I could only watch seven minutes of Rick Warren's interview with Barack Obama before I gave up. Warren, an evangelical preacher, asks Obama what are his and America's greatest moral failure. Obama's answer is pure altruism, with which Warren heartily agrees.
Obama says he did drugs and alcohol when he was young because he was selfish. He says he had to learn "it's not about me." Warren at that point says, "I like that!" The audience laughs at Warren's remark, which makes me think Warren has written in his books the very point that "it's not about me."
I have to point out here what seems to me obvious: abusing drugs and alcohol are not selfishness, but are acts of selflessness and self-destruction. Getting past drugs and alcohol is quite selfish if one wants to lead a long and happy life. Although Obama's position is absurd, Warren agrees with him entirely.
Obama went on to say America's greatest moral failure was the failure to be sufficiently altruistic, although he didn't use these words. He quoted scripture to back up his idea that we have to help the least among us.
Well, there you have the perfect nightmare, the joining of the New Left with the religious right. Rick Warren, a man greatly admired by the religious Republican Hugh Hewitt, was in complete agreement with Obama's altruism. How can Republicans resist Obama's altruism when they hold the same morality?
From what I read at the Dougout, McCain's answer to Warren's question about America's moral failure was as even worse than Obama's:
McCain said the nation's greatest moral shortcoming is its failure to "devote ourselves to causes greater than our self-interests."
America's greatest moral failure is in fact altruism, the morality of Rick Warren's religion and the ideal held by both Obama and McCain. The Declaration of Independence holds that Americans have a right to the pursuit of happiness. Altruists hold that the pursuit of happiness is immoral and that everyone has a duty to sacrifice for the least among us. The differences between the Republicans and the Democrats are mere quibbling over who sets the standard of sacrifice, God or the state.
Whichever candidate wins in November, the next four years should see liberty in America take some terrible blows. We will be marched down the road to serfdom in the name of sacrifice, with Biblical scripture quoted to justify every step of the way.
3 comments:
Your experience is similar to mine -- I could only stand the first several minutes, up until Obama referenced his drug use and the word "selfish" appeared.
The greatest moral failure in America today is the destructive breakdown of the family. With the prodigious rate of divorce in America you are living witnesses to SELFISHNESS!!!
So, Granna, people should sacrifice their happiness for their family and remain imprisoned in an unhappy marriage their entire life? Perhaps instead they should be truly SELFISH and give the matter two minutes of thought before they enter a marriage and before they have children. The truly SELFISH man learns to introspect well and to think long-range, thus minimizing mistakes he might make in relationships. But even highly rational people can make mistakes, and when they find themselves in a marriage in which the love has died, the best possible choice for all parties involved, even the children, is for the parents to divorce and pursue their happiness. If they don't, then their children will grow up thinking marriage is a union of two miserable adults who stop pursuing values, stop living as humans should live, and pass their misery on to their children, all in the name of "family values."
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