Atheism and the Moralisms of the Wax-Nose, Part I

What Scares the New Atheists

John Gray
March 3, 2015
The Guardian

[In this extended essay published in The Guardian John Gray focuses upon the inevitable amorality of atheism.  Since atheism has no foundation for any morality, what moral precepts its does advocate have no defendable foundation.  Atheist moral precepts are wishful thinking. This has led atheists down through the years to adhere to a bunch of conflicting moralisms, moral positions, and moralities.  We have broken the essay down into shorter segments and will publish over consecutive days.  Ed.]


In 1929, the Thinker’s Library, a series established by the Rationalist Press Association to advance secular thinking and counter the influence of religion in Britain, published an English translation of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s 1899 book The Riddle of the Universe. Celebrated as “the German Darwin”, Haeckel was one of the most influential public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; The Riddle of the Universe sold half a million copies in Germany alone, and was translated into dozens of other languages. Hostile to Jewish and Christian traditions, Haeckel devised his own “religion of science” called Monism, which incorporated an anthropology that divided the human species into a hierarchy of racial groups. Though he died in 1919, before the Nazi Party had been founded, his ideas, and widespread influence in Germany, unquestionably helped to create an intellectual climate in which policies of racial slavery and genocide were able to claim a basis in science.

The Thinker’s Library also featured works by Julian Huxley, grandson of TH Huxley, the Victorian biologist who was known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his fierce defence of evolutionary theory. A proponent of “evolutionary humanism”, which he described as “religion without revelation”, Julian Huxley shared some of Haeckel’s views, including advocacy of eugenics. In 1931, Huxley wrote that there was “a certain amount of evidence that the negro is an earlier product of human evolution than the Mongolian or the European, and as such might be expected to have advanced less, both in body and mind”. Statements of this kind were then commonplace: there were many in the secular intelligentsia – including HG Wells, also a contributor to the Thinker’s Library – who looked forward to a time when “backward” peoples would be remade in a western mould or else vanish from the world.

But by the late 1930s, these views were becoming suspect: already in 1935, Huxley admitted that the concept of race was “hardly definable in scientific terms”. While he never renounced eugenics, little was heard from him on the subject after the second world war. The science that pronounced western people superior was bogus – but what shifted Huxley’s views wasn’t any scientific revelation: it was the rise of Nazism, which revealed what had been done under the aegis of Haeckel-style racism.

It has often been observed that Christianity follows changing moral fashions, all the while believing that it stands apart from the world. The same might be said, with more justice, of the prevalent version of atheism. If an earlier generation of unbelievers shared the racial prejudices of their time and elevated them to the status of scientific truths, evangelical atheists do the same with the liberal values to which western societies subscribe today – while looking with contempt upon “backward” cultures that have not abandoned religion.

The racial theories promoted by atheists in the past have been consigned to the memory hole – and today’s most influential atheists would no more endorse racist biology than they would be seen following the guidance of an astrologer. But they have not renounced the conviction that human values must be based in science; now it is liberal values which receive that accolade. There are disputes, sometimes bitter, over how to define and interpret those values, but their supremacy is hardly ever questioned. For 21st century atheist missionaries, being liberal and scientific in outlook are one and the same.

It’s a reassuringly simple equation. In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values. When organised as a movement and backed by the power of the state, atheist ideologies have been an integral part of despotic regimes that also claimed to be based in science, such as the former Soviet Union. Many rival moralities and political systems – most of them, to date, illiberal – have attempted to assert a basis in science. All have been fraudulent and ephemeral. Yet the attempt continues in atheist movements today, which claim that liberal values can be scientifically validated and are therefore humanly universal.

Fortunately, this type of atheism isn’t the only one that has ever existed. There have been many modern atheisms, some of them more cogent and more intellectually liberating than the type that makes so much noise today. Campaigning atheism is a missionary enterprise, aiming to convert humankind to a particular version of unbelief; but not all atheists have been interested in propagating a new gospel, and some have been friendly to traditional faiths.

Evangelical atheists today view liberal values as part of an emerging global civilisation; but not all atheists, even when they have been committed liberals, have shared this comforting conviction. Atheism comes in many irreducibly different forms, among which the variety being promoted at the present time looks strikingly banal and parochial.

Daily Devotional

The Supreme Law of the Creation

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On his brother’s admission to an Oxford hospital, for treatment of alcoholism; and on the meaning of vicarious suffering, or what Lewis will call, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the “Deeper Magic,” mentioned above in his letter to Sister Penelope, 19 November 1941.

