"[T]hings don't seem to get better.... elected officials are just not interested in the welfare of the people," and are offering no protection or other practical support to the Christian communities whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed. — Fr. Andrew Dewan, Director of Communications in Nigeria's Catholic Diocese of Pankshin, canuk.org, July 16, Nigeria.

On July 1, a young Christian man was sentenced to death for "blasphemy" in a Pakistani court. But first Ehsan Shan will need to serve a 22-year prison sentence and pay a fine of one million rupees. — July 2, Pakistan.

On July 20, a Christian man learned that a Muslim organization had offered a $20,000 reward to anyone who beheads him for "blasphemy" .....posters circulating in Pakistan in July [were] showing his picture and calling upon Muslims to hunt the infidel down and to perform, in the words of the posters, sar tan se juda—"head separated from body"—on him." He said the reason the false blasphemy accusation was leveled against him in the first place was to intimidate him from his activist work: "I have been reporting about the forced conversion and rape of minor Hindu girls and their subsequent marriages to Muslim Men." — July 26.

"The land in question has been specifically designated for religious use, but the government is discriminating against the church because it is not associated with the state's preferred religion...." — Alliance Defending Freedom, July 12, Turkey.

Plato, at least in his magnum opus The Republic, depicts the ideal society as one ruled by those who know best, with the mission to look after the populace from cradle to grave. All that people have to do is obey the rules and enjoy the good life offered by ruling philosophers.

Aristotle, in contrast, focuses on the individual who is, with the exception of occasions when gods intervene, master of his destiny.

The settlers who created the United States were closer to Aristotle's cult of the individual than to Plato's collective utopia. They came to the New World as individuals or in groups too small to try to impose a collective identity on others. They were farmers who became path-finders, trailblazers and eventually nation-builders, always operating as individuals and coming together only in emergencies and exceptional circumstances such as fighting enemies.

In his 780-page autobiography, President Barack Obama mocks critics who suggest he may be a "closet socialist." He then reveals his attachment to collectivism, praising "the collective spirit, a thing we all wish for, a sense of connection that overrides our differences." He added that the regulatory state has made American lives a lot better -- words that bring to mind Benito Mussolini's declamations about the big corporatist state that redistributes the fruits of national endeavor.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney once noted that almost half of all Americans depended on federal handouts and perks one way or another, and thus wouldn't vote for a candidate who argued for a smaller state and the cult of the individual as hero.

Well, they didn't vote for him.