Category Archives: Religion

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.

Evangelical Mercerism

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Those inclined to accuse me of thinking like a lapsed Catholic or even being a lapsed Catholic will have much to work with in this post. First, let me admit up front to having gone through Catholic schools and Catholic colleges. In those schools I received an education in the history of religion, the history of Christianity and the granular doctrinal differences between the sects laying claim to the label of Christian.

That said, I have not counted myself as a Catholic for a very long time and I’m not much of a believer. I think the Catholic mass is the most beautiful of the Christian services, followed closely by the Anglicans, the latter having much better music. The CoE also does a first rate job designing churches. Those big red doors are striking.

Black churches are the most entertaining and have the best food. It’s not even close on the food side of things. The mail order theologians I see on TV like Joel Osteen strike me as creepy and weird. I suspect they are just con-men without a lick of faith, but I have no proof of that. I could be completely wrong, but that’s my hunch.

Having said all that, I wish you nothing but the best if you find peace of comfort watching Joel Osteen or attending a non-denominational quasi-Christian service down at the motor lodge. A world run by the followers of Joel Olsteen would be a better world than one run by Progressives. In the former you get to say “no thank you” and close the door when they knock. In the latter you better open the door and do what they say – or else.

That buildup is a lead in to some comments regarding this post Rod Dreher linked to the other day.

One of the great Evangelical leaders of the twentieth century, Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru) and signatory of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, published a small booklet in 1952 entitled Four Spiritual Laws. It was used for over six decades as an evangelistic tool by literally millions of Christians worldwide. And it had – indeed, continues to have – a profound and lasting impact on Evangelicalism and the way in which that movement presents the Gospel to unbelievers and those who have strayed from their faith.

Even though I count myself among those whose spiritual journey was shaped by Bright’s vision and his call to share the good news of Jesus with family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues, I have come to believe that Bright’s first spiritual law – “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life” – presents a misleading depiction of what it means to follow Jesus.

I’ve known a great many Evangelicals and I have attended their services and even some of their Bible classes. This passive, feminine view of Christianity has always struck me as anti-Christian. It is occassionalism, the antithesis of Christianity, to believe man does not play a defining part of his destiny.

Logically, it is even nuttier simply because God’s plan could be that you have to figure it out on your own. Put another way, His plan may be for you to create your own plan. Simply blaming things on God and his plan for you sounds like an excuse to me. It also sounds like paganism, where the fates determine the course of your life.

But the decades long near-absence of the truth of the cross and the Gospel of suffering and transformation – that following Jesus is as much about getting heaven into you as you getting into heaven – resulted in generations of American Christians who spend half their Sunday services singing “hymns” to a Jesus that sounds more like their boyfriend than their Lord.

For this reason, as the hostility to Christian faith continues to mount in the United States – especially on issues that will require government coercion in matters of religious conscience –many of our fellow believers, unwilling to entertain the possibility that they must suffer as Christ suffered, will continue to acquiesce to the spirit of the age and construct a Jesus that conforms to that spirit. This Lord will wind up agreeing – or at least, not disputing – any of the pieties of the secular intelligentsia.

The economic, social, and familial pressures will seem so unbearable – so inconsistent with that “wonderful plan for your life” – they will quickly and enthusiastically distance themselves from those brethren who choose to pick up the cross and not check the “like” button. Whatever it is that hangs in the balance – professional honor, academic respectability, securing a lucrative business contract, or thirty pieces of silver – it will surely be described as the place to which “the Lord is leading us.”

Although they will claim to be devout “Evangelicals” or “Catholics,” they will nevertheless embody the beliefs that H. Richard Niebuhr once attributed to what was at the time the most dominant religious force in America, Liberal Protestantism: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”

This is already on display as many Evangelicals adopt the pagan beliefs of environmentalism. You can be sure that they will quickly buckle to pressure on gay marriage. There are already many out celebrating the love that won’t shut the hell up. How long before Joel Osteen is sporting a rainbow tunic and pointing out passages in the Bible he say are in support of sodomy?

It’s why I say Christianity in the West is in permanent retreat. Sure, there will always be people kicking around calling themselves Christian. There will be churches with decent crowds on Sunday. But, in the face of the Fosterite Left, it will be nothing more than Mercerism, a harmless pastime at best. A tool of social control at worst.