C.S. Lewis

2 July 1949
Thanks for your most kind and comforting letter—like a touch of a friend’s hand in a dark place. For it is much darker than I feared. W’s trouble is to be called ‘nervous insomnia’ in speaking to Janie and others; but in reality (this for your private ear) it is Drink. This bout started about ten days ago. Last Sunday the doctor and I begged him to go into a nursing home (that has always effectively ended previous bouts) and he refused. Yesterday we succeeded in getting him in; but alas, too late. The nursing home has announced this morning that he is out of control and they refuse to keep him. Today a mental specialist is to see him and he will be transferred, I hope for a short stay, to what is called a hospital but is really an asylum. Naturally there is no question of a later Irish jaunt for me this year. A few odd days here and there in England is the best I can hope for.

Don’t imagine I doubt for a moment that what God sends us must be sent in love and will all be for the best if we have grace to use it so. My mind doesn’t waver on this point; my feelings sometimes do. That’s why it does me good to hear what I believe repeated in your voice—it being the rule of the universe that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves and one can paddle every canoe except one’s own. That is why Christ’s suffering for us is not a mere theological dodge but the supreme case of the law that governs the whole world; and when they mocked him by saying, ‘He saved others, himself he connot save,’ [Matthew 27:42; Mark 15:31] they were really uttering, little as they knew it, the ultimate law of the spiritual world.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume II
Compiled in Yours, Jack
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume II: Family Letters 1905-1931. Copyright © 2004 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Rampant Positivity and Other Idiocies

Pedal Cars to the Rescue

The government education system is in a right royal mess, if the analysis of a professor at the University of Melbourne is to be given due regard.  The NZ government system is awash, apparently, with untested, speculative, high-risk novelties that pass as avant-garde, progressive, cutting edge educational practice.  Or, as Professor Stephen Dinham inelegantly puts it, the system has been " hijacked by fads, many of which he said had been either debunked or were unproven."

What are these fads that pass as leading edge pedagogical practice?  The leader of the misshapen herd of mongrel theories is the insistence on relentless praise, or

"self-boosting" where students were saturated in "rampant positivity".  "The danger with this is [students] get into the big, bad world and they find out they're not so good. This is a tremendous blow to their self-esteem," he told the Herald on Sunday.

He said a lack of honest, helpful feedback was leading to a confusion for children.  Giving children regular, constructive feedback about how to improve was a better policy, he said.  "We need to say to kids that they can do this, they can't do that but to move their learning forward they need to do this, that or the other. What we don't say is you're good or bad at something," said Dinham.

This reinforced a valuable message that effort brought reward. [NZ Herald]

We would add that it is not just a blow to self-esteem.

How Israel Became the Whipping Boy

European Socialists' Mystifying Stand-For-Islam Explained

Daniel Pipes
February 28, 2015

Oct. 28, 2012 update: In a surprisingly good article for the usually worthless New York Times opinion page, Colin Shindler (emeritus professor at the University of London asks "why do today's European socialists identify with Islamists whose worldview is light-years removed from their own?" He points to leftist anti-colonialism as the key, something I did not mention in "[The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace":

Colin Shindler of SOAS.

The old left in Europe was forged in the struggle against local fascists in the 1930s. Most of Europe experienced a brutal Nazi occupation and bore witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. The European left strongly identified with Jewish suffering and therefore welcomed the birth of the state of Israel in 1948. Some viewed the struggle for Israel in the same light as the fight for freedom in the Spanish Civil War. But the succeeding generation of the European left did not see things this way. Its frame of reference was the anticolonial struggle — in Vietnam, South Africa, Rhodesia and a host of other places. Its hallowed icon was not the soldier of the International Brigades who fought against Franco in Spain, but Che Guevara — whose image adorned countless student bedrooms. Anticolonialism further influenced myriad causes, from America's Black Panthers in the 1960s to Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela today.

It began with Israel's exclusion from the ranks of the nonaligned nations more than 50 years ago, when Arab states refused to attend a 1955 nonaligned conference in Indonesia if an Israeli delegate was present. The Jewish state was snubbed in favor of such feudal kingdoms as Saudi Arabia, Libya and Yemen. And Israel's collusion with imperial powers like Britain and France during the Suez crisis the following year cemented its ostracism.

Given the deep remorse for the misdeeds of colonialism, it was easier for the New Left of the 1960s to identify with the emerging Palestinian national movement than with the already established social democratic Israel. This deepening hostility toward Israel was present in Europe before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and before the rush to build settlements on the West Bank.

Daily Devotional

Where Our Comfort Comes From

They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” So he delivered him over to them to be crucified. (John 19:15–16)

John Piper

Pilate’s authority to crucify Jesus did not intimidate Jesus. Why not?

