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The Fifth Horseman 11

This is the first of what Peter Boghossian calls his Interventions. I can’t testify to the veracity of these dialogues, but it is clear that he intends them as examples of how he puts his anti-apologetics into practice. Notice how in addition to being an unmitigated asshole, he’s not actually trying to convince his colleague of anything, merely plant some seeds of doubt. My own recommended response is in italics, underneath JM’s responses. Pay attention to how at each point, they disrupt the Street Epistemologist’s attempt to move the dialogue onto a rote path that permits him to attack without having to defend even the most absurd assertions.

The dirty little secret of the Socratic method is the way it can be used to create false dilemmas and illusionary contradictions. This is why you never, ever, grant someone attempting to use it the right to define anything, or even agree with any of their seemingly legitimate statements. Instead, force dictionary definitions on them, as doing so reliably disrupts their attempt to present their false dilemmas as well as calls their credibility into question as they attempt to deny that a dictionary definition is as legitimate as their own question-begging inventions.

I’ll now show how I’ve used these responses in two brief informal, dialectical interventions. The purpose of the interventions was to change targeted beliefs held by my interlocutors. The first intervention was with a colleague (JM) I bumped into on the street.

JM: What you seem to want to do is to take away everyone’s faith.

PB: Yeah. Why is that a problem?

JM: Well what the hell do you think? I mean what do you really think?
VD: Because what other people believe is not your business. And because faith is proven to be beneficial to literally billions of people around the world. Materially beneficial. (see anti-apologetic #8)

PB: It’s not about what I think, it’s about what you think. Why is that a problem?

JM: I’m not one of your students. Don’t answer a question with a question.
[Excellent response – VD]

PB: Okay. Here’s what I really think. I think I should be given some type of community service award for devoting my life to helping people learn to reason effectively. Now could you please answer my question? Why is helping people to abandon their faith a bad thing?

JM: Because for the most part these are good, decent people. You’re taking good, kind, Christian people and you’re taking away something that they rely on.
VD: Don’t try to evade the question. I asked you why you think that isn’t a problem. I didn’t ask if you think you should be given an award or if you think the Trail Blazers will win next weekend. Answer the question!

PB: Do you think the thing that they rely upon [faith], do you think that will lead them to the truth?

JM: Of course not. No sane person could. But it [faith] not only makes them feel good, it also keeps them in check. What do you think would happen if you and X [a colleague] had your way?
VD: You seem to think that faith is an epistemology. It isn’t. It is nothing more than choosing an operative axiom, just like one does in science and mathematics. You’re committing a category error.

PB: What do you think would happen?

JM: You know what would happen, that’s why you’re asking me what would happen. They’d be murdering and raping and who only knows what else.

PB: So you mean that by taking away a bad way of reasoning the natural consequence is that people become murderers?

JM: The reason that a lot of people don’t rape and murder in the first place is because of religion.

PB: Well what about Scandinavia?
VD: What about it? Scandinavia has the highest rape rates in Europe. Sweden does, to be specific. You’re proving the point. (See anti-apologetic #11)

JM: You people love to talk about Scandinavia.

PB: Well?

JM: Well that’s not the same.

PB: The same as what?

JM: The conditions there are not the same as the conditions here, and you know it.

PB: I have no idea what you’re talking about. What do you mean?

JM: You know exactly what I mean. I mean they’re not analogous, and you’re making them analogous.

PB: You mean if all other variables were held constant and the Scandinavians became more faithful, the murder and rape rates would drop?

(Sigh and a long pause)

JM: You’re impossible.

PB: So are you willing to change your mind and agree that helping to rid large numbers of people from an unreliable process of reasoning will not have a detrimental effect on the society?

(Sigh)

PB: Well?

(Sigh)

JM got off to a good start, but instead of pressing after he initially knocked Boghossian back, he gave up. But where JM really went off the track here is with his consequential appeal to immorality. This is defensible, but only if you’re prepared to go into considerably more detail than he was. A much better line of response concerning the negative effect of what would happen if Boghossian got his wish is the inevitable decline and fall of Western society. Atheism is observably parasitical on a religious population and it is much harder for Street Epistemologists to deny falling birth rates and the mass replacement of the increasingly irreligious First World population by religious Third World immigrants than to defend the question of whether people are more or less moral than before.

