Tag: religion

75 percent

75 percent of the religious persecution around the world is directed at Christians. It is committed by the religious and irreligious alike. Meanwhile, Western liberals wring their hands about nonexistent persecution of Muslims and hunt for anti-semitic Nazis. When the militant arms of the Church of England and the Southern Baptists are openly committing murder without fear of prosecution, then perhaps they’ll have a case. Until then, they should shut up and look at what is happening around the world:

The British branch of the 64-year-old, Vatican-approved organization Aid to the Church in Need today released a report finding that a full 75 percent of religious persecution is currently being carried out against Christians. It further claims that, in two-thirds of the countries, this persecution has worsened. “For millions of Christians around the world,” the report states, “persecution, violence discrimination and suffering are a way of life as they live out their faith.”

Of course, secular society doesn’t care about Christians being persecuted, since a significant portion of it is actively and openly hoping to perform similar persecution itself. But that’s all right, because as before, the persecution will only serve to forge a stronger Church.

A failure of atheist logic

A former atheist contemplates the irrationality of atheist opposition to religion:

I had something of an epiphany. One night, after a long dinner, I was walking back to my hotel in downtown Salt Lake City at 2am and I suddenly realised: I felt safe. As any transatlantic traveller knows, this is a pretty unusual experience in an American city after midnight.

Why did I feel safe? Because I was in a largely Mormon city, and Mormons are never going to mug you. They might bore or annoy you when they come knocking on your door, touting their faith, but they are not going to attack you. The Mormons’ wholesome religiousness, their endless and charitable kindliness, made their city a better place. And that made me think: Why was I so supercilious about such happy, hospitable people? What gave me the right to sneer at their religion?

From that moment I took a deeper, more rigorous interest in the possible benefits of religious faith. Not one particular creed, but all creeds. And I was startled by what I found. For a growing yet largely unnoticed body of scientific work, amassed over the past 30 years, shows religious belief is medically, socially and psychologically beneficial…. Crucially, religious people lived longer than atheists even if they didn’t go regularly to a place of worship. This study clearly suggests there is a benefit in pure faith alone — perhaps this religiousness works by affording a greater sense of inner purpose and solace in grief.

This begs the question: Given all this vast evidence that religion is good for you, how come the atheists seem so set against it? They pride themselves on their rationality, yet so much of the empirical evidence indicates that God is good for you. Surely, then, it is the atheists, not the devout, who are acting irrationally?

Not only acting irrationally, but arguing nonsensically as well. I have pointed out on occasion the way in which the desire of some atheists to kick out what they see as a crutch out from under religious believers is an indication of a malicious character. If atheists persist in their attempts to destroy religious belief in light of this growing body of empirical evidence of the beneficial nature of religion, it will prove that their primary motivation is neither truth nor reason, but pure malice and ill-will.

Moreover, such evidence is one more nail in the coffin of Freudian pseudo-science. Since real science indicates that religious belief is good for you versus the Freudian claim that it is unhealthy, those atheists who still cling stubbornly to the outdated Freudian position will be revealed as overtly anti-science, their scientific pretensions notwithstanding.

Don’t miss the comments. It is always amusing to see the self-professed “intelligent” and “educated” atheists revealing their blatant ignorance by citing the usual nonexistent prison statistics, misleading divorce statistics, and imaginary military history.

Of Church and State

This is an example of why the Church needs to keep itself apart from the State. The purpose of the separation of Church and State is not to protect the State from the doctrine of the Church, but to protect the Church from the dictates of the State:

Gays and lesbians will be able to ‘marry’ in church under new laws to be unveiled this week. The historic decision by Liberal Democrat Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone will end the legal definition of marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. A gay couple will be able to refer to one of the partners as a ‘husband’, and a lesbian couple will be able to refer to one of the partners as a ‘wife’. A key part of the reform will bring an end to the ban that prevents civil partnerships being conducted in places of worship.