Not because Pilate was lying. Not because he didn’t have authority to crucify Jesus. He did.
Rather, this authority did not intimidate Jesus because it was derivative. Jesus said, “It was given to you from above.” Which means it is really authoritative. Not less. But more.

So how is this not intimidating? Pilate not only has authority to kill Jesus. But he has God-given authority to kill him.  This does not intimidate Jesus because Pilate’s authority over Jesus is subordinate to God’s authority over Pilate. Jesus gets his comfort at this moment not because Pilate’s will is powerless, but because Pilate’s will is guided. Not because Jesus isn’t in the hands of Pilate’s fear, but because Pilate is in the hands of Jesus’s Father.

Which means that our comfort comes not from the powerlessness of our enemies, but from our Father’s sovereign rule over their power.

Nasty Stuff

Academic Idiot Gets Skewered

There are few things more annoying than academics attempting to put a "scientific" veneer upon modern claptrap.  Columnist Rodney Hide skewers the latest offering by a University of Otago professor whose latest "call to action" is risible.

Being poor makes you fat. How unfair is that? It's bad enough you're poor without food sticking to your tum.  A news report states: "Adults living in poor areas [are] 1.6 times as likely to be obese as those in other areas." Poverty is not the problem. It's living in poor areas. Moving house should do wonders for your waistline.

University of Otago Professor Jim Mann explains: "Being economically disadvantaged is a predisposing factor to obesity."  His is the politically correct expression for the poor. "Being economically disadvantaged" renders poverty an affliction. As in, "Poor fellow, bad dose of economic disadvantage. Caught it off the neighbours."

But why does being poor make you fat? "One reason is good food preparation requires either time or money. If you are rich you can get good food or if you have a lot of time you can soak the lentils, et cetera," says Mann.  It's the non-soaked lentils? Seriously? Besides, people in the past were poorer and weren't fat. And they didn't soak their lentils.

Mann goes on: "Once you are obese it also feeds socio-economic disadvantage because you are too exhausted to work, getting jobs is more difficult, people are prejudiced against obese people and people are less likely to employ you - this is the vicious cycle."  So you are poor and get a little fat. Once a little fat you get poorer and consequently fatter. On and on it goes.

What Mann is assuming in his argument is that the poor are not responsible for their obesity.

Letter From the UK (About Industrialised Crime and Winking Authorities)

Multi-Culti In Action

300 victims groomed and assaulted by Oxfordshire gangs, report finds

Serious case review finds failings by police and social services as it identifies hundreds of victims 

The Daily Telegraph 

A damning report is expected to disclose that more than 300 young people have been groomed and sexually exploited by gangs in Oxfordshire over the past 15 years. Systemic failures by police and social services meant victims were subjected to years of sexual torture, rape and trafficking, it is understood.The victims, mostly girls, come predominantly from Oxford, making it the latest area in Britain to be embroiled in a scandal over the handling of child sex abuse and proving the issue is not confined to inner cities.

One senior investigative source told The Guardian: “If you think you haven’t got a problem in your city or town, you are just not looking for it.”  The report comes after seven men were jailed for a string of horrendous child sex crimes against six victims, aged between 11 and 15, over a seven-year period.

Daily Devotional

Injured and Ill-Tempered

C. S. Lewis

Screwtape outlines a fundamental deception:

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.

Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-à-tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear. Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’.

Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Gender Inflation

Bonfire of the Vanities

Over the past few months the West has reached a new waypoint of absurdity in its acceptance of the notion that one's gender is a bender.  It has turned out that one's gender is whatever one identifies it as being.  Facebook, ever on the cutting edge of nihilism and narcissism, thoughtfully listed around thirty-five gender options for "clients" to choose as part of the lemming rush-to-the-cliff of gender identity.  But time and tide wait for no man, so now, in the latest iteration, Facebook in the UK has expanded the list of potential gender identities to seventy.  If you thought that 35 gender self-identities was an inflation to the nonsensical, what does a doubling indicate?

For our part, we are only just able to get up off the floor from rolling around laughing.  But we have not yet reached the limits of hilarity on this one.  Because the West is also insisting upon sexual and gender licentiousness as an absolute and irrevocable human right, it finds itself in a pickle.  Institutions of all kinds will have to change.  Take the humble prison.  Here the state is displayed in all its fearsome might.  But every prisoner must be treated with dignity, which of course means that each prisoner's gender identity must be reflected appropriately.  This from Stuff:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Ukraine #1

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

March 2, 2015

In the past, I have made passing references to Ukraine, and those references have made clear my distaste for Putin’s brand of Russian adventurism, along with my sympathies for Ukraine, stuck as they are with us on their side, us being such a hapless chump of a superpower. For example, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had a bunch of nukes. We talked them into surrendering those nukes in exchange for us guaranteeing their borders. They were stupid enough to believe us, so it is partly their fault I guess.

