Religion – Page 6 – Barrel Strength

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Decadence 2

An interesting article in Spiked! by Frank Furedi, called “Teaching Consent, Teaching Intimacy” is valid and worth reading on how colleges are screwing up the idea of consent to make males look like rapists. I commend it for that alone.

But down in the weeds of commentary is this gem from a JDsHandsome Son:

When a species becomes sick, lame, lazy, stupid and just too anemic to carry on, Mother Nature sends in a predator to take it out. She does this for the benefit of all the other species who might be better able to use Her valuable resources.

Western civilization has become such a collection of weak, inbred hemophiliacs, bubble boys, and snowflakes that Mother Nature is fed up with it. Her predator of choice is Islam and its legions of rabid murderous hordes taking over Europe and eventually America, both of which have shown their weariness of life and liberty. She also is staging Russia and China to provide some assistance if necessary.

Europe is being colonized with military aged men streaming across the continent and who will soon be slaughtering its fragile native born eunuchs, geldings and neurotic females too pathetic to any longer even manage their intimate lives without being told by others how to act. As soon as the invaders are settled in government provided housing and the benefits checks start to roll in to their accounts, they will begin to protest their treatment. After that, they’ll start thinning out the European herd by murdering their hosts.

We in America can only hope enough brain dead citizens here can wake up and overthrow the progressive stupidity, such as this ridiculous “consent” nonsense, that has seized this once proud nation. Perhaps more images of UK citizens beheaded on London streets in broad daylight as other citizens saunter around the bodies like farm animals sniffing the carcasses before being nudged to their slop buckets will open those sleepy eyes.

Loose lips sink ships

I am tiring of liberal tolerance. To be more precise, I am tiring of tolerance itself being promoted as a virtue without reference to what is being tolerated.

I had occasion to issue a gentle reproof yesterday to an American friend who keeps uttering nearly homicidal anger at Evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Republicans. In short, I grew intolerant of loose talk the net effect of which was to legitimize violence against one’s fellow citizens. Even if the speaker is civilized and over 65, I am becoming sufficiently alarmed at the general atmosphere of loose talk that I feel it necessary to risk social offence in saying: “tone it down”.

: Chris Harper-Mercer, 26, gunman in the Umpqua Community College in Oregon

The rampage killer in the Oregon community college, Chris Harper Mercer, martyred – that is the word – ten Christians yesterday for the crime – in his eyes- of their faith. I can only shudder at the bravery of those who, seeing their classmates killed for admitting to being Christians, still admitted to being Christians themselves. I am not sure I would have had the courage. But my concern is the atmosphere of loose anti-Christian talk of the Dawkins-Dennett variety that has pervaded the culture, and given the justification to the crazy angry young men of this world to kill Christians. The killer was not a Muslim; he was what can be described as a secular-humanist, an atheist. Such people used to lack convictions; recently they have been led to believe their atheism amounts to a justification for martyring the faithful who have convictions or beliefs different from their own.

In the same way that we can hold Wahhabist doctrines to be the source of Islamic jihad, so we can now hold militant atheism/materialism to be responsible for this martyrdom of Christians. They have now joined the ranks of the rest of us fallible humans: people will kill for what they believe, and now the atheist/materialists have their own home-grown American mass killers.

Of course, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot beat them to the punch many years ago.

RIP: The great cholesterol scam (1955 – 2015)

Your doctor still probably believes that cholesterol in the diet translates into cholesterol in the bloodstream, that there is “good” and “bad” cholesterol, and that “bad” cholesterol bears a statistically significant relationship to heart disease. Every one of these propositions is false.

I refer you to an excellent article by Matt Ridley “cholesterol is not bad for you”, who writes:

Cholesterol is not some vile poison but an essential ingredient of life, which makes animal cell membranes flexible and is the raw material for making hormones, like testosterone and oestrogen. Your liver manufactures most of the cholesterol found in your blood from scratch, and adjusts for what you ingest, which is why diet does not determine blood cholesterol levels. Lowering blood cholesterol by changing diet is all but impossible.

Nor is there any good evidence that high blood cholesterol causes atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease or shorter life. It is not even a risk factor in people who have already had heart attacks. In elderly people — ie, those who have the most heart attacks — the lower your blood cholesterol, the greater your risk of death. Likewise in children.

From the very first, the studies that linked the ingestion of cholesterol and saturated animal fats to cardiovascular disease were not just flawed, but tinged with scandal.

It is well worth reading the rest. What I have to say here reflects upon the course of this great fallacy. The cholesterol scam bears a strong relationship to the anthropogenic global warming scam.

1) it is propagated by scientists on a non-scientific mission.