Now, you can certainly call a fish a gorilla if you want to. You can even pass a law declaring that all fish are henceforth to be legally considered gorillas. But it still won’t make a fish into a gorilla. At this point, it’s almost impossible to lament the decline of what was once Christendom as its actions eminently merit its forthcoming collapse.

It will be interesting to see how long the various governments attempt to deny the obvious logic that permits polygamy and bestiagamy under the same guise as homogamy before the inevitable acceptance.

Actual persecution

As atheists continue whine about how no one likes them and how they are second-class citizens, Christians are still being murdered for their faith around the world… as they have been for the last two thousand years:

Islamist militants divided into two groups who accessed the Coptic homes through the roofs of their neighbors’ houses. The survivors say the masked attackers of the first home were led by Ibrahim Hamdy Ibrahim. They killed Joseph Waheeb Massoud, his wife Samah, their 15-year-old daughter Christine, and their eight-year-old son Fady Youssef. The other masked group was led by Yasser Essam Khaled. They killed Saleeb Ayad Mayez, his wife Zakia, their four-year-old son Joseph and three-year-old daughter Justina, his 23-year-old sister Amgad, their mother Zakia, and Saniora Fahim.

Richard Dawkins likes to assert that a child cannot have a religious identity. But the fact that a child can be killed for a nonexistent identity clearly disproves that assertion. It certainly hasn’t stopped others who share Dawkins’s lack of religious identity from killing them. Given the way in which secularism has proven demographically barren, science has proven morally neutral, and democracy has proven to be a two-edged sword, it is time for the secularists and atheists of the West to seriously rethink their intransigent opposition to Christianity.

The choice is the same as it has always been for Europe and the West, between Christian civilization and pagan barbarism. The third option simply doesn’t exist. It’s not that Christianity needs the support of non-believers to survive, history from Rome to Communist China proves that it will survive and even thrive during periods of pagan persecution. It is Western civilization itself that requires non-believers to support Christian institutions and traditions; if secularists continue to align themselves with the pagans against Christendom, they will find themselves destroying the very aspect of society which they wished to save.

Religious fitness and science education

Ever since I started reading up on the present state of evolutionary theory a few years ago, I have found it rather remarkable to discover how resistant the TEpNS enthusiasts tend to be with regards to concluding what this article in the Scientific American points out is entirely obvious:

Blume’s research also shows quite vividly that secular, nonreligious people are being dramatically out-reproduced by religious people of any faith. Across a broad swath of demographic data relating to religiosity, the godly are gaining traction in offspring produced. For example, there’s a global-level positive correlation between frequency of parental worship attendance and number of offspring. Those who “never” attend religious services bear, on a worldwide average, 1.67 children per lifetime; “once per month,” and the average goes up to 2.01 children; “more than once a week,” 2.5 children. Those numbers add up—and quickly. Some of the strongest data from Blume’s analyses, however, come from a Swiss Statistic Office poll conducted in the year 2000. These data are especially valuable because nearly the entire Swiss population answered this questionnaire—6,972,244 individuals, amounting to 95.67% of the population—which included a question about religious denomination.

“The results are highly significant,” writes Blume: “… women among all denominational categories give birth to far more children than the non-affiliated. And this remains true even among those (Jewish and Christian) communities who combine nearly double as much births with higher percentages of academics and higher income classes as their non-affiliated Swiss contemporaries.”

In other words, it’s not just that “educated” or “upper class” people have fewer children and tend also to be less religious, but even when you control for such things statistically, religiosity independently predicts number of offspring born to mothers.

The spandrel explanation for religion has always looked like little more than willful blindness combined with wishful thinking on the part of anti-theists. In the same way that most atheists are reluctant to admit the unavoidably nihilistic conclusion to their material reductionism, (hence the “irrational atheist” appellation), many irreligious evolutionists so dislike religion that they will concoct any number of far-fetched hypotheses to avoid concluding that even from their own godless perspective, religion has great utility and provides a reproductive advantage. As anecdotal evidence, the 12 or so couples who made up our old Bible study in Minnesota and who were all just beginning to have their first children now have between three and six non-adopted children per couple. The average is probably around 3.8; even with the Christmas cards I can never keep them all straight.