Of course, it’s hilarious that Boggie interprets (sigh) as “you win, there is no intellectually credible response to the brilliance of your wit and reason” rather than “wow, I cannot believe what a hopeless asshole you are.” Vegas would give shorter odds to Boghossian having a higher-than-normal Asperger’s Quotient than to Peyton Manning facing the 2013 Vikings secondary.

The implications of complexity

I find it remarkable that despite this apparent order of magnitude, (or more), change in the complexity of the DNA code, (now codes), even the genetic scientists who made the discovery are failing to grasp its obvious implications with regards to conventional Neo-Darwinian selectionism:

“For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made,” said Stamatoyannopoulos. “Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways.”

The genetic code is similar for all organisms and is stored in one of the two DNA strands as non-overlapping, linear sequence of nitrogenous bases Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C) and Thymine (T). These four letters are the ‘alphabet’ of the genetic code and are used to write code words. The code consists of three-letter words (also called triplets or codons). There are a total of 64 codons.

Now, researchers have found that the codons, which they refer to as duons, can be used for gene control. The team says that about 15 percent of codons could act as duons and that these bilingual genetic codes have shaped protein evolution.

At this point, one is beginning to wonder if the scientists are so focused on the evolutionary trees that even a copyright notice would somehow escape their attention. Copyright (c) 6000 BC God. All rights reserved. “Well, obviously that is a codal pattern that evolved early in a common ancestor and merely happens to look like alphabetical characters, from which the various divergent mutations didn’t happen to provide any selection advantages.”

Here is the point that so many die-hard evolutionists can’t seem to grasp. Let me try to walk them through the logic of my skepticism with a simple analogy.

Charlie has a car. Charlie is speaking to you in Minneapolis. Charlie says he left Chicago seven hours ago and drove to Minneapolis on a single tank of gas. However, in the car, you discover two receipts, both dated today, from gas stations in Colorado Springs and Sioux Falls.

Now, if you can understand how this indicates that Charlie’s story is false, you should be able to understand how adding an additional order of magnitude of complexity to the DNA programming process completely rules out the time-scale of the conventional Neo-Darwinian selectionist model. There were already real problems with the model, hence the development of hypothesized excuses such as Punctuated Equilibrium.

But by adding the time needed for another level of mutation on top of what was already required by the previous single-code model, I don’t see how it is possible to seriously insist that the conventional natural selection model can hold up in light of this discovery. Now, perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems to me that either the DNA mutation process has to take place considerably faster than has been observed over the past 50 years or a new model will be required.

My guess is that the initial explanatory defense will be that the mutations are more frequent, but more significant using the two-code process, but this is a defense unlikely to do more than buy a little time, as it will soon be possible to observe whether such mutations are actually taking place or not. Remember, the main reason that TENS has been able to survive so long is that its long timescales required resisted observation. If the timescales are shorter and the mutations selected more frequent, then we can observe and falsify them.

And, of course, even if the new, faster model turns out to be correct, this opens up a whole new can of worms that Jonathan Haidt correctly identifies as the likely consequences of a faster evolutionary model:

A wall has long protected respectable evolutionary inquiry from accusations of aiding and abetting racism. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). Evolutionary psychology has therefore focused on the Pleistocene era – the period from about 1.8 million years ago to the dawn of agriculture — during which our common humanity was forged for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But the writing is on the wall.

Science is more dangerous than religion

In TIA, I pointed out that if the New Atheists were consistent, they would be arguing for the elimination of science on the same basis that they argue for the end of religion. After all, it is science that presently poses the only serious dangers to Mankind and while it is science that is presently causing a tremendous number of casualties around the world.

Remember, the worst religious crime of the entire Middle Ages was the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in which King Charles IX of France ordered an estimated 10,000 Huegenots killed. Now Karl Denninger draws our attention to an article in Forbes concerning the estimated consequences of a single case of apparent “research misconduct”:

Last summer British researchers provoked concern when they published a paper raising the possibility that by following an established guideline UK doctors may have caused as many as 10,000 deaths each year. Now they have gone a step further and published an estimate that the same guideline may have led to the deaths of as many as 800,00 people in Europe over the last five years. The finding, they write, “is so large that the only context in the last 50 years comes from the largest scale professional failures in the political sphere.” The 800,000 deaths are comparable in size to the worst cases of genocide and mass murder in recent history. In their new article published in the European Heart Journal, Graham Cole and Darrel Francis continue to explore the extent and implications of the damage caused by the Don Poldermans research misconduct case.