But this promises to descend into the particulars too quickly. I do want to get there in subsequent installments, but first I want to make some distinctions between two different kinds of political issues. There are the “do triangles have three sides?” issues, and there are the “did Smith shoot Murphy on the night of the 13th?” issues. Whether minimum wage laws are a good idea is the former kind of issue, and who should own the Crimea is the latter kind.

Unfortunately, the latter kind of issue is the kind that winds up in shooting wars, when the issues are often far more murky than people like to pretend, while the former kind of issue is the kind where people are prone to adopt a live and let live approach.

Daily Devotional

Radical Effects of the Resurrection

If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Corinthians 15:19)

John Piper

Paul concludes from his hourly danger and his daily dying and his fighting with beasts that the life he has chosen in following Jesus is foolish and pitiable if he will not be raised from the dead.  If death were the end of the matter, he says, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” This doesn’t mean: Let’s all become gluttons and drunkards. They are pitiable too — with or without the resurrection. He means: If there is no resurrection, what makes sense is middle-class moderation to maximize earthly pleasures.

But that is not what Paul chooses. He chooses suffering, because he chooses obedience. When Ananias came to him at his conversion with the words from the Lord Jesus, “I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:16), Paul accepted this as part of his calling.  How could Paul do it? What was the source of this radical obedience? The answer is given in 1 Corinthians 15:20: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” In other words, Christ was raised, and I will be raised with him. Therefore, nothing suffered for Jesus is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58).

The hope of the resurrection radically changed the way Paul lived. It freed him from materialism and consumerism. It gave him the power to go without things that many people feel they must have in this life. For example, though he had the right to marry (1 Corinthians 9:5), he renounced that pleasure because he was called to bear so much suffering.

Rankings and Credibility

Buffoons To the Right and to the Left of Us

In New Zealand we have been entertained for several years by a particular gaggle of buffoons.  It has been an outstanding comedy.  At the centre has been Kim Dotcom, a merry crim with lots of money, who has made an art form out of teasing, flirting, enticing, and seducing politicians of the ideological left, right, and centre. 

Caught up amidst the brouhaha has been one John Banks, ACT parliamentarian who was convicted of a conspiracy to conceal a donation from Dotcom which should have been declared.  The Court of Appeal has overturned that conviction and Banks is awaiting a new trial.  New evidence has come to light which appears to corroborate Mr Banks's testimony.

The original conviction was courtesy of High Court Justice, Edwin Wylie who declared in the original trial that he found "Dotcom was a good witness".  (The trial was by judge, and not by jury).

It seems as though the Justice Edwin Wylie deserves to share the butt of ribaldry, being well joined in with the gaggle of buffoons which have intersected with Dotcom.

The following is from a site which rates NZ judges and according to its ranking of justices in the  2014 Judge Survey Score (1-10), Justice Wylie scored a 6.7 out of 10, which ranked him at 59th out of 62. The narrative reads:

Justice Wylie is less than an imposing presence on the bench.  He generally comes across as feeble and indecisive, commonly asking appearing counsel whether they agree with his conclusions and then changing his conclusions radically if one side – particularly the Crown – suggest (sic) he missed the point.  As with most judges in New Zealand, Wylie J can be fair if there is no personal reason not to be.  He is an average lawyer who has successfully fought above his weight but, because he commonly is riddled with self-doubt and is cursed with an overwhelming compulsion to please his audience, he is the butt of many jokes by the lawyers who appear before him.

Ouch.

Up With the "Even More Evil Empire"

Empowering Jihad: The Deadly Myth of a 'Root Cause'

by Phyllis Chesler
The New York Post
February 26, 2015

Reports that "Jihadi John," the British-accented narrator of ISIS snuff videos, is Mohammed Emwazi — an educated young man from a middle-class background — ought to put the final stake in the pretense that poverty and a lack of education and opportunity fuel Islamist hate.

This mistaken idea seems to be Obama administration policy.

Marie Harf, the US Department of State deputy spokesperson, recently said:

We cannot win this war by killing [jihadists]. We need to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs. . . We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.

Of course, the news about "Jihadi John" is only the latest evidence to the contrary. These terrorists are often well educated and even wealthy. Osama bin Laden certainly was.

