Blogito ergo sum.

President Bush’s muscular foreign policy – especially the centerpiece of his execution of the War on Terror: the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – is based not only on the (perhaps mistaken) threat of WMD, but also on the altruistic motive of liberating the masses oppressed by radical Islam.  Standing in the best and noblest American tradition, he proclaimed that “eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul.”

 I’m not so sure.

The Statue of Liberty calls to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  Score one for W.

Thomas Jefferson observed that “all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed” – but then declared that enough was enough!  Score two for W.

Novelists, perhaps more sensitive to the human spirit, have long doubted mankind’s preference for liberty over security.

Thomas Mann’s character Leo Naphta put it this way: “It is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart’s desire in freedom.  Its deepest desire is to obey.”

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor accused Jesus of failure: “And we shall give them bread  in Your name and lie, telling them that it is in Your name.  …So, in the end, they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us: ‘Enslave us, but feed us!’  …There is nothing a free man is so anxious to do as to find something to worship.”

Orwell’s Big Brother similarly convinced his subjects: “Slavery is freedom.”

The long insurgency in Iraq, the re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the electoral affirmation of former-KGB Vladmir Putin’s United Russia party, the razor-thin defeat at the ballot box of Hugo Chavez’ attempt to become ”presidente for life” in Venezuela, and even the growing preference for the nanny state here in America, persuade me that, sadly, the novelists are right and the politicians are wrong.

The attempt to cultivate democracy – without the philosophical foundation which only Christianity can provide – is noble but misguided, and ultimately doomed to failure.

To observe America’s embarrassing opulence (decadence?), one only need slow down while Christmas shopping and notice the stuff, stuff, stuff all around us.

To wit, I saw in one store:

• A pair of table lamps with orange, oval shades and black, rectangular, see-through bases.  I suppose that if you celebrated Halloween all year round…
• A Hello Kitty padded wiffle bat.  Would that be for a boy or a girl?
• A furry, pink ottoman.  I kid you not!

This was just a few items…in one store…

Does anybody really buy this stuff?

If you want a bracing antidote to the sentimentalization of the Christmas narratives in Matthew and Luke, try reading the apocalyptic rendering in Revelation 12!

“Then the angel left her” (Luke 1:38).

I wonder how Mary felt.  Did she doubt?  Think it a dream?  A hallucination? 

Did the night seem the same as before?  Profoundly different?

Was she exhilarated?  Exhausted?  Afraid?  Supremely alone?  Did she laugh?  Cry?  Sleep?  Faint?  Shiver?

We know what happened later – the Great Miracle.

But in the minutes after the luminous voice disappeared, I wonder what happened then.

In reporting today’s tragic shootings in Colorado, does it strike anybody else as odd that instead of describing the church and the mission center as “Christian,” the news reports keep describing “religious organizations”?

If they were Muslim, I’ll bet that the actual name of the religion would be prominent, but since they’re both Christian, they’re merely “religious.”

I also wonder whether there will be any talk of these being “hate crimes.”

If the victims were gay, I’ll bet that that fact would have been reported immediately and prominently.

Am I a Christian paranoid?

Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), says about the global warming scare: “The current alarm rests on the false assumption that…our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman’s forecast for next week.”