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An excellent article in the New York Times magazine:

No law can exist for a millennium without being broken, and there are scattered historical reports, mostly from Christian chroniclers, of Muslim forces acting outside the bounds of lawful jihad, without the authorization of the scholars. Men were always considered legitimate targets, and Muslim armies sometimes slaughtered them just as Muslims could be slaughtered by their enemies. Remarkably enough, though, the legal principles of jihad protecting women, children and fellow Muslims survived well into the modern era, when the secular regimes of the Muslim world began to fight according to secular ideas. The World War I Armenian genocide, which took place in the last, secularizing gasp of the declining Ottoman Empire, was the first really substantial systematic violation of the ban on killing women and children in recorded Islamic history.

This is yet another example of one of the great ironies of secularism. Secularists, particularly militantly atheist ones, constantly posit religion as a source of violence and evil, and yet the historical record very clearly shows, even in the case of Islam, that religion tends to be a mitigating factor in reducing the level of violence that is integral to every human conflict between rival forces.

By any means necessary is not a religious notion, it is a fundamentally secular one. For only secularism knows no inherent bounds upon it and it is this secular notion that has released the world’s militaries from past strictures of civilized behavior.

When the target is almost too big, I suppose it’s best to begin at the beginning:

Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live.

I counted 12 logical errors in the article quoted, but the most entertaining thing about Sam Harris is that he literally can’t write his first sentence without making an easily verifiable factual error. So, even if we avert our eyes and skip over Mr. Harris’ confusion of the terms “authorship” and “inspiration”, since there are six billion people on the planet, there would need to be at least three billion people who believe that the Creator of the universe wrote or dictated their holy book for his opening sentence to be true, .

Let’s start with the numbers and see who believes this:

Y Christianity: 2.1 billion
N Islam: 1.3 billion
N Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
N Hinduism: 900 million*
N Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
N Buddhism: 376 million
N primal-indigenous: 300 million
N African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
N Sikhism: 23 million
N Juche: 19 million
N Spiritism: 15 million
Y Judaism: 14 million
N Baha’i: 7 million
N Jainism: 4.2 million
N Shinto: 4 million
N Cao Dai: 4 million
N Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
N Tenrikyo: 2 million
N Neo-Paganism: 1 million
N Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
N Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
N Scientology: 500 thousand

So, assuming that all professed Christians believe in the divine authorship of the Bible, (which we know isn’t true), 2.114 billion fit the description, only a billion or so short of Mr. Harris’ “most people”. Of course, Mr. Harris was almost surely counting Muslims, forgetting (one hopes, as opposed to simply not knowing) that it wasn’t a Creator god who supposedly dictated the Koran, but merely the angel Gabriel.

As for those “many books”, there are actually very, very few books for which a claim of divine authorship is made. It is not made for the Vedas or Upanishads, the Yasna, the Book of Mormon, the I Ching, the Talmud, the Dasam Granth or Battlefield Earth. In fact, I’d be quite interested to see Mr. Harris make a list of these “many books claiming divine authorship”.

I don’t believe all atheists are idiots, but you can rest assured that any atheist regurgitating Sam Harris quotes is one.

*You could try to make a case for the Bhagavad Gita, but even the few Hindu commentators who appear to view it as divinely authored recommend approaching it “as if” it had been so written. Since the other sacred Hindu scriptures don’t even appear to make any such claim, it would be seriously stretching the concept to assign a Y to the very diverse religion that is Hinduism

Giles Coren considers the latest excuse for porco-humanity:

I HAVE HEARD some hilarious excuses from fat people in my time, but the one rolled out in the last item of yesterday’s Today programme managed to flabbergast even me. Indeed, I dare say that obese people all over Britain were so delighted by this new chance to blame their condition on something other than their own moral turpitude that many of them choked on their cornflakes. Except that by 8.53am they had probably already wolfed down their cornflakes and were well onto their third plate of scrambled eggs and bacon with pancakes and maple syrup.

While making a documentary about the obesity crisis for More4 this year, I went to great trouble to show how such excuses as “I’ve got a slow metabolism”, “it’s genetic”, “I can’t afford healthy food” and “I’ve got an underactive thyroid” were in most cases as meaningless and self-deluding as “I’ve got heavy bones” and “like Superman, I have infinite mass”.

