If Lucifer had a Hammer

Posted on April 27, 2004 in Crosstalk Morals & Ethics Secularism

It’s Politics Tuesday!

After I got done being amazed that people continue to be amazed at Kevin Drum’s thickheadedness when it comes to seeing religious people on the Left, I wandered over to look at the blog of my favorite atheist, Stu Savory. Stu did the Great Books meme that I did and then excoriated. He then announced that he’d been rereading Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle:

It got me thinking about strikes by asteroids etc.: if Lucifer did have a hammer anywhere near here, he’d probably aim it at the RC cathedral in nearby Paderborn, the centre of Roman Catholicism in Germany. That’s only 18 km away, as Death’s Dark Angel flies.

You know, I thought, Stu doesn’t understand Satan if he thinks that. As anyone who has ever dealt with or tried to do good through the Catholic Church has known (cf. Ono Ekeh), the Devil’s already jammed up the works on that one. He wouldn’t target the Vatican, the Crystal Cathedral, the Israeli Knesset, Mecca, the actual HOUSE(s) of Saud, Bob Jones University, Pat Robertson’s Broadcasting network, Oral Roberts University, Liberty College, or Saddleback Church either. He’s got those covered.

No, Lucifer would target the religious people marching in the March on Human Lives or in an antiwar demonstration or in a civil rights promenade. He’d take those out as if they didn’t exist.

Which is effectively what Bruce Reed’s guest post at Kevin Drum’s site has done. Under Kevin’s aegis, Bruce has effectively erased the presence of religious people at last Saturday’s gathering. Why? Because, I think, Kevin and Bruce’s kneejerk elitism fails to discern anyone who isn’t wearing either a cardinal’s scarlet cassock, a nun’s habit, a roman collar, a yamulke, or a lapel cross on a well-tailored grey suit as religious. My experience is that Kevin doesn’t believe that the People exist. He believes in their elites, who he supplicates to herd their sheep to the polls on election day. It’s a chosen blindness — a desire to not see the Left as including people motivated by Faith. The Quakers, the Unitarians, the liberal Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and others just don’t register when Kevin looks. They don’t fit with his tick-tock perception of the world.

Since when is Kevin one to complain about religious tolerance when he doesn’t even acknowledge that leftist Catholics and others exist? This latest ministry of his lips and fingertips just underscores the reservations that I have had about Kevin ever since I met and first started to read him: Kevin’s not about conscience but about obtaining power. This being settled in my mind, I have only one more question: when this is so glaringly obvious, why do people continue to read him? Why give him the limelight and deny it to the people of Faith and Conscience who don’t care about power?