But then, as I have repeatedly pointed out, scientists tend to be much worse than one would expect them to be at correctly applying logic. Although I suppose they really should not be expected to do it well; after all, the entire raison d’etre of the proper scientific method is to avoid relying upon logic in favor of reaching conclusions that are based firmly upon experimentation and observation, confirmed by replication. The problem, of course, is that logic is still required with regards to interpreting the significance of the conclusions provided by the scientific method and I have observed that very few scientists, if any, appear to have received any training in logic as part of their professional education.

Now, please feel free to correct me with actual curriculum-related facts if I am wrong about my conclusions here, but based on the many arguments I have seen put forth on various subjects from numerous individuals holding science-related PhDs, I very much doubt that many science majors devote any time to learning either history or logic. A look at the M.I.T. Department of Biology’s graduate and undergraduate programs shows no sign of requiring either beyond the standard Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Requirement for all undergraduate majors. While it is entirely possible that MIT science majors are choosing to study history or philosophy as part of their grand total of eight (8!) elective courses, they could just as easily be taking courses in Comparative Media Studies or Theater Arts. And given the astonishing inability of science majors to anticipate the supply and demand curves for PhDs in their chosen fields, one is forced to conclude that very few of them elect to study economics.

What this suggests is that scientists, on average, are at least as ignorant of history, economics, philosophy, religion, and logic as they believe non-scientists to be of science, and for precisely the same reason. Therefore, barring any convincing individual demonstration to the contrary, their opinions outside their professional discipline are ignorant and should be taken no more seriously than they believe the opinions of non-scientists are to be regarded within their field.

Verse of the Day

“As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor. The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left. Even as fools walk along the road, they lack sense and show everyone how stupid they are.”
– Ecclesiastes 10:1-3

Keep that in mind the next time you speak with one of your Christian friends who inclines to the left. And it is, of course, intriguing that the Bible should not only correctly anticipate post-18th century political ideologies, but correctly identify the sort of individual who belongs to them as well….

Mailvox: religious ignorance

Much has been made of the fact that atheists and agnostics scored the highest on the Pew Forum’s recent quiz on the world’s religions. I’ve certainly received a lot of emails about it from atheists and Christians alike. But what hasn’t been pointed out is that they still only answered 65 percent of the questions correctly. This may help explain the dichotomy we often see here between the atheist’s belief that he knows a lot about religion and his demonstrated ignorance of the tenets of a particular religion. The fact that an atheist happens to have heard of Vajrayana Buddhism or Divine Command theory, usually through a second-hand reference, will set him well ahead of the average religious individual. But it doesn’t actually mean that he knows anything about any specific religion or that his knowledge is likely to compare favorably with that of a religious adherent who happens to take his religion seriously.

Furthermore, logic suggests that someone who subscribes to no religion is far more likely to be familiar with the competing tenets of the various religions than any one adherent is to be familiar with the others. This perspective is supported by the fact that both Jews and Mormons outscored atheists and agnostics when the questions related to Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism were left out of the equation and that Mormons and evangelicals scored much better than anyone – 86 percent and 73 percent respectively – on questions related to the Bible.

So, my conclusion is that atheists should try to keep in mind that while they know more about religion in general than most evangelicals do, they don’t know as much about the Bible or Christianity. And Christians should remember that knowing a lot about Christianity is not synonymous with knowing a lot about religion.

So, if you’re interested, take the short version of the quiz yourself and report on how you did. Here is my score, which apparently would have had me in the top .02 percent: “You answered 15 out of 15 questions correctly for a score of 100%.”

The real religious threat

James Delingpole explains that it comes from the radical Gaians brainwashed by years of public school propaganda:

It’s time we woke up to the threat posed by this mass brainwashing of the younger generation. We worry, rightly, about those Muslim children who are being indoctrinated with the extreme Wahaabist version of their faith. Yet we seem astonishingly complacent that every day, in schools of every kind throughout the Western world, our children are being taught by well-meaning teachers to view their world and culture through exactly the same anti-capitalist, anti-human, anti-growth eyes as James Lee and the Unabomber.