I little dreamt, however, that the health editor of The Ecologist, Pat Thomas, would soon be attempting to persuade us, by way of a report in her magazine and a debate on Radio 4, that the critical rise in obesity in the past 20 years has been caused by . . . pollution.

My personal theory is that aliens have converted the Earth into a massive Man ranch and prefer their most delectable morsels of long pig to be dripping with fat.

The Lizard Queen transforms before our eyes:

In an appearance early Wednesday evening in front of roughly three-dozen LGBT leaders, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton indicated that she would not oppose efforts by Eliot Spitzer, the odds-on favorite to become the new governor, to enact a same-sex marriage law in New York.

She also suggested that language she used when she first ran for the Senate in 2000 explaining her opposition to marriage equality based on the institution’s moral, religious, and traditional foundations had not reflected the “many long conversations” she’s had since with “friends” and others, and that her advocacy on LGBT issues “has certainly evolved.”

Later that evening, Ms Rodham-Clinton refused to comment upon a patch of green scales that has recently appeared on the left side of her neck. When a reporter from the Fabulous Lavender Times asked her about her unusual skin condition, the junior senator from New York merely stared at him with strangely dead eyes and blinked several times before departing in the company of Ruthie Manhands, the president of the Oregon chapter of Lesbian Lumberjacks for Choice.

The Divine Camille in Salon. Five pages and a quote-worthy section on every page:

Well, as long as the Democrats are perceived as the anti-religion party, we’re going to lose the culture wars…. I’m speaking here as an atheist who studies religion and respects it enormously. In the history of mankind, the benefits that religion has brought to society in shaping behavior and moral choice are overwhelming in comparison to the negatives, which anyone can list — like religious wars and bigotry. Without religion, we’d have anarchy.

Religion is also a metaphysical system that honors the largeness of the universe. It’s that sense of largeness, which my generation used to call cosmic consciousness, that is missing in the cynical ideologies promoted by the elite universities — like post-structuralism, which is obsessed with politics and language and has a depressingly debased view of human experience. Post-structuralism doesn’t see the stars or the enormity of nature, which for religious people symbolizes God’s power. So I think that the constant sniping at religion coming from liberal Democrats is really a dead end.

But there’s reason for alarm at the right-wing intertwining of religion and politics, where the Bible is seen as the prophetic master plan of the universe and where Israel as the Holy Land must be protected at all costs from Muslim infiltration — duplicating the agenda of the medieval crusades. But to claim, as Democrats often do, that there has always been a separation of church and state in America is misleading: The U.S. simply has no official state religion. The formative influence in our intellectual heritage came from Puritan dissidents in New England. Major universities like Harvard and Yale were founded on religious principles.

The more liberal parents are, the less contact their children have with religious ideas. That will surely disable our future American leaders from being able to understand the religious commitment of Islamic fundamentalists. Liberal journalists often seem incredulous about how anyone would seek death for religious principles. But that was the entire history of early Christianity, when the saints willingly sought martyrdom. We’re heading into that world again.

What do contemporary intellectuals have to offer anyhow? What passionate engagement do they have to appeal to young people? Liberal secularism has become bourgeois and materialistic. It’s snide, elitist, and politically marginalized.

She’s right, liberal secularism is not only a demographic dead end, but an intellectual dead end as well. While science can progress in spite of this handicap, as it is no longer a primarily intellectual exercise but more of an engineering one, the same is not true of philosophy, literature and other arts. Regardless, Camille Paglia’s boldness and willingness to criticize those whose political ideology she shares is always remarkable.

The Donkey Liberation Front is outraged:

Royal remains and sacrifice of babies and donkeys revealed in lost Syrian city

Among the more striking discoveries are a hitherto unseen form of ancient writing and the fact that the women in the tombs tend to have more grave wealth than the men….

The newly-discovered tombs contained signs of the ritual sacrifice: underground brick structures yielded the skeletons of infants and decapitated donkeys or perhaps onagers (their wild cousins), as well as puppy bones, Prof Schwartz said. “Given these discoveries, it’s likely that the tomb complex is a royal cemetery,” he said. “Nowhere else in the region have we seen this elaborate example of animal sacrifices as part of burial rituals.”