It Was Always About The Christians

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After The Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council declared marriage, as we have known it for 10,000 years, to be null and void, most of the chattering skulls on what passes for the Right these days went into predictable hysterics. Progressive lunatics decorated themselves in rainbows, celebrating without fully understanding what it is they are celebrating. They just like gloating.

So far the only chattering skull to sort of get what’s happening is David French at National Review.

The most striking aspect of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, which created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, was its deep emotion. This was no mere legal opinion. Indeed, the law and Constitution had little to do with it. (To Justice Kennedy, the most persuasive legal precedents were his own prior opinions protecting gay rights.) This was a statement of belief, written with the passion of a preacher, meant to inspire.

Consider the already much-quoted closing: As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

Or this:

“Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there.”

This isn’t constitutional law, it’s theology — a secular theology of self-actualization — crafted in such a way that its adherents will no doubt ask, “What decent person can disagree?” This is about love, and the law can’t fight love. Justice Kennedy’s opinion was nine parts romantic poetry and one part legal analysis (if that).

It has always been theology. The striking thing about the century long battle between the Cult of Modern Liberalism and the American Right is how uneven the fight has been. One side is focused, never losing sight of the bigger goals. The other side is composed of blithering idiots convinced they can talk their opponents out of destroying them.

And destruction is the only end possible. The Cult never loses sight of their main targets. The health care bill was mostly changes in the law to interfere with the free exercise of religion. Forcing some Christians to pay for abortions, for example, is forcing them to violate their faith. Do that enough and even the faithful give up. History is clear. Conversion is always compulsory.

This piece in America’s Newspaper of Record shines the light on what comes next.

On Friday, in a momentous decision, the Supreme Court allowed same-sex marriages nationwide. But the fight over how those weddings are accommodated or recognized, particularly by religious organizations, is far from over.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ dissent noted the many outstanding issues, which is why he would have preferred states passing laws allowing gay marriage, rather than judicial fiat. For Roberts, only legislation or voter initiatives signal “true acceptance.” Also, “respect for sincere religious conviction” led to “accommodations for religious practice” in every jurisdiction to democratically adopt it.

Those religious-liberty protections make clear that pre-existing bans on sexual-orientation discrimination — which provide sorely needed protections to LGBT individuals in housing, hiring and public accommodations — do not inadvertently spill over to a religious sacrament like marriage.

For example, in DC, Maryland, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Washington, marriage counseling provided by churches could continue to cater exclusively to heterosexual couples. After extensive hearings, legislatures in four states expressly provided that religious social-services agencies could continue to place children exclusively with heterosexual married couples, although in three states, such placements may occur only if the program receives no public money.

The First Amendment, courts agree, means churches can refuse to conduct religious ceremonies for same-sex partners if it conflicts with their belief. But what if, say, a couple wants to hold a reception in a church basement? Can they be refused?

The dissenters skewered Justice Anthony Kennedy for trivializing the impact on religious believers. Kennedy says, “The First Amendment ensures that religions, those who adhere to religious doctrines, and others have protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths.”

Clarence Thomas countered that “individuals and churches [will be] confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples,” an “inevitability” that the majority’s “weak gesture toward religious liberty in a single paragraph” is wholly insufficient to address. Samuel Alito worried that “those who cling to old beliefs . . . risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”

At oral argument, Alito asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli the question nagging many religiously affiliated educational institutions — the fact that Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status in the 1980s because it opposed interracial marriage. “So, would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same­-sex marriage?”

Verrilli conceded that tax exemption is “certainly going to be an issue.”

Of course it is going to be an issue. It has always been the issue. The whole point of gay marriage, after all, is to further bust up the traditional family and to marginalize Christian churches. A central tenet of the Cult of Modern Liberalism is the first and only loyalty of the people is to the state. The state is not just a government but the entirety of life. Nothing is outside the state, including God. This reads like it was written yesterday by Barak Obama for a reason.

What will happen from here is a wave of lawsuits against anyone and everyone holding out against the Homintern. This will include churches. Initially the courts will try to beat back this assault on the First Amendment, but in a decade the cost of not embracing the sodomite banner will break the remaining holdouts. Churches that refuse to perform gay weddings will lose their tax exempt status. Many will close. Being a Christian will be equated with being in the Klan.

