The Kavanaugh hearing and the true danger of Godless Communists

Watching the Kavanaugh hearing, it’s obvious that Leftists who don’t believe in eternal damnation have no internal brakes stopping their evil behavior.

Kavanaugh Godless Communists Hand of God and Adam MichaelangeloIn 1954, Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, something it did as a direct rebuke to Godless communism. I never really focused on the “Godless” part of the phrase “Godless communism.” To me, communism was the scourge, and the Godless part was almost akin to a verbal twitch or perhaps a clear identifier. They’re not just communists! They’re Godless communists!

Thinking about it, though, the phrase “Godless Communist” has a deeper meaning than I first realized. To the extent that America was founded as a nation beholden to God (even though the First Amendment thankfully) ensured that the federal government could not impose religious values, rituals, or doctrines on people, communism was not only an economic threat, it was also cultural threat.

Communism’s war on God undermined everything America stood for: A nation that took directly from the Creator Himself the self-evident truths underlying its ideals. Without a Creator, those self-evident truths become mere wishful thinking. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as meaningless and ephemeral as any garden-variety slogan.

“Now, more than ever!” “Just Do It!” “Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.” “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — on sale now until supplies run out if you vote for your local Democrat politician.”

Looking at the Kavanaugh hearings, though, I can see an even deeper implication to the dangers lurking behind Godless Communism. God is a moral brake. Without God, one may have rules, but they are simply man-made strictures with which men comply or avoid depending upon consequences from . . . other men.*

After all, there is no moral imperative regarding right turns on red. In some states, you can; in some states, you can’t. And in those states in which right turns on red are barred, what stops us isn’t any moral sense of wrongness, it’s the fear of getting caught and having to pay an expensive ticket. Some of our rules look back to the Bible (“thou shalt not murder,” “thou shalt not steal,” but we enforce them from a civil, not a religious perspective.

Again, I’m grateful that our First Amendment keeps the judge from intoning that, not only are you going to prison, but you’re also going to Hell. Having said that, though, I prefer a population that thinks Hell is part of the mix to one that doesn’t. Again, government can be scary, but only if it catches you. An all-seeing, all-knowing, ethical God always catches you.

I’ve mentioned before in connection with the hearings that Kavanaugh is an openly devout man. His faith is an integral part of his life. I think his is a true and deep faith, rather than hypocritical posturing. (I can’t help think of Obama “not really listening” in Rev. Wright’s church as the latter excoriated America.) If I am correct, Kavanaugh truly believes there is a God.

Given that Kavanaugh believes in the Christian God, he also believes he has a soul, an eternal, existential part of himself that will return to God after he sheds his physical being. The extension of this thinking is that Kavanaugh also believes that his behavior on this earth has consequences extending far beyond his short mortal time.

This belief system means that Kavanaugh, when he determines on a course of action, isn’t just thinking about whether he’s breaking a rule and might get caught. He has greater concerns than fines, imprisonment, or even death. Earth is only a short part of the soul’s journey. The longest part is afterwards, when the ultimate reckoning comes.

In that ultimate reckoning, while God probably discounts illegal right turns on red, Kavanaugh knows that he will have to answer to his God for bigger things: Did he try to rape a girl? Is there evil behind his decision to coach his children’s basketball teams? Did he lie under oath? If he made the wrong choices as to any of those questions, it’s not just a Supreme Court appointment or basketball coaching on the line; it’s eternity.

Kavanaugh, of course, is imperfect, as we all are, but I believe (and this is my bias showing) that his true faith means he will not commit evil acts. For that reason, I do not believe that he tried to rape a girl, or that he’s a nasty pedophile sneaking peaks under little girls’ basketball uniforms, or that he would deliberately lie under oath. As to all his behaviors, his soul is at stake and, as a believing man, he’s not going to play games on earth and thereby risk all eternity.

The opposite is true if you’re a Godless Communist. For communists, the only Heaven is the one you create on earth. Moreover, because this earthly Heaven is so important — it’s the only one they’re going to get and they want it in their mortal lifetimes — there are no brakes to their behavior. If bringing about Heaven requires lying, cheating, defaming people, destroying reputations, or even killing, it’s okay. If these tactics succeed, they’ve got their statist Heaven right there in front of them. Indeed, if they’re a Mao or Castro or any other communist dictator, they not only get to create that Heaven, they get to reap the rewards of unlimited wealth and power. Woo-hoo!