2) it is believed because it plausibly explains an observation (increasing global temperature [for a time], increasing heart attacks from smoking in the 1950s and 60s). It taps into large anxieties about too much wealth, too much happiness, in western societies. There must be sin somewhere, and the public is ready to flog itself in the cause of a secularized idea of God, uh, I mean Good.

3) the causal relationship is weaker than first supposed; the research is found to be sloppy, the facts have been fudged, subsequent studies do not fully support the original claims, nevertheless the orthodoxy is promulgated all the more harshly for being doubted.

4) by now, powerful economic and ideological interests have taken hold. They supply an ongoing source of funds and opinion to ensure the perpetuation of the alarm: in the case of cholesterol, the margarine industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical establishment, and in the case of AGW, the tribe of bureaucrats and leftists who seek to control markets, whose god of Marxism had failed, and who needed a new god (Gaia) to justify their rule.

5) The skeptics who have patiently argued on the basis of facts that the science of each phenomenon was weak, are ostracized by the opinion establishments of medicine and global warming. Cranks, but the cranks are right and the orthodox priests and Levites are wrong.

6) Eventually, after fifty or sixty years, the subject of discussion just changes. In the case of cholesterol, the evidence gets weaker and weaker, and the problems caused by too much sugar consumption (obesity, diabetes), caused in part by people not eating enough fats and meats, reaches a stage where it can no longer be ignored.

7) the retreat of the orthodoxy is covered by a smokescreen of fresh concerns for some other catastrophe. No admissions of error or apologies for wrecked careers and following bad science are ever issued. Time flows on, bringing neither knowledge nor greater understanding of the role of folly in human affairs.

8) stages 6 and 7 have been reached in the cholesterol cycle; they are beginning in the anthropogenic global warming scam. Fifty years from now, there will still be clanking windmills in the North Sea, but whether they will be still linked to a power grid is less likely, and whether anyone will pay attention is doubtful. The lobbies that keep them there, however, will still exist.

These long term fashions in intolerant error should cause all people to question the intelligence and wisdom of the human species. I call these schools of thought and action “phologiston”, after a disproven but thousand-year-old Greek theory of what fire was.

There are two major sources of metaphorical phlogiston in modern society: the climate people and the medical profession.

Phlogiston is the ancient term for a substance that was imputed to exist in all things that prevented combustion. Phlogiston was necessary in a Greek idea of a universe. Without phlogiston, everything would burn, because it was in the nature of all things to seek to rise from the four sub-lunary elements below (earth, air, fire , water) to the empyrean , the zone beyond fire, outside the orbits of the five planets around the earth. This was the hidden metaphysical postulate, which they never questioned. (All summaries of obsolete world views make them look ridiculous; they were not, they were merely in error).

If all things naturally wanted to burn up, then something must prevent combustion, and this substance was called “phlogiston”. From premise to assumed force. No one questioned the premise for more than a thousand years.

So when Priestly and Lavoisier said that combustion was a process of oxygenation, and proved it by showing that certain things gained weight when burned, phlogiston lost credibility to a newer, chemical idea of burning.

Note that phlogiston is an idea predicated on a larger world view, and is introduced to explain the operations of that world view. That things do not normally burn is something that needs explanation in the Greek world view.

Correspondingly, in the modern world view in North America and Europe, the fact that needs explaining – I propose for your consideration – is “why are we so rich?” and the answer we get out of post-Christian secularized guilt is: “We must have done something wrong.”

The assumption of a secularized guilt is the underlying assumption. Heart attacks are punishment for overindulgence in highly nutritious food; global warming is punishment for our thoughtless depredations upon Gaia. A future perspective may laugh at the modern human propensity to consider prosperity and health as occasions for guilt, just as we denigrate the Greeks for assuming all things want to burn their way to the empyrean sphere of a geocentric universe.

I tell you folks, the longer I live, the more truth I see in Chesterton’s remark – attributed to him – that when people cease to believe in God, the more likely they are to believe any nonsense that comes their way. Save your beliefs for absurdities like the Christian religion, and keep your mind clear to detect the bullshit constantly propagated in the material world. It will not lack for targets, I assure you.

Al-Ghazali and the Closing of the Muslim Mind

I have been telling you people about this malign influence over the Muslim mind, the philosopher Al-Ghazali, for some time. Robert Reilly wrote a book about him in “The Closing of the Muslim Mind“, which you should read if you wish to understand why, for many muslims, everything in the world is “in’shallah” – as God wills- when the subject under discussion is as trivial as why the car tire has a flat.

In a world without natural causes, everything that happens happens directly from God’s will. Imagine a world without natural causes. Everything must be a human conspiracy, and act of a djinn, or an act of God. Imagine what happens to science and philosophy when there are no natural causes. They crash. They become quasi-heretical activities, when they are not fully heretical.