Daily Devotional

A Pilgrim On the Earth, At Home with God

"Thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation."
Psalm 91:9

Charles H. Spurgeon

The Israelites in the wilderness were continually exposed to change. Whenever the pillar stayed its motion, the tents were pitched; but tomorrow, ere the morning sun had risen, the trumpet sounded, the ark was in motion, and the fiery, cloudy pillar was leading the way through the narrow defiles of the mountain, up the hill side, or along the arid waste of the wilderness. They had scarcely time to rest a little before they heard the sound of "Away! this is not your rest; you must still be onward journeying towards Canaan!" They were never long in one place. Even wells and palm trees could not detain them.

Yet they had an abiding home in their God, his cloudy pillar was their roof-tree, and its flame by night their household fire. They must go onward from place to place, continually changing, never having time to settle, and to say, "Now we are secure; in this place we shall dwell." "Yet," says Moses, "though we are always changing, Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place throughout all generations."

The Christian knows no change with regard to God. He may be rich today and poor to-morrow; he may be sickly today and well to-morrow; he may be in happiness today, to-morrow he may be distressed--but there is no change with regard to his relationship to God. If he loved me yesterday, he loves me today.

My unmoving mansion of rest is my blessed Lord. Let prospects be blighted; let hopes be blasted; let joy be withered; let mildews destroy everything; I have lost nothing of what I have in God. He is "my strong habitation whereunto I can continually resort." I am a pilgrim in the world, but at home in my God. In the earth I wander, but in God I dwell in a quiet habitation.

Common Bonds and the Anglosphere

Our Dirty Little Secret

A correspondent, Liam Hehir, writing in the Manawatu Standard, attempts a rationale as to why New Zealand should be actively involved in the Western military effort against ISIS.  It is because of a shared cultural traditions enjoyed by the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  He defines some key aspects of this shared culture.

As it is with families, so it is with nations and there is a natural affinity between those countries that share a Britannic inheritance. Winston Churchill spoke of the common bonds of the "English speaking peoples". New Zealand historian James Belich has written of it as the "Anglo-World". The term that seems to be vogue now is the "Anglosphere". . . .

This closeness is not based on race. An Italian American has little ancestry in common with a British Pakistani or an Australian Aborigine. There is no such thing as a "Canadian" or "New Zealand" ethnicity. Our familiarity is instead bound up in shared traditions like the common law, habeas corpus, trial by jury, free enterprise, private property, freedom of speech and, of course, the English language.

Hehir neglects to mention that the two dominant members of the Anglosphere, the UK and the US, also have a long tradition of colonialism and neo-colonialism respectively.   This tradition we in NZ, but also Canada and Australia do not share--at least not to the same degree.  It is those traditions which have led both the UK and the US off to war, repeatedly.

Sweden's Rabid Abortionism

Abortion Opponents Compared to Jihadists

The Observatory

 

February 2015: Mona Sahlin's, the national coordinator against violent extremism at the Swedish Ministry of Justice, stated during a panel discussion on religion and democracy that the midwife Ellinor Grimmark, a Christian who refuses to participate in abortion, was an "extreme religious practitioner who is fighting in a similar way as do the people fighting for the Islamic state.”

Source:
www.varldenidag.se/nyhet/2015/02/09/Sahlin-jamstallde-jihadister-med-abortmotstandare
www.citizengo.org/de/19049-christen-mit-gewissen-sind-keine-djihadisten

Daily Devotional

The Pebble and the Seed

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

The sun is 93 million miles away. It would be fair to say that the sun is distant. But for everyone who has eyes to see, the sun is very much present.

The Lord Jesus Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father. He is there, not here. As a true man, He is located in the heavenly places. And yet, God has established the kingdom of His Son in such a way that the radiance of the Son’s glory extends throughout that entire kingdom, which is done through the power of the Spirit.

That radiance of glory is not felt equally by all. If you were to bury a pebble in your garden and a seed in your garden right next to the pebble, you would get very different results from them. The seed contains life, and so can respond to the gift presented by the distant sun now present. The pebble contains no life, and is insensible to whether the sun is distant or present.

Unmentionable

The West's Religious War

One of our more thoughtful opinionistas has written a piece about the Left's "conflicted" state over ISIS.  In his opining, he shows just how confused and conflicted he also is.  Taken together, Karl Du Fresne and the Left  have a deeply held common view about ISIS. 

Firstly, let's review Du Fresne's analysis of the Left's position.  In summary he argues that the Left is taking a moral view--a highly principled view--but it's blinkered.  That is, it's hypocritical and compromised.

It's hard to think of a more challenging conundrum than the one posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis).  Labour leader Andrew Little was right last week to describe Isis as evil. It's a word seldom heard these days because it implies a moral judgment, and moral judgments are unfashionable. But "evil" is the only way to describe men who coldly behead their captives, and then amp up the shock factor by burning one alive.

