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West Virginias legislature recently passed legislation allowing Bible classes in public schools. The outcome may surprise conservative supporters, according to a Masters thesis written by Aaron Franzen titled Reading the American Bible: Its Role in Liberal Morality, Criminal Justice Attitudes, in May of 2011. (https://ethics daily.com/why-regular-bible-readers-tend-to-become-more-progressive/)

Franzen scrutinized the effects of regular Bible reading on the readers views. Franzens thesis recognizes churches really dont teach the Bible. Generally, they offer an agenda-driven interpretation of select portions of scripture. Thats not a criticism. Its a fair critique. If youre longing for an in-depth study of the Bible, a Sunday morning sermon is not going to satisfy.

Franzens data show church attendance alone has very little impact on whether one believes that in order to be a good person, he or she must be engaged in the pursuit of justice. That comes with the discipline of regularly reading the Bible.

It was my working-class parents who made me a Democrat, but it was the Bible that made me a liberal. You might say I was radicalized by the Gospels and the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament. Franzens study explains how that works.

His observations about biblical literalism are consistent with mine. Many literalists dont actually read the Bible. Preachers and Sunday school teachers read select parts of it to them and interpret it for them. Thus, Franzen decided to conduct an academic inquiry, asking, What effect, if any, does this activity of routinely reading the Bible have on them?

Franzen says, It is surprising that little attention has been given to the significance of actually reading the Bible. Perhaps the Bibles ubiquity promotes the misperception that we all know what it says, and, consequently, reading it is simply a habitual and ultimately meaningless activity.

His conclusions wont surprise those who read the Bible.

Reading the Bible actually tends to have a liberalizing effect on the reader. With each increased level of reading the Bible, the odds that the respondent agreed with the statement about engaging in social and economic justice in order to be a good person went up by about 39%.

Most striking was Franzens finding that regular Bible reading impacts personal beliefs about social and economic justice as much their political ideology. That is, the more liberal one considers themselves politically, the more he thinks one needs to actively engage in social and economic justice in order to be a good person. His finding? The liberalizing trend of reading the Bible is even similar to the effect of political ideology.

Likewise, he found that the more an Evangelical reads the Bible, the more moderate their conservative position in regards to social and economic justice.

Franzen also considered attitudes about the relationship between science and religion. Case in point, those who believe climate change is a hoax tend to be more conservative politically and religiously. At the heart of those views is both a literal reading of scripture and a distrust of science.

Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe is a prominent example. He is conservative both politically and religiously. Inhofe reads Genesis 8:22 literally to make his point. It says, While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.

The senator explains, My point is Gods still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we human beings would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is, to me, outrageous.

Franzen found that Evangelicals are more likely to believe science and scripture are not compatible. He also found the more time one spends actually reading the Bible, the less likely they are to find religion incompatible with science. For each increase in how often the respondents read the Bible, the odds that they saw religion and science as being incompatible decreased by 22%.

Given Franzens findings, perhaps folks should read the Bible more often, and we liberals should join the Evangelicals in promoting Bible studies in public schools.

Rodger McDaniel lives in Laramie and is the pastor at Highlands Presbyterian Church in Cheyenne. Email: rmc81448@gmail.com.

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McDaniel: Want to avoid becoming liberal? Steer clear of the Bible - Wyoming Tribune

Every day, as the novel coronavirus spreads lethally across the nation, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is conducting a televised master class in government that has drawn a wide and admiring audience. Lauded for his elevated and candid leadership, he is underlining the absence of any such qualities in the president of the United States right when they are needed most.

Where President Donald Trump so often sounds feckless, egomaniacal and terribly uninformed, Cuomo appears serious, determined and fully in command of the facts. While Trump dithers and tries to escape responsibility, Cuomo asserts his authority and then accepts the inevitable blame for wrenching decisions. It is all too obvious which one is the adult in the room. Trump boasts of his phony greatness, while Cuomo can rattle off a long list of real achievements.

But the stark contrast between these politicians goes beyond their personalities.

Trump personifies the right-wing Republican revulsion of government, which is why he enjoys the unquestioning loyalty of his own partys most extreme elements. Under his fathers tutelage, Trump came to see government as a cynical game that rewarded corruption. If government demanded to collect taxes owed, the Trump Organization found brazen ways to avoid paying. If government enforced an end to housing discrimination, the Trumps fought in court to preserve their racial preferences. And if government forbade the self-serving misuse of the Trump Foundation or the defrauding of Trump University enrollees, then the Trumps would look for a way around those rules, too.