The Progressive Timeline

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A topic of interest amongst many crime-thinkers, as well as some mainstream writers who secretly read crime-thinkers for column material, is why Progressives can never come to terms with the fact that they have been in charge of most of society for generations. It’s as if they have been asleep for the last fifty years or were taught an alternative history.

Detroit collapses in on itself and Progressive are out in the streets protesting as if the city was run by a secret cabal of Free Masons. They demand change and the implementation of their preferred solutions. Left out is the fact they were the ones in charge for fifty odd years and they had implemented all of their preferred polices, causing the collapse.

Race is the most obvious big social issue which has been totally controlled by Progressives. Since the 1950’s, the Left has had a free hand in trying tonmake the races get along. They even control the definition of “getting along.” Despite this, the last few years has been a non-stop campaign to “fix” race, as well as a cynical effort to cause a race war.

After the church shooting, every member of the Cult was out in the streets claiming nothing has changed since the last time a white guy killed a bunch of black people, which was fifty years ago. Normal people would look at the near total absence of white on black crime in the South, relative to the bad old days, as an amazing development. To the Left, this has not happened and it is still 1955.

My theory for why Progressives have a folded timeline is that their religion is synchronic versus diachronic and it is emotional. The Western tradition, informed by the Catholic scholarly traditions, is diachronic and dispassionate. History is a series of events, each influencing the other. The French Revolution, for example, led to Napoleon, the latter being the result of the former.

The Progressive sense of history is synchronic and emotional. The Civil Rights Movement has enormous emotional resonance with the left so it is of constant interest and talked about as if it happened yesterday. On the other hand, the near total domination of America urban centers by Progressive politicians has no emotional resonance so may as well have happened ten thousand years ago or not at all.

This jumps out when talking with millennials, who have been marinated in the New Religion throughout their schooling. Even those who ostensibly reject the one true faith have this emotional timeline baked into their thinking. They divide the past into two parts. There are those events that happened a long time ago before they were around and those events that happened in their time, which are all consuming.

For instance, I recently was talking with a millennial about mobile phones. He made the comment that life must have been rough before Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. He just assumed that this thing important to him, was a seminal moment in history. When I explained to him that I had a mobile phone in the 1980’s, I may as well have told him I lived in the age of dragons. He was incredulous.

I think this explains the current moral panic over the Confederate flag. In the Progressive timeline, the Civil War looms large, casting a shadow over everything. Their emotional response to the flag is the same as abolitionists felt in the 19th century. It’s why plagiarists like Doris Kearns Goodwin try so hard to make Lincoln into a Progressive Democrat.

It’s also why after half a century that we are still treated to JFK retrospectives around the anniversary of his death. Kennedy was an insignificant figure in American history, but he looms large in the Progressive imagination, even larger than FDR. The reason is he was “martyred” and then turned into a saint in the Cult of Modern Liberalism. The real JFK would have been revolted by modern liberalism, but the mythological one is the Brigham Young of the faith.

A strange little book I read a long time ago is The Man Who Folded Himself, by Star Trek writer David Gerrold. The premise is that the timeline can be folded on itself so that points separated by eons can appear to be moments apart. That’s the mind of the Progressive. Events of great emotional import are clustered together on their timeline in the near past. Everything else is scattered in the distant past, many beyond the event horizon.

The result of this folded timeline is a historical amnesia. It is, perhaps, a defense mechanism to deal with disconfirmations. When the prophesies do not come true, those events quickly recede into the distant past so the believer can maintain their faith. Think about how chronic gamblers never remember their loses, but remember every cent they won.

Those events that fit the narrative are always in their minds as if they just happened. Sometimes, they confuse the imaginary events like the Mathew Shepherd murder with real events. Just the other day a moonbat brought this case with me. When I pointed out that he was not, in fact, a victim of homophobia, the moonbat was incredulous. I had to provide proof and they were still insisting it could have happened.

Oddly, the Dark Ages are described as the period when the barbarians snuffed out the light of Rome. That’s not exactly true, but it is useful. What will we call the period when the fanatics turn out the lights on the past, disconnecting us from material reality? Maybe in  the future, our time will be known as the start of the Blind Ages.

