Tag: religion

A Jew speaks out for Christians

It is noteworthy for Mr. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, is speaking out for Christians in being massacred in Africa and the Levant:

The general indifference to ISIS, with its mass executions of Christians and its deadly preoccupation with Israel, isn’t just wrong; it’s obscene.

In a speech before thousands of Christians in Budapest in June, I made a solemn promise that just as I will not be silent in the face of the growing threat of anti-Semitism in Europe and in the Middle East, I will not be indifferent to Christian suffering. Historically, it has almost always been the other way around: Jews have all too often been the persecuted minority. But Israel has been among the first countries to aid Christians in South Sudan. Christians can openly practice their religion in Israel, unlike in much of the Middle East.

This bond between Jews and Christians makes complete sense. We share much more than most religions. We read the same Bible, and share a moral and ethical core. Now, sadly, we share a kind of suffering: Christians are dying because of their beliefs, because they are defenseless and because the world is indifferent to their suffering.

Good people must join together and stop this revolting wave of violence. It’s not as if we are powerless. I write this as a citizen of the strongest military power on earth. I write this as a Jewish leader who cares about my Christian brothers and sisters.

The Jewish people understand all too well what can happen when the world is silent. This campaign of death must be stopped.

It would be nice if Mr. Lauder’s example would encourage Mr. Foxman and other Jews living in America to stop shrieking about how celebrating Christmas is a second Holocaust and attempting to import more Muslims into the West.

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Although he is vastly unpopular with the pinkshirts due to a combination of his huge success as a SF writer combined with his lack of enthusiasm for homosexuals playing house, Orson Scott Card is no conventional conservative. His political positions are more than a little incoherent, especially those where he appeals to what he claims is Christian theology:

The Republican Party deserves to fail, has chosen to fail, and this death wish continues in full force. They could have elected Mitt Romney in 2012 and stopped the
national nightmare by installing in the White House the most competent
man to be a major party nominee since Dwight Eisenhower.

But the evangelical Christians stayed home in droves rather
than vote for an evil Mormon – thus remaining “pure” but refusing to
govern.

The irony is that these very “Christians,” so determined to be
pure, now have as their single most important test of purity the most
unChristian dogma in present-day politics: No Amnesty!

Card’s first mistake is failing to recognize that the Republican Party chose to fail in 2012 by nominating Mitt Romney. But evangelical Christians were not Romney’s problem. Card simply does not have his facts straight. Not only did evangelicals vote for Romney at a higher rate than Mormons did, 79 percent vs 78 percent, but according to Pew
Research they gave him more support than they gave either John McCain (65 percent) or George W. Bush (63
percent and 67 percent in 2000 and 2004).

If anything, Card should be blaming Hispanic Catholics, whose support dropped five points, from 26 percent to 21 percent, from 2008 to 2012.

There were, of course, other Republican groups who were less than keen on the Romney. Libertarians loathed him. Ron Paul’s supporters despised him as well as their treatment by the Republican machine. Competent or not, the man was nearly as foolish a choice as John McCain, and would be even stupider in 2016. What the Republican party leaders always describe as “electable” has reliably turned out to be the opposite.

Mormons may well be fine, upstanding individuals on average. They still belong to a statistically insignificant religious group that is looked on with some suspicion due to their unusual views concerning what is, and what is not, Christian. Among them, apparently, being the idea that amnesty for criminals is a Christian concept, when that actually goes well beyond heresy into the realm of pure fiction.

Card’s version of Christian theology is as incorrect as his grasp of the 2012 voting patterns. I recommend to him the example of Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well. There may be neither Greek nor Jew in Christ Jesus, but at no point does Jesus, or any of the apostles, ever suggest that Roman citizenship belongs to everyone or that the Samaritans should be supported by Jewish taxes.