The family that Cuomo grew up in regarded government as an instrument to improve society and, for those who served in office, a public trust. His late father, Mario Cuomo, who ran New York as governor for three terms, became one of the most eloquent advocates of Democratic Party principles. Marios rhetoric depicted the state as a family, with mutual support as its watchword and pragmatic progressivism as its guiding philosophy. The point of government was not to grab for oneself as the Trumps did incessantly but to achieve betterment for all.

It was a compelling vision, even if his own government sometimes fell short of those aspirations. And his decision not to seek the presidency disappointed an entire generation of admiring liberals.

While Andrew Cuomo too admired his father and reveres his memory, he has never enjoyed the same reputation for intellect and charm. From the time he ran his fathers early campaigns, he seemed to be little more than a tough kid from Queens, smart and effective but more ruthless and less compassionate than his father.

The kinder way to describe him in those days was an operations guy, less interested in liberal ideals or the fine points of Catholic social ethics than in getting the job done. Many people disliked him, especially if they got in his way.

Beneath the abrasive exterior, however, there was always something else that only those closest to him would glimpse. He has his fathers buoyant confidence and dry sense of humor and a surprising capacity to comfort the grieving that emerges on private occasions. Those qualities make a difference now, at a frightening moment when the country needs reassurance so badly.

Andrew Cuomo is still an old-fashioned operations guy, which means that as governor, he insists on science, metrics, data and systems that work. In an era when the news cycle has been dominated by Trumps lies, fabrications and illusions, Cuomos refusal to sugarcoat a dire reality is refreshing. So is his capacity to grapple with the details of governance, which have always been part of his life. These are the time-honored virtues of liberalism. And his service in federal and state positions has trained him for this hour in a way that is true of few other public officials.

We can only hope that his sane and sound approach to the crisis will prevail (and that he continues to succeed in mostly suppressing his true feelings about Trump). We can also hope that even at his age, with all his experience, he is still learning not only about the world but about himself.

What he has showed us lately is a capacity to transcend his perceived limitations and display the decency, strength, humor and inspiration missing from our government. No matter what happens in this years election, a rebuilding America will need such leaders badly. If we still have a bigger and brighter future, then this Andrew Cuomo does, too.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at http://www.creators.com.

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The Liberal Virtues Of Andrew Cuomo - The National Memo

EVER wondered why Premiership strikers are in the main worth considerably more than goalkeepers?

After all, a great goalkeeper can win you matches just as effectively as a great striker.

Because attack is more glamorous than defence: on the whole people watch football to see great goals being scored, not great saves being made.

So it is with politics, which is why the liberals and progressives seem to have all the best tunes. They get to build the great utopias, fulfil the feel-good ideals: in their world it is always year zero, that glad confident morning when it is bliss to be alive. Conservatism, especially social conservatism, seems by comparison deadly dull. In our modern world of hitherto unimaginable plenty, it is not surprising that liberalism triumphed: looking at those pictures of those young hipsters out and about in Londons parks last weekend, it was clear that the concept of serious defeat or hardship was inconceivable to them.

Well, the chickens have well and truly come home to roost. As social conservatives have always argued, it is now apparent that a central problem with liberalism is that it creates a low-resilience society. Rejecting the organic frameworks that took centuries to build, over the last fifty years it has substituted its own highly sophisticated but highly unstable ones, in the process maxing out all our social and economic capital.

An early warning of ultra-liberalisms impending failure was the 2008 banking crisis, when supposedly super-sophisticated financial instruments and the sub-psychotic behaviour of self-styled masters of the universe drove the worlds financial system on to the rocks, a crisis that exposed long-term structural weaknesses in the Western liberal model and from which we have never really recovered. The Covid-19 crisis today has exposed the cascading instabilities of ultra-liberal systems: global travel infrastructure failed to stop the virus entering the country; food shortages arose from the lack of elasticity in just-in-time supply chain management.

The reason is fundamentally cultural: the year-zero minded liberal elites never thought to ask themselves whether there really will always be a better tomorrow. As James Delingpole constantly warns us, these same people, driven by green ideological zeal, are blithely building the same instabilities into energy supply.

The Covid-19 crisis has exposed not just lack of resilience in the capitalist economy but societys lack of resilience in terms of social capital. (Social capital, far more than monetary capital, being the capital upon which all capitalist economy ultimately depends.) For instance, it has been known for some time that single-earner couples are less likely to suffer bankruptcy than double-income families, because there is more redundancy within the family unit. In comparison the all must work model of society used by politicians to boost short-term economic growth has left most families highly vulnerable. With the schools now shut, some people (most probably women)will inevitably have to give up paid employment or curtail working hours, but modern families simply cannot afford this sudden loss of income. At the community scale, our stock of social capital also leaves something to be desired: yes, it is true that an impressive 400,000 have volunteered to help the NHS, but just a few days ago we were horrified by a seemingly large minority in society ignoring pleas for social distancing.