In this week’s New Yorker, there is a short story by Salman Rushdie about the f=great Islamic follower of Aristotle, Ibn-Rushd, and this is what he has to say about al-Ghazali:

There was a deep, sad wound in him, because he was a defeated man, had lost the great battle of his life to a dead Persian, Ghazali of Tus, an adversary who had been dead for eighty-five years. A hundred years earlier, Ghazali had written a book called “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” in which he attacked Greeks like Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, and their allies, Ibn Rushd’s great precursors Ibn Sina and al-Farabi. Ghazali had suffered a crisis of belief at one point, but had recovered with such conviction that he became the greatest scourge of philosophy in the history of the world. Philosophy, he jeered, was incapable of proving the existence of God, or even of proving the impossibility of there being two gods. Philosophy believed in the inevitability of causes and effects, which was an insult to the power of God, who could easily intervene to make causes ineffectual and alter effects if He so chose.

The crude popular level of interpretation of al-Ghazali that has reached the islamic street is that God renders all causes not originating in Himself utterly null. Everything proceeds from God’s will. Hence why bother with science?

“What happens,” Ibn Rushd asked Dunia when the night wrapped them in silence and they could speak of forbidden things, “if a lighted stick is brought into contact with a ball of cotton?”

“The cotton catches fire, of course,” she answered.

“And why does it catch fire?”

“Because that is the way of it,” she said. “The fire licks the cotton and the cotton becomes part of the fire. It’s how things are.”

“The law of nature,” he said. “Causes have their effects.” And her head nodded beneath his caressing hand.

“He disagreed,” Ibn Rushd said, and she knew that he meant the enemy, Ghazali. “He said that the cotton caught fire because God made it do so, because in God’s universe the only law is what God wills.”

“So if God had wanted the cotton to put out the fire, if He had wanted the fire to become part of the cotton, He could have done that?”

“Yes,” Ibn Rushd said. “According to Ghazali’s book, God could do that.”

She thought for a moment. “That’s stupid,” she said, finally. Even in the dark she could sense the resigned smile, the smile with cynicism in it as well as pain, spreading crookedly across his bearded face.

“He would say that this was the true faith,” he answered her, “and that to disagree with it would be . . . incoherent.”

“So anything can happen if God decides it’s O.K.,” she said. “A man’s feet might no longer touch the ground, for example. He could start walking on air.”

“A miracle,” Ibn Rushd said, “is just God changing the rules by which He chooses to play, and if we don’t comprehend it, it is because God is ultimately ineffable, which is to say, beyond our comprehension.”

The point is, the differences between Islam, on the one hand, and Christianity on the other, including secular societies proceeding from Christian belief, is that the universe is intelligible. It can be figured out. This is why science as we understand the term emerged in Christian lands and not anywhere else (despite what they tell you in university). Neither India nor China, for different reasons, developed science in the sense in which the practice originated in the christian west. But in Islam, the development of philosophy and science was cut short by the fanatics and by the baneful influence of the philosopher who renounced philosophy, Al-Ghazali.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is one of those places that challenge every libertarian’s ideas about how things should run. It is intensely left-wing in many respects: its citizens evince a strong social cohesion predicated on non-market values, the city enforces minute regulation of architecture, zoning and social behaviour, while a high level of government spending maintains social and municipal services. Yet Amsterdam also manages to show how capitalist it is in every store-front. In some ways, I thought, this place is a Potemkin village, and then thought “No” it is a Disney-like theme park maintained by millions of tourists and the willing cooperation of its citizens.

It seems to gather every hipster in Holland into one place: there are tiny stores selling electrical fixtures of the 1950s, micro-art galleries, baroque music concerts, weird antique stores of every description, ecological butcheries, and apartments which, when revealed by walking by, are contemporary art-galleries with dining room tables. Indeed, I was informed that the police check out every potential inner-city resident of Amsterdam; that to live there requires a permit. And the permit is issued if you are Dutch enough, which is to say, willing to abide by the rules of the place, as the police may explain to you.

Make no mistake. This place has rules, visible and invisible. Once, more than a decade ago, I was with a bunch of guys at a restaurant on one of the outer ring of canals. It was October, dark and cold. We headed out the door for a doobie, because it was a non-smoking bar. Eventually the young lady of the place came out and politely informed us that we could not smoke a joint in front of the place, because that might imply the restaurant tolerated dope smoking , but that we could smoke dope at the end of the block, at a construction site a few yards away. A Dutch compromise of behavioural zoning worked out precisely to the meter.

A place as well run as Amsterdam must run on behavioural zoning. Stuff allowed in the red-light district cannot be tolerated a block away from it. By the way, if you do not wish to find the red-light district, you can avoid it for your first seven trips to the place, as I did. Nothing to see: move on.