ISIS in America

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The Left has a lot in common with Islam. Progressives and Muslims have different traditions and a different vision of their desired future. The point of the comparison is not to prove they are the same. It is simply to explain by comparison. Multiculturalism has made comparison a taboo, but it is a useful way to understand things. It used to be the main way we studied cultures, but that was a long time ago in another country.

Anyway, consider this story the other day from the heart of Islam:

ISIS fighters have destroyed two ancient Muslim shrines in the oasis city of Palmyra, the Syrian government confirmed Wednesday, the latest act of cultural vandalism by the Sunni extremists.

ISIS seized control of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site dating back 2,000 years, last month, prompting fears for the site’s survival.

An email sent on behalf of Syria’s antiquities chief, Maamoun Abdulkarim, head of the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, said the body had heard four days ago from people in Palmyra of the shrines’ destruction.

“ISIS has blown up two ancient Muslim shrines in Palmyra, and has published photos of this awful crime against the Syrian cultural heritage on Facebook,” the statement said.

One of the tombs destroyed is that of Mohammed bin Ali, a descendent of Ali bin Abi Taleb, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin, the website DGAM said. It’s in a hilly area 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) north of Palmyra.

Now, consider this story from the heart of Liberalism:

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial, which has stood near the banks of the Potomac River in Washington for more than 70 years, is a classical tribute to the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president.

This week, the Jefferson Memorial was drawn into the national debate about race following the shooting deaths of nine people in a predominantly black church in South Carolina last week. It joins other public statues depicting Southern or Confederate figures, including Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, that some are arguing represent the country’s racist past and should be removed.

CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield this week questioned whether the Jefferson Memorial should be taken down because Jefferson owned slaves. “There is a monument to him in the capital city of the United States. No one ever asks for that to come down,” Banfield said.

Fellow anchor Don Lemon responded by saying Jefferson represented “the entire United States, not just the South.” But he added: “There may come a day when we want to rethink Jefferson. I don’t know if we should do that.”

Now, it is easy to dismiss the chattering skulls on CNN because no one watches CNN and these are two idiots with the IQ of goldfish. They are not demanding we blow up the Jefferson Memorial because it is blasphemy.

I’ll just point out that twenty years ago fringe idiots on TV were talking about men marrying men. It sounded absurd then, but now you can have your property taken if you laugh at gay marriage. Twenty years from ululating liberals could very well be blowing up the Jefferson Memorial because it offends the one true faith.

 

The New Religion

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The Rachel Dolezal story is hilarious for a boatload of reasons. There’s the obvious comparison to people who insist we pretend they are of another sex. If you can pretend to be the opposite sex, why not another race? More precisely, if sex is a social construct, then why is race not a social construct? Of course, for decades the war on white people has been based on the assertion that race is a social construct.

It used to be that we need not worry about such things. Biology was real and people accepted it. Those who did not were deemed mentally ill and treated accordingly. Rachel Dolezal was not fooling anyone, I suspect. People are not that stupid. They are that polite, however, and no one wants to get in a spat over race, even if it involves someone fraudulently using race to game the system. Elizabeth Warren pulled the same stunt and got away with it for the same reasons.

It’s fun to make sport of the internal contradictions, but it is even more fun to watch the Cult attack itself over something like this. Rachel Dolezal believes all the right things and has literally committed her life to them, but in doing so she has made a mockery of the one true faith. But, condemning someone for not being black enough sounds a lot like the paper bag test or the one drop rule.

Aside from the humor, it does reveal the basics of the New Religion, at least at this stage of its development. The New Religion is based on three principles: egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism.The order is important as the first two principles are the oldest and most important. Egalitarianism goes back to Rousseau and is at the root of all radical movements since the French Revolution.

If all men are the same, logically all cultures are the same. Multiculturalism is not logically possible without accepting egalitarianism. On the other hand, like Marxism, multiculturalism is a solution to the obvious problem that people will notice that not all cultures are the same and not all people seem to be equal. By ennobling the embrace of all cultures and condemning ethnocentrism, noticing becomes a defect in the noticer, rather than in the noticed.

If everyone is the same and no cultures are better than any other, inequity must be due to something other than biology and culture. Since white societies are the richest and most dominant, they must doing something to upset the natural order. That’s where anti-racism comes into the mix. The sin of racism is what allows whites in particular and white society in general, to rule over the rest of the world.

