“The ideas that came through Athens, Rome, London, Paris, and Philadelphia are what make life good for most people in free societies today. That the individuals have value, and even the powers that be must submit to the rule of law” – Bill Maher

Bill Maher gets his usual shot in at the Republicans at the end of this little speech with which he wraps up his show, but that may not be earning him as many Brownie points with the US Left as it used to, because the rest of the speech is a brutal takedown of his own side.

Sure, as an atheist he’s still hotter for the Enlightenment than that bunch of self-serving, anti-Christian propagandists deserve (“We Are The Light”, which funnily enough sounds like something Jesus did say), but that’s okay. As revisionist history moves forward there are an increasing number of historians who can see the Christian roots of Western development, including the Enlightened Ones.

Twelve minutes. Watch all of it.

Then there’s this guy coming from the Right, Konstantin Kisin, a secular Jew who grew up as child in the USSR before he and his family got out as it was collapsing. “We are in the fight of our lives.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said the strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than its level of industrialization. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core can not stand.

You can read the full transcript of his speech here.