There is an element of gleeful sadism in their barbarism. Last week they pushed a gay man from the top of a tall building - reportedly the fourth such execution for homosexuality.  As with their other atrocities, they posted pictures and video online, a gesture that was part boast, part taunt. In doing so, they were saying to the world: "Look what we're capable of. There is no limit to what we will do.  "Norms of civilised behaviour don't apply to us. In fact we hold the civilised world in contempt. You know, and we know, that you are too weak and divided to stop us."

Du Fresne goes on to paint the ISIS military threat as real: therefore, New Zealand cannot walk away.

Nothing More Authoritarian Than Liberals

Not Just Jews 

Christians Under Increasing Attack in Europe

By Austin Ruse
BreitbartLondon
27 February, 2015

Christian churches are under increasing assault all over Europe, reports a Vienna-based group charged with monitoring such attacks.

They report that Christian churches have been increasingly vandalized in Switzerland, Christian graves desecrated in France, and churches graffitied in Italy. Much of the vandalism comes at the hands of those opposing church teachings on homosexuality.

Earlier this month, someone vandalized a Catholic Church in the Swiss Canon of Jura, two hours north of Geneva. The vandals wrote, “Jesus is Gay” and “Your Religion is Not Mine” along with satanic symbols on the outside of the church.  Also this month, in the Calvados region of France, dozens of Christian symbols in a graveyard were vandalized.

The Observatory reports the Church of Saint John the Baptist in the Italian town of Lecce was spraypainted, “God is a transgender” and “Priests are pedophiles.” Other graffiti indicated that the attack was related to a recent pro-family conference held nearby.

Daily Devotional

The Deadly Gentle Slope

Screwtape reveals Nothing:

C. S. Lewis

The Christians describe the Enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Sourced from BibleGateway.

Wrong to Sit Upon a Chair

Evolutionary, Because Its Stupid

Over one hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton saw plainly the connection between humanitarianism and human-hating Greenism (although Greenism did not exist formally as a cause back then).  He wrote:

We constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern humanitarians; I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity. . . . I am here only following the outlines of their argument, which consists in maintaining that man has been progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves, then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants.

I think it is wrong to sit on a man.  Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse.  Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair.  That is the drive of the argument.  And for this argument it can be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress.  A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might--one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children.  This drift may be really evolutionary, because it is stupid.  [G. K. Chesterton, "The Eternal Revolution,"  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 316.]

And so it has come to be that the modern Greenist is profoundly anti-human and pro-crustacean.

Letter From the UK (About Another Example of Taqiyya)

Lies Of Jihad John’s British Supporters Exposed

By Andre Walker
BreitbartLondon
March 1, 2015

This week the British advocacy group CAGE held a press conference in which it claimed Mohammed Emwazi aka Jihad John, was radicalised by the security services after he was questioned by its officers. The Sunday Telegraph has revealed this is not the first time the group has defended terrorist, or lied for its own political purposes.

CAGE claims to be a “Human Rights Advocacy Group” but in reality its narrative is that Muslims are being discriminated against by the British, and that those who turn to terror can blame their neighbours for it. In today’s paper Andrew Gilligan claims “Cage is no collection of loonies… It is part of a closely connected network of extremists relentlessly – and successfully – lying to young Muslims that they are hated and persecuted by their fellow citizens in order to make them supporters of terror.”

He continues: “The unfortunate truth is that they have significant traction with parts of its target market”. This is because many younger Muslims do not read or trust the mainstream media, and instead rely on information from groups like CAGE. The group claims it advocates people who are wrongly accused as part of the war on terror, but in reality they have defended people who have plead guilty in legitimate courts.

Daily Devotional

When God Becomes 100% for Us

Among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Ephesians 2:3)

John Piper

All of God’s wrath, all of the condemnation we deserve, was poured out on Jesus. All of God’s demands for perfect righteousness were fulfilled by Christ. The moment we see (by grace!) this Treasure and receive him in this way his death counts as our death and his condemnation as our condemnation and his righteousness as our righteousness, and God becomes 100% irrevocably for us forever in that instant.

The question this leaves unanswered is, “Doesn’t the Bible teach that in eternity God set his favor on us in election?”

In other words, thoughtful people ask, “Did God only become 100% for us in the moment of faith and union with Christ and justification? Did he not become 100% for us in the act of election before the foundation of the world?” Paul says in Ephesians 1:4–5, “[God] chose us in [Jesus] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.”

Is God then not 100% for the elect from eternity? The answer hangs on the meaning of “100%.”