And as for a Mormon scare-quoting evangelicals and referring to them as “Christians” on the basis of their failure to support an foreign invasion consisting of tens of millions of aliens, well, let’s just say I don’t think that is the wisest choice of theological ground for Mr. Card to fight that particular battle. The fact that evangelicals generally tolerate Mormons these days does not mean they are going to be terribly inclined to having the legitimacy of their Christianity questioned by one.

Especially when Mr. Card simply embarrasses himself with his observable lack of knowledge of the Bible.

These “Christians” would do well to read chapter 18 of the Gospel of
Matthew, where Jesus tells his exact opinion of those who demand “no
amnesty, ever!” for other people’s sins – while they expect to be
forgiven for their own much greater ones.

Card is, theologically speaking, a complete illiterate. Jesus says absolutely nothing about “those who demand no amnesty ever.” Quite to the contrary, he says: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.”

In other words, Christians are to treat their unrepentant sinful brothers like pagans. Presumably, they need not treat unrepentant criminal aliens any better. As for the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, the three requirements are for the debtor to admit that the debt is owed, be willing to pay it, and beg for patience, none of which apply to invading foreigners.

My suspicion is that Card is sufficiently Biblically illiterate to have confused the reference to gouging out an eye in Matthew 18:9 with Matthew 7:5’s reference to planks and specks.

Community cohesion and its foes

Apparently the new term for freedom of association is “community cohesion”:

A nun in east London climbed to the top of a local building and ripped down a flag similar to the one flown by Jihadist militants in Syria and Iraq.

IB Times reported Friday that the flag was being flown alongside Palestinian flags and slogans in support of Gaza. Community members issued complaints over the flag with local council members, claiming that it was causing tension within the community. When council members went to take the flag down, they were surprised to find, someone had beat them to it.

“The council can confirm that following reports this morning of a
flag erected on the Will Crooks Estate, council officials took steps to
remove it but found it had already been taken down by Sister Christine
Frost, a well-known local activist and promoter of community cohesion,” a
council spokesman said.

Some argued that the black flag with
arabic writing resembling the flags flown by ISIL, also known as ISIS,
was only a symbol of Muslim faith and was not flown in support of
militant groups.

Don’t listen to the taqiyyah. The black flag is a symbol of Islamic supremacy. It is a sad testament to the spineless men of the West that a woman has to act in their stead.

Never forget what ISIS stands for: murdered men, raped women, beheaded children, and the extermination of Christianity.

The non-problem of pain

Gene Wolfe explains why the so-called “problem of pain” is simply not a credible argument for the non-existence or non-beneficence of God: 

You once said that pain tends to prove God’s reality rather than the opposite; that pain was not a theological difficulty for you.

No, it isn’t. If you catch a dragonfly and bend the end of its body up, it will eat itself until it dies. When people have had their mouths numbed for dentistry, they must be warned not to chew their tongues. I think if we assume that pain is simply an evil we’re oversimplifying things. 

[Thinks a moment.] You’re saying that pain may be a necessary design feature that the Divine Engineer—

Yes, absolutely. 

—put into his animated machines.
 If you had living things without pain, they would have a very rough time surviving.

More than ten years ago, I pointed out a similar observation concerning the existence of evil, which, far from being any sort of theological problem, is in fact evidence of the factual basis of Christian theology. Wolfe is observing that pain has an important purpose in life, as it is there to provide negative feedback to self-destructive actions. This does not mean that pain is good per se, only that it provides a good purpose.

For those interested in discussing the literary aspects of Mr. Wolfe’s observations, some of the more interesting parts have been posted at Castalia House, as well as a link to the full interview.

High IQs and theism

This is no surprise. As I’ve shown in the past, “there are 11.4x more +2SD theists who either know God exists or believe
God exists despite having the occasional doubt than there are +2SD
atheists who don’t believe God exists.”

Have you ever heard the claim “all smart people are atheists”, or maybe
its inverse: “people who believe in God are dumb”? It’s quite a
pervasive urban legend, and one which I’ve known is false for a long
time, but I didn’t realize just how false until the other day. I
recently decided to do a quick cataloging of the ten highest IQ’s on
earth, and discovered that it’s nearly the exact opposite of the truth!

