It’s official! John Derbyshire says so…

Trouble is, Jesus was not a philosopher. The Bible is full of inspiration and spiritual insights, but as a handbook for conducting worldly affairs, it needs to be taken with a dash of, well, worldliness. Taking in strangers may get you robbed. Turning the other cheek may get you killed.

Like many liberal, atheist types I have always been a big admirer of Jesus’s philosophy and have struggled to reconcile the conservative worldview with Jesus’s outlook on social affairs – What would Jesus drive? What kind of gun would Jesus own? etc. and, most germane to this post,

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth [Matthew 5:38]

Thanks to the Derb, I no longer have to struggle with the paradox. The Christian Right isn’t.