Likewise, the atheist Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of deeply Catholic France, mused, “No society can exist without inequality of fortunes; and inequality of fortunes cannot exist without religion.
“When a man is dying of hunger beside another who is stuffing himself with food, he cannot accept this difference if there is not an authority who tells him, ‘God wishes it so.’”
Jim Pence of Glendale, Ky., who runs the feisty Hillbilly Report Blog, put it similarly, if more inelegantly and irreverently: “Never before have so few with so much promised to take away so much from so many and then laugh their asses off as the so many with so little vote for the so few with so much.”