Politics and Society: The Dogmatic Left

September was a black-out month for blogging. Apologies. Now that October is here, let's get started...

A bit more than a decade ago my family started attending a Christian Church on a regular basis. We had previously looked at a couple different churches but the fit was poor. What we found all too often that the message was to simply take things on faith and not to try and understand the deeper meaning if there didn't obviously appear to be one. That's just not how I roll. If all the evidence, logic, and reason point in the opposite direction of what I'm being told I'm going to question it. This new church embraced this thinking and exposed me to a 'higher' theology that lacked the dogmatic assertions of most Christian institutions (though still had some).

This thinking is also how I approach just about everything else, including politics. When I look at conservative versus liberal stances on the variety of subjects that separate the two wings I apply logic, reason and evidence and thus side differently on each subject, which just so happens to fall well inline with most libertarian stances. For example, reason supports marriage equality, evidence offers nothing up to support this being a bad thing for society in fact it would suggest the opposite, and logic dictates that as a secular society the only argument against marriage equality is based on religious principle and so we must therefore support marriage equality. So here I would side with the left, but say when it comes to social welfare programs I side more with the right. When I talk to conservatives about these two differences, we simply agree to disagree on the marriage equality topic, but when I talk to friends on the left I am sometimes treated as some sort of heretic, a betrayer of the faith so to speak, for wanting more limits on social welfare programs.

That is when it first dawned on me. People on the left do not lack a faith system as some on the extreme right would assert, the left IS their faith system. Political Correctness is just another way of saying "Religious Orthodoxy". The word 'orthodox' effectively means "Correct View" so we could just as easily say "religious correctness" could we not? So what then is the difference? Clearly they hold different views but they are basically trying to achieve the same goals. Societal compliance in accordance with one world view that centers around an ideology of ethics and morality that is then used to control the masses of said society. Those with different views are branded heretics, placed on the outside, and marginalized by being slandered and made out to be the sources of evil in said society.

To be fair I know a good number of people that consider themselves liberals but when I talk with them they only feel strongly about a couple left-stances and the others that we might debate they see reason (they are smart people). Most of them align more with libertarians like I do when their views are truly weighed but they feel more affinity with the left and based on such conversations I would attribute this to the pressures of Political Correctness. I often hear the words, "I just feel", like they are more connected with the left, but when reason applies they are more like me, more centered and can relate to both sides depending on the issue. Most of us are moderates no matter which side of the spectrum we fall on

The obvious irony is how a vocal majority of left-leaning voices are critical of the 'Church' promoting one ideology for all peoples when that is exactly what the leftist agenda is and while most Christians in America are conservative or at least right-leaning a tenant of the conservative dogma is liberty and constitutional protections, including free speech and religion essential to this secular society. Most conservative-Christians do not hide the fact that many of their political stances stem from religious principles. Another irony to me is that the free speech movement born in Berkeley is now defended most strongly by moderates and conservatives and it is the more extreme liberal that are recycling the idea of acceptable or "correct" speech.

When reason is applied one cannot miss that political correctness is in opposition with free speech and that political correctness has all the hallmarks of religious orthodoxy.