Category ►►► God in the Dry Dock

March 28, 2008

Brave Sir Robin vs. the Mosque of England

In recent years, Moslems in the United Kingdom have gotten bolder. Not only do they commit more violent crime against ordinary British citizens, they demand special treatment from the British government ("All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others"). Yet I am now convinced that the core of the problem in Great Britain is not the Moslems but the Church of England itself.

Great Britain has a state religion, and many British subjects look to the established church for moral guidance. The house of God should be an unwavering, unchanging, and uncompromising spiritual core of the people. Even though we humans often cannot meet God's expectations, we're at least supposed to learn through the churches and clergy what He expects of us.

Isn’t that why people are willing to risk their lives for their fellow men, for what's right, or for their faith? Isn’t that why ordinary people will rise up to fight against evil? People should know what is good and what is evil.

But what if the church tells you that the most important thing is to be "tolerant of the intolerant" and instructs its faithful to be "sensitive" to a rogue culture -- one that demands human sacrifice, no less -- simply to avoid "conflict?"

As unbelievable as it sounds, that is just what is happening in the UK, per Tony Blankley:

Two weeks ago, the story came from a town with a college that has been a leading force in the advancement of Christian civilization for 900 years: Oxford, England. Once again, something more than bluebirds threatens English skies. It seems that authorities at the Oxford Central Mosque have requested permission to use loudspeakers to blast the call to prayer five times a day from atop their minaret across the town that has heard for the past 900 summers, falls, winters and springs only the bells of the local churches.

Unsurprisingly, the Church of England's bishop for Oxford, the Right Rev. John Pritchard, has announced his support, calling on his congregation to "enjoy community diversity." He would be a likely successor to the current archbishop of Canterbury, who called for Shariah law for England recently.

It is not so much the attempt by European Muslims to alter their adopted homeland to fit their faith that's troubling as it is the willingness of Europeans to accommodate them. Sharia creep will continue as long as it meets no resistance.

If Christianity's teachings are now to include “diversity” of faith, then why should it even be a separate religion? A broken moral compass points nowhere, and cultural sensitivity to the violent will not buy peace; all you will get is more confusion, more violence, and fewer Christians.

We have long known that the "Moslem Mafia" has been running drugs and coercing underaged girls into prostitution. When parents seek help from the local authorities, British police often refuse to pursue the criminals for fear of being insufficiently sensitive to minority cultures or even provoking racial violence:

Last night Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation, said the police were differentiating between criminals on the basis of race.

He claimed, driven by fear of race riots in places like Blackburn and Oldham, officers were "overtly sensitive" and not clamping down on the sordid practice.

His controversial comments in this week's Panorama reignite a massively controversial issue which exploded over a Channel 4 documentary in 2004.

That programme which claimed Asian men in Bradford were grooming under age white girls for prostitution was pulled from C4's schedules.

This was because police claimed at the time that it could provoke racial violence during the local election campaign.

(Hat tip to Lionheart.)

But it's not just "tolerance" that Moslems demand in Great Britain; some Moslem "youths" are beginning to act more like Hitler Youths, with the children of Pakistani immigrants physically attacking Christian and Jewish worshippers and clergymen:

Canon Ainsworth, 57, who was wearing his clerical collar, was punched and kicked by two Asian youths while another shouted religious abuse outside St George’s on March 5. He suffered cuts, bruises and two black eyes. He was discharged from St Bartholomew’s hospital but later readmitted following complications to an injury.

But British authority does nothing, and church authority coos and placates the aggressors. Actually, that is not entirely true; the rozzers have done something: They've arrested a blogger, Lionheart, for the "crime" of exposing the Moslem crimes above. He was arrested for "stirring up racial hatred" against Moslems.

[Dafydd adds: Thank God the UK has such strong freedom of speech protections...]

Evidently, the UK is less interested in stopping the gradual, frog-boiling takeover of their country by Moslem militants than they are in stopping the mouths of those who speak out against it. When the Bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali complained about Moslem violence against non-Moslems, he was severly criticized -- even by the leader of the Liberal Democrat Party:

The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, blamed multiculturalism for segregating religious groups and said non-Muslims faced a hostile reception in places dominated by the ideology of Islamic radicals.

He wrote that the integration agenda pursued by the government lacked "a moral and spiritual vision", and he condemned the failure to give priority to the established church [the Church of England], which he believes has led to a "multi-faith mish-mash".

He also questioned whether elements of sharia law were applicable in the UK, particularly the use of loudspeakers on mosques to spread the call to prayer.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said the bishop had not produced any evidence of "no-go areas" for non-Muslims, a notion he described as "an extraordinarily inflammatory way of putting it".