The inevitable consequence of reduced social capital is todays total systemic failure, necessitating massive state intervention and authoritarian lockdown. A very dark bridge has been crossed, and consequently many Right-wing pundits are decidedly gloomy about the final outcome: we will, apparently, inevitably become much more socialist, more authoritarian and more sclerotic.

However, dont despair. Social conservativism can provide an alternative, strangely enough by absorbing lessons first learnt by the IT industry. For many years the industry was rather like liberalism it built highly sophisticated but unstable products. After brilliantly conceived disaster upon disaster, IT developed a culture that hard-baked resiliency into the innovation process and proved that you neednt sacrifice dynamism for stability. Crucially, this required a wholesale change in software development culture. Other industries noticed: after the last banking crisis regular stress testing of bank risk portfolios started to be taken much more seriously.

The result is a more conservative and stable industry that still offers innovative products. It is now surely certain that such ideas will be extrapolated to the economy generally, such as mandating minimum stockpiling of non-perishable goods in critical areas such as food, health and energy, with such vital sectors routinely stress-tested against disaster scenarios.

There is no reason why social conservatives cannot use similar arguments for society generally.Think resilient,to adapt Apples old advertising slogan, should be our motto for all society going forward. The current crisis is a huge opportunity to reimagine social conservatism; we were, in the end, proved right all along, that it is the social capital of family and community that matter above all else in building resilience into society, and the rebuilding of that capital is clearly essential if anysustainablebut dynamicfuture is to be had.In short, we should seek not to stop change, which is inevitable, but to champion the building ofresiliency into change.Liberalism as we have known it is clearly finished, brought down by its own arrogance and incompetence. Arguably social conservatism failed in the past because it was portrayed as the enemy of progress. We can now present ourselves as its friend, and liberalism as its calamity-strewn enemy.

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The virus has brought the liberal chickens home to roost - The Conservative Woman

By Tony Waters 27 March 2020

Miss Burma (2017) by Charmaine Craig is a historical novel that tells the story of Burma from the perspective of a Karen family that was part of Rangoons elite after World War II. The book describes the Karen perspective on mid-20th-century wars in Burma, beginning with the Japanese invasion in 1942 and continuing today. Resonating particularly well is the focus on the betrayals that underlay ceasefire and peace negotiations conducted in the name of liberal democracy starting in the 1940s. This is a reminder that the post-2015 peace industry is not really new to Yangon. As with the various militaries involved in the conflict, the peace negotiators have failures going back to World War II.

Miss Burma describes the backdrop to the violence and peace negotiations in a Burma continually buffeted by foreign influence from Britain, the Japanese invaders and, after World War II, the manipulations of CIA agents. And behind it all is the eerie presence of Burmese strongman Ne Win, who in the course of the novel appears as a brutal interrogator in Insein Prison, a military commander, a manipulator of Rangoons high life, and ultimately the powerful cruel dictator.

In such contexts, the novels protagonists maneuver, are imprisoned, flee, and negotiate peace agreements and ceasefires. They do this knowing that at any moment they can be shot, their body weighted down with chains, and tossed out of a helicopter into the sea. The promises of liberal democracy, seemingly embraced by Karen and Burmese leaders and manipulated by foreigners, are in strange tension with torture, high society, Insein Prison, Miss Burma pageants, movie stardom and exile to remote Karen command posts.

On its surface, Miss Burma is a straightforward story of a prominent Karen family from Rangoon. The family begins as a marriage between a Rangoon Jew, Saw Benson, and a Karen bride, Naw Khin. A daughter, Louisa Benson, is born in 1941. Louisa will go on to win the first Miss Burma pageant in 1956, and in the mid-1960s marries Karen rebel leader Saw Lin Htin (fictionalized as General Lynton in Miss Burma).

Miss Burma really begins in 1938 with the Rangoon romance and marriage of Louisas parents. After betrayal during World War II to pro-Japanese forces, the family escapes to the countryside, and is saved by sympathetic Karen villagers who adopt the Jewish father, and even dramatically rescue him after capture and torture by Japanese soldiers. Following the war, Saw Benson does well in business by mobilizing his Karen family and comrades into a trading and manufacturing company. They become prominent in Rangoons elite Karen circles, at the same time as the Karen become focused on the British betrayal of promises to establish an independent Karenistan.