Indeed the charms and delights of Amsterdam are found in the walking around, in the architecture so carefully maintained, in the thousands of great bars and restaurants, in the amiable way the Dutch manage to live in the crowded spaces, in their friendly inhabitation of the place, in their tolerance of the tourists in their midst.

The annoyances of Amsterdam for the North American conservative are the arrogant sit-up cyclists in their damned cycling lanes whizzing by, who have rights of way against pedestrians and motor-cars;but more importantly, in the idea that minute planning and regulation, formal and informal, could actually work, that a great capital of 17th century capitalism could actually be preserved more or less intact for centuries without redevelopment, high rises, and modern architecture, but at the price of this regulation, that a highly capitalist people – including the hipster artists – might choose to live in a highly regulated way.

Does this not send Ayn Rand spinning in her grave? I hope so. Amsterdam epitomizes every thing that Jane Jacobs had to say about cities, communities, and markets: that highly creative and capitalist places are one and the same, and that markets are embedded in, and contained by, societies, and that the rules of markets co-exist within non-market institutions and rules. Do yourself a favour. Read Jane Jacobs’ “Systems of Survival”, which is scarcely a hundred pages long, and see if your views of markets and society are not deepened.

Or join me for another ramble through Amsterdam, as we discourse about markets, societies, religious freedom, and how to hold them all together in some harmony. The walk will do us good.

David Warren flogs me for being a simpleton

I published a post the other day on Michael Coren’s retreat from Catholic orthodoxy, which he said was instigated by the Roman Church’s attitudes towards homosexuality. I concluded that we are in the presence of a vast shift of opinion on the subject,comparable to the changes in opinion that led tot he abolition of slavery and the reduction of cruelty towards animals.

As I wandered through David Warren’s always enlightening blog, I came across this:

Perhaps the most irritating argument for “gay” is “changing public attitudes.” It is the chief argument used from liberal pulpits, in both church and media. It comes down to this: Once upon a time, people took slavery for granted, or cruelty to animals, or many other wicked things. We would justify them by the Bible, in the old days. But today we know better!

This is pure charlatanry, though to be fair, the people who make this argument sometimes believe it. And when they do, they may be extenuated insofar as they are invincibly ignorant — of history.

Opposition to, and voluntary rejection of, the ancient pagan institution of slavery, came in with Christianity itself.

To the latter I say, “Perfectly true”. The elaboration of Christian ideas has led to the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, the change in attitude towards cruelty to children, cruelty to animals, and, I would argue to increasing sensitivity to the infliction or occurrence of suffering everywhere.

My point is quite limited. It is my belief that the massive change in attitudes towards sexuality, hetero, homo and every point in between,is the result of increasing sensitivity to the infliction of social pain and ostracism on outliers. While the birth control pill had a dramatic and immediate effect on social mores, and should not be discounted, the change in attitude toward homosexuality is driven by some portion of Christian-influenced sentiment to realize more fully the command of universal love that Jesus taught.

David Warren may disagree, with his usual erudition. His blog is admirable, informed, and even if wrong at some points, the man ain’t for turning. My favourite reactionary.

Catholic apologist goes Anglican

Running a blog provides much pleasure, and not a little duty to feed the beast. Amidst the insanity of the world in general one does not lack for topics. I have been busy of late earning a living, for which I apologize. Islam, climate, Obama: these dirigibles of folly grow tiresome. So with some trepidation I chose last night that it was time to say a word about the conversion of a polemical Catholic to Anglicanism.

I am speaking of the noted Canadian Roman Catholic apologist Michael Coren, who has left for the sunnier shores of the Anglican Church.

Both churches are liturgical. Both place the eucharist – the communal eating of the bread as flesh and wine as blood of Christ – at the centre of their services. One says the bread and wine are the real presence of Christ, the other says that they are “the memorial which He hath commanded”. The doctrinal niceties of difference may be more important than I weigh them. Yet for me the principal difference is that the Anglican clergy are not a caste of people set aside by magical powers from the laity.

By “magical powers” I mean just that.

As a Catholic friend of mine once observed, “80% of Catholic theology seems to concern the priestly role. What about the saintliness of Joe Average?” I digress.

I am not holding out Michael Coren as a deep thinker. He does not hold himself out as the avatar of Thomas Aquinas. But he was a committed and well-reasoned Catholic, and proudly wore the team jacket. So it was interesting that the main reason he cites, as a heterosexual and happily married man (it seems), was that Catholic teaching about homosexual relations was wrong.

No thinking Christian can be easy with the tide of relentless attitudinal change we are required to undergo in modern society. Some few of the Catholic right oppose all change on sexual matters, and are satisfied with what they hold to be eternal truths. As David Warren wrote on the subject of Michael Coren:

To some, this stasis — this insistence on a moral and spiritual order that cannot be altered by men, nor by a God who is self-consistent — makes the Catholic Church a dead end. To others, it is actually liberating, to stand for the right, regardless of the numbers; regardless, finally, even of the cost.