Mr. Clegg could perhaps have had a little sensitivity himself, realizing how dangerous it was for an Anglican bishop born in Pakistan to blow the whistle on militant Islam, which might well see him as an "apostate," despite the fact that he was born into a Christian family. Not all Islamist radicals stop to consider the niceties of religious freedom. Coming from a Moslem culture, the bishop evidently understands better than many pure-British clergy the fundamental incompatibility between liberal Christianity and militant Salafism from the land of the Taliban.

So what has the head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to say about these outrageous attacks against men of Christian faith? Well, recently he called for incorporating Sharia in England; then he turned about and equated Moslem extremists and their victims.

It doesn't take much imagination to see how internally divided societies find brief moments of unity when they have successfully identified some other group as the real source of their own insecurity. Look at any major conflict in the world at the moment and the mechanism is clear enough. Repressive and insecure states in the Islamic world demonise a mythical Christian 'West', and culturally confused, sceptical and frightened European and North American societies cling to the picture of a global militant Islam, determined to 'destroy our way of life.' Two fragile and intensely quarrelsome societies in the Holy Land find some security in at least knowing that there is an enemy they can all hate on the other side of the wall.

So is it any wonder that Moslems in the UK are emboldened in direct proportion to the rate of dismay and disheartening of British Anglicans? Not that the Cathlic Church is much better; if they have stepped forward to provide moral guidance to Brits confused by the easy acquiescence of government and religious officials to Islamic bullying, they've been awfully quiet about it.

Recently, the marriage rate in the UK has dropped to a record low. As Moslem worshippers grow, the number of churchgoers diminishes; as politicians turn a blind eye to rampaging "Asian youths" and take seriously demands for polygamy under sharia, and as churches abandon their historic role of enunciating God's eternal law in favor of politicaly correct "tolerance" and "sensitivity" to what looks a lot like evil -- sex-slavery of teenaged girls, violence against priests, threats and intimidation -- it's hardly surprising that the British lose respect for the church, for priests and bishops, and even for God.

The voices of Archbishop Rowen Williams and the Right Rev. John Pritchard are heard throughout the United Kingdom loud and clear. The real danger these people create is not emboldening Islamist extremists but driving Christians away from faith. If British Christians cannot rely on the moral authority of the Church of England, where can they seek it? If the church says there is no difference between Moslem terrorists and Christian faithful, why should anyone go to church, pray, obey the laws of the Bible, or even get married before God? And certainly, why risk life and limb fighting back against violent religious zealots?

I am not a Christian, so take this advice for what it's worth. I think what Britain desperately needs is to purge all these multicultural bishops, these "men without chests," as C.S. Lewis called them... "cerebral men" who are pure thought with no courage, no stability, no magnanimity. Just as the Catholic Church had finally to purge child molesters and practicing homosexual priests, no matter what the cost, the Church of England mast rid itself of forever-compromising, socialist, chestless non-believers who pretend to represent faith.

The survival of Christianity in Great Britain depends on purging the clergy; the survival of the United Kingdom in any recognizable form depends upon the survival of Christianity there.

It's hard to watch Great Britain go down without a fight. I cannot believe there isn't a regiment of English yeomen left to stand against this evil, longbows in hand. Of course there are some, such as Lionheart, Melanie, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali; and lets not forget the British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are ill-served by their Labour PM Gordon Brown (he's no Tony Blair).

But they are too far and too few between. If the Church of England cannot cover the heroes' backs, how can the flock face the enemy front?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 28, 2008, at the time of 5:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 5, 2007

Gimmie That Ol' Time Religion...

This post was from an idea by Sachi, who did the initial research; it was written by Dafydd.

My best counterargument to the gloom and demographic doom of Mark Steyn's thesis in America Alone -- that the West is non-breeding itself out of existence -- is that Steyn has a bad habit of engaging in a brazen form of static analysis: he assumes that a myriad current trendlines will remain unchanged... the quintessential "if this goes on" conjecture.

The following is pure speculation. I suspect it's provable; and I suspect that it will seem true at the gut level to most readers of Big Lizards. But I'm not willing to do the research necessary to prove it conclusively. (Nor will I apologize for my laziness; take me as I am!)

Birth of a correlation

In particular, any argument of death by demography must assume the fertility rate remains the same, where total fertility rate (TFR) is the number of children per woman per lifetime.

