The Stream is running a series of fanciful political dialogues between a native Manhattanite Democrat, “Karen,” and “Obadiah” from Lubbock, Texas. Since Obadiah has been banned from Twitter and Facebook thanks to Karen’s complaints, the exchange takes place on Gab.com — a free speech platform which Karen has joined with the intent of monitoring it for “hate speech.” 

A Dangerous Christian Nationalist

KAREN: I see you’ve been sharing columns by that Christian Nationalist Zmirak defending racism. Feeling proud of yourself for hate-mongering again?

OBADIAH: Once more, you’re advertising to the world how badly you did on the Reading Comprehension section of the SATs. Something tells me that you probably teach in a public high school somewhere. No, no, I take that back. You’re a vice principal or something, and really active in your union. Am I getting warm?

KAREN: He writes piece after piece attacking Anti-Racism. You do the math.

OBADIAH: So by that logic, anybody who criticized anti-Communists like Joseph McCarthy must be a secret Communist. Now I’ll grant that a lot of McCarthy’s enemies really might have been Marxists. But a lot of them weren’t. Dwight Eisenhower for instance — unless you believe the John Birch Society. Are you a member? Because that would make you suddenly … interesting. But I suspect that you aren’t.

Systemic Unicorn Droppings

KAREN: Why would someone who calls himself a Christian constantly be undermining the fight against Systemic Racism?

OBADIAH: Why would any Christian have undermined the fight against witches? Because he was secretly a Satanist? Or can we use our capacious imaginations to consider that there might be other motives? Like … fear for the countless innocents caught up in a moral panic that vicious zealots and cynics stoked for their own profit and power.

KAREN: No white person is innocent here.

OBADIAH: Then no one is guilty. Since apparently none of us ever had any choice. So we don’t need to worry about it. At least, not by any moral calculus that seems remotely rational. Or do you believe in collective, inherited racial guilt? That’s more of Hitler thing than a Christian thing.

KAREN: You can afford to be flippant, since you’re in the position of power.

Society’s Scapegoats

OBADIAH: As a member of the one group — straight white males — which literally is not protected by anti-discrimination laws? The one group you can publish vicious attacks on with companies like Beacon Press, and get praised and hired by huge corporations to browbeat their employees in the name of “diversity?” Oh yeah, I’m really feeling the power. It’s going to my head, in fact.

KAREN: A few feeble efforts by our society to restore some modicum of Justice … .

OBADIAH: Yeah, let’s talk about that. What if I said that I’m opposed to Justice? Prove me wrong.

KAREN: What? You’re just admitting it? I guess that’s progress…

I Oppose Justice

OBADIAH: No, hear me out and you’ll realize it isn’t. What if I said that I oppose Justice as a goal? That I’m absolutely indifferent to racism, sexism, and any of the “phobias” you’re exercised about. I just … don’t care. And I hope to convince more people not to care about them either. I want you to convince me otherwise. But don’t use any moral reasons you’ve stolen from Christianity. That’s my worldview, not yours, and you have zero claim to its principles.

KAREN: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

OBADIAH: That’s evident. So I’ll chew this up for you into very small pieces, then spit it into your beak. First, you’re not some Creationist are you? You don’t believe in Intelligent Design, or any of those other worldviews that sees the traditional, patriarchal God of the Bible as behind human nature, right?

KAREN: I believe in Science, thank you very much.

OBADIAH: Perfect. For our purposes here anyway. Let’s pretend I agree with you. This universe just popped into existence from the Multiverse Generator for which we have no evidence. So we take it on faith.

By blind chance, this universe, unlike most others (whose existence we take on faith) was fine-tuned to make planets and suns even possible. Then on this earth out of the billions of planets, chemistry just happened to somehow bring about life. Micro-organisms just happened to generate positive mutations and useful proteins, despite the astronomical odds against that. S**t happens, am I right?

KAREN: Well that is what happened, as you can read in any textbook.