I think I am being fair when I assert that all sexual thinking, which is considered lust, is especially problematic to Christian doctrine. Hetero, homo, adultero, thinking of your wife in lewd ways: it is all suspect, some especially so.

Yet for all that the Christian Church seems to hold sexuality suspect – as a drive that more often than not takes us away from God – society is undergoing one of those huge transformations of sentiment, whereby feelings of disgust and guilt for sexuality are being abandoned. It is akin to what happened to attitudes towards slavery or cruelty to animals. It is as if the sentiment was discovered, and held up to inspection, and found wanting. Why do we hold these lusts to be disgusting? Why do we shame people for practicing them?

I do not think most people thought much about slavery, or cruelty to animals, until there was a slow trickle downward of changed attitudes at the top. Blame it on Quakers, who led the fight against both. I also think that the late 19th century saw an intensification of anti-sexual feelings that had not existed in Christian society before that time, and it lasted at least as the generation that fought in World War 2.

Society has softened its sentiments towards sexuality of all kinds in the last sixty years. In my days in university women students were still housed and chaperoned in special dormitories, which practice ended in my time. Women’s sexual activity was legitimated as a reasonable and shameless course of action within a very short time after the Pill.

Indeed, the birth control pill could be living proof of a science-fictional universe, in which sexual mores worked out over thousands of years are abandoned in the space of a few years as the human drive to fuck is made safe from reproduction. I am not saying this is good – I am enough of a conservative to worry abstractly about such things – but I am asserting that it has happened, and cannot be reversed by anything short of a titanic change of sentiment and belief, of which I see no sign.

We are still working out the sexual rules between men and women in consequence of sharing work-spaces all day long. Why should the adaptation to homosexual sex be faster, smoother, or better understood?
In the end we might still agree that sexual relations outside marriage are “objectively disordered”, as the Roman Church likes to say, but our attitudes will not carry with them much condemnation. That seems to have happened already.

Bob Hope, the famous comedian, stated once in the sixties: “They have just legalized homosexuality in California. I am leaving for Nevada before they make it compulsory”.

I am as confused as anyone about this gay thing: I do not want Christian bakers to be compelled to bake cakes for lesbian weddings, so call me a reactionary; I do not want gay people to undergo any more legal disabilities, so call me liberal. But I do not want my sentiments – particularly my sexual tastes or lack thereof – to be made the object of state persecution for being insufficiently enlightened, progressive, or, for that matter, Christian.

So welcome to the club, Mr.Coren. We are just going to have to muddle through.

What I have always felt Gaianism was, it is: degenerate Calvinism

Jonathan Franzen on the subject of the ecology and global warming confirms my view that the religion of Gaianism is a degenerate Christianity. Calvinist Christianity, to be more precise.

Franzen writes:

Maybe it’s because I was raised as a Protestant and became an environmentalist, but I’ve long been struck by the spiritual kinship of environmentalism and New England Puritanism. Both belief systems are haunted by the feeling that simply to be human is to be guilty. In the case of environmentalism, the feeling is grounded in scientific fact. Whether it’s prehistoric North Americans hunting the mastodon to extinction, Maori wiping out the megafauna of New Zealand, or modern civilization deforesting the planet and emptying the oceans, human beings are universal killers of the natural world. And now climate change has given us an eschatology for reckoning with our guilt: coming soon, some hellishly overheated tomorrow, is Judgment Day. Unless we repent and mend our ways, we’ll all be sinners in the hands of an angry Earth.

I’m still susceptible to this sort of puritanism. Rarely do I board an airplane or drive to the grocery store without considering my carbon footprint and feeling guilty about it. But when I started watching birds, and worrying about their welfare, I became attracted to a countervailing strain of Christianity, inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s example of loving what’s concrete and vulnerable and right in front of us. I gave my support to the focussed work of the American Bird Conservancy and local Audubon societies. Even the most ominously degraded landscape could make me happy if it had birds in it.

And so I came to feel miserably conflicted about climate change. I accepted its supremacy as the environmental issue of our time, but I felt bullied by its dominance. Not only did it make every grocery-store run a guilt trip; it made me feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future. What were the eagles and the condors killed by wind turbines compared with the impact of rising sea levels on poor nations? What were the endemic cloud-forest birds of the Andes compared with the atmospheric benefits of Andean hydroelectric projects?….

