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The Sharia Supreme Court

Did you know that the five Supreme Court justices who voted in a limited way to protect the religious liberty of the Hobby Lobby owners are in the same category as Boko Haram and ISIS? I read it in this New York Times op-ed by Timothy Egan. Excerpt?: God is on a rampage in 2014, […]

Did you know that the five Supreme Court justices who voted in a limited way to protect the religious liberty of the Hobby Lobby owners are in the same category as Boko Haram and ISIS? I read it in this New York Times op-ed by Timothy Egan. Excerpt?:

God is on a rampage in 2014, a bit like the Old Testament scourge who gave direct instructions to people to kill one another.

It’s not true that all wars are fought in the name of religion, as some atheists assert. Of 1,723 armed conflicts documented in the three-volume “Encyclopedia of Wars,” only 123, or less than 7 percent, involved a religious cause. Hitler’s genocide, Stalin’s bloody purges and Pol Pot’s mass murders certainly make the case that state-sanctioned killings do not need the invocation of a higher power to succeed.

But this year, the ancient struggle of My God versus Your God is at the root of dozens of atrocities, giving pause to the optimists among us (myself included) who believe that while the arc of enlightenment is long, it still bends toward the better.

Got it? Even though only a small percentage of history’s wars were driven by religion, Egan wants us to focus on the threat religion poses to peace and good order. Thus follows a short catalog of murderous atrocities committed by ISIS (Muslim), Boko Haram (Muslim), and radical Buddhists in southeast Asia. He draws an equivalency between Hamas (explicitly Muslim, the constitution of which says the Zionist entity must be destroyed for the sake of Allah) and Israel (a secular Jewish state), saying, bizarrely, that religion is the reason both sides fight. And then:

In the United States, God is on the currency. By brilliant design, though, he is not mentioned in the Constitution. The founders were explicit: This country would never formally align God with one political party, or allow someone to use religion to ignore civil laws. At least that was the intent. In this summer of the violent God, five justices on the Supreme Court seem to feel otherwise.

ISIS, Boko Haram, Hamas … and five Catholic justices on the US Supreme Court. There you have it. All slaves of the “violent” God.

If this sort of thing appeared in a college newspaper, well, you could understand. That’s how undergraduates are, dealing in broad simplicities. If this kind of thing only existed to flatter the prejudices of the Upper West Side, you could roll your eyes at the parochial ignorance and sanctimony. But this appears in the most influential newspaper in the world.

This is a newspaper that would never and should never publish a column asserting that liberal Democrats should be associated with Stalin and Mao — hey, they’re all on the left! — because that would be as stupid as it was offensive. More to the point, this is a newspaper that would never and should never publish a column linking the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn DOMA to gay pedophiles and orgiasts, because such a linkage would be outrageously offensive.

But Christians — well, all enlightened people know that that’s how all religious people are, right? Violent. A threat to public order and the health of the body politic.

They’re laying the groundwork. Watch. They may not know what they’re doing. But don’t you be fooled.

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