familiar with the Puritan’s religious doctrine, religious practices, and lifestyles.)

We eventually ended up talking about the fact that God’s enormity makes him unknowable — yet so many are nevertheless certain that they can speak for God, predict his actions, and know his desires.  In that context, a little paradox flashed into my brain.  Pagan gods, rather consistently, are very human, and usually not in a very nice way.  If you cast your mind over the Greek and Roman panoply, you’ll see that the gods were greedy, lustful, vengeful, jealous, mischievous, vindictive, and impulsive.  And always, these characteristics showed themselves randomly.  The one consistent thing about the pagan gods was that they were unpredictable, arbitrary, and capricious.  For all that they mimicked human behaviors, they were impossible to understand.  One could only try to avoid and placate them.  For that reason, just like the children of abusive parents, pagan worshippers weren’t motivated by morality.  Rather, their goal, always, was to avoid abuse, no matter what it took.

The Jewish God was a different thing altogether.  Although abstract and invisible (no beautiful Aphrodite, thunderbolt-toting Zeus, or chariot-driving Apollo), the Jewish God did something unthinkable in the pagan world:  he entered into a fixed contract with his Chosen People.  He imposed an obligation upon himself to make these people his own and, in return, he imposed upon them a few specific, overarching moral rules (the commandments) and a raft of behavioral rules.  He never promised that his behavior would be comprehensible, but he make it clear that, if the Jews followed the rules, they would be his Chosen People and would not be at fault for the unknowable events that might affect their lives.

The irony, of course, is that humans, being human, haven’t been able to resist analyzing these practical and ethical obligations in an effort to reach into God’s mind and personality.  “If he tells us to do X, that must mean that he is (or wants) Y.“  The pagans didn’t bother to try to figure their gods out.  Doing so was like trying to herd cats or collect soap bubbles.  The Judeo-Christian God, though, by presenting humans with a rational template of behavior, gave the illusion that he is knowable.

As it happens, I don’t believe God can be knowable.  All we can do if we’re religious is follow the rules (whether Jewish or Christian), and take comfort from the fact that we’re holding up our side of the covenant.

Incidentally, because I can’t resist a bit of punditry myself, would it be too obvious if I suggested here that modern pagans, who rejoice in the “Progressive Environmentalist” label, engage in behaviors very similar to that practiced by the Greeks and Romans, in thrall to their own unpredictable earth goddess?  Because the earth they worship imposes no fixed moral standards or behavioral codes on them, they constantly take her temperature, trying to figure out if she’s running too hot or too cold.  And if the results of these investigations frighten them, they desperately try to placate her.

The human sacrifices the new pagans make aren’t as immediate as they once were — no people lobbed into swamps, buried in pits, tossed in volcanoes, or creatively eviscerated — but they’re just as real.  Thanks to the new pagans’ decision to abandon the petroleum products that have served us so long and so well, and their desperate move to turn crops into energy, rather than food, they’ve created starvation and unrest throughout the world.  (It’s been a while, but it’s worth remembering that Egypt was ripe for unrest because of skyrocketing food prices caused, in part, by the fact that food crops have been diverted to ethanol.)  If the immolation of large parts of the Middle East doesn’t count as a sizable human sacrifice to the unreliable, arbitrary and capricious Gaia, I don’t know what does.

I didn’t bother to read the entirety of an endless article about a bad thing happening in Mexico.  No, I’m not talking about drug cartels or about Mexican citizens being slaughtered by guns sent over courtesy of a Democrat Department of Justice attempting to prove that guns hurt people.  I’m talking about plants that process old batteries, releasing dangerous toxins into the surrounding country side.  Bad thing, right?  But the big irony is that this bad thing happened because of environmental zealots here in the US:

The rising flow of batteries is a result of strict new Environmental Protection Agency standards on lead pollution, which make domestic recycling more difficult and expensive, but do not prohibit companies from exporting the work and the danger to countries where standards are low and enforcement is lax.

Even when we’re trying to be good, we’re evil.