This leads to the near disintegration of the Union of Burma during the Civil War of 1949-1950 in which the Burmese Communist Party captures the north, the Mujahadin take Arakan, and Karen forces capture Mandalay and advance as far south as Insein. The government under Prime Minister U Nu and army commander Ne Win beat back the invasion at the Battle of Insein, an event still central to the memory of Burmese and Karen alike (though peculiarly missing from the English Wikipedia). Saw Benson ends up imprisoned in Insein Prison as a result.

In the process, readers learn about the elite world of post-independence Rangoon and more betrayals, death, and the ever-present specter of its jailor, General Ne Win. Meanwhile, the Americans play both sides, just as the British did. The CIA is represented by a fictionalized William Young (code-named Hatchet) who supplies the Karen rebels with logistical support, even as the US State Department represented by Ambassador William Sebald supplies the Burmese government with weapons to defeat the Karen and communist insurgencies.

As for Louisa, despite the kidnapping, torture and imprisonment of her parents, she competes in the first Miss Burma pageants, winning as a 15-year-old in 1956 and a 17-year-old in 1958. In the small incestuous world of elite Rangoon, she begins a glamorous but imbecilic film career, and becomes a favorite of Katie Ne Win. Indeed it is rumored that she is a mistress to the dictator himself!

At the height of Louisas movie career, General Ne Win leads his coup of 1962, and Louisa is called on to make propaganda films. In an improbable turn of events, she falls in love with General Lynton of the Karen National Army, a force also sponsored by the CIA. In this context, Western governments entice him into engaging in yet another Rangoon-based peace process with Prime Minister Ne Win in 1962-1963. This is a dangerous game for the Karen military leaders, who are required to go deep into enemy territory to negotiate.

Louisa and Gen. Lynton marry in 1964 and slip into the underground Karen maquis. Lynton is betrayed at a follow-up meeting during the peace process by Ne Wins negotiators. He is ambushed, killed, and his body dumped from a helicopter into the sea. Louisa returns to the maquis to lead his brigade in Karen State for a short time. There she negotiates a truce with other Karen groups. For her trouble her troops are (again) betrayed, and she leaves for the United States to join her father, who has already resettled there through his CIA connections. And that is the anti-climatic end to the novel.

But it is not the end of the story, as we learn from interviews given and articles written by the author Charmaine Craig when Miss Burma was published. Louisa herself receives a marriage proposal from an American and becomes the mother of Miss Burmas author. For indeed, the characters in the novel, while fictionalized, are very much based on historical figures, including the main protagonists, the dictator Ne Win, William Young, Ambassador Sebald, and General Lin Htin/Lynton. Most intriguingly, the Battle of Insein is a real event tooone which is so important in Myanmar history that Aung Zaw in 2009 called it The Battle that Never Ended because it still underpins the ongoing conflict between Naypitaw and the Karen National Union.

And this ongoing Battle of Insein is the real reason expats working in Yangons peace industry today should read Miss Burma. Because indeed, the war with the Karen in eastern Myanmar continues to vex the country. And if the reader revisits the very first page of the novel, there is a quote from an older novel, Graham Greenes The Quiet American (1955). Greenes book explains why the underlying thesis of Miss Burma is not only about Myanmar, but also about the West. While The Quiet American is specifically about the failure of French policy in its Indochina colony, writing in the early 1950s Greene points to Britains retreat from Burma as the best lesson for not only the French, but the Americans as well.

Look at the history of Burma. We go and invade the country: the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but like you Americans we werent colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made peace with the king [Ne Win] and we handed him back his province and left our [Karen] allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought wed stay. But we were liberals and we didnt want a bad conscience.

The Americans, British and other Westerners generating policy for Myanmar today are of course still liberals like Greene described, seeking to project their ideas about democracy and free market capitalism into Myanmar. The World Bank, Joint Peace Fund, International Monetary Fund and Western bankers still seek to salve liberal consciences marred by British colonialism and Americas wars in Southeast Asia. The message of Miss Burma, of course, is that the liberal ceasefires, peace negotiations and development projects designed in the West have been tried before, with the only result that peace was again made with the new King Ne Win and his successors from the military and maybe the NLD. And while the West may well blame the current Kings corruption for the failure of their liberal experiments, the costs are ultimately borne by those betrayed.

Tony Waters is Director of the Institute of Religion, Culture and Peace at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He works with Burmese, Karen and other students in the universitys PhD program in Peacebuilding. He is also a professor of Sociology at California State University, Chico, and author of academic books and articles. He can be reached at[emailprotected].