Or maybe they had some sort of matriarchy, after all, killing babies is the absolute top priority of our modern female elite. You’ll notice that they didn’t find any cat bones.

I do find it interesting how those who feel that religions are all the same or that Christianity has nothing to do with civilization never seem to notice how many other religions involve the bloody slaughter of adults, children, puppies or other animals in some way or another.

And I wonder, too, what future archeologists will conclude about our society when they uncover those pits of infant bones that escaped cremation at the abortion abattoirs.

In the words of Chuck D… here we go again:

Germany will on Wednesday adopt the most radical restructuring of its military since 1945, turning the Bundeswehr into an international intervention force, according to an internal cabinet strategy paper obtained by the Financial Times.

Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles
Uber alles in der Welt.
Einigkeit und Recht und Ordnung
Ist unsere Bewilligung!

Jetzt gibt es die neue Wehrmacht
Waffen alles schmuckt mit Blumen.
Hilf zu bringen, Lied’ zu singen
Immer wieder Tod des Juden!

Yeah, this sounds like a really freaking brilliant idea. I mean, that’s the real problem with the European Union, isn’t it… not enough armed Germans with a mandate for international intervention. I can’t wait to hear what sort of innocuous-sounding reason for the return of the Hakenkreuz they’re going to come up with.

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot – and his crimes – so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vaccuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other answer for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped.
– Paul Johnson, “Modern Times” p. 275

Thinking, educated atheists are aware that the essence of being educated did not spring, fully developed, from John Dewey’s head in the 1920s, although many of their more thoughtless fellows seem to think so. Not only were most educated men religious, but the very university system that educated them was an overtly Christian one, as was the hospital system. In fact, I doubt there was even much of a hospital concept in other religious cultures, not even the Chinese appear to have developed one.

Furthermore, if one judges secular society by its fruits, one has to harbor some serious reserves about its viability, let alone superiority, regardless of whether one examines education, the state of science, the arts or anything but technological progress which, it must be admitted, tends to be cumulative and therefore disqualified as a means of comparison.

I have no personal problem with atheists and agnostics; I can still remember being one of the latter myself. I do, however, take serious exception to those who would assume that the intellectual high ground belongs, by definition, to them. CS Lewis called them men without chests, I see them as lightweights. If one considers the ease with which a non-academic like me has shredded the flimsy arguments of a Singer, a Dawkins or a Harris – and no one has disputed that I have already done so at least once with each of them – then one has to wonder how bad it has gotten if they are supposed to be among the best these godless “brights” can offer.

I mean, if even the New York Times reviewer can see the nihilism inherent in Dawkins’ godlessness, it’s got to be pretty obvious. I can tell you why my morality supercedes yours and from whence it comes… I’ve yet to hear an atheist even begin to attempt seriously addressing either. Well, Harris tries, I suppose, but his attempts are more accurately characterized as “risible”, they don’t even manage to rise to the level of “feeble”.

(And no, the assertion that a man-invented morality based on nothing supercedes a morality based on a man-invented sky deity will not suffice. That manages equality, nothing more.)

As everyone knows, I don’t make a habit of discussing my friends and family on this blog, either for good or ill. But since it’s already in the paper, you can read this if you’re interested in the latest news about my father.

I have to admit that I find some people’s reactions to his actions to be rather mystifying, in much the same way that I never understood how it was supposed to be “cowardly” to fly a plane into a building. Considering most Americans’ views of a court system that jails pot smokers for life, lets murderers walk, creates strange “marriages” out of thin air, kicks people out of their homes and mines penumbras to find the right to kill unborn children, why would it be hard for anyone to understand when a man refuses voluntarily submit to its adjudication of a situation where it has an obvious self-interest?

And who is more cowardly, the sheep that go meekly along to the shearer or the one that jumps the fence and runs for the hills?

Granted, one might well question the practical wisdom of that decision, given the chance of being forced to contribute to a mutton dinner instead of a wool sweater, but that’s an entirely different matter.