We've got high school students coming from today until Thursday, but they aren't here yet, so I've got a little time to kill. I thought I'd expostulate for a few minutes on the nuclear problem that Japan is dealing with. I don't think anything catastrophic is going to happen, and, if not, this will be a disappointment to the left who hopes for a serious crisis that will end the use of nuclear power. It's all in their philosophy, and I'll go through it again.
As I've pointed out before in my posts, a major, major key to understanding modern liberalism is their belief in their own intellectual superiority, that human reason (theirs) can provide all the answers to man's problems if we would simply turn the world over to them. This is why the three major enemies of the left are wealth, religion, and the family. Each of those entities is self-supporting and thus doesn't need the intellectual direction of secular leftist elites. But if people are poor, they are dependent. If there is no religion, no God, then human reason becomes the all in all. If there is no family training children in ways that family wishes them to go, then that leaves direction and rearing in the hands of that same leftist intellectual class--it takes a village, you know. Public, state-run education is a perfect example of the left's desires--propagandize young minds in contrary ways to what religion and the family would teach and hopefully cookie-cutter robots will be produced, ready to follow the will of their intellectual superiors. It comes out of the Enlightenment of the 18th century and it's all based on the supposed superiority of human reason--God must go. All of this is simply history, folks, and to be found in their own writings. I've read it and you can, too. But you don't have to read it; it can be seen in their actions.
Since--in liberal theology--there is no God, this life is all we have. We must produce a Utopia on this earth. Again, the left (in its own mind) knows how to do this, and has indeed tried it in places like the Soviet Union, communist China, Cuba, and revolutionary France in the 1790s. And, of course, these were serious failures. They claim, however, that the failures were either because the leftist "revolutionaries" did not go far enough, or, more often, the stupid masses were too entrenched in their traditional, conservative ways to be sufficiently compliant to leftist doctrine (hence, again, the great emphasis the left puts today on public education directed by secular intellectuals in order to re-educate the ignorant populace into more "progressive" thinking). And since this world is all we have and must be turned into the heaven we won't have after life is over, things such as nuclear power, coal, fossil fuels, automobiles, etc. must be abolished; they harm, or could harm, the planet. Global warming is another example. It is being caused (according to the left) by human industry and will destroy the earth. So only government controls (i.e., control by the left) can save the Utopia they hope to produce. Hence, abolish nuclear power, etc., and turn to solar, wind, and other non-fossil forms of energy. This is only one form modern liberalism manifests itself, but it is a significant one.
It's a pipe-dream, of course, and it will never happen, could never happen. God can shrug His shoulders any time He wants to and produce 9.0 earthquakes, and there isn't a thing in the world anybody can do about it. There will never be a utopia on this earth, especially if the modern "progressive" gets too much power. We know from history the terror-filled socialistic dung heap produced when the left takes control--the aforementioned French Revolution, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge, and Mao and Communist China. These weren't "failures"; they were the logical conclusion of a society without God, run by men with no moral compass or conscience, whose only goal was power and control. And, without God, why not? What does Adolf Hitler care, right now, what we think of him? All of these leftists revolutionaries were believers in an earthly paradise and ended up killing untold millions of people who stood in their way, and they did it all in the name of the "people." "We're just doing it for your own good." "You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs," is the way Joseph Stalin put it. But it didn't work--can't work--because of the imperfectibility of humanity. And that's called sin. And that will never be cured, especially by an atheistic elite who doesn't even believe in it.
The most that can be hoped for on this earth is to have some trade-offs. The best life for as many people as possible involves some risks--like the use of fossil fuels, until capitalism--freedom for creativity--produces something superior. And above all we must be wise and learn the true lesson of the Japanese earthquke and tsunami--this life, for every human being, will at some point have an ending. It may come naturally, or it may come by catastrophic means. But that end will come. And the truly wise will prepare for it and encourage others to do the same thing.
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One final note on the Japanese tragedy. A little while ago, I received an email from the high school girl in Japan whom I mentioned in my post a couple of days ago. She had just heard that her best friend and another close friend were killed in the earthquake. The world that we live in can be very sad.