And what about what happens to the Godless Communist if he fails to achieve this Heaven on earth? He certainly doesn’t have to worry about eternal damnation because, if you’re a Godless Communist, your acts — the lying, cheating, defaming, killing — are a problem only if you’re caught and punished. God isn’t a brake on your immoral, unethical, cruel behavior . . . because there is no God. Woo-hoo! All you need to worry about is those man-made rules.

But here’s the cool thing if you’re a Leftist in America: The man-made rules never touch you!

Drunkenly drive a car into a river and leave a woman to drown? No worries. You’ll become the lion of the Senate.

Be a Grand Kleagle Beagle in the black-lynching KKK? No worries. You’ll become the conscience of the Senate.

Routinely sexually harass women, possibly rape a woman, sell access to the White House and technological secrets to the Chinese, have an utterly indecent relationship in the Oval Office with a woman young enough to be your child, and routinely fly off to an island known as “Pedophile Island” without your bodyguards? No worries. You’ll become your party’s revered elder statesmen.

Engage in insider trading, sell access to the White House, destroy women who try to speak up about sexual assault and rape, sell access to the State Department, load all of the State Department’s secrets onto an unsecured private email system, and vanish when an American consulate is under siege? No worries. You’ll become the famed martyr who should have been president.

Allow a Chinese spy to drive you all over the place for 20 years, even as you and your husband make bank off of business with China? No worries. You’ll still be seated in the Senate until you’re a nonagenarian and have to be carried out feet first.

For American Leftists, there are no consequences. None. For the most powerful of them, if they succeed, they’ve created their Heaven on earth, complete with wealth and power for themselves, never mind all the little people who get destroyed. If they lose, no matter how many laws they’ve broken or lives they’ve destroyed along the way, they still create wealth and power for themselves. There is no punishment on earth and they’re never worried about facing eternal damnation.

Some may pay lip service to God, but it’s pretty clear that their God is government. That’s how Obama could hear Wright preach hatred for 20 years without turning a hair. That’s how Nancy Pelosi, who is ostensibly Catholic, can call abortion “sacred.” And that’s how Chelsea Clinton, who’s the political equivalent of a mafia princess or Hugo Chavez’s daughter, can earnestly tell people that it would be “un-Christian” to end the mass slaughter of American babies (especially, one must add, minority babies). Their Christianity, like the “official” Russian Orthodox church during in the Soviet Union, is in service to the state, not in service to the Judeo-Christian God.

While Leftist foot soldiers don’t get all the perks their leaders get, the same calculation holds true for them. In service to the god of government, they have repeatedly proven that they have no stopping points. Lying, cheating, defaming, verbally and physically attacking people — it makes no difference. If they’re successful, they shut down speech, destroy men, intimidate people trying to eat or shop or sleep, get flakey Flake to back away from his teeny outburst of principled behavior, and generally run riot in the public square. If they’re arrested, they consider that a badge of success, especially because they’ll never actually have to serve time for their lawless activity. Across America, prosecutors wait until the dust settles, and then either decline to prosecute at all or extract meaningless fines, no matter the havoc these foot soldiers wreak.

If you are a person whose guiding principle is that the ends justify the means, you are dangerous. You’re even more dangerous, though, if you believe that there will never be any reckoning for your conduct, whether here or in the hereafter.

Dennis Prager likes to say that he believes in God in part because without God he would have no hope. There is so much injustice on earth — not petty little things like microaggressions but real injustice, such as the mass slaughter of children and subjugation of women in Africa and the Middle East — and so often that injustice receives no punishment on earth. He says that the only thing that allows him to get up in the morning is knowing that, in the afterlife, justice will be served. The good will receive their everlasting reward and the evil their everlasting punishment. It would help if more people believed that.

Incidentally, I know that there are highly moral atheists and self-styled pagans. However, their morality is a personal choice. They can walk away from it. Crystals, Gaia, and the great Nothingness that is atheism do not make moral demands in the same way that the Ten Commandments do. Believers, however, always know that something greater than they are is watching over their shoulder.

I believe, incidentally, that Hinduism and Buddhism also make moral demands on the faithful although I know too little about those belief systems to understand either the demands or the post-life consequences. As for Islam, its imprecations are too tied in with punishing unbelievers for me to have much hope that it reliably functions as a moral brake on evil behavior. Rather, as my cousin the prison chaplain said of prisoners who “convert” to Islam,

It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they similarly [sic] remain the angry judgmental vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.

Substitute socialist for Muslim and government for “religious,” and you’ve pretty much described every Leftist too.

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* I hope it’s obvious that I’m using the terms “man” and “men” here in the old-fashioned, generic sense of “humankind,” which is too awkward a phrase for my preferred writing.