Americans may be evil, but Nicholas Kristof wants us to know that the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t deserve its bad press, because, over dinner, a really nice 22-year-old girl assured him that it’s a peace-loving organization.  More than that, when he asked her about Israel, amongst other issues, she didn’t answer!  That proves that the Muslim Brotherhood is a force for good:

I asked skeptically about alcohol, peace with Israel, and the veil. Sondos, who wears a hijab, insisted that the Brotherhood wasn’t considering any changes in these areas and that its priority is simply jobs.

“Egyptians are now concerned about economic conditions,” she said. “They want to reform their economic system and to have jobs. They want to eliminate corruption.” Noting that alcohol supports the tourism industry, she added: “I don’t think any upcoming government will focus on banning anything.”

Apparently the charming young Sondos is a more reliable authority than the MB itself.  After all, who can forget the MB greatest hits, a list that includes this:

A senior cleric in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has declared that ordinary Egyptians are obligated to kill ‘Zionists’ whom they encounter.

This:

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which expects to win at least a plurality in Monday’s legislative elections, held a “kill the Jews” rally in Cairo Friday.

Thousands of supporters attended the pre-election rally at a mosque on the Muslim Sabbath, promising to “one day kill all the Jews” and wage war against Jerusalem’s “Judaization.”

And this, from a Muslim Brotherhood handbook:

“The Islamic Ummah [nation]… [is] the most exalted nation among men;…you are the masters of the world, even if your enemies desire your degradation…”

“Jihad and preparation towards Jihad are not only for the purpose of fending off assaults and attacks of Allah’s enemies against Muslims, but are also for the purpose of realizing the great task of establishing an Islamic state and strengthening the religion and spreading it around the world…

“…Jihad for Allah is not limited to the specific region of the Islamic countries, …and it shall continue to be raised, with the help of Allah, until every inch of the land of Islam will be liberated, the State of Islam will be established…

“Then comes the power of arms and weapons,… and this is the role of Jihad…, a religious public duty… incumbent upon the Islamic nation, and is a personal duty to fend off the infidels’ attack on the nation… (…)

The competition at the New York Times is always stiff, but I think that, today at least, Nicholas Kristof walks away with The Walter Duranty Award for most dishonest reporting to advance a political agenda antithetical to America, her values, and her allies.

Was it a surprise to you that Egypt went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me.

Was it a surprise to you that Libya went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me.

Was it a surprise to you that Tunisia went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me.

Has it been a surprise to you over the last decade that Iraq hasn’t bloomed into the Middle Eastern equivalent of small town America?  It hasn’t been for me.

If any of the above surprised you, my guess is that you worked for the Bush administration or are working for the Obama administration.  The first group naively believed that, if you gave people the vote, they would vote for freedom, not repression.  As for the second group, I don’t know if they shared that same naiveté, or if they’re truly bad people.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the Middle East has understood that, for many citizens in those benighted nations, Islamist government promises purity in lieu of deep, violent corruption.  The people there don’t understand the notion of freedom, but they’re very much alive to hypocrisy — and their Imams have been promising that this is the one thing they won’t get under an Islamist government.  Islam will bring them the peace of total submission to God’s rules, rather than the instability and terror of individual tyranny.

For people who have spent decades on the receiving end of arbitrary and capricious pseudo-Western governments, all the while hearing that their faith will provide honesty and peace, the outcome of elections was a no-brainer.  Lacking the one and a half centuries of self-governance that America had before she even embarked upon her Constitutional experiment, the notion of freedom and individual rights has no resonance.  Sure, some understand it, but for most freedom simply means not being bossed around by a Mubarak or Saddam or Gaddafi.

Mark Steyn ranks with me as being one of the un-surprised — and he recognizes how our blindness abroad leads to threats at home.

I’ll add too that relentless PC multiculturalism, which lauds every culture but our own, is de-programming the love of freedom bred into American DNA, and is therefore probably the greatest internal threat we face.

I’m with Sadie, that there’s something deeply off-putting about Obama casually applying the ancient Passover story to the uprisings in the Middle East:

Passover recalls the bondage and suffering of Jews in Egypt and the miracle of the Exodus, but U.S. President Barack Obama says its message is reflected in Muslim uprisings.