But climate change is seductive to organizations that want to be taken seriously. Besides being a ready-made meme, it’s usefully imponderable: while peer-reviewed scientific estimates put the annual American death toll of birds from collisions and from outdoor cats at more than three billion, no individual bird death can be definitively attributed to climate change (since local and short-term weather patterns have nonlinear causes). Although you could demonstrably save the lives of the birds now colliding with your windows or being killed by your cats, reducing your carbon footprint even to zero saves nothing. Declaring climate change bad for birds is therefore the opposite of controversial. To demand a ban on lead ammunition (lead poisoning is the foremost cause of California condor deaths) would alienate hunters. To take an aggressive stand against the overharvesting of horseshoe crabs (the real reason that the red knot, a shorebird, had to be put on the list of threatened U.S. species this winter) might embarrass the Obama Administration, whose director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, in announcing the listing, laid the blame for the red knot’s decline primarily on “climate change,” a politically more palatable culprit. Climate change is everyone’s fault—in other words, no one’s. We can all feel good about deploring it.

A little tragicomedy of climate activism is its shifting of goalposts. Ten years ago, we were told that we had ten years to take the kind of drastic actions needed to prevent global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius in this century. Today we hear, from some of the very same activists, that we still have ten years. In reality, our actions now would need to be even more drastic than they would have ten years ago, because further gigatons of carbon have accumulated in the atmosphere. At the rate we’re going, we’ll use up our entire emissions allowance for the century before we’re even halfway through it. Meanwhile, the actions that many governments now propose are less drastic than what they proposed ten years ago.

The article is important. It is the completest explanation and description of the mentality behind global warming catastrophism. We are ineluctably doomed. All else is window-dressing.

To answer the question, it’s important to acknowledge that drastic planetary overheating is a done deal. Even in the nations most threatened by flooding or drought, even in the countries most virtuously committed to alternative energy sources, no head of state has ever made a commitment to leaving any carbon in the ground. Without such a commitment, “alternative” merely means “additional”—postponement of human catastrophe, not prevention. The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy. We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe. One advantage of the latter approach is that, if a miracle cure like fusion energy should come along, there might still be some intact ecosystems for it to save….

Climate change shares many attributes of the economic system that’s accelerating it. Like capitalism, it is transnational, unpredictably disruptive, self-compounding, and inescapable. It defies individual resistance, creates big winners and big losers, and tends toward global monoculture—the extinction of difference at the species level, a monoculture of agenda at the institutional level. It also meshes nicely with the tech industry, by fostering the idea that only tech, whether through the efficiencies of Uber or some masterstroke of geoengineering, can solve the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions. As a narrative, climate change is almost as simple as “Markets are efficient.” The story can be told in fewer than a hundred and forty characters: We’re taking carbon that used to be sequestered and putting it in the atmosphere, and unless we stop we’re fucked.

I am reminded of John Calvin’s doctrines in all of this eco-bleating.

They are as follows:

(1) Total Depravity, more honestly called Total Inability: We are utterly unable to save ourselves. Neither turning to God nor to Gaia is sufficient. We burn fossil fuels despite ourselves.

(2) Unconditional Election.

Unconditional election is a doctrine within the reformed theology framework that in eternity past, before God created the world, he predestinated some people for salvation, the elect, and the others he left to continue in their sins and receive the just punishment, eternal damnation, for their transgressions of God’s law as outlined in the old and new Testaments of the Bible. God made these choices according to his own purposes apart from any conditions or qualities related to those persons.^[1]

God has selected the ecologically aware, and though they may consider themselves unworthy, yet they are of the elect, and the fossil fuel consumers and the climate change deniers are of the damned.

(3) Limited Atonement.

“Limited atonement,” also called “particular redemption” or “definite atonement”, asserts that Jesus’s substitutionary atonement was definite and certain in its purpose and in what it accomplished. This implies that only the sins of the elect were atoned for by Jesus’s death. Calvinists do not believe, however, that the atonement is limited in its value or power, but rather that the atonement is limited in the sense that it is intended for some and not all.

In Gaian terms, only the elect are saved, but they are unclear on the exact nature of the atonement which is called for, and there is no Christ who has made this atonement on anyone’s behalf. Plastic bags or paper ones, the fate of the earth depends on it, but we cannot be sure which one it is this week.

(4) “Irresistible grace,” also called “efficacious grace”, asserts that the saving grace of God is effectually applied to those whom he has determined to save (that is, the elect) and overcomes their resistance to obeying the call of the gospel, bringing them to a saving faith. This means that when God sovereignly purposes to save someone, that individual certainly will be saved.

As the elect of the ecological faith in the redemptive power of Gaia, they may yet err, even as they are mistaken about some particular of Gaia’s divine plan, but no error, however large, will prevent them from being among the Elect. So they could be wholly and massively wrong, even wrong about something as large as climate change, yet they will be saved.

