Category Archives: Religion

The Eco-Struggle

Posted on by

Way back in the 1980’s I was working for a Democrat Congressman and Al Gore was a first term senator.  Even then there was talk that he could one day run for president. I was just a kid so I naturally assumed it was true and paid attention to his career. When he ran in ’88 for the Democratic nomination, my impression was that he was a very weird dude. He reminded me of a distant cousin who came back from Vietnam with a heroin problem. Even after he got clean, he was still screwed up.

When Gore ran for President in 2000, I was pretty sure he was having some sort of nervous breakdown around the time of the debates. In the first debate he carried on like a child, making weird noises and faces trying to distract Bush. He was criticized for it, especially after the VP debates, which everyone thought were great. What made me think he lost his marbles was that he dressed like Dick Cheney and aped his tone and mannerisms in the second debate. Al Gore had become Zelig.

Of course, any doubts about his sanity were settled after the election when Gore dropped out of sight and went on some sort of spiritual pilgrimage. He got fat, grew a beard and walked the earth like Kwai Chang Caine, only to come back as an Old Testament prophet, instead of a Shaolin master. His preaching about global warming is, aesthetically, right out of the Hebrew Bible. Al Gore is Ezekiel telling you eco-sinners to repent or face the wrath of Gaia. Instead of idolatry, the sin is enjoying modern conveniences.

If you listen to Gore’s sermons on global warming, you can’t help but see them as sermons. He is preaching a faith that is not based on science, even though it borrows jargon and concepts from legitimate science. This TED Talk is a pretty good example.

We now have a moral challenge that is in the tradition of others that we have faced. One of the greatest poets of the last century in the US, Wallace Stevens, wrote a line that has stayed with me: “After the final ‘no,’ there comes a ‘yes,’ and on that ‘yes’, the future world depends.” When the abolitionists started their movement, they met with no after no after no. And then came a yes. The Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Rights Movement met endless no’s, until finally, there was a yes. The Civil Rights Movement, the movement against apartheid, and more recently, the movement for gay and lesbian rights here in the United States and elsewhere. After the final “no” comes a “yes.”

When any great moral challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is fore-ordained because of who we are as human beings. Ninety-nine percent of us, that is where we are now and it is why we’re going to win this. We have everything we need. Some still doubt that we have the will to act, but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource.

Even if we assume anthropogenic global warming is a real thing, an assumption that is increasingly dubious, “solving” it is an engineering problem, not a moral one.  To be a moral problem makes assumptions about the future that are matters of preference, not moral certainty. The Mesozoic Era was much warmer than today, with little difference between winters and summers on most of the earth. The planet was teaming with life, including the dinosaurs. Life, including humans, may flourish in the balmy future.

The science is not the point, of course. This is a crusade for guys like Gore and the others in the New Religion. The point of the crusade is to fail, which is inevitable with something like climate change. There is no “perfect” climate or even a correct range. Climate is by definition a dynamic thing.  No matter what happens to temperature data, the weather and government policy, the global warming cult will be out on the streets, banging their pots and pans, telling us to repent. For these people, we are always eco-sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia.

As with all iterations of the New Religion, the struggle is a central part of the cult of climate change. The truest believers are all members of the ruling elite, yet they carry on like they are plucky underdogs fighting mysterious dark forces that secretly control society. The strange thing you see with guys like Gore is the sacralizing of suffering on behalf of the cause. The whole climate change racket is shot thought with whining about the need to give up the comforts of modernity.

Even weirder, they have no intention of actually suffering for their faith. Instead, they want to make you suffer. Al Gore can buy “green credits” like indulgences because he is worth close to a billion. That means he gets to live like a royal, enjoying your suffering as you try to work the new gas can. His mansion is lit up like Versailles, while you squint in the florescent haze of your eco-friendly CFL. It’s suffering by proxy, where they sacrifice their time to watch you suffer as a result of their policies.

What strikes me about it is the utter pointlessness of it. The endless posing and posturing has no end because it has no end point. A faithful Christian at least has the serenity of his communion with God. The Muslim, at the click of the detonator, knows he will be with Allah. Climate change fanatics have nothing but a hopeless misery. Even if all of their policies are enacted, nothing comes of it.

The cult of climate change is a church with no sanctuary, so everyone assembles in the nave for no reason other than to be seen by the other believers. These are people suffering from a form of phantom limb syndrome. Instead having had a leg chopped off that they can still feel, it is their sense of the divine that has been amputated. The result is this weird nature cult run by billionaires.

The New Normal

Posted on by

A feature of modern life is the public act of grief after a “mass casualty event” like a flood or an Exploding Mohamed Occurrence. Once things settle down, the people in charge gather up for a parade or a ceremony at which they show everyone just how upset they are at what happened. The media makes a big deal of it and the public is encouraged to pretend it is a big deal. Then everyone goes back to what they were doing and we forget all about it.

