Was Leo Strauss an Idiot?

by Robert L. Johnson

Leo Strauss, pictured at left, the founding father of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) based neoconservative movement, is too often talked about and written about as being some sort of intelligent profound philosopher and thinker. The reality of it is that Strauss was a man who actually took the myths and lies found in the Hebrew Bible as factual. Only a non-thinker could do that!

In his speech and essay Jerusalem and Athens, Strauss writes regarding the fall of man Bible bilge, "Thus the stage was set for the fall of our first parents. The first move came from the serpent, the most cunning of all the beasts of the field. It seduced the woman into disobedience and then the woman seduced the man. The seduction moves from the lowest to the highest."

To paraphrase Clarence Darrow, isn’t anyone surprised that a serpent or snake is talking??? What intelligent person is going to buy into this nonsense??? And personally, I’ve never heard of a snake being classified as a "beast of the field".

As is the case in all the Abrahamic "revealed" religions, women do NOT fare too well. As Strauss points out, women in his example are below men and above serpents!

Strauss goes on to write, "According to the serpent’s assertion, knowledge of good and evil makes man immune to death, but we cannot know whether the serpent believes this." This is the kind of trash and mental excrement that the Bible is full of! Wondering what a talking snake believes! This mind-set is what drives the people in our governments to do such insane things as starting unnecessary wars! When you abandon your God-given reason you’re capable of doing almost anything. And if the population is full of people that take crap like this seriously, the government definitely won’t have a hard time leading them any where they want, into any war they want!

After Strauss points out that the Bible god doesn’t want intelligent people in his garden who dare to eat of the tree of wisdom, he moves on to the tree of life. He seriously writes and said that after Eve and Adam ate of the tree of wisdom, "As a consequence, there was now the danger that man might eat of the tree of life and live forever." This is worse than Ponce de Leon who found Florida while he was looking for the fountain of youth! What kind of mind takes myths like this seriously? Is it the kind of mind you want deciding what kind of society we’re going to have, what kind of society and world your children and grandchildren are going to live in? This is what the neocons and plutocrats are doing. They’re molding society through the strong arm of government to fit the Hebrew Bible based neoconservative vision for society.

One of the very funny Biblical absurdities is how long it claims that people lived. For example, it says that Adam lived to be 930 years old!

There are many such unreasonable Biblical claims, such as Jared who the Bible says lived for 962 years! The people who are said to have lived for centuries and centuries were before God had realized what a mistake he had made by making us, which then prompted him to kill every man, woman, child, and unborn baby by drowning with the exception of Noah and his family and two of every animal on the planet that he somehow managed to collect and load into the mythical ark. (This reminds me of a joke Thomas Paine included in his outstanding book on God, religion and Deism, The Age of Reason: "Do you believe in Noah - ah NO!") The gullible Strauss, father of the neocons and the policy makers who lead us to war in Iraq and the Middle East, doesn’t even question this Biblical boner! In the same essay/speech he writes, "Man’s antediluvian longevity was a relic of his original condition. Man originally lived in the garden of Eden, where he could have eaten of the tree of life and thus have become immortal. The longevity of antediluvian man reflects this lost chance." The only way to believe nonsense like this is to throw your God-given reason out the window!

To really demonstrate the danger of the Bible and the neocons to liberty and true freedom, all we have to do is read the following quote from Strauss, "God as it were experimented, for the instruction of mankind, with mankind living in freedom from law. This experiment, just as the experiment with men remaining like innocent children, ended in failure. Fallen or awake, man needs restraint, must live under law." Whose law, you may wonder. The answer is Israel’s law through the Hebrew Bible.

Since Strauss’ students, people such as Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and many others, are true believers in Strauss and the Hebrew Bible and the neocon nightmare, they truly believe that the Jews are God’s chosen people, "above all people that are upon the face of the earth." (Deuteronomy 7:6).  And they truly believe that the Palestinians (AND OTHERS) have no right to their land because the god of the Jews gave it to the Jews, as Strauss himself writes, when "Canaan, whose land came to be the promised land, was cursed because of Ham’s seeing the nakedness of his father Noah. . . only after Abraham’s offspring will have become a great nation will the land of Canaan be given to them forever." This is why there will not be peace in the Middle East or in the world, because people are still so taken in by the absurdities in the Bible that they truly believe that God gave all that land, "from the river of Egypt as far as the great river the Euphrates. The land of the Kenites, Kenizites, Kadmonites; the Chitties, Perizites, Refaim; the Emorites, Canaanites, Gigashites and Yevusites" to the Jews. This means that to fully occupy the land the Jewish god gave to the Jews, Israel’s borders will have to expand to include large parts of Egypt, Syria and Jordan! And of course this means much more war, much more suffering, and much more death. If Bible believing voters don’t come to realize that God has nothing to do with the Bible, these wars will take place just as assuredly as Iraq was invaded. It’s up to us to educate sincere people to what the religions and governments are doing to them and their children in the name of the god of the Hebrew Bible.