The appeal to intelligence is a fallacy. But, any atheist who makes it is not only violating logic, he’s also demonstrating his own ignorance.

The slippery slope is not a logical fallacy

To the contrary, the slippery slope is observably a predictive model with occasional success, particularly with regards to sexual matters:

Judge Garry Neilson, from the district court in the state of New South Wales, likened incest to homosexuality, which was once regarded as criminal and “unnatural” but is now widely accepted.

He said incest was now only a crime because it may lead to abnormalities in offspring but this rationale was increasingly irrelevant because of the availability of contraception and abortion.

“A jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now ‘available’, not having [a] sexual partner,” the judge said.

“If this was the 1950s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you’d invariably have, they would say it’s unnatural for a man to be interested in another man or a man being interested in a boy. Those things have gone….

“The complainant has been sexually awoken, shall we say, by having two relationships with men and she had become ‘free’ when the second relationship broke down. The only thing that might change that is the fact that they were a brother and sister but we’ve come a long way from the 1950s – when the position of the English Common Law was that sex outside marriage was not lawful.”

This should make it clear to everyone who is not a sexual deviant that the position of the English Common Law was correct, and that all of the various deviancies that have been legalized and normalized and declared no longer indicative of psychological sickness since the 1950s should promptly be returned to their former status.

There is no middle ground. What devotees of one particular immorality or another believe is a reasonable stopping point – here, and no further –  is nothing more than a waystation on the road to total depravity of the worst imaginable sort.

We libertarians were wrong. Societal liberty simply cannot be maximized through sexual anarchy any more than it can be maximized though unrestricted immigration, unrestricted government, or unrestricted voting. In retrospect, this should always have been obvious: if everything goes, then literally everything will go. This is no longer a hypothetical objection on the part of traditional conservatives, it is an undeniable reality. It is human nature to push at the boundaries; there will always be those who cross the line. Therefore, the line needs to be set firmly along boundaries that are undeniably eucivic and proven by centuries of tradition to be sustainable in the long term.

There will be those who disingenuously insist that the clock cannot be turned back, that humanity is doomed to an endless future of sodomy, incest, rape, necrophilia, and bestiality. This is provably false; the current period of sexual anarchy in the West is hardly the first in human history and it is very short by historical standards. And this particular clock most certainly will be turned back, one way or another, because everything from birth rates to the transmission rates of sexually transmitted diseases indicate that the current state of near-sexual anarchy has already reached the point of unsustainability.

Technology can never trump Creator-imposed morality any more than science can surmount the physical laws of Nature. It may appear to do so, for a short time, but that is nothing more than an illusion based on incomplete understanding.

Anti-religious discrimination in the workplace

Corporate anti-religious discrimination in America is nearly as severe as racial discrimination against blacks:

Most of the country might consider itself religious, but according to two recently released studies, admitting one’s faith on a resume can cut the chances for a callback by more than 25 percent.

Scholars with the “Religious Affiliation and Hiring Discrimination” field experiments, conducted in the South and New England, found that “applicants who expressed a religious identity were 26 percent less likely to receive a response from employers.”

“These studies do tend to show there will be factors in resumes that will lead to bias,” said David Lewin, head of Berkeley Research Group’s Labor and Employment practice and a professor of organizational behavior at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. “Religion could well be one of them.”

Similar studies utilizing identifiably black names showed that similarly qualified blacks are 33 percent less likely to receive a callback. (NB: before you embarrass yourself by trying to correct me, do the freaking math.) Keep this in mind the next time you see an atheist try to claim there is no anti-religious discrimination in America; the studies show that at least when it comes to corporate employment, it is four-fifths as severe as racial discrimination.