Therefore, white people of the New Religion jostle with one another for who can be the most ethno-masochist. The ultimate expression of that is to change ones race from white to black. We can all agree that Rachel Dolezal is nuts, but her choice here is not entirely irrational from the perspective of the true believer. Some white women marry black men, but she went even further and converted to blackness!

You see the same thing happening with trannies and homosexuals. In the mythology of the New Religion, women have been oppressed by white men almost as bad as blacks. This cult is, after all, a female cult. That makes white men the ultimate evil. How better to address that than proving maleness is a choice. If Bruce Jenner can choose to be female, then all of those terrible white men are choosing to be terrible white men.

All religions work backwards. By that I mean they begin with an endpoint and layout what must be done to reach that endpoint. For Christians, getting into heaven is about following certain rules and “living a Christian life.” For members of the New Religion, the goal is the earthly utopia where everyone lives in a paradise of equality. Therefore, the anointed are those who work to achieve it, through any means necessary.

Religions also always have a certain amount of hypocrisy and irrationality, too. They are human institutions, after all. The New Religion will ignore Elizabeth Warren’s trans-racialism because she is in the elite. Rachel Dolezal is just a provincial in flyover country. That means the good folks at NPR and the NYTimes can make sport of Rachel Dolezal, while celebrating Elizabet Warren.

It’s why cases like this will not have a lasting impact on the evolution of the New Religion. Hypocrisy, it turns out, is a great adaptation. It solves a lot of problems for human religion. Whether it is Catholic Bishops living like royalty while railing against earthly pleasures or Progressive pundits championing Bruce Jenner while condemning Rachel Dolezal, hypocrisy lets the faithful get past the internal contradictions and outright lunacy of their faith.

The Church of Climate Change

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One of my themes is how belief warps how people process information. The old line about how the fanatic only sees that which confirms his fanaticism is obviously true. Fans of Manchester United will believe anything horrible about fans of Liverpool. At the same time, they will never believe anything bad about the boys on their team. Fans of Tom Brady think he is innocent, while fans of the New Jersey teams think he is in some way responsible for killing Kennedy.

In public affairs, it works the same. Republicans think Democrats are secretly plotting to make Karl Marx our new god and Democrats think Republicans want to bring back slavery. This week the MYTimes went after Marco Rubio and every conservative is rushing to his defense. A week ago many of them thought he was  bum due to his open borders fanaticism.

It also has another manifestation. If you are convinced some event is inevitable, then all signs point to that inevitability. Read Zero Hedge for a week or two and you see what I mean. They are convinced the apocalypse is upon us and every news event is spun into the sign that the end is near. Some variation of “the coming zombie apocalypse in three charts” is a daily staple.

I think that’s at the heart of the Global Warming cult. “Cult” is the right word at this point, since the people passionate about it have deranged themselves to the point where those outside suspect sinister things about the movement. I have liberal friends who send me thousand word e-mails filled with links and graphs claiming that any day now the tipping point will be reached and we’re doomed. They are so sure that Gaia is angry and ready to punish us, it is axiomatic.

What this means is the looming disaster is a certainty in the minds of the adherents, beyond dispute in the same way no sane person disputes gravity or the laws of motion. It is a fixed thing now and forever, like arithmetic. If the data  shows that maybe Gaia is not all that angry, it is assumed to be wrong. It has to be. So they go back and refine the data and massage it so that it is “corrected” to comport with what they know must be true.

NOAA faking their data is not deception in the way in which we normally think of it. They’re simply correcting what they believe must be a mistake. Imagine measuring a stone falling to earth and the results show it falls at rates well outside standard gravity. We know objects near earth accelerate toward the earth at 9.80665 m/s. That’s axiomatic. Any measure outside that must be due to human error.

That’s what’s happening with the constant fiddling with temperature data. Everyone knows that the earth’s climate is warming. The data coming in from various instruments must fit into the the accepted model or those instruments are defective. It has to be, otherwise the very foundation of reality is in doubt. More important, the very identity of the people in the field is in doubt.

The assumption is that data disproving the belief will somehow shake them out of their faith, but it does not work like that for most people. Look at the number of people who can walk into a natural history museum and still believe in young earth creationism. Glaciers could cover North America and the AGW people will say the planet is overheating. It’s why they have started saying climate change rather than global warming. It’s not a conscious effort to deceive; they are simply adapting to dis-confirmation.

