Carnal Reason

Once people were ashamed of cowardice, apathy, and betrayal. Today’s pacifist, through the alchemy of complete narcissism, transmutes these failings into preening self-satisfaction. Pioneers in this field were the disgusting Not in Our Name crowd, whose very name proclaims their belief that the world revolves about them.

More recently the so-called Christian Peacemaker Teams have been in the news. Here is the Belmont Club’s apt analysis:

If I have it aright, the CPT would not on principle — if the word can be perverted thus — have placed a call, if they could, to save Tom Fox as he was being tortured to death because it might bring Multinational Forces rushing to violent rescue, an act they would have no part of. Yet they saw no contradiction in precipitating this absurd situation by their intentional presence in Iraq and by trailing their coat in the most dangerous neighborhoods; nor did they think it ethically consistent to refrain from telling the Press of the kidnapping though they must have known efforts to rescue them would be made, despite their well-publicized refusals. There is nothing more suspicious than false modesty performed conspicuously upon a stage.

As for myself, the Christian Peacemaker Teams remind me of nothing so much as Fred Phelps. I think that if ever there were an instance of latter-day blasphemy it must be in the CPT’s hideous claim that their “only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers”. Nothing seems further than the truth. They’ve endangered themselves, the lives of innocent Iraqis and those who hazarded themselves to find and rescue them for the sake of their own self-righteous theater. Vanity, not love is their watchword. Fortune and men’s eyes and not God is who they worship.

Posted on March 24th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: politics, religion