This isn’t to say there are not benefits to science, of course, but the problem is that virtually no one ever pays any attention to its risks, which is precisely why this sort of human tragedy is possible. Moreover, the reason it can happen is because science as it is actually practiced falls very far short of the ideal Science that exists only in the minds of its fetishists.

Perhaps it would be wise for doctors to return to the pre-scientific concept of: First, Do No Harm.

It’s also worth noting that no priest or cleric has ever exploded a nuclear bomb in the name of Allah, Jesus Christ, or Damballah Wedo. There have been at least 2,084 nuclear explosions set off by scientists.

Democracy in Virginia

Virginia’s attorney general single-handedly overturns the will of Virginia’s voters:

Virginia’s attorney general has concluded that the state’s ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional and he will no longer defend it in federal lawsuits challenging it, his office said Thursday. In an email to The Associated Press, Michael Kelly, a spokesman for Attorney General Mark Herring, said the state will instead side with the plaintiffs who are seeking to have the ban struck down.

I find it interesting that homosexual advocates think that overturning the will of the people is a good idea, when history clearly demonstrates that what cannot be imposed by votes will eventually be imposed by force. All this sort of thing does is demonstrate what the extremists have been pointing out for decades: democracy in the United States is a sham.

It’s fascinating to see that the USA is now observably less democratic than Uganda and other African states where homosexual activities have been outlawed. Imagine if positions were reversed and the Ugandan people voted to legalized homosexuality, but a single official overturned them and announced that it would remain criminalized. What would the reaction of the US media be?

The Fifth Horseman 10

And finally, we reach the end of Peter Boghossian’s 16 anti-apologetics. This is, quite literally, all he has in terms of anti-apologetical arguments, so if you’ve been underwhelmed by what he’s been able to show here, well, that’s what he’s got. My conclusion is that any Christian, or indeed, theist, who has merely read through these ten posts will be more than ready to obliterate any Street Epistemologist who attacks his faith on the grounds proposed by Mr. Boghossian.


ANTI-APOLOGETIC #11

“Without faith, society would devolve morally.”

This tends to be a late-game line, with Stalin and Hitler always included, sometimes followed by Pol Pot, Mussolini, and the Kims thrown in for good measure. The basic idea is that without objective standards of right and wrong, not only do ordinary people descend into savages, but vicious dictatorships are also inevitable.

“Without faith, society would devolve morally,” is an empirical claim. It’s a claim about the world. It’s also false. To respond, one need only survey religiosity and livability indices among various societies. Scandinavia has the lowest rate of religious belief in the world, yet on virtually all measures of well-being Scandinavian countries top every index (for more on this, see American sociologist Phil Zuckerman’s work).

I usually hear this defense from Christians. One response I offer is, “Saudi Arabia.” (For a one-word response, try “Iran.”) Saudi Arabia has one of the most devout, adherent populations on the planet, yet its citizens lack basic freedoms and are subject to the tyranny of religious police.

Finally, people use the Stalin/Hitler card in an attempt to argue that the worst dictatorships in recent times have had atheists at their helm (Hitler was more likely a deist if not a theist).

However, even granting this argument’s assumption, these men didn’t act like they did because they were atheists. That is, their nonbelief in a deity didn’t dictate particular actions they took. (This would be akin to arguing that Pol Pot—who was a bad man—didn’t believe in leprechauns, you don’t believe in leprechauns, therefore you’re as bad as Pol Pot.) Their systems were horrific precisely because they resembled faith-based systems where suspending warrant for belief is required (as is the wholesale adoption of an ideology, like Communism, Nazism, Fascism, etc.).

VD RESPONSE: The citation of religiosity and livability indices is not a rational response to an assertion of moral devolution. I’m a little astonished that it is necessary to point out to you that livability is not morality. Moreover, Sweden has the highest rates of rape in Europe while Scandinavia as a whole has very low marriage rates and the majority of Scandinavian children are illegitimate. This is moral devolution by any traditional moral standard.

