John C. A. Bambenek reacts to this snippet from the head of the Louisiana ACLU:

”They believe that they answer to a higher power, in my opinion. Which is the kind of thinking that you had with the people who flew the airplanes into the buildings in this country, and the people who did the kind of things in London.”

Bambenek rants:

No amount of parsing can take the meaning of this quote away. The head of the ACLU in Louisiana believes that if you believe in God you will eventually be led to fly planes into buildings, become a suicide bomber, or decapitate people on TV.

I have no love for the ACLU, but Bambenek's conclusion is a bit hysterical. In the first place, the ACLU lawyer is correct, in a limited sense - all kinds of horrors have been justified in the name of a 'higher power' so he is right on that score.

John goes overboard in saying this can be parsed in no other way but "if you believe in God you will eventually be led to fly planes into buildings, become a suicide bomber, or decapitate people on TV". That is hyperbole, if you ask me.

The answer to this lawyer is a little perspective - because the kind of thinking that removes a 'higher power' and replaces with 'society' or 'the state' leads to gulags, purges and re-education at the hands of sadists. When one believes a few eggs must be broken to make an omelet and those eggs are men and the results are mass graves and killing fields...one realizes the insipid narrow-mindedness of this ACLU drone.

Yeah, people who believe in a 'higher power' are capable of justifying murder, but so are people who don't believe. What's more, the death toll from governments which deny an authority higher than the state is well over 100 million souls in the last 100 years.

So really, this ACLU guy well, screw him. He's the kind of guy who'd re-educate ignorant Christians in his free from God fantasy of society.

UPDATE: I take back the 'hysterical' characterization of John's post. I do think it a bit an over-reaction, but it is hardly hysterical. I just believe it is better to agree with your adversary on the way to the judge - that is, the ACLU guy was technically accurate, but woefully narrow and positively shrill in making a comparison between people who are fighting for values through the democratic process and those who fight for values by murdering those who don't share those values.

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