With the term “100%” I am trying to preserve a biblical truth found in several passages of Scripture. For example, in Ephesians 2:3, Paul says that Christians were “children of wrath” before they were made alive in Christ Jesus: “We all once lived [among the sons of disobedience] in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”

Paul is saying that, before regeneration, God’s wrath was on us. The elect were under wrath. This changed when God made us alive in Christ Jesus and awakened us to see the truth and beauty of Christ so that we received him as the one who died for us and as the one whose righteousness is counted as ours because of our union with Jesus. Before this happened to us, we were under God’s wrath. Then, because of faith in Christ and union with him, all God’s wrath was removed and he then became, in that sense, 100% for us.

Therefore, exult in the truth that God will keep you. He will get you to the end because in Christ he is 100% for you. And therefore, getting to the end does not make God to be 100% for you. It is the effect of the fact that he is already 100% for you.

For more about John Piper's ministry and writing, see DesiringGod.org.

See No Evil

Easy Passes and Double Standards

Here is the latest mini-scandal in New Zealand.

Labour leader Andrew Little has stood down his welfare spokeswoman Carmel Sepuloni after her mother was accused of benefit fraud.  Little said there was an obvious conflict of interest.  TVNZ said it had broken the news to the Labour MP about the charges her mother faces.

Little said he was temporarily standing her aside from the social development portfolio, but she had done nothing wrong.  "Carmel is an adult and her mother is an adult. Carmel is not responsible for the actions of her mother," he said.  "We have agreed she will step aside ... on a temporary basis while these matters are dealt with. There is a conflict of interest at the present time."

Everyone has rushed to extend sympathy to Sepuloni.  Liberal blogger, David Farrar's contribution is representative of the whole:

One can only have sympathy for Sepuloni. Having a parent charged with an offence would be embarrassing for anyone, let alone when you are an MP. But no one will reasonably think it reflects on her at all.

Not so fast.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Mosocw

A Theology of Resistance for Florists

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

February 23, 2015

One of the things made apparent by the case of Baronelle Stutzman in Washington State is that we are to be allowed our convictions about same-sex mirage, but only if we can find a place to store them. You see all the storage bins have been nationalized and are now public property, and so all the contents have to conform the current policy of these United States, which holds, among other things, that the anus is now a sex organ. It follows from this that if you know it isn’t, having had biology in high school, then these aberrant and blasphemous thoughts of yours must never be expressed or even hinted at within a fifty foot radius of anyone who might be offended. What if you said something about this, and there were a drag queen nearby? Nothing worse than having a drag queen clutch at her pearls.

After you get to Heaven, you can take out these deep religious convictions and show them to God. So sorry. At that time, the public policy of these United States won’t care about any of this anymore because all these homo-regs of ours will at that time be found in a huge column of smoke ascending from Babylon the Great. But we don’t like to think about that too much, so for the time being you Christians had just better shut up.

Daily Devotional

Learning the Lessons of Jonah in the Deep

"Salvation is of the Lord."
Jonah 2:9

Charles H. Spurgeon

Salvation is the work of God. It is he alone who quickens the soul "dead in trespasses and sins," and it is he also who maintains the soul in its spiritual life. He is both "Alpha and Omega." "Salvation is of the Lord." If I am prayerful, God makes me prayerful; if I have graces, they are God's gifts to me; if I hold on in a consistent life, it is because he upholds me with his hand. I do nothing whatever towards my own preservation, except what God himself first does in me.

Whatever I have, all my goodness is of the Lord alone. Wherein I sin, that is my own; but wherein I act rightly, that is of God, wholly and completely. If I have repulsed a spiritual enemy, the Lord's strength nerved my arm. Do I live before men a consecrated life? It is not I, but Christ who liveth in me.

Am I sanctified? I did not cleanse myself: God's Holy Spirit sanctifies me. Am I weaned from the world? I am weaned by God's chastisements sanctified to my good. Do I grow in knowledge? The great Instructor teaches me. All my jewels were fashioned by heavenly art. I find in God all that I want; but I find in myself nothing but sin and misery. "He only is my rock and my salvation." Do I feed on the Word? That Word would be no food for me unless the Lord made it food for my soul, and helped me to feed upon it. Do I live on the manna which comes down from heaven? What is that manna but Jesus Christ himself incarnate, whose body and whose blood I eat and drink? Am I continually receiving fresh increase of strength? Where do I gather my might?

My help cometh from heaven's hills: without Jesus I can do nothing. As a branch cannot bring forth fruit except it abide in the vine, no more can I, except I abide in him. What Jonah learned in the great deep, let me learn this morning in my closet: "Salvation is of the Lord."

