McCarthy: "We won’t have an effective strategy for dealing with the Ummah ... until we commit to understanding what it is rather than imagining what it could be"

Another crucial point: "Americans were once proud to declare that their unalienable rights came from their Creator, the God of Judeo-Christian scripture. Today we sometimes seem embarrassed by this fundamental conceit of our founding. We prefer to trace our conceptions of liberty, equality, free will, freedom of conscience, due process, privacy, and proportional punishment to a humanist tradition, haughty enough to believe we can transcend the transcendent and arrive at a common humanity."

Many more instructive observations follow below, in an articulate analysis of the reality of the Islamic supremacist vision that still seeks to dominate the globe, and of the roots and folly of foreign policy based on wishful thinking.

Click on the title above to read the whole thing at Jihad Watch.

For my part, let me just say, I know a lot of people who are not Christians, nor Jews, nor believers in God of any kind, are offended by the idea that America is a Judeo-Christian nation.


But, think about it this way; there is no doubt that the Philosopher John Locke was an influence on our Founding Fathers. 


From Wiki:

To some degree, the Bill of Rights (and the American Revolution) incorporated the ideas of John Locke, who argued in his 1689 work Two Treatises of Government that civil society was created for the protection of property (Latin proprius, or that which is one's own, meaning "life, liberty, and estate"). Locke also advanced the notion that each individual is free and equal in the state of nature. Locke expounded on the idea of natural rights that are inherent to all individuals, a concept Madison mentioned in his speech presenting the Bill of Rights to the 1st Congress. Locke's argument for protecting economic rights against government may have been most salient to the framers of the Amendments; quartering and cruel punishments were not the current abuses of 1791.

That Wiki can assert such a thesis is not unreasonable. No one would be offended by the notion that a Philosopher would have influenced the American Bill of Rights.


But, Philosophers are merely men who propose ideas about the nature of Truth, Beauty, and Meaning. 


Religious Philosophers do the same, but they rely on notions given them by particular religious traditions and scriptures.


The history of Philosophy is replete with Thinkers who were believers; Descartes, Berkeley, Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard, etc., all were believers. Some of these, Kierkegaard, Spinoza and Descartes in particular, seemed intent upon using Philosophy as a means to find God.


And yet, no one would dispute these men contributed to the lineage of ideas which make up Western Civilization.


Likewise, many specifically Christian and Jewish Religious Philosophers indisputably contributed to the creation of the America Tradition. This idea ought not offend anyone any more than the idea that Locke was an influence. 

Judaism and Christianity are directly are both progenitors of the notion that man has Free Will in the realm of morality. That people who do not believe in God can also declare they believe in Moral Free Will does nothing to change the fact that the Philosophical System built around the idea of Free Will was born in Judaism, and developed further in the Rabbinical era, and throughout the history of the Christian Church. 


The notion of checks and balances is born directly from the concept of Moral Judgment and Justice. For what are Checks and Balances if they are not scales and penalties of Justice in action. The Penal System places Checks and Balances on the Individual, just as surely as a Constitution places Checks and Balances on the System which administers the lives of those Individuals.


The notion that all Individuals and groups of people are equal before the Law is likewise born of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Certainly, the Greeks (whose Philosophical ideas did not appeal to God for Justification) has an immense influence on the political thinking of Western Civilization.


But, the Greeks only granted true equality to Landowners. If a man lost his land, he lost his equal access to the Vote. In this sense it could be argued that the Greek concept of Equality was more akin to a business contract, rather than an actual acknowledgment of the worth of Individual Human Beings.


Anyway, let the arguing begin.