Saudi Arabia and Iran may lack what you consider to be basic freedoms, but you cannot argue that the behavior of the populace is considerably more moral, on average, than the behavior of people in the USA or Scandinavia. It may be an enforced morality, but let’s face it, there is going to be less theft wherever being caught stealing means running a real risk of having your hand chopped off. And don’t even think about trying to start disputing what is, or what is not moral, as doing so will simply prove the very point you are trying to argue against.

You are right to say that Hitler was not an atheist. He was not. He was a pagan occultist, which from the Christian perspective is considerably worse than atheism. However, you are committing the same basic logical error that Sam Harris commits by appealing to the No True Atheist fallacy. The point is not that an atheist’s action is dictated by his atheism. The point is that an atheist’s atheism removes any sense of externally imposed moral restrictions on his actions, and it is an observed and documented fact that atheists with unrestricted political power have historically been much more likely to behave in an immoral and murderous manner than Christians in similar positions of power. You’re trying to change the subject to causation while we’re pointing to an undeniable correlation.

We don’t have to know precisely what element of the cigarette causes cancer to know that it’s a bad idea to light it and stick it in your mouth. And we don’t have to understand why atheists are disproportionately prone to behaving in an immoral manner to observe when they do so.

In fact, what you are doing now is deeply and profoundly immoral. You have declared your object is to destroy the faith of others, while Mark 9:42 says: “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.” Your very existence is testimony to the devolution of morality inherent in atheism.

Don’t write for a living

I’ve pointed this out many times in the past, but this article on how writers earn less than you think should put it into perspective. I write solely as a hobby, I am persona non grata in most publishing circles, and even so my writing income puts me in the top 10 percent of traditionally published authors. That will go up in the coming year as I shift increasingly into Hybrid mode, but even so, I think I’d rather work a minimum wage job and spend all the money earned on lottery tickets than gamble on making $100,000 from writing for five consecutive years. Remember, unlike a salaried job, you are only as good as your last book, even if ebook sales extends the viability of your backlist.

This is not to discourage anyone from writing. To the contrary, I actively encourage anyone with an interest in writing to do so. Just don’t do it as a career. You don’t lift weights because you think you’re going to be a professional powerlifter, you don’t play softball because you think you’re going to make the major leagues, and you shouldn’t write because you think you’re going to be the next Stephen King or JK Rowling.

The answer to failing government

Is bigger government, of course. And by bigger, they mean global. The only problem, it seems, is that there is an unfortunate lack of “an extraordinary crisis” that impedes Man’s self-appointed saviors the ability to impose it.

September 11th could become the demarcation point of this new era much as 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia marked the beginning of the state-centric system of the international order. While the analogy is loose, it won’t take centuries for the effects of globalization and the end or at least the transition of the Westphalian era to take hold.

Beyond this inflection point in international politics, still unabsorbed and misunderstood by most governments and people, a second reality complicates taking effective action in what could truly be a “new world order,” the description coined by U.S. President George H.W. Bush after the implosion of the Soviet Union more than two decades ago.

Failed and failing government from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe with Brussels and Washington in between is the largest collective impediment to the betterment of mankind.

Without an extraordinary crisis, little is likely to be done to reverse or limit the damage imposed by failed or failing governance. The United States is Exhibit A although there are far too many competitors for that title.

You don’t suppose anyone would, you know, create one? Given that the lack of one is an “impediment to the betterment of mankind” and all. No, of course not! That would be conspiracy theory…..

Mailvox: on the distribution of atheist intelligence

Kaneadvice fails to recognize how sampling bias will tend to skew the statistical results:

Every commenter who knows how to use the GSS has been able to disprove the claim of atheist over-representation among the low-IQ population…. Why did Vox fail to conduct an accurate analysis? Was it primarily a cognitive or emotional failing?

Either way, I suspect Vox is smart enough to know he is wrong. Even if his emotions are driving him to go through rationalization gymnastics to justify his faith in theist superiority, the part of his brain that is still thinking logically knows that he has been proven wrong.

I am not wrong. The claim of atheist over-representation among the low-IQ population has not been disproved at all. As it happens, there is absolutely no contradiction between the chart I posted and the charts posted by those who have failed to understand it or recreate it. I charted apples, they charted oranges. It’s actually rather funny that they have had such a difficult time recreating my charts, considering that not only the data, but the second chart I posted, was literally right in front of their eyes. But let’s see if any of you can spot the obvious source of the problem with their critique of my intelligence distribution charts.