(5)”Perseverance of the saints” (or perseverance of God with the saints) (the word “saints” is used to refer to all who are set apart by God, and not of those who are exceptionally holy, canonized, or in heaven) asserts that since God is sovereign and his will cannot be frustrated by humans or anything else, those whom God has called into communion with himself will continue in faith until the end. Those who apparently fall away either never had true faith to begin with (1 John 2:19), or, if they are saved but not presently walking in the Spirit, they will be divinely chastened (Hebrews 12:5–11) and will repent (1 John 3:6–9).^[83]

More of the same. The elect of Gaia can do nothing to prevent their salvation, and if they are not part of the Elect, nothing can save them anyway.

Gaianism is not a new heresy, it is an old one. But inasmuch as it borrows the Calvinist ideology of the Elect, it is a heresy.

A more thoroughly Christian and biblical attack on Calvinism is found here, but as Calvinism is really a background factor in my attack on Gaianism, it is beside my point.

Charles Taylor doesn’t get it

Charles Taylor is one of Canada’s most eminent philosophers, a Roman Catholic, a three time candidate for the NDP, and well decorated for his accomplishments. I heard him back in 1967 lecturing at McGill University on political science, where he demonstrated to me a complete misunderstanding of philosophers prior to the French Revolution. I mean howlingly wrong.

Thirty years later, or thereabouts, I heard Taylor again after a conference on communitarianism in Ottawa in the 1990s. Communitarianism is a view of society promoted by Amitai Etzioni, an Israeli immigrant to the United States.The founding idea of communitarianism is that the community has rights; and it may reduce to something as simple as: where your neighbours mow their lawns, mow yours too. It is vain and socially detrimental to assert your “right” to turn your lawn into a weed-infested wild prairie in a carefully maintained garden suburb.

Wikipedia says:

His writings emphasize the importance for all societies to have a carefully crafted balance between rights and responsibilities and between autonomy and order.

Etzioni said to me that one of the most important aspects of Canada is its very strong sense of community order, which is stronger than that sense in the United States.

The meeting was held in the same building as the old Ottawa Press Club, and thus Charles Taylor, who had been one of the speakers, was interviewed by the CBC right after the conference. We were sitting in the bar of the old Press Club and we saw Taylor being interviewed live on CBC, saying something utterly wrong about Etzioni and what the conference had been about, rhetoric that communitarianism was a left-wing phenomenon about greater social spending rather than what Amitai Etzioni says it is, which is a call for the legitimacy of higher senses of community order.

Glendronach and I sped to the elevator, and to the CBC floor, whereupon the door opened and there appeared all six feet three of Charles Taylor, whom we greeted with a loud collective spontaneous cry of

“No it isn’t!”

And that pretty well sums up my view of Charles Taylor. I do not have the specialized knowledge of the subject to dispute him in his specialist domains, but wherever his views intersected what I already know about (politics, philosophers pre-French Revolution, and now the niqab issue) his rubber does not hit the road.

Today’s report in Huffington Post says:

Taylor said Harper is fueling anti-Muslim sentiment and that, in turn, makes alienated Muslim Canadians easier targets for recruitment by radical Islamist terrorists.

“Ask yourself what are the recruiters for Islamic State saying? They’re saying (to Muslims), ‘Look, they despise you, they think that you’re foreign, you’re dangerous, you’re not accepted here, so why don’t you come with us?’” Taylor said following a speech to the annual summit of the Broadbent Institute, a social democratic think-thank.

“The more you make it sound like that (is true), the more you’re helping them. And it’s strange that people don’t see this.”

Let us try to dissect this for a moment.

we despise those aspects of Islam which suppress the freedom of women to be present in society, and this is not a modern trend. Christianity has always allowed women to be socially present since its inception. Pagan societies too. Consider the existence of Byzantine Empress Theodora, AD500-548, co-ruler with the Emperor Justinian. Or how about Boudicca, the Celtic queen of the Iceni tribe who led the rebellion against Roman rule in Britain in AD 60-61? Women have been in power a long time on this side of the religious fence;
we do think many Muslims are foreign, in consequence;
they are dangerous, as has been amply demonstrated;
their practices are not accepted here;
so why do they not return to Islamic countries and practce their barbarous religion and social system where they came from, rather than try to colonize us?

Professor Taylor, what would you have us say to them? That we approve their social exclusion of women, their jihad, their violent intolerance of religious freedom, their attempts t o colonize us for Islam?

Who would believe it if it were ever said?

Taylor continued:

“We’re in a context where Islamaphobia is very powerful in the West,” he said.

“It’s perfectly understandable emotionally. We have to get over it and the worst and the last thing we need is for our political leaders to surf on it and encourage it.”

