Religion and Reason

In National Review's current issue, Ramesh Ponnuru's cover article had this gem: "Liberals tend to assume, without reflection, that the rational view of an issue is the one that most non-religious people take. The idea that a religious tradition could strengthen people's reason -- could help them reach rationally sound conclusions they might not otherwise reach -- rarely occurs to them."

Those two sentences speak volumes about the lack of deep thinking on the left. I'd go one step further, though. Few of the liberals I know have ever really thought about their beliefs. Most of their deeply held convictions are based not on reason at all, but on pure emotion.

And therein lies the doom of the left. Meaning well is not the same as doing good. Most of them do mean well, but their religion -- and the doctrine of the left is akin to religion, no less faith-based for most of its practitioners than is any godly creed -- calls for ignoring the actual results of putting that faith into practice. It is here that they fall short on the "doing good" part.