Tag: religion

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.

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.

You can always count on the fact that some idiot in authority, somewhere, is going to try to destroy the fabric of civilization:

Lord Justice Laws condemned any attempt to protect believers who take a stand on matters of conscience under the law as “irrational” and “capricious”. In comments likely to set the church on a collision course with the courts, he claimed that doing so could set Britain on the road to a “theocracy”, or religious rule. His comments came as he dismissed a legal challenge by a Christian relationship counsellor who was sacked after refusing to offer sex therapy sessions to homosexual couples because it was against his beliefs.

The views expressed by the amusingly mistitled Lord Justice Laws are largely the same views previously expressed by every totalitarian leader or bureaucrat throughout history. For it is empirically and demonstrably obvious that what is capricious and irrational are the many vagaries of present UK/EU “law”, not belief systems that have been much more clearly codified and accepted by far more people for centuries.

Every intelligent individual, religious or irreligious, should be able to see the very clear danger involved in declaring the right of the state to override conscience and that “no religious belief itself could be protected under the law ‘however long its tradition, however rich its culture'”. This is overt totalitarian madness and is a direct conceptual strike at every cherished freedom of Western civilization. If there is no room for the law to respect religious beliefs, there is no room for it to respect beliefs of any kind and it rests upon a foundation of nothing more than the law of tooth and claw. It is not only absurd, but downright backwards to claim that respecting religious beliefs would put the UK “on the road to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.” Most historical theocracies have been less autocratic than the current EU, and far less autocratic than dozens of the bloodthirsty anti-religious regimes of the 20th century.

Secularists should beware of celebrating this form of superficially secular form of jurisprudence, as it isn not indicative of a movement towards a rational and progressive secular humanist society, but rather the unlimited state power formerly seen in ancient pagan societies.

I was not a fan of Ross Douthat in the past, but I have to admit that he has really risen to the occasion more often than not and is rapidly becoming the most readable and interesting columnist at the New York Times. In today’s column, he succinctly points out something that I have less successfully been attempting to articulate for some time:

In a way, the muzzling of “South Park” is no more disquieting than any other example of Western institutions’ cowering before the threat of Islamist violence. It’s no worse than the German opera house that temporarily suspended performances of Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” because it included a scene featuring Muhammad’s severed head. Or Random House’s decision to cancel the publication of a novel about the prophet’s third wife. Or Yale University Press’s refusal to publish the controversial Danish cartoons … in a book about the Danish cartoon crisis. Or the fact that various Western journalists, intellectuals and politicians — the list includes Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Michel Houellebecq in France, Mark Steyn in Canada and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands — have been hauled before courts and “human rights” tribunals, in supposedly liberal societies, for daring to give offense to Islam….

Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn’t Weimar Germany, and Islam’s radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy. For that, we should be grateful. Because if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down.

The intrinsic problem with secular society is essentially atheism’s warrant problem writ large. Just as atheism permits individual moralities, but no objective and universally applicable moral structure, secular society has no material foundations upon which to sustain itself. The attempt to manufacture theoretical foundations are fruitless, because the perfectly reasonable hypotheses of intellectuals working in the abstract have no connection to the way in which everyone else actually lives their lives.

Hence the irrelevance of those who suggest that morals “could be” based on a happiness/suffering metric or ask “why couldn’t” a society be founded on one proposed secular principle or another. Many of these ideas could, in theory, exist, but the empirical and observable reality is that they do not exist, they have never existed, no one abides by them, and no one is actually willing to risk anything to ensure their survival.

It is now eminently clear that those who are quick to criticize the Spanish Inquisition 176 years after its abolition would not have uttered a peep against it if they lived in Queen Isabella’s Castile. The ideals that the secularists have proposed to substitute for the Christian values of the traditional West are quite clearly counterfeit, and unlike Christianity, cannot survive in competition with more rigorous rivals. As can be seen in India, Africa, and parts of Asia, only paganism and Christian revival are capable of competing successfully with aggressive Islam, which is why it is increasingly apparent that the 20th century secular societies will turn out to be as unsustainable and nearly as short-lived as the financial system that made them possible.

There are already signs that secularism is devolving into pagan global Gaianism. I suspect that this new religion will become Islam’s primary rival in the post-Christian West, even as Christianity continues to grow exposively in the East and South. This is not to say that Christianity will not survive in the West, of course it will continue to be a significant influence, but it may not be the culturally dominant religion that it has been throughout previous centuries.