In the Bronze Age, public acts of piety were common. In fact, they were a necessary part of the life of the polity. The ruler would participate in rituals in order to show the people he was in good with the gods and that he was sufficiently pious. It is argued that Cyrus the Great was able to defeat Babylon because the Babylonian king, Nabonidus, was not participating in these rituals, therefore his people welcomed the conquerors.

Today we don’t have our leaders slaughter a bull to the gods or do something interesting with virgins. Instead, our rulers invite barbarians onto our countries to slaughter us, so the rulers can then come out and show their piety. After the Exploding Mohamed Occurrence in Belgium, the European “leaders” had the typical ceremony.

Brussels Mayor Yvan Mayeur has led a minute’s silence in Paris with his French counterpart Anne Hidalgo.

The memorial for victims of the Brussels and Lahore attacks came exactly a week after explosions at the airport and on the metro killed 35 people in the Belgian capital.

“There is no more normal,” Mayeur warned. “This is a concept that needs to be redefined. We are in a different era and we need to live in this dimension and keep believing that our model of an open, multicultural city such as Paris, Brussels, London or New York, this is what we want to be. This is the future and that is the message I wanted to bring.”

Notice that expelling the Muslims is not an option? Notice that repelling the Muslims is never an option. Instead, we have to just accept this “new normal” where strange men with beards suddenly explode in public places. If Volkswagen made cars that exploded at the same rate as Muslims, the president of the company would be in jail and the company in bankruptcy. But the religion of multiculturalism overrides everything, including civil defense.

We are well past the point where this reckless behavior by the elites can be explained as simply mistaken. That quote makes clear that even the dullest politicians understand that a world of open borders is a future where the Exploding Mohamed Occurrence is going to be like the Windows game Minesweeper. Tick the wrong box and it is game over for you and your family. But you being blown to bits or having your daughter raped is the price you pay so they can have their public vigils.

Increasingly, this is where the evidence points. The Revolt of the Elites has as one manifestation a compulsion by the managerial class to create technocratic solutions to social problems. Given that the big issues of scarcity have been conquered, they are unconsciously creating new life threatening problems so they can solve them. I suppose we should be grateful that it is just Exploding Mohameds and not a new form of the Black Death.

The one thing George Bush said that was correct was that the job of government is to keep the people safe. Ultimately, settled people have tolerated hierarchical government where a minority rules the majority because of safety. For the overwhelming majority of people, a peaceful life of poverty beats a turbulent life, even one of prosperity. Most Americans would choose to be pets to a race of super intelligent chimps if it meant safety and comfort.

The bet being made today by the people in charge is you will accept a world of Exploding Mohameds. They will build out the custodial state, cameras on every block, even in homes, cops reviewing your twitter feed and the elimination of personal privacy, all in the name of safety. Every time a Mohamed goes off in a public space, the rulers will rush around acting like it is something they wish to prevent, while using it as a reason to slowly slam the cage door shut on the natives.

The problem here is that history has no example of this working. In every case where the people in charge have failed in their basic duties, the people in charge ended up dead oir fleeing for their lives. Maybe the technological revolution is allowing a break from historic trends. Maybe the people in charge can play this weird game of human chess and remain immune from the consequences. It is, however, not the way to bet.

The Entirely Worthless Catholic Church

Posted on by

There Catholic Church is now a disgrace. The images of the toe-sucking Pope over the weekend should have been enough to empty the pews for good, assuming anyone was left after the pedophile priest scandals. Now we see that Catholic universities are going full moonbat, censuring people for expressing what is still Catholic dogma.

In the fall of 2014, junior faculty member Cheryl Abbate told a student, who secretly recorded the exchange, that his defense of man-woman marriage was an unacceptable topic in her ethics class and compared his views to racism. She said, “You can have whatever opinions you want but I can tell you right now, in this class homophobic comments, racist comments, and sexist comments will not be tolerated.” And then she told the student he should drop the class.

On this very popular blog, Professor McAdams outed the incident and charged the teaching assistant with “using a tactic typical among liberals now. Opinions with which they disagree are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.”

A firestorm ensued that pitted the academic freedom of McAdams against the leftist pieties of the officially “Catholic” institution.

The teaching assistant is said to have gotten mean emails, though she was hailed as a liberal hero and went on to a tenure track position at another university. McAdams was brought up on charges.

It was announced this week that a “diverse” faculty committee recommended to the university president that McAdams be suspended without pay from April 1 through the fall of 2016 and that he lose his job unless he admits “guilt” and apologized “within the next two weeks.” Specifically, the demand is “Your acknowledgement that your November 9, 2014, blog post was reckless and incompatible with the mission and values of Marquette University and you express deep regret for the harm suffered by our former graduate student and instructor, Ms. Abbate.”

The ever quotable and crusty McAdams compared the demand to the “Inquisition, in which victims who ‘confessed’ they had been consorting with Satan and spreading heresy would be spared execution.” He called the demand a violation of “black letter guarantees of academic freedom embodied in University statutes.”

He also charges the university president with dishonesty since the faculty panel did not require such an admission of guilt or an apology. McAdams said such a statement from him would amount to a “loyalty oath” and he says he will not submit.

It’s perfectly reasonable for a religious institution to require its employees to be members of the religion. Similarly, a Catholic entity can demand that its employees support the positions of the Catholic Church. This is the basics of a civil sane society. If you don’t agree with the Catholic Church, don’t go to work for the Church or affiliated institutions. If I went to work for some devout Muslims, I would not bring a ham sandwich to work for lunch. It’s just common decency.

Marquette is allegedly a Catholic institution. The last time I checked, the Church still rejects the fruitless arrangement of gay marriage. Yet, here they are allowing Social Justice Warriors to fire a professor for upholding the Catholic position on marriage. What sort of church allows enemies of its existence take over its institutions like this? Why would anyone want to be a part of such a spineless, gutless hypocritical enterprise?

This is really not much a surprise. The Catholic Church is following the same path as the main Protestant sects. The Episcopal Church is a carnival of perversion with gay bishops and homicidal lesbians. It’s why their pews are empty. Who wants to celebrate that? The answer, of course, is no one and that’s why the Catholic Church is becoming a sad joke. Even with fair warning, they are heading down the same rat hole.

True Believers

Posted on by

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know a theme here is that people are more often driven by irrational belief than cold hard reason. Evolutionary biology tells us the belief is one of the oldest cognitive traits, probably co-evolving with language. The quest for salvation, grace and glory are at the heart of human history, because they are the things that drive men to dominate other men.

In the current age, formal religion based on the supernatural has mostly fallen away. Look at the empty churches across what we used to call Christendom and it is hard not to see the West as post-Christian. With some exceptions, the leaders of the free world, as we used to call the West, are secular men and women, lacking any identifiable attachment to a Christian sect. The exceptions are usually attached to modern sects that have found a way to wrap Christianity around the core of Rousseau-ist theology.

This “secularization” does not mean that men are less fanatical or lack belief. It just means it is untethered from the traditional constraints of organized religion. Christianity was particularly good at modulating belief, as well as directing it into useful habits. Of course, the Catholic Church was very good at rooting out the dangerous fanatics. The suppression of the flagellants is a good example and one relevant to our current age.

My favorite example, as an aside, is Konrad Schmidt, who claimed to be Frederick II and baptized himself in the blood of his followers. His band of fanatics abandoned their normal lives and spent their days praying in preparation for Judgment Day. The Inquisition had them burned at the stake before they caused too much trouble. For most of human history, people understood that the unhinged fanatic was more dangerous than the barbarian at the gate.

It is one of the many things we seem to have forgotten in the modern age. The bombings in Belgium once again remind us that the fanatic is the most serious threat to human civilization. I don’t mean the fanatics who self-detonated in the airport. I mean the fanatics who invited them into the West and now demand that we invite ever more of them into our lands. The bodies are still warm and the open borders fanatics are demanding even more immigration.

Read that Vox article and the only conclusion is that the writer is so committed to open borders she can no longer accept reality. Instead, she is forcing reality into the world she believes is just over the next hill, the fulfillment of prophesy. Amanda Taub may be harmlessly crazy, but the people running Western countries are just as unhinged as she is over the topic of immigration. Open borders is now a religion for these people. They will die for it, or at least let you die for it.

What other conclusion can be drawn from current events?

There’s no economic argument for importing foreigners. Wages in Western countries have been flat for decades. There are no unfilled jobs that can only be filled by foreigners. The demand for unskilled labor is falling, as automation take over in the West. Importing millions of illiterate young men who have no usable skills and the IQ of a grapefruit adds nothing but a burden to the economies of the West.

The other side of this is who has ever heard someone demand that their town or village invite foreign settlement? Were the residents of Amsterdam demanding their government fill up their city with Moroccans? Were Germans in Frankfurt organizing rallies in the 80’s demanding the importation of Turks? Did the people of Lewiston Maine ever get a chance to vote on the importation of Somalis?

Of course not. There never has been a practical reason to import foreigners into the West, much less hostile, low-IQ savages from the Middle East. Whatever contributions have been made to the Belgian economy by Muslims were just blown to bits by a pair of suicide bombers. There are now rivers of blood because the leadership of Europe has been overrun by what looks increasingly like a suicide cult.

Angela Merkel, who will be remembered as one of history’s greatest monsters, is a good example to study. This piece on her from a few months ago walks you through her “evolution” from mundane Christian lady to a prominent deacon is what amounts to liberation theology, centered on the annihilation of the West as penance for generations of oppression.

Merkel is not alone, of course. The religion of the West, at least for the people in charge, is the toxic blend of egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism. The more the bodies stack up, the more they are convinced they must somehow atone for the sins of the West. Each new blast renews their faith. There’s no reasoning with them and there is no bargaining with them. They are true believers.

Race Unrealism

Posted on by

I’ve often argued that anti-racism has become a religion, maybe something of a cargo cult. The adherents keep replaying the events of the Civil Rights Movement hoping something magical happens. The obvious stuff is the weird obsession with Hitler and the KKK. Every public figure they don’t like is Hitler and every group they don’t like is the KKK.

Then you have the hilariously insane stuff like calling the NBA diverse while baseball is lacking diversity. The word “racist” simply means “bad” for gentry liberals. This Jeff Jacoby column is worth reading for this sort of loony race mongering.

Do gender quotas pose that problem? No. But racial quotas certainly do.

American society is awash with race-based quotas, check-offs, preferences, and diversity policies. In countless settings — from college admissions to workplace hiring, from government contracts to legislative redistricting — opportunities and benefits are tied to racial percentages.

Twelve decades after Plessy v. Ferguson, the notorious Supreme Court decision in which eight justices upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation, Americans are labeled and sorted by race more obsessively than ever. It was in Plessy that Justice John Harlan delivered his ringing dissent: “Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. . . . The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color.”
Harlan’s fierce insistence that Americans are not to be treated differently on the basis of race became the great objective of the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century. “Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life,” argued Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the NAACP in 1950. “There is no understandable factual basis for classification by race.”

Marshall’s statement was even truer than he could have imagined. Today we know for a fact what scientists in the 1950s could only have surmised: Race is not biological. It is a social construct, not a genetic reality. The DNA of blacks cannot be distinguished from the DNA of Asians or the DNA of whites. Unlike our sex, which is stamped in our chromosomes, our racial and ethnic identities are purely subjective.

“I am an African-American, but in parts of Africa, I am white,” says Stanford professor Duana Fullwiley, an anthropologist of science and medicine. When research in West Africa requires her to fly from California to France to Senegal, she told Harvard Magazine in a 2008 interview, “My race changes as I cross the Atlantic.” In the United States she is black; in France she is considered métisse, or mixed-race; in Senegal, everyone regards her as white.

Of course human beings vary widely in their appearance. Populations from different parts of the world differ notably in their skin color, facial features, and hair texture. But those distinctions are superficial, not racial. They have no immutable significance. They contribute no more to “diversity” than right- and left-handedness do. To rely on such criteria when hiring employees or drawing electoral maps or assessing a corporate board is about as sensible as consulting a Magic 8 Ball.

Exactly no one in the quantitative fields thinks race is not genetic. There’s a debate whether race is the right word as there is great diversity within races. East Africans, for example, are very different from West Africans. East Africans dominate distance running, for example, while West Africans dominate sprint races. This is just one group difference that is well known in quantitative science.

Jacoby may have lost his marbles, but my recollection is he is the token normal at the Boston Globe. To balance his hate speech, they have a thousand hooting maniacs from the Cult of Modern Liberalism. That’s diversity! So, Jacoby may have gone native, but my sense is he is having some fun mocking the the Cult for their anti-racist irrationality.

This is why anti-racism is a religion and not a tactic. From the perspective of the political Left, racism is highly useful. I’m not just talking as a shaming tool. I mean as a political wedge. Demanding proportional representation in legislatures, for example, benefits the Left politically. Demanding head counts by race would help bust up natural rights and replace it with the authoritarianism of positive liberty. But, they can’t do it.

That’s the thing with the religious impulse. It’s largely a theatrical concept. The faithful would rather face the lions than renounce their faith because just before the jaws clamp on their throat, they see the adoration of their coreligionists. Anti-racists would rather damage their own cause than compromise on the faith. It’s what defines them.

Stupid CoNT’s

Posted on by

Most people think of cults as being a collection of suicidal weirdos led by a madman, who thinks he is Jesus. That’s understandable as they are the most colorful and therefore get the most attention. David Koresh and the Branch Davidians are the gold standard. Before him Charlie Manson was the guy Americans thought of whenever the subject of cults came up in conversation. The suicide cult is a regular feature of television police dramas for this reason.

The truth is cults don’t usually end in mass suicide. In fact, it is rare. Usually they run their course, eventually running out of steam and the adherents wander off to other things. People are natural believers and the more intense the inclination to believe, the more likely they are to sign onto mass movements, even wackadoodle nonsense like UFO cults and recycling campaigns. They go from one to another, looking for salvation, sometimes even signing onto a movement built on the negation of their prior cult.

Think of the nutty aunt who is always into some new age nonsense. Maybe she was into crystals and then it was a fake shaman that helped her discover her aura. Then it was off to volunteer for one social cause after another. We all know these sorts of people, yet we seldom think of them as members of a cult, but that’s what’s going on with them. Cults are just small, temporary mass movements.

The assumption is that cults always have a charismatic leader, but that is not the case. Scientology is a cult and it lacks this feature. Modern American liberalism latches onto temporary leaders like Barak Obama and now Bernie Sanders. The Obamasoxers of ten years ago are BernieBros today. Buckley Conservatives have been calling every GOP nominee “Reagan” since ’92. It’s a type of cargo cult where they think if they pretend their man is the Gipper, they will be transported back to the 80’s.

This brings us to the Cult of Never Trump, known on-line as #nevertrump and billeted at on-line sites like the Federalist, National Review On-line and The Blaze. Like every cult, the adherents are convinced beyond all reason that their cause is based in indisputable mathematical truths. These truths are so obvious, they repeat them with a regularity that resembles a chant. Every CoNT I’ve encountered says the exact same things, like they rehearse them.

This was something visitors to Maoist China and Stalinist Russia noticed about the bureaucrats. They always said the same things in response to questions. In most cases, it was simply pragmatic. The party stalwarts, the spear catchers for the cause, they chanted the party line with the enthusiasm of the fanatic. They did not just believe the party line, they were defined by it and defined by their adherence to it. They would die for it.

As an aside, I knew an Iranian that served in the Iran – Iraq War. He told me a story about how his unit came up to a minefield. The Revolutionary Guards in their unit ran into the field, sacrificing themselves to clear a path through the mines. For these men, their life was only useful in service to the cause. They had given themselves over completely to the cause and the proof of it was their willingness to die for it. Before they stepped on the mine, they were already dead to themselves.

The other thing every mass movement requires, particularly cults, is the bogeyman. To quote the go-to source on these things, Eric Hoffer, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”  The Nazis had the Jews, the Stalinists had the Kulaks and now the CoNT has Donald Trump. The enemy is what comes to define the cult and gives it a reason to continue on, even when all the prophesies fail.

The interesting thing about the CoNT is that it started a lot like a UFO cult, rather than a mass political movement. Last summer, they dismissed Trump as a ridiculous showman and not a real candidate. Then he was a vanity candidate who would drop out by fall. Then he would be crushed in the debates. Then Iowa was going to be his demise. This has been a pattern right up to now. After each setback, the CoNT rejiggers the prophesy and comes up with a new date for when the Dirt Monster will be slain.

The gold standard on this type of cult is the study, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. The group they studied was a UFO cult led by a woman named Dorothy Martin. It eventually disbanded, but she went on to start other fringe spiritual movements. I’ll just note that she was initially involved with Scientology. Again, true believers tend to move from one mass movement, one cult, to another.

Like a UFO cult, the CoNT becomes hyperactive as the next big date arrives. For the last week they have been waging a campaign to prove that the Dirt Monster is Hitler, hoping to bring about the great reckoning this Tuesday. This will surely go on until Trump clinches the nomination in a month or two. What happens at that point is tough to tell. I doubt we see a mass suicide, like the People’s Temple, but they will have to contend with what experts call “dis-conformation.”

This is when the true believer is presented with irrefutable evidence that contradicts their belief. In the famous Dorothy Martin case, the Seekers explained that the aliens did not come and destroy humanity because the faith of the Seekers convinced the aliens to relent. My guess is the CoNT will come up with something similar, maybe claiming Trump has changed and their efforts to stop have reformed him and made him acceptable.

Others will never go along with this. Neo-conservatives like Max Boot and Bill Kristol can never reconcile themselves to Trump. These are Trotskyites, who have a vision of the world wholly incompatible with anything one can call conservative.  The smart money says they head back over to the Left and find some way to reconcile themselves to their old friends on the

Either way, we are bedeviled with CoNT’s for a while longer, then it will be something else.

Deep Thoughts on Religion

Posted on by

The best guess of science is that belief evolved as one of man’s first cognitive traits. Most likely it evolved with language, but that’s a guess. Until science is able to pin down the exact spots on the genome that control belief, which will never happen in our lifetime, all we have is speculation. What we know about language and belief says the two most likely evolved as complimentary traits and emerged very early in humans.

In our current age, we tend to think of belief as religion, specifically monotheism, like Christianity and Islam. It’s more accurate to think of religion as a subset of belief, which includes culture, altruism, faith in what others say and so on. There are lots of things we accept as a matter of faith that fall outside the supernatural. Belief is what allows acquired knowledge to be passed around and passed between generations.

Religion, like language, is an incredibly efficient storehouse of acquired knowledge. If you believe the tides operate on the digestive rhythms of the great invisible guppy beyond the horizon and you have jotted them down in the Book of Guppy, your people now have a very useful chart of the tides. It’s also easy to pass this knowledge from one generation to the next by teaching the great faith of the guppy to the children. The fact that there is no big invisible guppy is irrelevant.

The evidence we have suggests that the first religions were naturalistic. When you live off the land as hunter-gatherers, explaining the natural world is an important part of survival. The first “gods” were probably spirits associated with things early man observed in nature. The winds, the rains, thunder, lightning and the changing of the seasons would be things early humans would know and “explain” by associating them with the supernatural.

Fertility gods have been found in human settlements all over the world, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. What makes life possible is the reproductive urge. Associating human fertility with animal and plant fertility, the fertility of the earth, is just another way of storing what has been learned about the natural world, including the people in it, into a portable set of beliefs that can be passed onto the next generation.

Most likely, religion became more structured and the gods more human, when man began to settle and develop agriculture. Human settlement requires cooperation and that means rules of conduct, enforcement of the rules, ways to deal with free loaders, how to defend property and so on. Religion makes for a very useful way to establish rules and enforce them. After all, if the gods say stealing is wrong, then punishing thieves is pleasing to the gods. Religion, it would seem, is essential to human settlement.

Something people often forget is that a big part of man’s environment is other men. Just as we have evolved to be a social animal, our cognitive toolkit evolved to benefit the social animal. It’s entirely possible that our sense of belief, our religious urge is what drove man to settle. Once man was able to accumulate enough knowledge about the natural world, settling down in one place may have been a natural development.

One of the great challenges of evolutionary biology is knowing which way the causal arrows point. More often than not, they point in both directions. The point here is that belief is one of the more important and powerful parts of the human animal. It lies at the core of what we are and how we went from foraging about in packs like chimps to living as we do today. It also shaped how we settled and how we altered our environment, which in turn helped shape humanity.

Modern people like to think we have abandoned all of those primitive things like gods, superstitions, rituals intended to change the direction of events. Christianity has mostly died out in Europe. About 70% of Czechs never attend church services. Only 44% of Germans say they believe there is a God. Churches in the Low Countries are being auctioned off as they no longer have parishioners. The main area of the Thirty Years War is no longer Christian. Imagine that.

It’s tempting to think humans are losing their religiosity, but that’s not how biology works. We can no more consciously abandon belief than we can will ourselves to be left handed Bolshevism, Marxism, Nazism and Fascism competed for a while to be the new religion of Europeans. Now it is multiculturalism and the nature cults like global warming and environmentalism. If the news is correct, the American cult of anti-racism is finding a home in Europe as well.

In the early years of widespread narcotic trafficking, well organized gangs that operated under strict rules ran the trade. They were violent and chaotic, but the violence and chaos were manageable. Then the cops decided to chop the heads off the drug gangs, thinking the organizations would die or be great diminished. Instead, the bits and pieces of the shattered organizations became block-by-block street gangs, making war with one another over drug corners and sneakers.

The collapse of Christianity in the West has followed a similar pattern. The various national and regional expressions of Christianity provided order and rationality to human belief. The slow motion collapse of these organizations resulted in crackpot death cults like Nazism, Marxism and Bolshevism. Today we have various forms of nature worship and minoritism, which are just as nutty and self-destructive, just less bloody so far.

B. S Haldane identified fanaticism as one of the four important inventions, which he associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. He was mistaken. The Greeks figured out that men would fight harder when they had a reason to fight. In all probability, fanaticism evolved not long after man had a reason to believe. Like belief, it is something that is a permanent feature of the human condition.

Humanity staggered along through the agrarian age with religions that helped make agrarian life sustainable. Christianity eventually allowed the West to advance beyond sustenance farming and finally became an asset in the rapid technological advance of the West. Whether or not the new religions will be an asset or the undoing of the West is impossible to know from where we sit. What we know is people will keep believing in something with some portion falling for it fanatically.

 

Indifference

Posted on by

The ancient Greeks looked up at the sky in search of first principles. In fact, this is the root of Western ontological thought. In the beginning, there are principles, what mathematics calls axioms. The Reflexive Axiom, for instance, states that every number is equal to itself. This is true at all times and all places since the beginning of time. A proof in math always rests upon at least one axiom.

The root of Jewish thought is looking into the silence of the Cosmos expecting to hear a voice, a revelation of something beyond the world. That revelation cannot be discovered with passive indifference. Silence must be broken as it was in the beginning, when God said “Let there be…” To grossly simplify things, silence, indifference and neutrality are the hell of a cosmos without the word of God.

This being a short blog post, the above is a grossly simplified bit of comparative philosophy, but the takeaway here is to understand the two different ways to confront the world. More specifically, the two different ways to confront the unpleasant parts of the world, namely other people. The Christian seeks to bring the immoral back into line with first principles. The Jew will present them with indifference.

The former has a history of running around looking for monsters to slay. Even today, when our rulers have abandoned anything resembling Christianity, they run around looking for sinners to torment. Having run out of sinners worth tormenting, they invented new sins so they could create new sinners. That’s why you suddenly find yourself in trouble because you think men should not wear dresses.

The Jewish approach is to exile those who cannot reconcile themselves to God and the faith. It’s not just a physical separation; it is an emotional and spiritual one. The Yiddish expression “meh” that is usually interpreted as a shoulder shrug is a very serious insult, or at least intended as one. To be indifferent to someone’s point of view, to not even be willing to speak to their arguments, is to relegate them to the hell of silence.

Reading this tantrum on National Review this morning, it occurred to me that the Jews have it right on this score. Ted Nugent is a fool, a horse’s ass, who makes a mockery of himself on TV for money. I don’t know if he is an anti-Semite, but my hunch is he is not because he is too stupid to know the meaning of the term. For the same reason we don’t condemn the retarded to the gallows, we should not call guys like Nugent anti-Semitic.

The writer of that piece is just a hipster dufus with a mullet and a British accent so he added nothing to my thoughts on the subject. His purpose is virtue signaling. “Look at me, I’m a good thinker. The proof is I’m hollering at a bad thinker. See?” This is popular on the Left, but increasingly so on the modern Right, thus proving that there is very little space between the two.

Regardless, the right answer here is to simply ignore people like Nugent, if you are striving for a more thoughtful dialogue about topics under public consideration. If you and a buddy are having beers, deciding on your next hat, maybe Nugent has something to offer on head gear. Anything else, the response should be “meh” and leave it at that. Idiots are the background noise of the cosmos. You’ll never hear the call if you spend all your time listening to idiots.

The Weirdness of Anti-Darwinism

Posted on by

A long time ago I decided that discussing biology with creationists or Intelligent Design believers was just a waste of time. Back in my schoolboy days, the Jesuits made clear that you can believe in God and accept biological science, but only if you reject occasionalism. God was the watchmaker, perhaps, but not the cause of all things in a direct, active sense of causality.

In fact, we were taught that human understanding of God had evolved and that was evident in the Bible. The God of the Old Testament was active and involved in the affairs of man, no different than the pagan gods of Greece, Rome and Mesopotamia. The New Testament showed a more mature understanding of God as a first mover, but otherwise not constantly tinkering with creation. The laws of nature were fixed and discoverable.

Many people calling themselves Christian think Catholics are all wrong and a corruption of Christianity. Many Catholics, maybe most, think the Jesuits are nothing but troublemakers and heretics. That all may be true, but the point they taught me is still correct. If you believe God is tinkering with the natural world and the direct cause of everything we see, then you have no choice but to reject science.

Bear in mind that I think most people can get along just fine believing God is watching over them, directing their lives and helping them win football games. A world in which everyone accepts Intelligent Design would look just like the world today, because most everyone, whether they know it or not, believes in God the fiddly watchmaker, who is always tinkering with creation. Otherwise, no one would pray.

You’ll note I never say I believe in evolution. To my way of thinking, that’s akin to saying I believe in gravity or I believe water is wet. These are not things that require a leap of faith. I believe I will die having sex with a super model. That requires a leap of faith. I know water is wet, gravity is 9.7536 m / s2 and evolution is the best explanation of the fossil record.

What I have always found odd is that some (many?) ID’ers have made a fetish out of Darwin. It’s as if they think Darwin is the Moses of the Church of Evolution. If they can somehow discredit this false god, they will bring down the whole evolution business. What’s even nuttier is they seem to think that discrediting evolution automagically makes their flapdoodle into accepted science.

You see that from the writer John C Wright in this post I stumbled upon a while back. The implied claim that Darwin thought man evolved from apes is a popular bit of nonsense from these people. I guess it makes them feel good, but it is simply not true. Go back far enough and we share a common ancestor with apes. Go back further and we share an ancestor with goldfish. No one thinks humans are goldfish.

Wright did not have to mention Darwin to make his point, but his brand of Christianity has an obsession with Darwin. They imagine he is not just the beginning of evolution, but the end. If you look at the ID’er sites they are shot through with “proof” that Darwinism is a false religion. Some guy wrote a book influential with ID’ers that claims Darwin was the original L. Ron Hubbard.

This post from the Fred Reed the other day is a good example of the other bit of weirdness with the anti-Darwin people.

Let us begin with Samuel Johnson’s response when asked whether we have free will. He replied that all theory holds that we do not, all experience that we do. A similar paradox occurs in the realm of Impossibility Theory. Many things occur in biology that all science says are possible, while all common sense says that they are not.

Fred’s argument is basically backwoods occasionalism. It sounds pleasing and folksy, but the central claim is that the natural world is unknowable. Science is bunk and therefore Fred’s crackpot theories are just as plausible as genetics or the carbon dating of fossils. It’s a weird blend of paganism and nihilism that is always under the surface of certain flavors of modern Christianity.

For me, at least, it is the deliberate ignorance at the heart of this brand of Christianity, if you can call it Christianity, that I find so weird. It’s as if the adherents believe ignorance is next to godliness. Like rhinos stamping out fires, they run around trying to make themselves and everyone around them dumber by casting science as religious cult with Charles Darwin at the head.

The Death of the Episcopal Church

Posted on by

An old friend is a minister in the Episcopal Church. I’d describe him as a traditional conservative. He’s not very political, but you cannot be involved in church life without understanding the politics. It’s not just the normal internal jostling for power that you see in all organizations. In the modern church, you have the outside politics, which is mostly a battle between the New Religion and traditional normalcy.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in The Episcopal Church. Largely anchored in Public Protestantism, the church has been swept up by all the fads that have popped out of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Since much of what animates the modern Progressive is a hatred of tradition, particularly the Christian tradition, there’s a wing of the church that believes it must destroy the church as part of its holy mission.

The primary point of entry, so to speak, for the radical wing is the issue of sodomy. Years ago, Bishop Gene Robinson decided his ticket to success in the church was to abandon his family and take up with a man. He went on to become the first openly gay Bishop of the church. Ever since, the church has been a magnet for homosexuals, creating problems for the church and greater Anglican communion.

For the first time, the global organizing body of Anglicans has punished the Episcopal Church, following years of heated debate with the American church over homosexuality, same-sex marriage and the role of women.

The Anglican Communion’s announcement Thursday that it would suspend its U.S. branch for three years from key voting positions was seen as a blow to the Episcopal Church, which allows its clergy to perform same-sex marriages and this summer voted to include the rite in its church laws.

It was also seen as a victory for conservative Anglicans, especially those in Africa,, who for years have been pressing the Anglican Communion to discipline the U.S. body.

“The traditional doctrine of the church in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds marriage as between a man and a woman in faithful, lifelong union,” the leaders of the Anglican Communion, which represents 44 national churches, said in a statement during a meeting in Canterbury. “The majority of those gathered reaffirm this teaching.”

Although it’s too early to predict what will happen three years from now, when the Episcopal Church could vote on its response to the suspension at its denomination-wide meeting, observers say it is unlikely that the U.S. church will reverse its position on same-sex marriage. This could prompt the Anglicans to continue the suspension or make it even harsher, not allowing the Episcopal Church to fill key positions on the global body.

“I don’t believe they will be ‘kicked out’ or exiled, but they will continue to be at a distance if they don’t change their direction,” said Jeff Walton, communications manager for the Institute on Religion & Democracy, a conservative Washington think tank that is frequently critical of mainline denominations.

The decision in England will have little impact on Episcopalians in the pews, who have grown increasingly liberal after the 2003 consecration of the openly gay priest Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire. That action prompted dozens of U.S. churches to break off and declare their allegiance to conservative rival groups.

You can tell how much someone values a thing by how much they are willing to give up in order to keep it. When negotiating a contract, part of the strategy is to determine what the other side is willing to concede and at what price. In fact, you want to find out what is not on the table, so you don’t waste your time. Sometimes, there’s no deal to be made and you want to figure that out quickly.

Here we see something I’ve written about often. Progressivism is a religion and it is a covetous one, similar to Islam. That means you cannot be both a Progressive and a Christian, without compromising on one or the other. You either slight your Progressive faith on issues like sodomy and abortion or your Christianity takes a back seat to your Progressivism. As my ancestors would say, “A man who chases two rabbits catches none.”

That’s why the pews are empty. Any attempt to reconcile the teachings of the church with the teaching of the New Religion will just alienate both the Progressive parishioners and the normal ones. My friend the minister says this is the challenge facing his parish. Neither side is happy with the attempts to commingle the two religions so both sides find a reason to leave. The only folks holding out are the geezers who do so out of habit.

Ultimately, that’s a perfectly fine outcome for the Progressives. Just as the Muslims turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, Progressives would love nothing more than to turn the churches into moon-bat meeting houses. If killing off the competing faith means killing off the church in which they have attended since childhood, they are fine with it. In the end, like the leadership of The Episcopal Church, they are Progressive first, everything else a distant second.