Takes one to know one

It’s a bit ironic and more than a little morbidly amusing to see the descendents of the secular activists that successfully infiltrated and overturned Christian education across the West wringing their hands over Islamic activists doing precisely the same thing:

Headteachers are warning that schools across Britain have been targeted in an alleged Islamist plot to take over classrooms. The National Association of Head Teachers said it had ‘serious concerns’ about attempts to ‘alter the character’ of at least six schools.

It also warned that efforts to infiltrate classrooms were not limited to Birmingham and were likely to be affecting other major towns and cities. The union said ‘concerted efforts’ had been made to infiltrate state schools and run them according to strict Islamic principles. While the body did not name the additional areas affected, there are concerns over schools in Bradford, Manchester and parts of East London, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Russell Hobby, NAHT general secretary, said some teachers were being appointed because of their Muslim faith rather than their skills. There was also evidence of ‘pressure’ being brought to bear on heads to adopt ‘certain philosophies and approaches’…. Meanwhile, it has been claimed that dozens of teachers pushed out of schools by an alleged Islamist takeover plot are too afraid to speak out because of gagging orders.

Meanwhile, in the USA, people are being pushed out of their public and private sector jobs by politically correct equalitarians for a failure to obediently submit to the currently dictated goodthink.

Perhaps it the time is approaching for Christians to adopt the same strategy. After all, we can do inquisitions and crusades a damn sight better than they can.

The ignorance of Cosmos

As expected, the science fetishists are cooing happily over the latest media foray into demonstrable ignorance of religious history:

Here’s the thing: Even “Cosmos” points out that Bruno had no scientific basis for his theories. “His vision of the cosmos was a lucky guess,” says Tyson. So why is the long-dead philosopher important enough to rate hero status? That would be because “Cosmos” takes his case as one of “martyrdom.”

What “Cosmos” does not point out to its audiences that the Catholic Church didn’t really care about Bruno’s views on the Earth moving around the Sun. His crimes — the ones for which he was executed — were theological. Several actual scientists in this period happily investigated the ideas of Copernicus’ theories without running into trouble. Even Galileo only got in trouble when he published books that directly mocked the Church’s adherence to the Earth being at the center.

Why does this matter?

So what if Giordano Bruno wasn’t a scientist and wasn’t executed for science? There are three big reasons why this does, in fact, matter and why it hurts “Cosmos” to get it wrong.

1. To borrow one of Tyson’s famous quotes, the good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. The same goes for history. Getting the history of science wrong hurts science itself. Why believe the science if other parts of the show are inaccurate?

2. Making Bruno into a martyr for science basically makes 100 years of historical research useless. The idea of Giordano Bruno as a scientific hero only originated in the 19th century, when he was championed by several historians. Since then, most have classified him as a philosopher sharing dangerous ideas in a dangerous time.

3. It’s an unstated goal of “Cosmos” to champion science and scientific reasoning over superstition and religious dogmatism. But you’re not going to win over anyone by vilifying religion in the face of science. Add in Bruno flying into space in an overtly crucifixion stance almost seems like giving religion the finger. You don’t win arguments that way, “Cosmos.”

The strange thing is that the science fetishists are always talking about a hypothetical religious ignorance of science while openly demonstrating their own ignorance of history, in particular, the history of the very religion they denigrate on false bases. At least one atheist is aware of the historical illiteracy of his co-irreligionists:

One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who has the lack of common sense to hang around on atheist discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person’s grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing….

It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the
people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply
picked this [bullsh–] up from other websites and popular books and
collapse as soon as you hit them with some hard evidence. I love to
totally stump them by asking them to present me with the name of one –
just one – scientist burned, persecuted or oppressed for their science
in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually
try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing
considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have
failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently
so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil
Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too
scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of
Medieval scientists – like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger
Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley,
William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of
Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa – and
ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages
without molestation from the Church, my opponents have usually run away
to hide and scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong….

Cosmos must have him groaning with despair.

