A friend just sent me a list of quotations this person had compiled asking me to decide whether each was uttered by Bill Barr or Ayatollah Khomeini. It was surprisingly difficult. I got 13 correct out of 15.
Ok, people want the list of quotations. Here it is. Note: while the friend is someone I trust a great deal, I have not personally checked the provenance of these quotations. Let’s see how the internet does with them.
1. “It is hard to resist the constant seductions of our contemporary society.”
“This conviction, this morality, these laws that are needed, we already possess. So as soon as someone goes somewhere or invents something, we should not hurry to abandon our religion and its laws, which regulate the life of man and provide for his well-being in this world ...
... and the hereafter.”
3. The problem is not that religion is being forced on others. The problem is that irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.
4. In the world there is no democracy better than our democracy
5. Modern secularists dismiss this idea of morality as other-worldly superstition imposed by a kill-joy clergy.
6. If you have divine motives, material benefits will follow suit but they are no longer material; they have become divine.
7. In the past, when societies are threatened by moral chaos, the overall social costs of licentiousness and irresponsible personal conduct becomes so high that society ultimately recoils and reevaluates the path that it is on.
8. First is the force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today. This is not decay; it is organized destruction.
9. “The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer.”
10. “The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.”
11. “[T]he left never cooperated with us, they only gave us problems...[i]t is not by chance that the present plot comes from them. My view is that it is not even a real left, but an artificial left.”
12. “I will not dwell on all the bitter results of the new secular age. Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery.”
13. “[T]his democracy, which you love so much and that you consider so valuable, does not have a precise meaning. Aristotle's democracy is one thing, the Soviet democracy is another thing…We cannot afford to have such an ambiguous concept placed in our Constitution.”
14. “And to control willful human beings, with an infinite capacity to rationalize, those moral values must rest on authority independent of men’s will – they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.”
15. “Anyone who will say that religion is separate from politics is a fool.”
Good luck, Twitterverse. I will post the answers tomorrow.
Ok folks, here are the answers:
Question #1: Barr
Question #1: Barr
Question #2: Khomeini
Question #3: Barr
Question #4: Khomeini
Question #5: Barr
Question #6: Khomeini
Question #7: Barr
Question #8: Barr
Question #9: Khomeini
Question #10: Barr
Question #11: Khomeini
Question #12: Barr
Question #13: Khomeini
Question #14: Barr
Question #15: Khomeini