Think of it this way. If you are a climate researcher today, you not only have the pressure to produce proof of global warming, you are surrounded by colleagues who believe deeply in the issue. Even if you know the data contradicts the prevailing “consensus” on the issue, it would take herculean will to publish it and face the wrath of your friends and colleagues. When you already are inclined to agree with them, the default assumption will be to dismiss the contradictory data and “correct” it.

There is an old idea called Social Comparison Theory that tries to explain why we tend to emulate those around us. The short version is that humans constantly compare themselves to others around them as a form of self-evaluation. If everyone else thinks pink flamingos on the lawn is gauche, then you are unlikely to install them on your lawn. This applies to opinions, styles, religion, etc.

It’s not hard to see how this is a great evolutionary adaptation. Cooperation scales very well. Two people working in tandem will beat two people working independently. Ten people working as a team will beat two people working in tandem. There are no examples of high status males, for example, whose lives prove the customs of their society nugatory. Rather, status is based on confirming that which society holds dear.

One of the things I find fascinating about third century Rome is how the Empire lost transcendent purpose. Everything was aimed at keeping the band together, so to speak. It’s argued that the Empire bankrupted itself trying to preserve the empire. In this period is when all sorts of odd cults and mystics popped up throughout the Empire. Sol Invictus and, of course, Christianity got going strong during this period as well.

In this post-Christian Era in the West, I think we’re seeing something similar. Oddball mass movements like climate change and its implicit millenarianism are only possible when no dominant ideology exists. The field is clear for people who no longer believe in anything to fall for everything. The Romans carried on a long time after they no longer had a reason to carry on, but eventually something replaced the old gods. Something will come along to be the dominant faith of the West, but I doubt it is climate change.

The Mind of the Maniac

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Whenever controversy breaks out over some new Progressive lunacy, a daily occurrence of late, the normal community struggles to explain what is happening, without writing it off to insanity. Usually, the old tropes are deployed as a way of labeling it as nuts so everyone can move on. “Marxism!” “They just want power!” “It’s the radical Progressive agenda!” “The Chicago way!”

Frankly, I think the next person who mentions Saul Alinsky should be pushed up against the wall and shot. But, that’s why I refrain from watching Fox News or listening to talk radio. I know those people are, for the most part, on my side of the fight, but I just can’t take the repetition of catch phrases that has become what passes for Conservatism these days.

That aside, the more thoughtful outside the fever swamps struggle to come to grips with what’s going on. After all, the people hooting and bellowing about the use of pronouns with regards to Bruce Jenner seem like sensible people. They went to college. They have respectable jobs in the media. They function in their day-to-day lives without a custodian. How can they not see the madness of our age?

Take for example this story about Ranger School. The short version is, in the name of fairness, girls were allowed to enter Ranger School and all twenty washed out the first time. Eight were invited back and they washed out again. Three were invited to give it a third shot. Strongly hinted, but not explicitly said, is the plan to maybe lower the standards so the girls can pass and become Rangers.

The Rangers are the best of the best, and being a Ranger means passing a physical test that pushes body and mind to the breaking point. If women can’t do it, the argument goes, then they shouldn’t be Rangers.

But there is another opinion quietly being voiced as well: that Ranger School is more akin to a rite of passage – an opportunity for men to “thump their chest,” as one Ranger puts it – than a realistic preparation for leading in war. That women can actually make Ranger units more effective. And that the standards that keep them out are outdated.

This, of course, is an attempt to move the goal posts. Ranger school was designed to cull the weak from the strong, both physically and mentally, so the remainder is an elite corp of fighters. This is not unique to the US military or to modern militarizes. Germanic tribes utilized a form of special forces against the Roman Legions. The Spartans organized their society around segregating their elite warriors into special units.

The question, therefore, is why in the world would the military want to risk degrading these units in an effort to include women. You’ll note that it is just assumed that inclusion of women would make the units more effective. Nowhere will you find anyone providing a reason why that is so. It is just a given like the laws of thermodynamics or gravity.

The question remains. Why?