For those of us who do not actually want to see a depopulated Europe taken over by its Moslem immigrants and turned into a sharia continent, the fertility rate is our escape clause: If we can noticibly improve the native-born European Christian TFR, we can forestall the dire consequences that Mark Steyn predicts. (I'll explain why "Christian" matters towards a bit later, but what I really mean is "non-Moslem.")

So what might raise a fertility rate? Well, what lowers one? In Europe, it seems to me that the plummeting fertility rate is directly linked to the lack of belief in the future: If a person sees a bright future, he tends to invest. Children are one of the most satisfying investments in the future; when tomorrow looks better than yesterday, it makes sense for parents to scrimp and save, delaying gratification today so that the kids will have a better life than their parents.

That is the norm. However, if the future looks grim and uncertain, if tomorrow seems like it will be worse than yesterday, then I believe potential parents tend to put off childbearing. Why bother? Why bring a kid into such a rotten world when it's getting rottener by the day?

Instead, I believe a lot of potential parents decide not to have children... instead, they party like it's (still) 1999. The corollary to monetary investment holds: If a market looks like it's headed downward with no hope of recovery anytime soon, a very, very large number of potential investors rationally decide not to invest in that market.

All right, we've reduced the Steyn Dilemma from "inevitable demography" to "raising the fertility rate" to creating a future bright enough to induce people ambivalent about having children to do so. So... how do we go about creating that bright future?

(I really am going somewhere with this; it's not just "turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down.")

The proposition that "tomorrow will be significantly better than yesterday" is, quite obviously, unprovable. (For one possibility, the Sun could go nova, killing everyone and destroying the planet.)

So if people are to believe in the future, they must do so as an article of faith. Faith, then, is an irreducible component of belief in a better future... and if the rest of my speculations are correct, faith is therefore a necessary component for a society to have a strong fertility rate. But -- faith in what, exactly?

Looking around the real world, societies (or subsocieties) that are strongly Jewish, Christian, or Moslem tend to have a high fertility rate; but so does India, which is mostly (82%) Hindu. According to this paper (page 21), the TFR for India as a whole declined from 3.4 in 1992-1993 to 2.9 children per woman per lifetime in 1998-1999. The fertility rates of both Hindus and Moslems declined over that same period: Hindus dropped from 3.3 to 2.8, and Indian Moslems dropped from 4.4 to 3.6.

Moslems are still growing faster than Hindus, but their rate of growth dropped more sharply: Moslems shed 0.8 over the same period that the Hindus shed only 0.5; put in percentages, the fertility rate of Indian Moslems declined by 18%, while that of Hindus declined by only 15%. "If this goes on," to be Steynian about it, eventually Indian Moslems and Hindus will have the same fertility rate.

What about other religions or quasi-religions (belief systems)? There is no indication that Buddhism or Shinto encourage large families, nor (obviously) does Communism. But considering the demographic trends, it seems the worst culprit is Euro-leftism, which is a faith-based belief in social-welfarism, self indulgence, and nihilism: Some European countries, such as Spain, have fertility rates of 1.1 ro 1.2, about half the bare replacement rate for a society. The United States has a fertility rate of 2.11, just about replacement; because of immigration, our population is growing.

(The highest TFRs tend to be in African countries with large animist populations; but they also have huge infant mortality rates, which somewhat cancels out the fertility rate. The case is atypical and can be ignored for our purposes.)

Looking at the relationship, however subjective, between culture and fertility, and between religion and fertility, I would argue that the best thing for Europe's population decline is a religious revival.

But of course, they're already getting one: Immigration into Europe is primarily Moslem. This particular religion, however, is expansionist, intolerant of dissent, theocratic, ambivalent about terrorism, and narcissistic to the point of believing the only proper function of infidels is as slaves to the faithful. Not every Moslem supports each of these elements; but especially among Moslem émigrés from the Middle East, Algeria, Somalia, and Indonesia, toleration of each of these elements (especially for sharia law) is disturbingly high. Thus, even though such immigration marginally improves the overall fertility rate of European countries, it's a very dangerous deal to make.

Fortunately -- some may say amazingly -- there is a revival of traditional religious worship underway in a number of European countries at this moment...

France

According to the French embassy in Australia, the last fifteen years saw a significant drop in religious practice:

• Christenings fell from 95% to 58%;
• Religious weddings dropped from 85% to 50%;
• Belief in God fell from 66% to 61%;
• Disbelief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus rose from 37% to 43%;
• In 1960, there were 45,000 French Catholic priests; today there are 22,000.

