by Steve Timmer

Apr 10, 2012, 9:49 AM

Jesus discovered America! III

On Easter Day, Katie said that it was the Christians — and their adjectives, the Judeos — who gave us the United States’ founding principle as expressed in the Declaration of Independence: the equality of persons, well men, but let’s not quibble for the moment. I’ve already discussed the op-ed in part one and part two.

I had intended that this part three would be the end of it, but tragically, it’s not to be. The concluding part will be a discussion of Kersten’s agenda.

But in the meantime, I’d like to consider how the 18th century Irishman Edmund Burke — a conservative favorite — compared Christianity and [gasp] Sharia law:

On one side, your lordships have the prisoner declaring that the people have no laws, no rights, no usages, no distinctions of rank, no sense of honor, no property; in short that they are nothing but a herd of slaves to be governed by the arbitrary will of a master. [That’s Christianity under the divine right of kings.] On the other side, we assert that the direct contrary of this is true. And to prove out assertion we have referred you to the institutes of Ghinges Khân and of Tamerlane: we have referred you to the Mahomedan law, which is binding upon all, from the crowned head to the meanest subject; a law interwoven with a system of the wisest, the most learned, and most enlightened jurisprudence that perhaps ever existed in the world. [that’s Sharia] We have shown you, that if these parties are to be compared together, it is not the rights of the people which are nothing, but rather the rights of the sovereign which are so. The rights of the people are every thing, as they ought to be in the true and natural order of things.

Emphasis added.

Burke was saying that Sharia law was more egalitarian than Christian doctrine:

[I]t is not the rights of the people which are nothing, but rather the rights of the sovereign which are so.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like Thomas Jefferson to me.

I first read the Burke quote in an article or post by Scott Horton that I cannot find at the moment.