What we have here on the left is a normal intelligence distribution chart. I didn’t create it, I didn’t cherry-pick it, and it is literally the first chart to appear when searching “intelligence distribution chart on Google. It’s a standard bell curve.

Now let’s look at the chart on the right, which was produced by indpndnt, who couldn’t recreate the results of my charts despite putting considerable effort into it. What is the obvious difference between these two charts? They both peak at 100, but both lines on indpndnt’s chart clearly overweight the right side at the expense of the left side, especially in the case of the blue God=1 line, which represents the “I don’t believe God exists” answer. Why does it do so? The answer is very simple. I’ll give you one guess.

Can’t figure it out? The answer is that the GSS results are heavily biased towards high intelligence responders. Of the 9,920.5 responses tabulated with the default weighting, 420.8 were in the highest category and only 169.3 were in the lowest. This is not consistent with what we know of intelligence distribution in the general populace. Neither indpndnt nor Daniel Haas noticed this high-IQ bias nor took it into account, and so their results are naturally skewed by it. The consequence is that the legitimately higher percentage of atheists in the highest-IQ category creates an exaggerated effect when the comparison is made to the total number of respondents rather than as a percentage of distinct IQ categories. This is not to charge them with being intellectually dishonest, however, as it is apparent that they simply failed to observe a problem with the dataset. They are not superintelligences, after all.

Even if we simply chart all 9,920.5 responses without regard for religious belief and we exclude the 65- category because there is no corresponding 135+ category, the high IQ bias of the GSS bell curve is apparent. At (114-86) it is +12 percent, at (121-79) it is +40 percent, and at (128-72) it is +28 percent. There are 300 excess 121+ respondents, 13 more than there are total atheist respondents.

Given this statistically significant sampling bias towards respondents of higher intelligence, it should be obvious that the only legitimate way to calculate the intelligent distributions is to utilize the percentage of respondents within each separate category. That is exactly what I did: 8.5 percent of 169 respondents is manifestly a higher percentage than 6.4 percent of 420.8 respondents. All the critics have managed to show here is that 27 is more than 14.4, which is true, but also happens to be irrelevant. The claim stands.

As for the difficulty they had recreating my charts, I will simply show a screen capture of the chart produced by the very GSS site at Berkeley from which I took the data. This is the original chart with the zero column removed for the sake of clarity.

And below is the exact same chart with the non-atheist categories grayed-out and my Calc chart superimposed on top of it. Look familiar? The only difference is one of scale; my X-axis maximum was 7 percent compared to 100 percent for the GSS chart. Given the observed nature of the GSS bias towards higher IQ respondents, the use of percentages rather than numerical totals is more likely to be a statistically credible method than the one utilized by the critics.

Faith is positive contagion

The atheist Peter Boghossian, to whose anti-apologetics I have been responding, likes to claim that he is mystified by how faith can be beneficial. But again and again, across a wide range of disciplines from medicine to sports, we see that “pretending to know what you don’t know” is materially beneficial to the faith-filled individual. From Grantland:

Anyone who plays sports understands this phenomenon. We want to use the same clubs, shoes, balls, bats, and everything else as the pros because they’re the best, and we want to give ourselves every chance to play as well as them. It’s as much about confidence as it is quality equipment.

This isn’t just common sense — social scientists have actually studied how using “professional” gear affects amateurs’ performance. In 2011, researchers at the University of Virginia laid out a putting mat, a ball, and a putter, and invited 41 undergraduates to take part in an experiment. The students were asked to do two things: Take 10 test putts and then try to draw the hole to scale. Half were told nothing about the putter’s origins. The rest were told it once belonged to a PGA Tour player. You already know what happened next. The students who thought they were using a pro’s club sank more putts and drew the hole larger than the control group. The social scientists running the experiment must have known that what they were witnessing was pure superstition. How else to describe the process by which years of practice and skill can be transmitted from an expert to an amateur through the simple transfer of an object? But because they’re academics, they use a different term — positive contagion.

Thus the Magic Putter refutes the false claim of the inutility of faith, even faith as incorrectly defined by the atheist. What the academic philosopher Peter Boghossian has clearly never mastered is a simple and intrinsically scientific concept: Let reason be silent when experience gainsays its conclusions.