OBADIAH: Precisely. Those mutations somehow developed entire new body plans for thousands and thousands of more developed life forms, even though we have no evidence of such massively mutated creatures ever surviving, anywhere. But we believe that they did in the past, though that never happens now. And millions of such massive, positive mutations just … happened during the tiny geological window of time called the Cambrian Explosion. For no reason at all.

And what honed them and made them stronger was not the result of any outside input, new information, from any Creator meddling with Science. No, it was just one thing that sorted out the good mutations from the bad ones: Natural Selection. The ruthless buzzsaw of violent competition for survival. That’s the operative principle that brought about mammal life, then primate life, then finally human beings. The strong survived and mated, killed off the weak, and gradually led us from living in caves to developing massive cities. That’s it right? No higher purpose lies behind any of it?

What Part of “Natural Selection” Sounds Anti-Racist to You?

KAREN: We don’t need to invent spirits in the sky to find higher purposes in life …

OBADIAH: Because you just pull them out of the nearest bodily orifice. Or you steal them from the Biblical view of man, and pretend that they’re still justified if He never existed. But of course if He doesn’t, they aren’t. What part of “random mutations” and “survival of the fittest” do you interpret as calling for “justice”? Or “equality”? Or especially “Anti-Racism”?

Have you noticed any of the higher apes insisting on fairness? Of course not. They’re ruthlessly hierarchical, and only the dominant males even get to mate. Nor do the females always get to consent to mating, by the way. In your godless universe, Survival of the Rapists in fact seems to be the rule. Who are we to criticize that? To go against the one unbreakable law of biology? By Darwin’s standard, the best human being who ever existed was Genghis Khan. He had so many wives and sex slaves, he left behind the most descendants. There are millions of them at the moment.

KAREN: This is just offensive….

The Best Man in History: Genghis Khan

OBADIAH: What part of “nature, red in tooth and claw” sounds like it cares about your feelings? Or your moral intuitions? They’re just electrical static in the part of the human brain that seems to have overdeveloped, gone rogue, proved a negative mutation. Science needs to find the brain center that sends messages suggesting we feel guilty for doing what comes naturally. So we can have it removed. 

By Darwin’s standard, again, perhaps the worst man in history was … Jesus Christ. He thought he was “God” but clearly wasn’t. He died young, left no descendants, and only succeeded in spreading some self-destructive ideas that made the people who followed him less fit to survive. So why are you borrowing Christian ideas, repackaging them as secular, and imposing them on people?

KAREN: Part of how we evolved also entailed the search for happiness … .

OBADIAH: Don’t you think people are happier when they’re powerful, and in control? So why should any of us relinquish one iota of power if we don’t have to? Why help other people’s offspring instead of our own?

My Cultus Is Not Your Costume

KAREN: I thought at least as a Christian you’d be happy that non-believers care about these things.

OBADIAH: But I’m not. I’m outraged. How dare you culturally appropriate the goals of the Abolitionist and Civil Rights movements, which were based on Christianity and nothing else, to give your godless life some fig leaf of meaning? Our cultus is not your costume. Give us those ethics back, you haven’t paid for them.

KAREN: This is useless.

OBADIAH: On the contrary, it’s highly fruitful. In fact, since I’m feeling generous, let me help you here. The Woke movement is trying to make adopting its views advantageous on a purely Darwinian basis. If you don’t repeat its groundless superstitions about “equality” and “justice,” you’ll have a hard time mating or earning a living.

So maybe your faction has found its killer app: Use legal force, political pressure, and crushing financial leverage to force people to adhere to secular parodies of Christian ethics, on pain of ending up the beta chimps that don’t get to mate. So their genes die out. Just one flaw in your plan: Our type still has more kids than yours, and we own most of the guns. You’ll have to do something about that. I’ve no doubt that Ivy League schools, federal agencies, and Facebook are busily working up some plans.

But until those plans are rolled out, if you really object to how Nature works, why don’t you go in the forest and try to convince the grizzly bears to become vegetarians? And be sure to capture your first (and last) dialogue on video. Just set up the camera and let Nature take its course. I could use some gallows humor right about now.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”