Even with a very long lifetime you have, at the most, only about 200,000 hours of time to accomplish your plans. Lothar Seiwert La Aboco de Temploplanado (my translation)
Just how much time does the left think it has to waste? In a recent Nation blog post by Reed Richardson (scroll down the page) he talks about the ubiquity of angry outrage as the predominant form of right-wing discourse by way of reviewing a book by Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj on that topic. I would recommend reading Richardson's post because he makes some important points about how democracy is, in fact, endangered by the promotion of hate-talk. He began with this:
Find out what a society gets angry about and you’ll find out what it thinks, who it cares about, and how fairly—or not—it functions. Does its anger dwell on isolated actions or does it challenge systemic ideas? Is it mostly directed at individuals or institutions? Is it driven from the bottom up or the top down? Does it seek change or simply retribution? Make no mistake, public anger is a necessary element of civil society and can be a public good, but not if it never does any good—if it’s only ever about settling scores, gathering scalps, documenting gaffes, and calling on others to apologize.
Richardson does criticize the authors who, presented with the oceans of right wing hate-talk media, concentrate far too much on the pint or so of left-wing hate talk in the broadcast and cabloid media. But if he had included leftish blogs and websites, he could have found quite a bit of angry hate talk.
It goes without saying, if he'd considered neo-atheism he would have been able to talk about the enormous amount of that which pours fourth as polluted waters from the would-be temple of reason, the alleged left. Curious to see what I might see on Alternet's front page after I read Richardson's blog, it was covered with the angry, unhinged hate talk of Valerie Tarico, Dan Arel, Katie Halper, C. J. Wereleman, Greta Christina and at that I decided to stop counting. And that is just on Alternet. The Nation and other old line leftish media regularly carries anti-religious invective and mockery, saying things about, almost exclusively, Christians that if they were said about Jews or Muslims or Hindus, Buddhists, animists by conservatives would make any honest list of hate talk.
Richardson is right that the anger the media sells to people does have a real life effect, a real life, POLITICAL effect. And he notes the reason that there is so much hate talk in the media, hate sells. I strongly suspect that anti-religious hate-talk accounts for most of Alernet's traffic. I strongly suspect that is true whenever a blog or online magazine spouts it. The choice by leftish media to do that means that they are not featuring other content that might have more of an effect than attracting the mighty 2.4% of atheists (less, actually, considering that many atheists are right-wingers) to badmouth the well over 90% who are either religious or don't share their addiction to several 2-minute-hates every day.
He quotes the Berry and Sobieraj to make that point:
Outrage discourse and programming may be effective at increasing advertising revenue and political support, but our research suggests that the mainstreaming of outrage in American political culture undermines some practices vital to healthy democratic life. […]
In this arena, issues of import to fans are used for maximum emotional impact, such that tiny niche issues are reshaped into scandals and significant developments that are less ideologically resonant are dismissed as trivial or ignored
The resources of the left, notably lacking lavish support from billionaires and ownership of the American media, are absurdly wasted on servicing the enthusiasm for conceited hatred and the eternal angry teenager music that is the lyric of neo-atheism.
If anti-religious invective were going to work for the left it would have reaped its greatest success in the former Soviet Union where entire generations grew up being constantly exposed to the neo-atheist line of propaganda with the full force of the state and the state media. But, as soon as that anti-democratic regime fell - neither a democratic-atheistic paradise nor a more democratic religious society resulted. The atheist paradise froze things in place, solidly in the past. The religion-based reform movements that rose in liberal Christianity in the 18th and 19th century, which were the force behind what liberal reform that has been accomplished, doesn't seem to have happened there. I know members of what are considered conservative denominations here who are decades ahead of the post-Soviet states and certainly far more morally obligated to respect democracy than any atheist state is. Considering how much of the allegedly leftist anti-religious impetus comes from the remnants of the absurd romanticization of Marxism*, in all of their hypocritical counterproductivity, the continuation of it, in the face of the century and a half of its failure, constitutes an enduring psychosis. Why would they expect it will produce anything else? It has always tried to power itself into a majority position on the assertions of its sciencyness, just as it does today. But the only thing it has ever really had was its impotent ridicule.
I think that the enormous amount of anti-religious hate-talk on the left is a symptom of why the left doesn't win, and it isn't merely because that hate-talk distracts from important things like wining elections and changing laws. Though it certainly has worked against the left and has been an enormous help for the right. I think it is a symptom of a fatal refusal of the left to actually be a real, egalitarian, left instead of a lazy, self-centered leftish libertarianism.
The gospel of Jesus is hated by the pseudo-left because it constitutes a far more powerful program of far more proven success than the various materialist contenders for what comprises a "real" left. It is hated on an individual basis because it imposes requirements of self-sacrifice on believers that are not welcome by the affluent on the would-be left anymore than a rigorous assertion of his gospel is to the pseudo-Christian right. It was no more welcomed by royalty and the nobility of the middle-ages, the oligarchic aristocrats of the later ages when the hereditary rule of them gave way to elected governments or the aspiring members of today's elites, not even in those just hanging on to the lower levels of that in academia.
The gospel of Jesus, based in the Jewish Law, in regard to how human beings are to act to each others, is radically egalitarian in a way that no proposed, allegedly scientific, successor is. If you treat others as you would have them treat you, you cannot enslave people, you cannot subjugate them, you cannot allow them to starve or linger in misery of material necessities. You can't even merely placate your conscience that you have made some theoretical provision of subsistence for the "deserving poor" in the manner of the aristocratic British socialists - who Marilynne Robinson noted were obsessed with reducing the poor to absolute destitution before they provided any assistance. You must provide them with what you would be provided with. Which is entirely more radical than anything Marx or any of his materialist colleagues require. And it is a requirement for believers because it is more than merely a position of intellectual ideology, it is a commandment of God.
* Isn't it time for the left to face the fact that Marx was not a democrat and that Marxism was merely a different kind of dictatorship, one that proved to be as capable of all the same corruptions of every other form of dictatorship, as anyone who had experienced even limited democracy, could have predicted a dictatorship would become? The absurd pursuit of Marxism by the anti-religious left should have long ago been considered a sign that they weren't really any alternative to the far right, they would just produce a different form of serfdom.
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