The Top Ten Liberal Superstitions

I find that most liberals believe the most astonishing things for the most amazingly flimsy reasons. What I mean is that many liberals accept uncritically the talking points of the left without actually thinking the issues through for themselves.

It seems that they admire someone who is rich or cool or trendy, or perhaps someone who is admired by such people, and they simply take what that person has to say at face value. They are quick to accept what the "experts" claim and loathe to agree with what most people call common sense, which they see as the accumulated stupidity of the human race.

So I thought I would compile a list of the Top Ten Liberal Superstitions. These are beliefs for which I see no factual or logical basis and which are parroted uncritically by left-wingers or those who are trying to impress left-wingers.

10. Anthropogenic Global Warming - the idea that the earth's current warming cycle is not natural but caused by human activity since the Industrial Revolution. There is no scientific consensus despite the best efforts of activists, leftist UN employees and certain climate scientists to gin one up by a plethora of unseemly methods.

9. Condoms Lower the Rate at Which the AIDS Virus Spreads - this is the idea that despite creating a false sense of security, which is likely to lead to more sexual activity with multiple partners, condoms will reduce the number of people who get infected in a given country if enough of them are distributed. Liberals have a weakness for anything that involves replacing the need for personal moral restraint with technology.

8. Abstinence Education Doesn't Work - this idea that teaching young people the benefits of saving sex for marriage couldn't possible result in a higher average age of first intercourse or a lower incidence of sexual activity among teens. This reluctance to believe that teens cannot react in a rational manner to information demeans all of us.

7. Nuclear Disarmament - the idea that all the US has to do is make up its mind to rid the world of nuclear weapons and it could do so in short order through treaties and by taking the lead in destroying its own nuclear stockpile - i.e. the idea that if the US goes first then all other nations (and terrorist groups) will follow suit.

6. Socialism Increases Social Justice - this is the idea that if you want more social justice you should elect a socialist government because Karl Marx was a great humanist thinker. Never mind the fact that the ideas of Karl Marx have brought blood and fire followed by stagnation everywhere they have been tried so far. He represents the future. This idea involves the belief that government employees can sit around a table and devise policies that can be implemented in such a way as to make a society in which everyone is more or less equal.

5. Feminism Means That Woman Have to Become Men in Order to Be Fully Human - this is the idea put forward by second wave feminism that in order to be fully human and reach their potential, women have to do everything that alpha males do in exactly the same way as the men do in competition with men. This means that a woman can be most fully a woman by leaving behind everything distinctively feminine. And this is called "feminism"? Orwell would be proud.

4. You Can't Go Back to Premodern Traditional Ways of Doing Anything - this is the idea that all modern "advances," including such winners as no-fault divorce and factory farming, simply cannot be undone. Progress is a jealous god and brooks no dissent. The Roman Catholic Ressourcement movement and the Baptist attempt to be apostolic are just impossibilities. The idea that we took a wrong turn and need to recover some wisdom of the past as the way forward is dismissed as "nostalgia."

3. That the Definition of Marriage Can Be Changed by Legislative or Judicial Fiat (or Just Because We Really, Really Want To) - this idea is that we can deconstruct and reconstruct the nature of marriage with the stroke of a pen. It supposes that thousands of years of human wisdom from every culture in the world can be undone just because some spoiled modernists believe they want to do so.

2. Materialistic Darwinism Has Nothing to Do with Morality - this is the idea that a whole society can (and should) accept a totally Darwinian account of the origin of species and can still hold to a belief in human exceptionalism and a moral code derived from our Judeo-Christian heritage. I can imagine why they do not believe Christian preachers on this point, but I can't figure out how they think they can ignore Nietzsche.

1. Killing People is a Good Solution to Social Problems - Abortion and euthanasia seem to be the answer for so many things for liberals. Getting rid of the unwanted, the elderly, the handicapped by murder is seen as humanism.

Maybe you have some additions you would rather see on this list instead of some of these beliefs. I welcome suggestions.