In his annual message, prior to his third straight participation in the Passover Seder, President Obama stated, “The story of Passover…instructs each generation to remember its past, while appreciating the beauty of freedom and the responsibility it entails. This year that ancient instruction is reflected in the daily headlines as we see modern stories of social transformation and liberation unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Aside from the superficiality of Obama’s message, it has two other problems.  First, typically for a Progressive, he fails to understand revolts that are keyed to a people’s freedom versus revolts that simply raise up a new oppressor.

In America, because of the American Revolution, our template is that revolutions bring about greater freedom.  However, as France, Russia, China, Cuba, etc., show, our revolution was not typical.  As often as not, a “revolution” simply brings about an equal or greater tyranny.  It remains to be seen, for example, whether Egypt results in greater freedom for the people (since Mubarak was very oppressive) or lesser freedom (since there is nothing more repressive than an Islamic regime).  At least Mubarak was dormant when it came to waging war against Israel and America.

Libya sees exactly the same problem. Gaddafi is a monster but, vis a vis America, he has been a benign monster since 2003.  Now, though, we’re cheerfully spending millions of dollars a day (dollars we don’t have) to overthrow Gaddafi so that al Qaeda can take his place.  Al Qaeda, which is killing our troops in Afghanistan, will not improve the Libyan people’s lot (because radical Islam is always oppressive government), but it will put America at greater risk.

In Iran, I supported the Green Revolution because it was good for America:  anything that rocked the current Islamic government had to improve the status quo as far as Americans were concerned.  It was, frankly, questionable whether the Iranian people would simply be trading the frying pan for the fire.  While I applauded their courage, I had my doubts about their freedom quota.

Not all uprisings are created equal.  That’s problem number one with Obama’s facile little analysis.

Problem number two is that there’s something horrible about quoting one of the greatest stories in Jewish history, a story that has been retold annually in Jewish homes for thousands of years, to justify revolutions that will put into power people who have as their primary goal . . . killing Jews.  That’s just wrong.  Deeply, deeply, classlessly, tactlessly wrong.

In honor of Mubarak’s strategic retreat to Sharm El Sheikh, here is the anthem of the 1967 War, which saw Sharm El Sheikh end in Israel’s hands, a situation that lasted up until Egypt got it back in 1982, as part of the peace treaty:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Has the U.S. ever been so clueless as  it is today with respect to events going on in Egypt?

CIA Director Panetta just admitted that he gets his information on Egyptian events from the media, rather than from his own agency. National Intelligence Director Jim Clapper, meanwhile, pontificates about how the Muslim Brotherhood is a largely secular organization, only to be immediately followed by the rapid back-pedaling of his minions.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/report-cia-chief-based-congressional-mubarak-testimony-on-media-broadcasts/

So, is it fair to blame the CIA for these massive intelligence failures?

What we are seeing is the successful culmination of the witch hunts that have been directed against the CIA post 9/11 by the Democrat Left and their fellow travelers. Remember AG Eric Holder’s crusade to prosecute CIA personnel when the Obama administration came to power?

Were I in the CIA today, I expect that I would be doing everything that I could to take no risks, make no decisions, and effectively do…nothing! And that’s what we have got for national intelligence…a blind nothing.

No, I don’t blame the CIA or any other intelligence agency for these intelligence failures.

Feel safer now?

When I read that the Obama administration is good with having the Muslim Brotherhood on board in Egypt, because it’s really not such a bad organization, I keep thinking of 1930′s rationalizations about Mussolini:  He made the trains run on time.  Surely our standards of decency are higher than that?

Uh, no.  I guess not.

UPDATE:  Yet another example of the “Mussolini was efficient” attitude.

When I read news reports saying that Mohammed El-Baradei had shown up in Egypt as a potential “democratic” leader, I was confused.  Surely this couldn’t be the same El-Baradei who served for so long as the head of the IAEA?  I couldn’t find specifics within my own brain, and was too lazy to look around on the internet, but when I thought of that El-Baradei, I kept thinking of someone who lied about Iran’s nuclear program, and who was relentlessly hostile to America and Israel.

Sometimes my instincts are right on the money — he’s a bad dude, with a bad history.  Egypt will go from the Mubarak frying pan straight into the El-Baradei fire if the latter steps up to a leadership position.

You can read what I wrote about the speech here.  Others have been writing too.

