I happened on to this by friend Greg Swann this morning, here, amongst the comments to a silly post.

In the end the begrudgingly-occidental, oriental-by-preference drag-alongs don’t matter. The West, and the world, if the world is to amount to anything, belongs to those who are willing to make critical distinctions. The rest are just there, that’s all.

Then, I happened upon this article via The Independent Institute. Go take a look at it. It really doesn’t serve to excerpt anything from the article because my point here is of a more general nature.

I’m an anarchist, atheist, secularist holder of moral principles based not upon the nature of God, but upon the nature of the ideal man. Accordingly, nobody appreciates the danger of political power blended with religious ideology more than I.

Yet, it seems wholly ridiculous to me that we fail to make a critical distinction between an imperfect empire based on American civilization and any other empire that has ever existed previously, in history. We rail against a president who has the audacity to pray (gasp!), yet we can’t grasp the distinction between that sort of faith and the sort that worships death on earth—to themselves in martyrdom and to all who don’t share it.

Aren’t we smart?