Dark Enlightenment: the second stage

We appear to have passed the “Ridicule” stage of the counterreaction to what some are calling “The Dark Enlightenment”. This is apparent because now, it’s not only our direct enemies on the godless equalitarian Left that are attacking us, but mealy-mouthed equalitarian Christian quislings are attempting to establish their credibility as Left-friendly moderates by joining in on the fun:

What’s the Dark Enlightenment? Basically, it’s a de-Christianized form of right wingery that is drinking deep of white supremacy and racialism. Sometimes, it appeals to something called “Western” Christianity, but this is basically a fig leaf for getting discernment-free conservatives to jettison actual Christian teaching in favor of nutty white supremacy by rhetoric about how Euro-superiority makes it plain that the whole “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek” race indifference is a huge mistake.

Other times, it daubs on a layer of pseudo-science by tossing around the phrase “human biodiversity” (by which they mean “some races are inferior to others”).

And not infrequently, some of its adherents ditch so much as the figleaf of Christianity (since Christianity really is irreconcilable with racism) and openly promotes bullshit “northern” neo-paganism as they get in touch with their inner Himmlers. Because everybody knows that the people who erected standing stones as their highest achievement were just about to usher in a golden age when they were rudely interrupted by brown ruffians named Augustine and St. Paul and Plato who tamed their manly Nordic creativity with their ethnically impure southern barbarism.

 Let’s count the errors:

  1. There is nothing de-Christianized about it. Several of the so-called “Sith Lords” of the movement, such as it is, are outspoken and uncompromising Christians.
  2. It has nothing to do with white supremacy and everything to do with white survival. In fact, most of the HBDers would be better categorized as Asian supremacists.
  3. There is no call to jettison any genuinely Christian teaching, but rather, the many anti-Biblical Churchian teachings that presently infect the Church.
  4. It is true that “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek”. The key words there are “in Christ”. The Church is not the State. In the civil government of every political entity where non-Christians are permitted to reside, there most certainly are national, religious, and ethnic distinctions to be made.
  5. There is nothing pseudo-scientific about human biodiversity. The only pseudo-science is on the part of the equalitarians and anti-racists, whose argument that human beings are all essentially the same has been conclusively destroyed by genetic science.
  6. Christianity clearly encompasses the acknowledgement of differences between races and nations. See Matthew 10:5 and Matthew 15:21

Shea wrongly sees the Dark Enlightenment as a threat to Christianity, failing to understand that it is the corrective for the disease of left-wing Churchianism.

At least one of my readers has a young, formerly Catholic, relative who is going for this vile crap in a big way (he now practices bullshit white supremacist paganism because Christianity adulterated European racial stock with its acceptance of all races as children of God) and it is apparently going viral in some College Republican circles (according to people who are writing me about it).

The fact that young men are leaving the Church is not an indictment of the Dark Enlightenment. Indeed, we Christians who acknowledge its truths are the only ones who will be able to reach this young ex-Catholic and other young men who have left the Church because we are the only ones they will trust. We are the only ones who have not lied to them. Their leaving is an indictment of the deceitful Churchianism that has betrayed the young sheep who were in the fold, and who have fled it in reaction due to the non-stop lies they have observed, deceit of the sort that Shea is still perpetrating.

Jesus Christ is the Truth. And one cannot defend the truth with lies. John 15:4 states: “No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.” It is not hard to observe that every church, including the Roman Catholic Church, that has embraced equalitarianism, feminism, and anti-racism has almost immediately begun to die. But it appears the idea that anti-racism and desegregation is unbiblical and consequentially antithetical to Christianity may be as hard for some to bear as the idea that homosexuality and usury and fornication are for others.

And yet, fifty years of experience have rendered this conclusion all but inescapable. Show me a church that prides itself on its opposition to racism and I’ll show you a church that will soon embrace female pastors, unrepentant sinners, and declining attendance. That doesn’t mean that racism is a Christian virtue, it merely means that opposing racism is as legitimate a Christian policy as opposing chocolate or the Denver Broncos.

UPDATE: It looks like Irenist has a little confessing to do this weekend:

“Mr. Beale’s piece complains that the Church
embraces “anti-racism,” implying that he thinks the Church should be
pro-racist. As you might say: pretty lame.” 

He can lie and whine about the truths he finds uncomfortable all he likes. In the meantime, his Churchian organization will continue to die. Stick to the truth and you will never have to lie. Embrace a lie and you will soon find it difficult to speak the truth.