Well said. Nor would it be a stretch to say that a significant amount of Leftist thinking derives from a reaction against Christianity.

I love the contrast between the well-known staple of orthodox Marxism that calls religion the opiate of the people, and Czeslow Milosz’s response – that the real opiate is the idea that there is no life after death, no higher power to answer to, no day of reckoning for the evil that men do.

This isn’t really what the doctrine of original sin means, even ignoring the “imaginary people” snark.

The Founders believed enough in the practical implications of original sin that they created a system of checks and balances to disperse the power in government among various groups, and to give each branch of the federal govt specific means to restrain the other branches. If the Founders had subscribed to a view of man as innately good, the Constitution would be a radically different document.

I will agree insofar as the “four legs good, two legs bad” mentality and moral relativism are hallmarks of the contemporary Western Left, but I don’t think these things are primarily outworkings, even distorted ones, of Christianity. The Left is hugely populated by secularists whose beliefs about man, morality, the universe, and God (or the non-existence thereof), descend variously from Darwin and French and German philosophers. C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man” does a good job, I think, tracing the consequences of those ideas, which were not rooted in Christianity but stood in direct opposition to it.

The Christian Left is the only segment of the Left that really gives any kind of a sincere rip about what Jesus said. And to the extent that any of them do parrot the “Judge not” verse, it is in ignorance (or convenient airbrushing) of all the other many, many verses in which Jesus talks about judgment and damnation. A non-judgmental Jesus is the actual “imaginary person” in this scenario.

The Left has also appropriated a lot of ideas from Eastern philosophy and spiritual traditions, as well as pre-Christian animist beliefs.

Orthodox Christianity is not only not the ideological fount of the modern Western Left, it is and has always been the natural enemy thereof. Name the issue — morality, sexuality, sanctity of life, the place of man in the larger world — and you will find the two groups inevitably on opposite sides of the divide.

He’d rather those people had died? Such a withered and twisted soul.

When “Schindler’s List” came out, I was singing its praises to a a Jewish friend, who was unimpressed. “These Hollywood Jews,” he said. “It takes them 50 years to make a movie about the Holocaust and when they do, the hero’s a Nazi.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoJRLStD9c