I love finding decent books in the bargains section of Barnes and Noble. This week, I found the followign two volumes, for $4 each.
The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader, published in 1996, is an interesting edited collection of essays from the founders of the neo-con movement – 1960’s liberal intellectuals that had problems with the pro-Marxist extreme liberalism of the time. The author argues (in his late 1990’s timeframe) that these intellectuals formulated a doctrine that was not anti-government programs, like the conservatives of the day, but were critical of the left in their overly simplistic view of government, castigating liberals for:
"ignorance of the complexity of social action and teh embedded wisdom in human systems, a lack of resolve in confronting evil, a laissez-faire attitude toward human virtue, and an unwillingness to defend the critical ideas of American civilization from its discontents….
In the past several yeras, the neoconservatives have perceived a moral decline fuled by a militant secularism pervading the culture. Seeking to retrieve the notion of public virtue they deemed necessary for civilization, they neoconservatives turned to th esource of those values, religion. Consequently, they developed a defense of religion in the pu8blic square that incorporates all who share the Judeo-Christian heritage." – p. xv.
I also picked up a copy of Tim LaHaye’s 2000 publication, Mind Siege, in which he raised the alarm that secular humanism and its five basic tenets (atheism, evolution, amorality, human autonomy, and globalism) are enemies of man and God. I’m not sure if it’s any good, and based on the amazon reviews and his somewhat anti-intellectual track record, it might even be a waste of $4. But we’ll see, maybe I can glean something good out of it.