Ethics

Alan Keyes' Historical Blindness

By Ed Brayton

One of the things that is endlessly amusing about those who invoke the wrath of God as an explanation for every bad thing that happens is their total lack of historical perspective. Each new calamity requires a new explanation, fresh attempts by those who seek to speak on behalf of God to discern the message being sent by the latest disaster facing us. We are forever on the brink, it seems, of God's final judgment of our apostasy, a final unleashing of His famously hot temper that we seem to provoke so easily.

It's similar in dynamic to the constant claims that the end is near. One would think that after a few times of hearing such a claim and seeing it fail to materialize, others would take the hint and stop making it. But each apocalyptic prediction seems to exist in a vacuum, as though none had tried the same tortured reasoning before and come up snake eyes. This is what I thought as I read this column by Alan Keyes.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on June 08, 2009 (boomark / email).