QUOTE OF THE DAY - AT 8:17 A.M. ET:  Reader Errol Phillips alerts us to this quote from author Andrew Klavan, at frontpagemag.com:

Shame and guilt and self-hatred are universal.   Whether you chalk it up to original sin or to Oedipus or call it Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or white guilt or black guilt,  every single one of us knows he is not the person he was made to be.  There are honest ways to confront that.  You can kneel before God and  pray for forgiveness and live in the joy of his love.  Or you can  drink heavily and make sardonic remarks until you destroy everyone you care about and then keel over dead – that’s honest too.  

But what a lot of people do is try to escape their sense  of shame dishonestly by constructing elaborate moral frameworks that allow them to parade their virtue and their lavish repentance without any real inconvenience to themselves while simultaneously indulging in  self-righteousness by condemning others for their impenitent evil.  That’s the bad version of religion – the sort of religion Jesus came to dismantle.  And that’s exactly the sort of religion leftism is:  an elaborate system for hiding shame behind a cheap mask of virtue.  That’s why they demonize any opposition.  To them,  we’re not just disagreeing with them, we’re threatening to tear off the  mask of their virtue and reveal them to themselves.  Which, without  God or sufficient whiskey, would be unbearable.  

COMMENT:  Beautifully said. 

December 11,  2009