The Nothing People

John C. Wright on the restless hearts of the empty souls, who are never content no matter what they achieve and regardless of what gains they make:

Being without a sense of the objective nature of reality, they are without a belief in objective morals. Being without a belief in objective morals, they lack honor, and, lacking honor, they lack courage, lack decency, lack courtesy.

Hence, their one, sole and only means of discussing their principles in debate is to accuse whomever dares question them of any and every thing they think evil: they call normal people stupid and evil and heartless, bigoted and racist and fascist and thisist and thatist.

The content of the accusation does not matter, only the relief of being able to accuse, and accuse, and accuse.

Their only consistent principle — a principle never admitted, of course, but obvious in their every manifesto — is the Unreality Principle, which holds that it is better and braver to believe in make-believe than in real reality. The more unreal the belief, the less based on fact, the more open the self contradiction, the greater the power of will and nobility of spirit needed to believe it, and hence the greatest applause from the modern mind is reserved to those of their number that believe the most unreal and unrealistic things. And yet, with typical unselfaware modern irony, they call themselves the reality-based community.

In sum, their philosophy consists of the single principle that no philosophy is valid. Their ethics consist of a single precept that making ethical judgments is ‘judgmental’ that is, ethically wrong. Their economic theory, socialism, consists of an arrogant denial that the laws of economics apply to economic phenomena. Their theory of psychology says that men do not have free will, because cause and effect is absolute; their theory of metaphysics is that subatomic particles do have free will, because cause and effect is statistical, approximate, uncertain, incomplete, and illusory. And on and on. All their thought is one self-refuting statement after another.

Philosophically, theologically and morally, the modern mindset is an end-state. Once a man has utterly rejected reason, he cannot reason himself to another conclusion. Once he has rejected morality, he has no sense of honor to compel him to live up to a philosophy more demanding than narrow selfishness.

Again, once he had rejected the authority of tradition, so that his one precept is to ignore all precepts of his teachers, he has no motive and no way to pass along to the next generation this selfsame precept, for he then is himself a teacher teaching them to ignore all teachers. And so on.

No compromise is possible with these people. I use the term loosely, for they are not morally accountable Men and Women in the full sense of the term. They are intellectual nomads, always on the move, always parasitical, always acting to destroy, always needing an accusational high that is more powerful than the one before.

This is why attempts to appease them are always fruitless, why they always devour their own. You might as rationally attempt to reason with the weather as attempt to reason with them. They eat their own as readily as they devour those they overcome, and their bitterest hatred is reserved for those who stand up to them and tell them, with all the contempt that they merit, “you are nothing and you will never be anything”. Never ever back down to them.

If there is one thing they hate to hear, it is that they are fallen. They cling furiously to their pride and to their pretense to superiority because that is all they have. They are de facto psychopaths; they have no ability to empathize for all that they claim to empathize with everything and everyone from the snail darter to a bullied homosexual teen. They have endless hypothetical love for humanity and nothing of the real thing for their neighbors or anyone but themselves.

The real and the decent people sense their emptiness. We tiptoe around them, trying not to trigger the endless minefield of their sensitivities. This is pointless. Like insects, they thrive in darkness; whenever exposed to the harsh light of truth they are desperate to conceal their words and their deeds, to hide their empty sickness. But this is wrong, because there is only one hope for them, and that is the crushing of their pride.

There is nothing that can fill up the vast abyss within them except God. Nothing. So do not spare them. Remind them that they are nothing. Remind them that they are evil. Tell them the truth because they already know it and the reason for their frenetic activity is that they are running from it. Remind them their only hope at the joy they envy and crave is to abandon their empty, narcissistic pride and allow the Way, the Truth, and the Life to fill up the void within.

One of my friends once asked me why I seem to run into so many of these people, both personally and professionally. The answer is simple. I see them, they know I see them, and their instinctive reaction is to immediately attack those who recognize them for what they are. You see, the Nothing People always lie and thereby sentence themselves to a lifetime of policing the perceptions of others. It’s not that I recognize their lies so much as I recognize the constant scanning of others perception of them in which they necessarily engage.