Normal people would look at this and conclude the obvious. That is, point of the spear soldiering is the most physically and mentally demanding thing a human can do. Men are larger, stronger and possess greater cardiovascular capacity so men will dominate women in the physical aspects. Men are also more aggressive and violent, characteristics that come in handy when trying to kill people.

The members of the New Religion, however, believe biology is an illusion and that sexes are an artifact from a bygone era. There are no “men” or “women” in a strict sense. People are “assigned” a sex at birth and that colors their development into what we think of as men and women. That’s why the “women” are failing Ranger School.

Further, perfect equality is the optimal result of humanity, the true nature of man. Therefore unequal results must mean we’re doing something wrong. Our society is arranged in an immoral or unjust way causing these variations in results. That’s key to understanding the worldview of these people. They have a mystical vision of the perfect human society, which drives them to keep rearranging things in order to achieve it.

That’s why Ranger School will eventually be turned into diversity seminar. It’s effectiveness as a fighting unit is of no concern to the New Religion. What is of ultimate concern, the all consuming concern, is that the unit is perfectly equal and there is no difference between the members, regardless of what “sex” they were assigned at birth. If it is impossible to achieve such a thing, then it must be destroyed. An offense to the great spirit cannot be tolerated.

That’s the other part of the New Religion. Their destruction of social institutions without the slightest idea of how to replace them is not nihilism. Much like fanatical Muslims, fanatical Progressives see the elimination of that which offends their beliefs as part of the march to perfection. The Mohammedan thinks that end is to dwell with Allah for eternity. Progressives see the end as the eschaton, which can only come about when the imperfections are removed.

The Islamic Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

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According to a new study, the Church of England is heading for the dustbin of history, while British Islam is on the upswing.

The Church of England has suffered a dramatic slump in its followers, shocking new figures show.

Between 2012 and 2014, the proportion of Britons identifying themselves as C of E or Anglican dropped from 21 per cent to 17 per cent – a fall of about 1.7 million people.

Over the same period, the number of Muslims in Britain grew by nearly one million, according to a survey by the respected NatCen Social Research Institute.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey warned last night that unless urgent action was taken, the Church was just ‘one generation away from extinction’.

The number of Anglicans in Britain has dropped from about 10.3 million to 8.6 million, and will raise fresh fears over the future of the Church of England, which has been in decline since the 1960s.

Of course, those numbers of Anglicans is boosted by imports from the old empire. Africans and Arabs are surely boosting those figures. How many natives attend services even occasionally is unknown to me. The overall weekly attendance rate of Christians in England is 12%. My bet it the number of self-identified Christians who bother attending services is less than 20%.

Alarmingly for Church leaders, the worst losses have come over the past decade, with about 4.5 million fewer people affiliating themselves to the C of E or Anglicanism between 2004 and 2014. In contrast, those who describe themselves as Muslim have jumped from 3.2 per cent of the population – equivalent to 1.5 million – in 2012 to 4.7 per cent or 2.4 million in 2014. The only Christian denomination that has remained relatively stable between the 1980s and today is Catholicism – numbers have dipped slightly from ten per cent to eight per cent.

Mr Brierley said the Roman Catholic Church had benefited from the influx of immigrants in recent years, particularly those from Eastern Europe. He added: ‘It is not just Poles. Many others are joining the Church when they come here, from Filipinos to Portuguese. There are seven different Catholic churches just for Croatians in London.’

A category called ‘Other Christian’ has also remained steady, boosted by the rise of largely black congregations attending Pentecostal ‘mega-churches’.

Naomi Jones, of NatCen, said one explanation for the Anglican decline is that fewer people see Christianity as being an important part of their British identity.

I have an old friend who is an Episcopal minister. The Episcopal Church is suffering from the same problems as the Anglican Church. Women, homosexuals and Progressives have worked hard to turn the church into an anti-Christian and anti-Western romper room. They had a Bishop a few years back who was a proud sodomite and all-around public nuisance.

Christianity only works when it calls the faithful to live in opposition to the fallen world. In Europe, nationalism was mixed into the faith so that each people could make their own claims to be God’s chosen. Even so, the faithful, including secular leaders, were required to live according to the tenets of the faith, which demanded the foregoing of earthly pleasures in order to spend eternity in heaven.