The fear of Islam is actually one of the few indicators that western society is healthy, and has a sense of itself as a community, despite the endless articulation and elaboration of “rights” of the individual against the community, so constantly promoted by our out of control legal culture. Islamo-phobia is healthy, same as Nazi-phobia, or Commie-phobia. Totalitarian political ideologies should be resisted by liberal society, and not, as Charles Taylor would have it, embraced as just another part of life’s rich tapestry. You do not let weevils ruin the tapestry.

You are allowed to teach Christianity as if it might be true

A very welcome decision of the Supreme Court this morning in the Loyola High School case: you are allowed to teach Catholicism in a Catholic school as if it might be true.
The case concerned the rights of a Catholic private school in Montreal, Quebec to teach a religion and ethics course without being forced to teach the view that all religions, being worthy of respect, were actually equally true.

If anything, the Minister’s decision – which was the basis of Loyola’s decision to appeal – shows that the Government of Quebec has established secular humanism as its official state religion, and that it is prepared to enforce the idea that all religions, being somehow worthy of respect, are in a sense equally unworthy of belief.

A religion need have nothing to do with a God, gods, or the metaphysical, and still be a religion. National Socialism (Naziism) and Communism were state religions, though both were anti-Christian and atheistic. The Government of Quebec has merely transferred its state religion from an ultramontane version of Roman Catholicism to secular humanism, but it retains is collectivist and authoritarian impulses.

From the judgment:

Held: The Minister’s decision requiring that all aspects of Loyola’s proposed program be taught from a neutral perspective, including the teaching of Catholicism, limited freedom of religion more than was necessary given the statutory objectives. As a result, it did not reflect a proportionate balancing and should be set aside. The appeal is allowed and the matter remitted to the Minister for reconsideration.

The majority decision was written by Judge Rosalie Abella (who knew?) and for once I agree with her.

Freedom of religion means that no one can be forced to adhere to or refrain from a particular set of religious beliefs. This includes both the individual and collective aspects of religious belief. Religious freedom under the Charter must therefore account for the socially embedded nature of religious belief, and the deep linkages between this belief and its manifestation through communal institutions and traditions.

The context in this case is state regulation of religious schools. This raises the question of how to balance robust protection for the values underlying religious freedom with the values of a secular state. The state has a legitimate interest in ensuring that students in all schools are capable, as adults, of conducting themselves with openness and respect as they confront cultural and religious differences. A vibrant, multicultural democracy depends on the capacity of its citizens to engage in thoughtful and inclusive forms of deliberation. But a secular state does not — and cannot — interfere with the beliefs or practices of a religious group unless they conflict with or harm overriding public interests. Nor can a secular state support or prefer the practices of one group over another. The pursuit of secular values means respecting the right to hold and manifest different religious beliefs. A secular state respects religious differences, it does not seek to extinguish them.

Loyola is a private Catholic institution. The collective aspects of religious freedom — in this case, the collective manifestation and transmission of Catholic beliefs — are a crucial part of its claim. The Minister’s decision requires Loyola to teach Catholicism, the very faith that animates its character, from a neutral perspective. Although the state’s purpose is secular, this amounts to requiring a Catholic institution to speak about its own religion in terms defined by the state rather than by its own understanding. This demonstrably interferes with the manner in which the members of an institution formed for the purpose of transmitting Catholicism can teach and learn about the Catholic faith. It also undermines the liberty of the members of the community who have chosen to give effect to the collective dimension of their religious beliefs by participating in a denominational school.

Snippets:

In a multicultural society, it is not a breach of anyone’s freedom of religion to be required to learn (or teach) about the doctrines and ethics of other world religions in a neutral and respectful way…..

Preventing a school like Loyola from teaching and discussing Catholicism, the core of its identity, in any part of the program from its own perspective, does little to further the ERC Program’s objectives while at the same time seriously interfering with the values underlying religious freedom. The Minister’s decision is, as a result, unreasonable.

Unfortunately, Madame Justice Abella sent the case back to the Minister of Education for reconsideration, rather than granting the relief sought immediately.

Per McLachlan,C.J., Moldaver and Rothstein:

The communal character of religion means that protecting the religious freedom of individuals requires protecting the religious freedom of religious organizations, including religious educational bodies such as Loyola….

The freedom of religion protected by s. 2 (a) of the Charter is not limited to religious belief, worship and the practice of religious customs. Rather, it extends to conduct more readily characterized as the propagation of, rather than the practice of, religion.

Indeed, presenting fundamentally incompatible religious doctrines as equally legitimate and equally credible could imply that they are both equally false. Surely this cannot be a perspective that a religious school can be compelled to adopt.

The minority differed principally in seeking to grant Loyola the relief it sought immediately, rather than sending the decision back to the Quebec Minister of Education for reconsideration

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Category: Religion