Ed Miliband has my sympathy. His bulging eyes suggest he may be suffering from a thyroid disorder, and that sort of thing can make one deluded.
Specifically, he appears to have delusions of grandeur – to the point of thinking he is some kind of deity, possibly the Almighty himself.
It’s hard to interpret the remarks he has made on faith in any other way. But judge for yourself.
First Ed said he didn’t believe in God, which is par for the Labour course. But then he claimed he still had ‘faith’.
Now everyone has faith in something, even animals do. A dog has faith in its power to keep intruders away by barking. A cat has faith in its ability to outrun a dog. Both have faith in their owner’s commitment to feeding them.
But when a man uses the word ‘faith’ in the same sentence as ‘God’, then he must be talking about some sort of religious faith. So what’s Ed’s? Thought you’d never ask:
“In terms of faith for me, it’s a faith about how you change the world. And that is actually true for a lot of religious people as well.”
Thanks for making it clear, Ed, and in such stylish English. There is no God, so it’s Ed Miliband’s remit to change the world.
But a slight correction, if I may. ‘A lot of religious people’ don’t think they can change the world. A lot of lunatics do.
‘Religious people’ set much less grandiose tasks for themselves: keeping faith in God and living according to his commandments. Whether or how God will then choose to change the world is entirely up to him.
What Ed effectively says is that he has faith not in God but in himself. This activates a simple syllogism: Only God can change the world. Ed can change the world. Ergo, Ed is God.
Now that we’ve deduced that fact, let’s acknowledge that Ed isn’t alone in suffering from this delusion – madmen seldom are. Loonie bins are full of Jesus Christs, Napoleons and Hitlers.
Ed’s co-sufferers are much more numerous, but they’re all children of the same parent: the Enlightenment. That catastrophic development was all about knocking God out of the edifice of Western civilisation and pretending that man himself is big enough to fill the hole thus formed.
The most salient thing man has demonstrated since then is his ability to do murder on an ever-accelerating scale. But there are gradations within that talent, as there are within any other, and socialists, whether national or international, are without close seconds.
I’m not suggesting that Ed has personally perpetrated any crimes – only that his devout allegiance to that pernicious doctrine makes him an accessory after the fact. It’s really that allegiance that he tried to communicate so awkwardly by dragging God in.
Having demonstrated his grasp of theological nuances, Ed proceeded to establish his credentials as both historian and logician.
His intention, he said, is to become “the first Jewish Prime Minister”. Ed has probably heard of Benjamin Disraeli, who definitely served as Prime Minister to Queen Victoria. Hence one has to surmise that, according to Ed, Disraeli doesn’t qualify as a Jew.
True enough, Disraeli didn’t espouse Judaism. But then neither does Ed, which doesn’t prevent him from regarding himself as a Jew.
Of course Ed made his profound remarks on a visit to Israel, where a Jewish convert to another religion isn’t viewed as a Jew. Disraeli was baptised into the Church of England at age 12 and, if he were alive today, he wouldn’t be automatically entitled to an Israeli passport.
This is a perfectly valid, if not indisputable, view. But the thing is that Ed doesn’t share it: “I’m Jewish by birth origin and it’s a part of who I am,” he said in the next breath.
This presupposes a purely ethnic view of Jewishness, which is as valid as the one wholly based on religion. The problem is that the two views are mutually exclusive.
Disraeli was Sephardic Jewish on both sides of his family, just as Ed’s family is Ashkenazi. They’re both ‘Jewish by birth origin’. Disraeli believed in God, Ed doesn’t. But he tries to disavow Disraeli’s Jewishness on the basis of a strictly clerical definition.
Such a disastrous failure to think logically is sometimes symptomatic of a mental disorder, but we oughtn’t try to medicalise everything. Simple common or garden idiocy is a much more frequent and plausible cause.
I for one welcome this explanation for it tallies with my lifelong observation that lefties aren’t only misguided but actually stupid. Or else so wicked that they’ll say or do anything to advance their cause.
One can only hope that Ed won’t become Prime Minister at all, Jewish or otherwise. That way he’ll be spared querying on such subjects as Judaism, faith, history and logic. And we’ll be spared the calamity he’d certainly visit on Britain given the chance.