Mainstream Protestant faiths, like the C of E, have thrown in the towel on all that sacrifice and self-denial stuff. As a result, people stopped going to services, What would be the point? The Church was supposed to offer guidance and support in navigating around temptation. If the guy saying mass cannot control himself and preaches that you follow his lead, why not stay home and watch TV instead?

That’s all water under the bridge now as Christianity is dead on the Continent and nearly dead in the Anglosphere. The big news is that Islam is maybe a decade away from being the biggest religion in England. With about ten percent of the population being Muslim now, ongoing conversion and immigration suggest Muslims will be pushing 25% of the population in a generation.

It’s tempting to think that the rest of the country will rise up in opposition, but everyone thought something similar when Æthelberht converted to Christianity in the 6th century. As Osama bin Laden put it, people see a strong horse and a weak horse. They will choose the strong horse. Just as Christianity was the strong horse 1500 years ago, Islam is now the strong horse in Britain.

As-salamu alaykum Chaps!

Dennett, Dawkins and other Atheist Crackpots

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Right after Penn Jillette went bonkers and took up atheism as his cause, he was on Red Eye making the case for his new religion. Like all converts, he was proselytizing because he was full of doubt. Logically, the reason people try to recruit is for confirmation. If scads of other sensible people are signing up for the cause, the cause must be a good thing. So, he was trying to get the others on the panel with him to go along with his new cause.

He also employed a little trick I suppose has become popular with the atheist movement. It works like this. If you cannot or will not fully embrace the belief in a living god, then you are an atheist. This is an attempt to widen the pool and normalize atheism by declaring it the default position.

In other words, left to their own devices, humans will not believe in the supernatural and instead will embrace the pure reason of atheism. I guess that means wearing dildos on their head and fighting otters. Or maybe it means dating transexuals. Regardless, the implication is that religion is a made up thing with out any basis in the natural world. The fact that this is provably false does not factor into the equation.

Penn Jillette is a fine entertainer and a lot smarter than most people in the entertainment rackets, but he is full of baloney. Indifference to religion and the supernatural is exactly that, indifference. I don’t believe in God, but I don’t disbelieve either. Logically, I can never know if there is or there is not a God or gods or some other supernatural force at the heart of existence. I know I can’t know and have no strong beliefs about the matter.

Atheists are certain or at least they claim to be certain. I doubt that, but even taking them at face value, they claim to know that which cannot be known, which means they believe. Atheism is just another mass movement with its own set of beliefs. One of those beliefs is that the pious atheist must make war on the Christians. Like those annoying people giving away copies of The Watchtower, atheists make being a public nuisance the highest calling.

Anyway, this showed up in my twitter feed the other day.

The link goes to this Salon interview the atheist crackpot Daniel Dennet and the alleged end of religion. Dennett is a great example of how someone can be brilliant in one area and a total loon in most others. Noam Chomsky is (was?) a great linguist, but he is otherwise nutty as a fruitcake, indulging in all sorts of deranged theories.

That Dennett interview reads like the sort of stuff you find from survivalist websites. The final reckoning is coming and you better be prepared!!! He so desperately wants to be right that any scrap of data that can be interpreted as proof is waved around like the missing link. In the end, he just comes off like a madman struggling to keep it together.

For the most part, eccentric old coots like Dennett are harmless and often entertaining. His lectures are probably great fun, even when he slips into his crazy talk. In my student years, the best teachers were those mad old guys who no longer cared about convention and simply said what was on their minds. They made the material interesting.

The trouble is these crackpots are not always harmless. Dawkins and Dennett have argued for banning religion by force. Dennett argued in his book Breaking the Spell for removing children from parents who are religious, which is most parents. Specifically he advocates the end of privacy laws and religious liberty so the state can raise children free from religion.

Dawkins, of course, thinks it is OK for the state to gather up the unfit and exterminate them so none of this should be surprising. Celebrity atheists seem to care as much for being offensive as they do about atheism. There’s reason to believe that the attraction of atheism is it lets these guys be an ass in public.

Over 50 years ago Whittaker Chambers exposed the reality of Utopians like Dawkins and Dennett in his great take down of Ayn Rand. In the end, all of these theories end up in a bloodbath.That’s because the Utopians hate humanity. Humans are irrational and messy, which means human society will be irrational and messy. Utopians hate that so they inevitably conclude that the way to paradise is to kill the humans.