But in the last few years, this trend has begun to reverse itself; more Frenchmen, particularly French youths, are turning (or sometimes returning) to the religious tradition of France:

But despite these symptoms of decline, there are also hints of renewal. For several years now, the number of prayer groups with a mixed membership of lay people and people devoted to the religious life has been rising, and there are now said to be 3,000 of them. Organised pilgrimages to places like Chartres attract bigger and bigger crowds (of 20,000-30,000 people), as do Church rallies for young people. Millions of people visit the most sacred Catholic sites such as Lourdes or Lisieux; and thousands visit abbeys or stay in monasteries. There has also been a rise, in recent years, in the number of adult baptisms (12,000 in 1997, compared with 8,000 in 1993 and 890 in 1976). Similarly, the number of lay Church representatives in secondary schools, hospitals and prisons has shown a steady rise. Finally, we should remind ourselves of the outstanding success of the JMJ (Journées mondiales de la jeunesse or World Youth Days) in August 1997, during which as many as a million young people gathered in Paris to meet Pope John Paul II.

But has this increase in Catholic religiosity affected the fertility rate of Catholics in France? According to French-language sources cited by Wikipedia, total fertility rate (TFR) in France dropped steadily in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, hitting a nadir of 1.66 in 1993 (remember, 2.1 is replacement rate in civilized countries). From that point, it began inching upwards again at a rate of increase of 1.3% per year for six years.

But then in the year 2000, TFR jumped up 8% to 1.87; it held steady until 2003; finally, from 2003 to 2006, TFR increased at an annual rate of 3.7% per year and is currently at 1.98.

The total rise in recent years -- I arbitrarily define that as when the bigger rise began in 2000 -- has been nearly 0.2, which is about 10.6%. But wait... could the higher fertility rate be due solely to the Moslems population of France?

Moslems compose 7% of the French population; what would the Moslem fertility rate have to be to fully account for the increase from 1999? For 7% of the population to fully account for a rise in TFR of 0.2, the fertility rate of French Moslems would have had to rise by nearly 2.9 children per adult woman.

But this is absurd: Taking the Indian Moslem rate as more or less a baseline, that would mean the Moslem fertility rate would have had to nearly double in the last seven years. Even assuming a slight rise in the percent of Moslems in the population, such an increase would still demand that Moslem fertility in France skyrocket -- while it was shrinking elsewhere.

So mathematically, it would be difficult not to conclude that there was a significant rise in total fertility rate among Catholic French families since 1999... which coincides very neatly with the rise in religiosity. This is not a proof, of course; but it is a strong indicator that our initial supposition was correct: A rise in traditional, religious beliefs, at the expense of atheism, Communism, or secular social-welfarism, tends to correlate to an increase in fertility rates.

This finding fits with studies here in the United States that show that religious families tend to have significantly more kids than irreligious families.

I don't have fertility figures for Germany or Italy, but there is evidence of a religious revival there, too...

Germany

The Christian Science Monitor, hardly a right-wing publication, has been keeping track of the rise in regligion in both Germany and Italy:

• Head of state Angela Merkel - the daughter of a Protestant minister - this month renewed calls to include a specific reference in the EU constitution to Europe's Christian heritage.
• There are more theologians in the German parliament than in any other Western parliament, including the US Congress. And when the last government cabinet was sworn in, nearly every member -- instead of the usual 50 percent -- opted for the religious version of the inaugural oath, according to Karsten Voigt, coordinator of German-American relations at the foreign ministry.
• In a recent survey gauging the perceived credibility of different professions, pastors were ranked in the Top 5.
• German students must take either ethics or religion classes, though Berlin recently made ethics compulsory, and religion optional. Mr. Voigt reports that "more and more" high schoolers in the state of Brandenburg are opting for religion too.
• Church attendance is no longer declining, and in one state the number of young churchgoers is going up, says Voigt.

The process is not as pronounced in Germany as in France; but Germany has the legacy of the Soviet Union and its satellite, East Germany, to overcome.

Italy

Another article in the CSM discusses religious revival in Italy, home to Roman Catholicism:

Sister Cristina is one of 550 young Italian women who joined the country's 7,500 cloistered nuns in 2005 - a dramatic increase from the 350 who became nuns in 2003. Vatican officials say the sudden rise in Italian monasticism mirrors a resurgence in Catholicism among young Italians during recent years....

Vatican officials say young people's thirst for moral direction is driving a resurging interest in Catholicism. "There's a reawakening after a time of secularization," says Sister Giuseppina Fragasso, vice president of the Vatican's association for cloistered monks and nuns.