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Reading MyanmarMiss Burma and the Liberal Conscience - The Irrawaddy News Magazine

Lets start by being charitable and assuming that Liberals in Ottawa, seized by the ravages of the coronavirus and the threat it represents to Canadas future health and prosperity, legitimately believed they needed draconian powers to tax, spend and borrow without the hindrance of approval by Parliament.

Lets guess that, notwithstanding the spirit of co-operation that has broken out among elected representatives of all parties, Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus government feared good fellowship would wane as the crisis aged, patience dwindled and the darker side of human nature poked its nasty snout into national affairs.

Sure, OK, the Tories, the New Democrats and the separatists were ready to grant Trudeau unprecedented leeway to deal quickly with a fast-moving threat, for now. But what if they changed their minds, and the prime minister, down the road, found himself unable to act as quickly as he felt necessary without having to explain himself or justify his actions? So the Liberals slipped a few last-minute clauses into an agreement with the other parties enabling the government to hold onto powers that Conservative MP Scott Reid called it a Henry VIII bill in reference to the unlimited powers of a feudal monarch. If agreed, as Reid noted, it would have stripped Parliament of its normal powers between now and the end of next year, twenty-one months in the future, and long after the health crisis is likely to have come to an end.

Conservative MP Scott Reid called it a 'Henry VIII bill' in reference to the unlimited powers of a feudal monarch

Trudeau, as he does, insisted the government had nothing but the best interests of the country in mind. We recognize that this pandemic is moving extremely quickly and it is an exceptional situation that requires extreme flexibility and rapidity of response by governments to be able to help Canadians and react to a situation that weve seen is moving quickly every single day, he said. Talks were continuing to both get that flexibility to be able to get measures out the door and keep in place our democratic institutions and the values that are so important to us all.

Confronted by fierce opposition, the Liberals dropped a demand for unlimited ability to raise or lower taxes at their whim until the end of 2021, though the Tories remained upset at a provision granting Finance Minister Bill Morneau bottomless borrowing authority. When the deal was eventually concluded, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer noted it included several provisions allowing for checks on the original unfettered powers Liberals sought.

Even if we suspend normal levels of skepticism for the duration of this outbreak, however, one has to wonder what Trudeau was thinking. Hed been having a fairly good crisis until now, shouldering his duties as husband and father to a virus-stricken family while appearing daily to outline government measures and offer what reassurances were possible. Then, boom! He uses the situation to demand a level of one-man rule Canadian minds could only boggle at. Not just for a few weeks until things turned back towards normality, but until the end of next year.

There are lots of reasons to tremble at what this government might get up to with that sort of spending and taxing capacity. From Day One of the Liberals 2015 victory theyve ignored their own pledges about budget prudence and spending sensibility. Theyve made no effort to contain their ballooning deficits or swelling debt loads. Theyve blown past every self-imposed benchmark on restraint and quit bothering to even pretend they have a target date for returning the budget to balance.

If Morneau has shown us anything during his tenure as finance minister, its that he can be talked into just about any new outlay with a minimum of effort. Hes become expert at verbal gobbledygook, speaking with ease while saying nothing, leaving the most persistent interviewers grappling for any hint of his actual thoughts. Putting trust into the tandem of Trudeau and Morneau to practice discipline without Parliament or the press there to bear witness to their activities would be nothing short of irrational. Had the opposition parties given their consent, they should have been hauled up on charges of betraying their role and responsibilities as elected representatives.

There are lots of reasons to tremble at what this government might get up to with that sort of spending and taxing capacity

To put the most cynical interpretation on the situation would note that Trudeaus government is in a minority situation and requires support from at least one other party to stay in office. Obtaining the ability to tax, borrow and spend at will, free even of the minimal restraints placed on elected majorities, well past any date at which the virus is likely to be brought under control, would pretty much free the Liberals of any fear of being brought down. New Democrats love unrestrained spending. It would be difficult to find a spending program of which leader Jagmeet Singh disapproved. Even plans that benefitted arch foes in the corporate or business communities might be accommodated providing adequate billions were directed to long-held NDP priorities.

When Pierre Trudeau found himself reduced to a minority in 1972, having seen his majority reduced to a two-seat cushion over the Conservatives, he discovered that by placating the NDP and opening the bank vaults he could buy a lifeline for himself and his government. Two years later he won back his majority while the NDP tanked. Unfortunately, Trudeau never reined in spending, setting off the deficit spiral that climaxed in the 1995 debt crisis.

Is that what this Trudeau was up to? Or was his power grab just another example of the poor judgment he has shown at regular intervals throughout his life? Thanks to some healthy screeching from opposition benches, we might not have to find out.

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Kelly McParland: Was the Liberals' attempted power grab really about the coronavirus? - National Post