Knowing the Enemy, Part III

Perpetual Warfare and the End Times

Bernard Haykel is a Princeton scholar and a leading exponent upon ISIS theology.  He is contemptuous of the Western tendency to deny the authentically Islamic features of ISIS.

A good comparison at this point is to consider the Irish Troubles.  The violence of the Provisionals or the Ulstermen may have been identified as genuine and consistent, not deviant, expressions of Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, but such a view would run into the brick wall of the Scriptures themselves.  Many in the West want to make the same case with respect to ISIS--it is deemed a deviant, novel version of Islam.  But the argument falters when one reckons with the fact that ISIS theology and doctrine closely adheres to Islamic history: to the Koran, to Muhammad, to the hadith and to sharia law.

Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic, cites Haykel as follows:

Every academic I asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent me to Haykel. Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the United States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee, there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent.

Letter From Australia (About Going Nuclear)

Nuclear Power Now a Hot Option 

South Australian inquiry ordered

ANDREW BOLT
Herald Sun
February 12, 2015

ALARMISTS like Jay Weatherill now finally admit nuclear power isn’t actually a terrifying mass-killing menace. 
 
Now they say we need nuclear to stop their latest terrifying mass-killing menace — global warming.
Can you believe these guys? Nuclear power has switched from our greatest threat to greatest saviour. Yet none of these hypesters has said sorry for having peddled such baseless scares.

Take Weatherill, South Australia’s Labor Premier. As a budding politician he was “­opposed to nuclear power, all elements of it”, but this week said he’d changed his mind.  Now he is calling for a royal commission to “consider what role our state can potentially play in the fuel cycle for the peaceful use of nuclear energy”.

See, Weatherill reckons a nuclear industry might help save his struggling state.  The most obvious money-spinner would be a nuclear waste facility, like one Pangea tried to sell in 1999 that would have earned us $2 billion a year.

. . . anti-nuclear protesters are shameless. When the Fukushima reactor was smashed by a tsunami in 2011 they were at it again, with Crikey’s Guy Rundle predicting “the Japanese crews (at the reactor) will ... bleed out internally under the full glare of the world’s media”. In fact, not one person died from the radiation and the WHO doubts any will.

It makes sense. We have the stable geology and stable government to store the world’s nuclear waste, safe from earthquakes and terrorists.  But such facts never used to count with the likes of the unapologetic Weatherill. Such alarmists instead mounted the usual scare against Pangea and ran it out of town. Pangea couldn’t even get interviews with the young Howard government.

Daily Devotional

Final Escape From the Jaw of the Lion

"Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil."
Matthew 4:1

Charles H. Spurgeon

A holy character does not avert temptation--Jesus was tempted. When Satan tempts us, his sparks fall upon tinder; but in Christ's case, it was like striking sparks on water; yet the enemy continued his evil work.

Now, if the devil goes on striking when there is no result, how much more will he do it when he knows what inflammable stuff our hearts are made of. Though you become greatly sanctified by the Holy Ghost, expect that the great dog of hell will bark at you still.

In the haunts of men we expect to be tempted, but even seclusion will not guard us from the same trial. Jesus Christ was led away from human society into the wilderness, and was tempted of the devil. Solitude has its charms and its benefits, and may be useful in checking the lust of the eye and the pride of life; but the devil will follow us into the most lovely retreats. Do not suppose that it is only the worldly-minded who have dreadful thoughts and blasphemous temptations, for even spiritual-minded persons endure the same; and in the holiest position we may suffer the darkest temptation. The utmost consecration of spirit will not insure you against Satanic temptation.

Knowing the Enemy, Part II

Beware Uniting the Entire Family Against You

Whilst the West is failing miserably to come to terms with ISIS, remaining confused and bemused, ironically ISIS is no shrinking violet.  It boldly declares itself and wants everyone in the West to understand it and what animates it.  But because its roots are theological and religious, the Western Commentariat--wilfully ignorant of all things religious--has gone into an "It does not compute" mode. 

Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic, nails the essence of the issue.

In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

Returning civilisation to the seventh-century and helping to engineer the last days, the Apocalypse, are beliefs and objectives so ludicrous to the modern Western secularist that ISIS cannot be taken seriously.  Consequently the West invents objectives and beliefs for ISIS that make them more understandable.  To the Western mindset ISIS exists because of oppression and exploitation (by whom, no-one is quite sure); it is a native reaction to systemic injustice and poverty--and so forth.  In other words, the West constantly attempts to fit ISIS into its peculiar narrative and perspective upon the world.  Yet how foolish is this: