Category Archives: Religion

The Weirdness of Anti-Darwinism

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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

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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.

The Death of Islam

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If you lived in 11th century London around the time when Harold Godwinson was making the mistake of leaving too many troops in the north, your life was rather shabby compared to the life of a man living in Damascus or Samarra. This was the Golden Age of Islam. The Muslims were on the cutting edge of commerce, math, science and economics. If you were looking down from above, Islam looked like a winner.

Granted, the Muslim advance into Europe had been halted, but they still controlled large parts of Europe and controlled the Mediterranean. As a practical matter, just in terms of peace and prosperity, Islam looked like a superior model to what existed in Christendom and Asia. It was not just at the top either. Literacy rates, and life expectancy were much higher in the caliphate than anywhere else.

Fast forward 200 years and life in London would not have changed much. The typical peasant would have had a life similar to his ancestors under someone like William the Conqueror. To the East, however, little guys on ponies had defeated the armies of Europe and were poised to drive all the way to the Atlantic. The armies of the Batu Khan had smashed the Rus and were ready to ride to Paris.

To the south, those same guys from Asia were sacking Baghdad, burning its libraries and murdering most of the male citizens, while impregnating the females.  Historians estimate that a million citizens of Baghdad were killed in one week. The destruction was so massive, the population of the region did not recover until the 19th century. The Mongol Invasion ended the Golden Age of Islam.

By the 14th century, Islam was still dominant in what we call the Arab world, but it was not producing or even augmenting an ascendant culture and people. In fact, as the culture of the Near and Middle East collapsed, it took Islam with it, turning it into a tool for jostling between clans and tribes. The Muslims held on militarily through the 20th century, but that was largely due to the Turks and their long involvement in Europe going back to antiquity.

Even so, by the late Middle Ages, life in the typical European village was not that much better than life in the typical Muslim village. If you just looked at the top, the Ottoman Turks looked strongest, but the seeds of decline were apparent. While the West was on the cusp of great technological, cultural and financial revolutions, the Ottomans were still running a system Diocletian would have understood.

As the West moved from the Middle Ages into the Early Modern Period, it was about to rocket ahead of the rest of the world technologically, culturally and military. The typical villager in Europe was living a vastly more prosperous life than his contemporary in Baghdad or Tripoli. The religion, the culture, the demographics and even the climate all came together to produce what we know to be the modern world – in Europe.

Islam never made it out of the Middle Ages until Western prosperity overflowed its cups and brought material wealth to the Arab world. Even so, Iraq is still a Medieval society equipped with satellite dishes and mobile phones. Their culture, economics and politics remain locked in the amber of a bygone age. Even their revolutionaries sound like extras from a B-movie about the Crusades.

That’s not just a reality we in the West accept. It is a reality that every Muslim from the Arab world faces and grapples with every day. The culture that produced him lost to the culture that confronts him. No one stands in line for the latest Muslim mobile phone. There is no Muslim Silicon Valley. The armies of Allah throw rocks at the space ships and lasers of the infidel. To be a Muslim is to be a loser.

That daily reality is in his pocket when he looks at his cell phone. It is on TV where all the actors wear Western clothes. It is in his house where his sister demands to wear makeup and live on her own, dating men outside the family. Even at mosque he is reminded that he is on the losing side of the fight. He rides a Western made bus or drives a Western made car. He texts his coreligionists on an Apple iPhone, not a Mohammad Phone.

There is an argument that Islam is on the rise. As we see Muslims pouring into Europe and even America, the argument goes, Islam is like rising flood waters, about to wash away the West. That misses what’s happening at the roots of Muslim culture. Every one of those Muslims is on a journey that will end as it did for John the Savage in Brave New World.

The Muslim defines himself by his family relations. He is everyone who came before him. His culture is their culture and their culture defines him. Those Muslims on the road to Berlin can either abandon themselves and their identity in order to join their new world, or, they can embrace death. The self-detonation phenomenon is just a dramatic way of choosing the latter.

The thing is, both choices have the same implication, the death of Islam as an organizing philosophy. Just as the Muslim is faced with the reality of assimilation, Islam is faced with the same choice. Islam can cut itself lose from its past and embrace the material world of Western culture or it can blow itself up in a last final act of vengeance against the victor. Either way, Islam is dying.

The Sunni-Shia war that is centered in Syria is perhaps the way forward so Islam can evolve and become a workable mode of thought in a modern technological world. Like the Thirty years War, maybe old Islam is burning itself out and what comes next is a lighter, personal version of Islam. The Thirty Years War left large chunks of central Europe depopulated and others reduced to cannibalism so these transformations carry a heavy price.

Islam is collapsing and it could very well take the rest of us with it. The central challenge to leaders of the West is how to manage this civilizational collapse, which primarily means containing it. The past year has been about piety contests over who can invite the most Muslims in for settlement. The coming decade will be about who can keep the most Muslims out of the West.

 

Bill Nye The Nazi Guy

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I’ve never been famous or had a desire to be famous. In fact, it has always struck me as a miserable way to live. These things are a matter of taste and not having ever been famous, I may be all wrong about my reaction to it. My ego has never responded well to flattery so I’m confident fame would not be fun for me. Having people stopping and pointing at me sounds horrible.

There are others for whom fame, even minor fame, is a narcotic that hooks them like a meth addict. They crave it and when they get a taste of it, they will do anything for more of it. My hunch is this is what drives people into the entertainment fields. It’s not the money or the thrill of being good at something. They want to be famous and they will go through every humiliation in order to get a taste of fame. The casting couch could not exist otherwise.

That’s what drives a guy like Bill Nye to repeatedly make an fool of himself. He gained some minor celebrity making kids laugh on TV while doing parlor tricks and now he is obsessed with getting on TV or mentioned on-line. That usually means saying asinine things that the Left can use to claim science proves they are right. It’s why he peddles himself as a scientist when he is nothing of the sort.

Yeah, you’re leading to my next point. Part of the solution to this problem or this set of problems associated with climate change is getting the deniers out of our discourse. You know, we can’t have these people – they’re absolutely toxic. And so part of the message in this book is to get the deniers out of the picture, and along that line – I’ve been saying this a lot the last few weeks as  I listen to the Republican debates – maybe one of these people will go out on his or her own, thinking for him or herself, and say, “You know, I’ve been thinking about this and climate change is a very serious problem. So if I’m president, we’re going to address climate change.”

Anyone familiar with their history will recognize why I call him the Nazi Guy. He is dehumanizing the people who disagree with him and his cult’s beliefs. That lets him dismiss them without consideration. It’s a pretty short trip from where he is now, calling the infidels “toxic”, to a place where he is demanding they be rounded up and shot.

Again, Nye is just an attention whore saying increasingly deranged things in order to get people to notice him. He has figured out that his fake scientist act works on the hard thumping crazies of the Left so that’s his act. If juggling chainsaws was popular with the public, he would be out there doing that instead of peddling this nonsense.

The whiff of fascism is particularly strong here because climate worship has a lot in common with fascism, particularly Nazism. Hitler was a vegan and a bit obsessed with living what we would consider to be the granola lifestyle. The Germans, after all, did give us the Hippies. Instead of rubbing out the mongrel races threatening the folk, the Climate Nazis want to rub out those who threaten Gaia.

This is not an exaggeration. There was a green wing to National Socialism and it was very influential. The mystique of blood and soil was exactly that, blood and soil. For the Nazis, the folk were inextricably bound up in the land. Romantic feelings toward nature were an essential part of the Nazi movement. Preserving Germany for Germans was one side of the coin. Keeping the natural environment of Germans pristine and unsullied was the other side.

Stories like this from New York make a lot of sense if you think of these people as they think of themselves. The climate change warriors are not just defending the environment; they think they are defending themselves and their kind. It’s blood and soil mixed with Puritanism. Instead of the elect running around looking for blasphemers, they are running around looking for deniers. Instead of bringing sinners to account, they are suing the oil companies.

The Yankee Scold

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In another age, David Brooks would have been a guy standing against the wall at the town hall meeting, where the fate of Esther was being debated. Some would argue that a good dunking was enough. Others would argue that burning at the stake was the only way to make sure the devil was not living in the village. Later, David would make clever and witty observations about the night’s events to his coevals.

Poor Esther, however, would have spent that night looking for David to come to her aid believing he would explain to the townspeople that she was not a witch or possessed by the devil. After all, the well regarded Mr. Brooks had counseled her to trust in the good judgement of the townsfolk and trust in God to carry her through this ordeal. A whole lot of Esthers have gone to the gallows waiting for their David to rise and speak on their behalf.

David Brooks is pitched as a conservative voice at the New York Times, but I can’t think of single right winger who would consider him a fellow traveler. Brooks is what the Left imagines a good and sensible conservative should be, as opposed to those malignant Morlocks on the other side of the wall. For Progressives, Brooks is a good person with some contrary ideas about how best to run society.

As is always the case with the Left, reality is something different. Brooks is a Public Protestant. That is, he is not overly concerned with private morality. He was, for instance, one of the first to dismiss the indecency charges against Bill Clinton. Instead, men like Brooks imagine themselves as anointed by God to carry out God’s work and try to make the world a more perfect and less sinful place.

When men like Brooks think and write about morality, it is not in the context of his relationship to the Almighty. It is about your relationship with the Almighty, which happens to be the managerial class, of which Brooks is a member in good standing. This profile of Brooks provides an example of what I mean.

In general, Brooks contends, journalists balk at sharing moral viewpoints, and readers bristle upon receiving them. His critics find him an insufferable scold, a pompous sermonizer. “I think there is some allergy our culture has toward moral judgment of any kind,” he reflects. “There is a big relativistic strain through our society that if it feels good for you, then who am I to judge? I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I’d rather take the hits for being a moralizer than to have a public square where there’s no moral thought going on.”

Therein lies the difference between the Public and Private Protestant. The Born Again Christian would prefer it if the public square was family friendly, but that has nothing to do with their relationship with God. It’s why we see these folks retreating from politics again. Their salvation is a personal matter, not a political one. Once there is no room in politics to debate issues like abortion and marriage, there’s no point in participating.

For Public Protestants like Brooks, the public square is all consuming. The anointed are not judged by their private relationship with the Almighty. They are judged, along with the society they maintain, on the general morality of society. It’s why they are endlessly meddling in the lives of the people. If they let you fall into a degraded state, it reflects on them so they believe they are obligated to prevent that from happening, whether you like it or not.

The trouble that is brewing in the Republican Party is directly tied to this divide over morality. David Brooks is considered a conservative at the New York Times because he resists the current fads roiling the ruling class and instead adheres to old Yankee sense of public obligation and public authority. The Progressives really don’t disagree with him on these points. They just think he is old fashioned, which is closely associated in their mind with reactionary.

Outside of this ecosystem, where the bulk of GOP voters reside, this dynamic just looks like two sides of the same coin. Paul Ryan hugging Barak Obama as they agree on how much of your money to spend on their public improvement projects strikes many GOP voters as a betrayal. In the room where these two men are hugging, it feels like they are adversaries. Outside the room it looks like they are partners.

That’s because outside the room, most American are Private Protestants. I’m using the term as a non-sectarian, cultural label. Lots of atheists, Catholics and Hindus reject the serve-the-world/save-the-world ethos of the ruling class. These voters are looking from Republican to Democrat, and from Democrat to Republican, and from Republican to Democrat again; but it is impossible to say which is which.

Since the 19th century, America has been dominated by the old Roundhead culture that dates to the founding. The south has been too weak economically and culturally to push back. The middle has thrown in with the winners out of necessity. The choices before the voters since the middle of the 20th century has been between the hair-on-fire fanatic and the prudent scold, with guys like Brooks filling the role of the latter.

Politics is about numbers and the numbers no longer favor the Roundhead coalition and that’s what leaves guys like David Brooks sleepless at night. His role as the sensible antidote to the fanaticism of his coreligionists is of no value when there is a more cavalier coalition to counter the Roundheads. That’s what we are seeing signs of in the Trump coalition.

The space for the Yankee scold to operate is getting small. Perhaps that’s why David Brooks is suddenly struggling with his relationship with the Almighty. He keeps working on that sermon, making weekly improvements, but the number of people in the pews gets smaller and smaller. Pretty soon, all the Yankee scolds will be left searching for a congregation.

The Hive

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The late great Joe Sobran argued that modern American liberalism embraced abnormality as a replacement for the allegiance to international communism. The Soviet Empire was a murderous and nullifying creation, but the American Left simply ignored its reality and instead pretended it was the path to some glorious future. When reality made that impossible. The Hive was left without a queen and found a variety of causes like gay rights around which to organize.

Sobran was mostly right in his description of the post-Soviet Progressives, but I don’t think he truly appreciated the nature of the American Left. As he wrote in one of his columns, for him the Left was an odor, something he could sense, but not fully describe. He was not alone. The Right was just as warped as the Left by the defeat of Nazism and the subsequent Cold War. It was the lens through which everything was viewed for half a century.

The big mistake, I think, is to assume the American Left is just a traveling partner of the European Left. The Right has turned “socialist” into an epithet that has no meaning. Calling Obama a socialist or his health care scheme socialism is just a way to lodge a protest. The Right and the Left have embraced the basics of socialism for close to a century now. The debate is over how far to go with it. The last serious politician to advocate the end of Social Security, for example, was Barry Goldwater.

When Christianity failed as a unifying force for Europe, nationalism filled the void. “If all of us can’t be God’s people, well, maybe some of us can be God’s people” was what bound the people to each other and their rulers. When nationalism failed, various forms of socialism filled the void. Fascism, socialism and communism are European heresies, with communism as the first serious effort to unify Europe under a single religion since the Thirty Years War.

In America, what emerged after the Civil War was Public Protestantism mainly in New England and Private Protestantism in the rest of the country. The old Puritans had always believed that each person’s salvation was predetermined. What mattered was carrying out God’s work on earth. Put another way, you signaled your salvation status through public piety and working toward the perfection of society. That’s why New England has always been the hotbed of utopian lunacy.

Private Protestantism is the mirror opposite, starting with the status of one’s soul. Your garden variety Evangelical thinks the point of your life is to get right with Jesus in order to gain salvation. Since heaven on earth is not just an impossibility, but against the will of God, efforts to perfect society are pointless and possible evil. It’s why populism, individualism and a fetish for individual rights is dominant in the South, Appalachia and the Southwest.

Now, it is certainly true that Jews and European immigrants of the 19th and 20th century brought socialism, fascism and communism with them. These ideas found a home in the Yankee culture of Public Protestantism. The philosophy of Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, for example, turns up in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century. Similarly, Reform Judaism of Abraham Geiger folded neatly into the American Progressive Movement, which has always been the technocratic arm of Public Protestantism.

The central defect the Puritans faced, the one they were never able to resolve, was that the human condition is immutable. They could kill as many Indians as they liked, but the nature of man was not going to change. Worse yet, Christianity was often at odds with utopian efforts to fix the world. In the 19th century Christianity, began to take a back seat to saving the world, but that created a new problem. If the purpose of God’s anointed is to save the world, what’s the point if there is no longer a God to do the anointing?

In the 20th century, Progressivism became Public Protestantism with a void at the core where God used to exist. Into that void first rushed an imaginary interpretation of Soviet Bolshevism that needed constant tending to avoid exposing the humanity crushing reality of it. Once that became impossible, what has rushed into the void is a series of vulgarities that serve no purpose other than to offend common sense. The God of the Left is now just the outrage of the decent.

It’s why the Left appears to be racing to the abyss. Today they clamor for what was unimaginable twenty years ago. That means twenty years from now they will be clamoring for what commonsense today says is beyond absurd. In 1995 gay marriage was a joke and today it is required. Today pedophilia is a monstrous taboo, but already the Left is clamoring to normalize it. The debate amongst Progressives is never about limits. It is about how far beyond the limits they can go.

The race to pile on society every imaginable indignity has its limits. Pop music performers, for example, tried to replace talent with outrageous behavior. Finally, there was no one left to outrage. The logic of the Progressive faith will follow the same path, but the end is the obliteration of society. Open borders fanaticism, for example, is just passing out the Kool-Aid at a national scale. One can’t help but wonder if Obama’s urge to give Iran the bomb does not include the hope that they use it.

It will not end well.

The Faith of the Crazy

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What’s hard for normal people to wrap their heads around, I think, is how modern liberalism is not a set of fact-based opinions, but a crazy quilt of beliefs that are untethered from reality. Normal people tend to assume that people can look around, see the world as it is and act accordingly. Those who fail to acknowledge reality are either mistaken or insane. For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, conservatives have assumed liberals are mistaken and therefore they can be corrected.

Over the last decade, many on the right have come to the conclusion that the people we call Progressives are suffering from a mental disorder. Maybe it is the nutty aunt who thinks Obama is Jesus. Maybe it is that neighbor who has covered his Prius in “coexist” bumper stickers. These are not people with whom you can have a conversation because they find some way to preach Progressive craziness at you, even over the damned weather.

I tend to think of it a third way, which is as a religion. I call it the Cult of Modern Liberalism because what we call politically correct is what we used to call “pious” in another age. The PC enforcers deeply believe in egalitarianism, anti-racism and multiculturalism as pathways to salvation. It’s Congregationalism with God removed from the cosmology. Here’s a good example of it in the Washington Post.

This month, Jennifer Cramblett lost her “wrongful birth” lawsuit, which centered on a troubling ideology that has been creeping into mainstream discussions in ways not seen in decades. Cramblett claimed that the sperm used to inseminate her came from the wrong donor, leading to a biracial child, which she had not wanted. Her lawsuit claimed that this mix-up in the lab caused her and her family personal injuries of various kinds.

This lawsuit was shadowed by a troubling logic: the idea that race is a biological reality with particular traits and behaviors that can be avoided through proper breeding practices. In doing so, Cramblett’s claims echoed arguments made in a darker era of global history of “scientific” racism.

Here’s how the argument goes. Some people are born with outstanding talents, easily mastering basketball, mathematics, languages or piano, if given the right environment in which to grow. What biologist or social scientist could argue with that? But alongside that genetic understanding, an old and pernicious assumption has crept back into the American conversation, in which aptitudes are supposedly inherited by race: certain peoples are thought to have rhythm, or intellect, or speed or charm. That’s a fast track toward the old 19th- and early 20th-century problem of “scientific” racism.

First off, you’ll note the tone. These are two deeply religious people speaking to an audience they assume to share their religion. If instead of “racism” the bogeyman was the devil, it would be something you would expect from certain Christian sects. If the bogeyman was Western decadence, then this would read like a sermon from the local imam. Instead, the bogeyman is biology so it is a boiler plate lecture we’ve all come to expect from people who enjoy diversity seminars.

You’ll also note that the authors are both professors with degrees in nonsense fields like racism and sociology. These are not fields of study that add to the stock of human knowledge about the world. These are fields dedicated to enforcing religious orthodoxy. When your kids go off to college, they are forced to sit through diversity lectures by these types of people as part of the “orientation.”

The Washington Post gobbles up submissions like this because it helps the faithful resist the temptations of biological science, which is becoming a real threat to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. When genetics can trace your genealogy back to the home country by merely taking a mouth swab and correlate physiological attributes to intelligence, biology becomes the same sort of threat to the New Religion as it was to the Old Religion.

Because this new religion inherits so much from the old religion, it even comes with an apocalyptic element. This breathless story on “climate change” is a daily feature in Progressive media. Christianity used to keep people in line by promising eternal damnation in the fiery pits of Hell if you broke God’s laws. Progressives promise an extremely high air conditioning bill if you keep using the lawnmower.

The interesting thing about the New Religion is it is a throwback to the pre-Christian days. Before the Jews gave us a fixed, rational God who created a fixed and rational world, people truly thought appeals to the gods would change the laws of nature. Hang a bull’s penis around your neck and your next kid would be a son. Burn a couple of heretics and the rains would come and end the drought.

Climate change is paganism for guys and gals on the private jet circuit. They force the state to pass some regulation making it hard for you to cut your grass because that will appease, well, whatever is in the blank spot where Elagabalus used to sit. As has always been the case, the rich guy making the sacrifice to the gods is never sacrificing anything of his. It’s always some other guy stretched out on the altar, having his heart ripped out.

Obama: The L. Ron Hubbard of Modern Liberalism

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On a few occasions, here and elsewhere, I compared the recent spasm of monument desecration by the American Left to what we are seeing with ISIS in the Near East. It is an easy comparison. One group of fanatics is attacking the monuments of the past because Allah commands it. Another is attacking symbols from the past because the void where God used to exist in their cosmology commands it.

Look, the primary attraction of the comparison is it makes Progressives nuts when you point out this comparison. Their near total lack of self-awareness coupled with total ignorance of their ideological movement causes them to think they are pure logic machines, the exact opposite of the sky-god worshiping barbarians. It’s a classic example of the hive mentality of cults. Hold a mirror up to them and they shriek in horror.

The joking aside, I do think the Left has jumped the fence and is no longer simply a political ideology. This is fairly obvious with the reaction to Bernie Sanders, who is an old school commie. Bernie is focused on economics, not culture. When pressed, he mouths the Cult-Marx platitudes, but he’s clearly not into it. His defense of American jobs with regards to immigration sent the Vox boys into hysterics.

It’s tempting to think of the modern Progressives as tarted up commies from the previous age, but there are a different breed of cat. Theirs is a spiritual movement, more than economics or even ideology. They see salvation through egalitarianism and multiculturalism. Leveling the economic playing field is simply not important to them, especially since most are in the managerial elite.

An example of what I mean is early on in Obama’s tenure, he talked about creating a domestic army to address the laundry list of ills he thought needed attention. He was not thinking about a teacher corp pr civilian conservation corp. He had something closer to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in mind, an army of young people scolding the non-believers. In other words, they were building a mass movement.

That has eventually turned in Organizing for America, the off-the-books campaign operation that Team Obama used to coordinate, outside the view of Congress, their operations of the 2012 election. Presidents have campaign operations, but this was a radical departure in that it was intended to live on long after Obama left office. It would allow him to co-opt future campaigns by maintaining a private agit-prop operation coordinating with groups like the SEIU and the vast army of non-profits like Planned Parenthood.

This story in the Times about how Obama is doing something different folds in nicely with his dreams of being the spiritual leader of global liberalism, defining the morality of the New Religion and by extension, the nation.

Publicly, Mr. Obama betrays little urgency about his future. Privately, he is preparing for his postpresidency with the same fierce discipline and fund-raising ambition that characterized the 2008 campaign that got him to the White House.

The long-running dinner this past February is part of a methodical effort taking place inside and outside the White House as the president, first lady and a cadre of top aides map out a postpresidential infrastructure and endowment they estimate could cost as much as $1 billion. The president’s aides did not ask any of the guests for library contributions after the dinner, but a number of those at the table could be donors in the future.

The $1 billion — double what George W. Bush raised for his library and its various programs — would be used for what one adviser called a “digital-first” presidential library loaded with modern technologies, and to establish a foundation with a worldwide reach.

Supporters have urged Mr. Obama to avoid the mistake made by Bill Clinton, whose associates raised just enough money to build his library in Little Rock, Ark., forcing Mr. Clinton to pursue high-dollar donors for years to come. Including construction costs, Mr. Obama’s associates set a goal of raising at least $800 million — enough money, they say, to avoid never-ending fund-raising. One top adviser said that $800 million was a floor rather than a ceiling.

What Obama does not want to be doing in his retirement is grubbing for money. What he enjoys most is standing in front of adoring crowds telling them his inner thoughts. Obama speeches have always been an interior monologue broadcast to whoever is within earshot. If the Obama Foundation is a self-perpetuating financial engine that keeps him and his wife in a lifestyle they believe they deserve, Obama is free to spread the gospel.

One top aide said Mr. Obama respected Mr. Bush’s decision to limit his time in public after leaving office, but also admired Mr. Clinton’s aggressive use of the spotlight to press his agenda.

“My sense is that he’s probably a blend of the two,”’ said David Plouffe, one of Mr. Obama’s closest former aides and a member of the library foundation board.

In response to a question from Mr. Doerr at the February White House dinner, the president told the group that he wanted to focus on civic engagement and opportunities for youths, pushing guests for ideas about how to make government work better, Mr. Hoffman recalled in an interview. The president asked if social networks could improve the way society confronted problems.

In their conversations with Mr. Obama and his advisers, people from Silicon Valley and Hollywood are pressing for a heavy reliance on cutting-edge technology in the library that would help spread the story of Mr. Obama’s presidency across the globe. Ideally, one adviser said, a person in Kenya could put on a pair of virtual reality goggles and be transported to Mr. Obama’s 2008 speech on race in Philadelphia.

Some discussions at the dinners have focused on the role Mr. Obama might play internationally after the diplomatic opening with Cuba, the nuclear deal with Iran, the confrontations with Russia and the drawdown of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama is not the hardest working guy in the world, something I actually admire about him, so I question whether he will really want to be the spiritual leader of his own cult. His people clearly think that is his future. Undoubtedly, Organizing for Action will be a part of this initiative. That will allow Obama to control the Democrat Party by wielding financial and spiritual power long after he is gone from office.

Progressive Awakenings tend to run out of steam after a decade or so. The reason is the charismatic leaders tend to die off. Wilson was a vegetable at the end. FDR dropped dead. JFK, MLK and RFK were all shot in the 60’s and there was no one to pick up the torch.

Obama is young and in good health so he could possible keep the torch lit well beyond the normal active phase. He could set himself up in New York City and a mountain lair in Hawaii, where he can direct his followers and issue encyclicals to the faithful. Another book is on the way so it could perhaps be the Dianetics of the Left.

Post-Christian West

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On this day 1374 years ago, give or take, A Northumbrian army assembled on a field in the West Midlands, which is on the west (left) side of England. North Umbria was in the northern most territory of England, bordering Scotland. Their leader was a man named Oswald and he was the king of Bernicia. He was the most powerful king on the island, the Bretwalda, and the man often credited with the Christianizing the north of England.

On the other side was King Penda of Mercia, one of the other kings of the heptarchy. Mercia covered the area that is now called the Midlands, which is conveniently located in the middle of England. Penda was a pagan, the last pagan king of England. Mercia was not very powerful, but they stood in the way of Oswald dominating the south, so they were a natural target for the Northumbrians.

On the day of the battle, Oswald, no doubt, stood before his men and prayed to the new God for victory over their pagan enemies. The custom of the age was to promise gifts to the Church and maybe a daughter or son to the Church in exchange for victory. This was one of the many pagan habits the Church tolerated in order to bring the people slowly into the Church.

On the other side, Penda most certainly made offerings to the old gods, along with promises of additional sacrifices if they were victorious. The origins of King Penda are a bit murky, but we do know he was a pagan, and the pagan faith of Britain was Wodenism. It most likely came over with the Saxons and there’s some evidence that Penda was a Saxon.

The Battle of Maserfield probably lasted just a short while. The “armies” of the day were warbands under the command of an Althing or head chief. No one really knows, but the consensus is that armies were at most a few thousand men and probably numbered in the hundreds. In the end, Penda was victorious. Bede describes the outcome as a field made white with the bones of the saints. Oswald, when the battle was lost, is claimed to have knelt and prayed for the souls of his soldiers. Penda had him chopped into pieces and displayed on stakes.

If you were alive at the time, particularly if you were a Mercian, you probably thought Christianity was on the run and the old gods were reasserting their dominion. Certainly, Christians had their doubts. But, a dozen years later Oswald’s brother killed Penda at the Battle of Winwaed and a dozen years after that Oswiu presided over the Synod of Whitby where the secular and Christian authorities codified Christianity for the whole of England, including Mercia.

The point of this blast from the past is to illustrate how the culture can seem to shift very quickly. Even in the slow moving medieval period, a nation could switch religions within a generation. One day you’re helping your father burn the Christian missionary, the next day your son is packing wood under your pagan feet at the behest of the local priest. In a world where the religion of the king is the religion of the people, things can change quickly.

A little closer to our time is the matter of homosexual marriage. In the US, as is usually the case, the rulers impose their fads on the people through the mockery of the court system. That makes it easier for the people to pretend they are a conservative people with a liberal government. The reality is Christianity is dead in America so the people in charge know they will face no resistance.

In Ireland, a place to played up by Hollywood as an austere Catholic country, the people rushed to the polls to vote for homosexual marriage. It’s not that they really cared about the gays or that they were smiting the Church. They simply stopped being Catholic. In 1990, 80% of the people went to church each week. Today it is half that number so voting for homosexual marriage was just what the cool kids were doing.

The point here is that what you see happening today is a lot like what happened with the spread of Christianity through Europe. It was slow and proceeded in fits and starts. Early Christianity in Britain, for example, was hilarious due to the heavy drinking and fornicating of the priests. The commoners could hardly be held to account by such men, at least on moral issues. Over time, a critical mass of true believers gained the upper hand and Christianity became a defining force in English life.

That’s what we’re seeing with the New Religion. It’s not ready to wipe Christianity out completely. It’s simply too ridiculous to be taken seriously by enough people. But it is making steady progress. If you look at this post from a blogger with a name that is too hard to spell, what you see is the steady erosion of Christianity in America. A third of people under 30 have “no religious affiliation” which means they are not Christian.

About half the country does not attend church at all. In New England, the home of liberal fanaticism, church attendance has collapsed, now resembling Europe. The number of church closings in America suggests that self-reporting of church attendance is wildly inflated. Even in the South, which has always been the most religious part of the country, there’s been a decline in church attendance.

The Battle of Maserfield seemed to stall or even possible signal a rollback of Christianity, but it was just a blip. Similarly, the eradication of Christianity by people of the New Religion has stalled from time to time, but it is winning and will win in time. Today Christians are stripped of their property for disobeying homosexuals. In a generation they will be banned from public. Like Wodenism, Christianity will be a weird part of the past for future generations.

David Brooks and the Long War

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One of the ways you tell who is winning and who is losing is to look at which way the advice is flowing. Losers never give advice because no one takes advice from a loser so even if they have something to offer, no one pays much attention. Winners, on the other hand, love talking about how they won and will offer anyone and everyone tips as to how to be a winner.

There’s also something else. Winners are confident. They are willing to offer help to the loser because they are sure they are better than the other guy and have no fear he will use the advice to turn the tables. In other words, it is safe for the winner to be magnanimous as he perceives he has little to lose and will gain much by looking magnanimous. The loser, in contrast, must play close to the vest in the hope of scoring an upset.

That’s why we see in American public debate, a flow of advice and suggestions from Progressives to their alleged opponents. Democrats are always brimming with tips for Republicans. Progressives are always out lecturing extreme right-wing extremists about the folly of their extreme right-wing extremism. Here’s an example from David Brooks the other day.

These conservatives are enmeshed in a decades-long culture war that has been fought over issues arising from the sexual revolution. Most of the conservative commentators I’ve read over the past few days are resolved to keep fighting that war.

I am to the left of the people I have been describing on almost all of these social issues. But I hope they regard me as a friend and admirer. And from that vantage point, I would just ask them to consider a change in course.

Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution.

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.

You get that? David Brooks is generously offering you his sage advice , which is you need to give up and join the winning team. He wastes a lot of time tarting it up, while casting himself as something other than a conventional Progressive. That’s just part of the act. William Safire perfected this a half century ago and now it has become a feature of Progressive agit-prop.

Of course, this is not advice offered in the spirit of fellowship. David Brooks thinks social conservatives are sub-human and he would gladly sign up to slam the oven door on them. This is mostly gloating. Brooks is taking a victory lap. He also hopes that social conservatives will keep fighting. His cult is reactionary and they need bogeymen. When the day comes that the Left clears the field of enemies, it is the day it collapses.

It’s why the Left is so good at inventing monsters. Its identity is based on struggle, something they inherited from Continental communists. Despite the fact Brooks has never known a time when he and his coreligionists have not been in control of the culture, they still believe they are struggling to set things right and break the spine of the WASP oppressors.

After every battle, the Left celebrates, but then says there is much left to be done. This Brooks column always turns up in the transition phase, They partied and now they are sobering up, being reminded that “those evil social conservatives are still out there, plotting and scheming to take back our victory. If only they would just give up!”

In one of life’s great ironies, America is being cleared of Christians by a religious cult that habitually nails itself to the cross and then blames the Christians.