David Codrea:

“That is nonsense,” he responded to the contention that arms are needed to defend freedom, revealing just where he stood (still stands?) on citizens resisting the tyranny he now warns against. “If the government wants to take your rights away or imprison you for whatever reason, your owning an assault rifle is not going to stop it.

Trying to take away my guns would be a very messy and ugly affair, and notice how Savage doesn’t say who exactly is going to do the taking.  Advocates of gun bans never consider that they advocate putting someone else in harm’s way.

Mike Vanderboegh has a long and interesting post on Ralph Peters’ book “Wars of Blood and Faith.”  Mike remarks:

Peters’ eye is focused on the world picture of 2007, not the American domestic reality as we experience it now after 7 years, most of them reflecting the neo-tyrannies of the Obama regime. Yet Peters’ description of the elites of both parties and of the permanent Mandarin bureaucracies that serve them is even more accurate today. And the disconnect between their collectivist ideologies /slash/ godless-religion and the deeply held beliefs of those of us who still revere the Founders, seek liberty, and worship the God of Abraham, Moses, David and the Christ could not be any more stark than that between us and the beheading savages of the Islamic State.

As I have observed before, we are a nation divided along the answer to the existential question, “Does the government serve the people or do the people serve the government?” This is a political question, yes. It is an intellectual question. It is a question of competing and mutually exclusive world views. It is thus also a moral question. It is a religious question. It is a question of blood and belief, to use Peters’ words.

I enjoyed Peters’ book and can always take away something from his interviews.  But I don’t always agree with him, and one specific black mark on his book is its tendency to lump all religious view into the same category.

But I too disagree with Peters and his diagnosis of the malady.  I must unfortunately wax philosophical for a moment and recommend that you read the first chapter of Gordon H. Clark’s “Religion, Reason and Revelation.”  Clark utterly demolishes all attempts to define religion by showing how those who would do so set out boundary conditions for the definition that reason in a circle (or assume the consequent).  It’s best to discuss these matters in terms of world view, or philosophical systems.  Christianity is a system, or world view, as much as Dewey’s instrumentalism, Mill’s utilitarianism, communism or any other ‘ism.  It just happens to be the truth, but that is beside the point.

The point is that communism is a faith as much as Christianity is a faith, and it is much of a world view as Christianity is a world view.  As far as Islam is concerned, it is a political faith more than anything else, and a totalitarian one at that.  There are many manifestations of evil, but the most prominent one in politics is totalitarianism.  Separating Islamists from communists isn’t a very useful or meaningful bifurcation, and I think Peters has missed the boat on this one.  Yesterday it was the communists, today it’s Islam, today and tomorrow it’s the contemporary manifestation of communism in America.  They are different faces of evil.  But “there is nothing new under the sun,” as the wise man said.