Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

You have to hand it to these American exceptionalist Christians. Back in the day, at the turn of the last century, the cross followed the flag. In other words, the U.S. conquered various territories for political and strategic reasons. Close behind was always a group of Christian missionaries, determined to bring the true faith to the pagan heathens. Usually, there at least were schools and churches and hospitals established, even if the approach was paternalistic and patronizing.

The second-millenium exceptionalist Christians have taken a different approach, as James de Young, a professor at Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon, made clear in a forum the other night. He declared that the U.S. incursion into Iraq, with all the mayhem and chaos and civilian casualties it brought, meets all the requirements for a "just war" and are therefore not only permitted, but sanctioned by God. We had just cause, he explained, to invade Iraq "in light of 9/11." "I don't think we brought war to anyone," Professor de Young said. "The war came to us. . . . "

Rhetoric like this just takes your breath away. First, it sickens you to know that there are people like this among us. Surely, warmongering on this level -- from a self-proclaimed "man of God" -- should bring expulsion from the ranks of civilized humanity. Also, of course, it makes you wonder about the evolution of militant Christianity and American exceptionalism. When the cross followed the flag decades ago, at least you could argue that the residents got some benefit. Now, they get a bomb dropped on their neighborhood and/or a bullet upside the head. I guess the object now is to off the brown infidels, rather than convert them.

Which only begs the troubling question: Whom would Jesus bomb?

-- BUCKAROOSKIDOO

A church in turmoil faces a new controversy with word that James McGreevey, who made headlines as the nation's first openly gay governor, may become an Episcopal priest.

-- GLORIA CAMPISI

There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking. . . .

The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning—but by no means the end—of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. . . . As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.

-- CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

"God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," the new book by Christopher Hitchens, contains one of the stupidest and ugliest factual errors published by a major publisher in years. Some will call the error anti-Semitic; others will just call it woefully uninformed. But it's an error that certainly discredits the rest of the book, for it reveals how little the author has bothered to learn about the subject at hand.

Hitchens writes, "Orthodox Jews conduct Congress by means of a hole in the sheet . . . " This is, as even most idiots know, a total fabrication. As a lie, it's not as bad as the blood libel, but it's not so far from the old tales of sexual perversion in Catholic monasteries and convents -- it's a lie meant to discredit a whole people by making them seem sexually bizarre and far outside decent society.

-- MARK OPPENHEIMER

On any Sunday morning, there are more Anglicans in the pews in Nigeria than in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada combined.

-- MARK STEYN

[W]e are in a civilizational crisis outside the monastery's walls. Fundamentalist religion is on the march, its certainty dangerous, its ambitions terrifying, its capacity for destruction incalculable. In my more realistic moments, I have come to accept the inevitability of large-scale global destruction in my lifetime. The odds against it aren't great. Islamist countries already have nukes; a particularly extreme faction in Iran may soon have access to them; Islamists are not only capable of inflicting Armageddon, they clearly want to. They are not subject to intimidation, which is what makes religious faith at its most intense so powerful. They cannot even be stopped by force. We have learned that in Iraq. Bullets cannot change hearts. It is so easy to destroy; it is so hard to build.

-- ANDREW SULLIVAN