The Anchoress, in addition to her must-read Ich bin ein Muslimer takedown of the speech, has a list of blogs thinking about what he said, which I’ll just copy wholesale:

Andy McCarthy: Koranic text Obama left out
Andrew Bolt: Islam, I am your savior!
Fausta: What was missing from the speech
David P. Goldman: Why Couldn’t Obama’s writers find a peace quote from the Koran?
Abe Greenwald: Not too good on Women’s Rights
Jennifer Rubin: Abudullah is not charmed by Obama
Bookworm: Gives the speech a C and wonders about specifically Muslim formulations
Ed Morrissey: Not so bad; not much different from Bush
Michelle Malkin: Not having any; didn’t like Bush’s speeches here, either.
Rich Lowry: On the whole not bad
Max Boot: Could have been a lot worse
Ann Althouse: Commenters parse the speech
Jake Tapper: President finds himself in Hieroglyphs
Hugh Hewitt: The World is Worse for this dishonest speech
“Yes we can” in Hieroglyphics
Mike Allen: Kinda common rhetoric
Confederate Yankee: Obama’s Brilliant Delusion
Andy McCarthy: Founding Fathers Friends to Islam?
Dana Perino: Comparing two presidents, two speeches
Damian Thompson: Watch out for Christian Terrorists!
Noisy Room: United Under Allah
Obama’s Nixon China Speech
Flopping Aces: Charm Offenses & History
Gateway: US President won’t stand for democracy

Here are some more reads I recommend:

Joshuapundit summarizes all the of ill-informed, fatuous and foolish statements that surrounded the nuggets of smartness and decency buried in that mess.

Rick Moran about the sadness the deliberately or foolishly misinformed speech engendered in him, and Sammy Benoit chimes in.

Ira Stoll, who hoped for better when it came to Obama and the Jews, confesses that the speech brings him to a different point of view.

Peter Daou also caught that strange obsession with the hijab.

Max Boot notes that the speech could have been worse, and explains what was good.  He also highlights all the false equivalencies Obama drew between the Muslim world and the west.  He also deconstructs the little misuse of history, by which Obama implied that Tripoli and the US have always been partners in freedom.  (I bet Boot would give the speech the same C I did.)

Jennifer Rubin also sounds many of the same notes I did.

And Abe Greenwald agreed with me on the bizarre fact that Obama kept harking back to those hijabs.

Here are John and Paul from Power Line, each of whom also damn it with faint praise and praise it with faint damns.

Reading all of these views shows that the issues I picked up upon — the vague mea culpas, the hostility to women, the hostility to Israel, the apparent willingness to protect America (thank God), the false moral equivalences, the bastardized history, etc. — were not products of my own anti-Obama imagination but were, in fact, truly present in an anything-but-earth-shattering speech to the Arab world.

Laer thinks the speech was as good as it could get, considering both audience and speaker.

UPDATE:  I have to add Peter Wehner to the list, for nailing both Obama’s rhetorical and substantive approach:

The best way to view President Obama’s speech in Cairo is to understand the way Obama views himself and the rhetorical devices he employs. In this case, the key to unlocking Obama’s speech may be Aristotle’s golden mean, the search for a mid-point between extremes. Obama’s rhetorical template is an increasingly familiar one: he gives voice to one side of a dispute and then the other. And Obama — our philosopher-king, the Voice of Reason in an unreasonable world — interprets and arbitrates these disputes, putting them in just the right context and arriving at just the right solution. Or so we are led to believe. The trouble is that Obama’s approach at times distorts history and mistreats our closest allies.

The above, by the way, is not just an airy-fairy conclusion.  Wehner goes on to support his theory — and also shows the lies Obama has to tell to maintain this Olympian posture.

Krauthammer wasn’t so thrilled either, and he caught the same point I did about the bizarre comparison Obama made between women in America and women in the Muslim world.  He also latched onto the innanely self-referential quality that is in all Obama’s speeches, as did Benjamin Sarlin, who gives the formula for writing your own Obama speech.

And you know you’re in good company when you make the same points Melanie Phillips does.

UPDATE II:  Soccer Dad reminds us that, as with Sotomayor’s 32 infamous words, context is king.  Also, JoshuPundit also wondered, as I did, if, in referring to Muslim charitable practices, Obama was suggesting that we do away with that little legal provision make it illegal to fund terrorism.