The modern environmental movement is not kind, caring or gentle. It is a series of ticking time bombs waiting to blow up in our face.

If it weren’t for the fact that Western economies are collapsing anyhow, one could make a serious argument that the Gaians are a greater threat to humanity than the most expansionist imperialists of the Dar al-Harb. The lunacy of James Lee is a clear warning sign.

Darwinianism and evolution

The vehement objections of those who believe in the evolution of the species notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that Darwinianism is a religious cult of faith. This is a simple and provable matter of observable evidence. But the key is to understand what “Darwinianism” means, for as is all too often the case, the atheists who subscribe to Darwinianism engage in their usual bait-and-switch by hiding their philosophical beliefs behind a false veneer of science. So, when the Darwinian denies that belief in the ever-mutating biological theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection is a religion, he is absolutely correct. And yet, the denial is irrelevant. This is because the Darwinian cult has its foundations in the biological theory, but cannot legitimately be conflated with it.

Consider one of the first great prophets of Darwinianism, Herbert Spencer, who stated that “Evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness.” In Revoking the Moral Order, David J. Peterson writes:

Spencer taught further that society embodied a self-perfecting process…. Using his own “scientific” methodology which he dubbed “reasoning by analysis” he concluded that creating the ideal man biologically was analogous to bringing about the ideal state of society; a realization of utopia.

Herbert Spencer, if you do not recognize his name, was the founder of “Social Darwinism”, which has absolutely nothing to do with the heartless, Dickens-era capitalist connotations applied to it today. It is, instead, the religion to which today’s New Atheists and progressives subscribe. This means it is entirely correct to describe a Darwinian as possessing “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe”, or in other words, as possessing religious faith. However, keep in mind that the mere belief in the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection is not alone sufficient to make one a Darwinian. That requires a belief in evolution-driven progress towards an eventual end of one sort or another.

To say that a fish evolved into an amphibian is to be an evolutionist. To say that Man has evolved beyond traditional morals is to be a Darwinian. The distinction is an important one, as is least a biological quasi-science whereas the latter is nothing more than a secular religion.

Suicide of the liberal society

In light of the recent Supreme Court decision on Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, Stanley Fish considers the question of whether religion should be given special status in a liberal society or not. And his correct conclusion is precisely why it is foolish for secularists to celebrate what is little more than a step towards secular self-destruction:

The dilemma is sharpened and even rendered poignant by the fact that liberalism very much wants to believe that it is being fair to religion, but what it calls fairness amounts to cutting religion down to liberal size…. What it goes to show is that the conflict between the liberal state, with its devotion to procedural rather than substantive norms, and religion, which is all substance from its doctrines to its procedures, is intractable. In his “Political Liberalism,” John Rawls asks how democracy’s aspiration for “a just and stable society of free and equal citizens” can be squared with the fact that some of those citizens hold beliefs that are exclusionary; how can they receive equal treatment if they deny it to others?

What the modern secularists tend to forget is that the reason religion was historically granted a special place in society is due to its incredible power, which only the historically illiterate secularist will ignore. The idea behind enshrining the freedom of religious expression into the Constitution was to avoid the sort of power struggles between Church and Church or Church and State that tended to tear society apart. But misconceived confidence in the idea of linear progress through science and technology to a sexy, science fiction secular utopia, in addition to the judicially-dictated transformation from freedom of religion to freedom from religion, is setting the stage for a return of the very problems that the earlier form of American liberal society was constructed to avoid. This is short-sighted, because the easily demonstrated fact of the matter is that religion is far hardier and far more difficult to destroy than liberal society. The logic is simple. If there is no longer room for religion in liberal society, then liberal society will eventually be destroyed like every other force that has tried to oppose religion… assuming it doesn’t collapse of its metastasizing contradictions first.