The number of Catholic clergy has dwindled worldwide since peaking in the late 1960s. In particular, it's getting harder to attract new blood to the priesthood. According to the Vatican's statistics office, monasteries have been closing too fast for their researchers to keep track. While other Christian sects attract priests by allowing them to marry and by inviting women to ordination, the Catholic church still prohibits such activities.

But the tide is turning in Italy. Nearly half of adult Catholics attend mass at least weekly, up from 35 percent who did so in 1980.

Clergy credit much of young people's interest in Catholicism to the late Pope John Paul II, stressing the impact of the World Youth Days he started in 1984. Catholic fervor reached a crescendo with his death in April 2005. "This pope really brought the faith closer to young people; there was a strong bond between him and us," affirms Giovanna, a young biologist praying by John Paul II's tomb in Rome.

Endgame

For some reason I have never been able to fathom, it is always tempting to hunt for a negative trend, extend it beyond all reason, and then use it as an excuse to despair. But this is a misuse of the science of demography: You cannot just extrapolate wildly, willy nilly, based upon a few data points. Mark Twain summed it up well in chapter 17 of Life On the Mississippi (1850):

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,' just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

I won't say we've turned a corner in Europe; but we're definitely peeping around it and starting to make our turn. Traditional Christian religion appears to be on the rise on that continent; and in one country where we have data, this rise correlates to a rise in fertility rate as well.

I can even see a mechanism at play: As more Moslems pour into Europe and begin demanding separate regions under sharia law, arrogantly demanding that Christian "infidels" accomodate Moslem beliefs, and threatening non-Moslems with violence and lawlessness, angry and frightened Christians may well turn to the religion of their youth (or perhaps of their fathers and mothers). Thus, Christian religiosity in Europe may be rising directly in response to the Moslem onslaught.

So take heart; Steyn notwithstanding, there is no reason to believe that current bad demographic trends will continue as they are indefinitely. Western culture is the most malleable, adaptable culture on the planet, and we can respond to crisis better than any other civilization. I still have full confidence that if the radical Moslems push jihad too far, we'll go Mediaeval on them.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 5, 2007, at the time of 8:16 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

January 2, 2007

The First Victim of the "Big Lie"

Paul at Power Line has an interesting post up about the persistence of blindness by the drive-by media to the murder of U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel Jr. and his chargé d'affaires Curtis Moore back in 1973... a hit that appears to me to have been personally ordered by Yasser Arafat. (Paul links to a post last June by Scott Johnson, in which he goes into more detail about crime and evidence.) Please read these first before continuing...

All right, this is the line Paul wrote that caught my eye:

[W]hy has our MSM which prides itself on exposing government cover-ups ignored almost totally the cable...?

The answer... is that Arafat's role in killing American diplomats runs counter to the MSM's narrative about our world and is, therefore, information that it would prefer the public not know.

I think Paul may be overestimating the role played by mendacity and underestimating the will to deny on the part of the elite media -- and indeed all of humanity: I don't think journalists consciously keep this information from the public; I believe they're unconsciously keeping it from themselves.

I can't believe my eyes

In my early youth, I used to dabble in magic (prestidigitation, not sorcery; sorcery was in my middle youth). I was never very good -- no patience -- but I was a magic junkie who watched every live and broadcast magic show I could find... scores of them by the time I was fifteen, perhaps a hundred individual acts or more. After a while, I caught onto the big secret of magic: the "gimmick," the actual working of the trick, typically takes place in plain view.

So why doesn't the audience see it? Because the magician tells them not to. He doesn't come out and say, "see here now, close your eyes for this bit." Instead, he misdirects their attention to this side, when the gimmick is taking place on that side.

The great magicians (Herrmann, Thurston, Kellar) were sheer artists at misdirection. It was said of Harry Kellar that when he was performing, a brass band could march across the stage behind him, followed by a half-dozen elephants, and the audience would later swear he was alone.

This demonstrates what I call "the will to disbelieve." Your eyes may see, but your brain does all the observing... or in this case, the unobserving.

Everyone who goes to a magic show wants to be fooled. Haven't you noticed that most people, if you tell them how a trick is really done, are not satisfied but instead rather disappointed? That's because, even though they asked, they really didn't want to know.

The hard-headed skeptics are especially desperate to be fooled; they're always the easiest to misdirect. (The hardest to fool are children: they haven't yet learned the knack of willful blindness. By nature, they tend to look in exactly the right place, which is exactly the wrong place for a magician!)

It may twist and turn, but this post has not careered out of control; I'm actually going somewhere with it.

Magic is a universal indicator. It's a synecdoche, which can mean many things: in this case, a small part that stands in for the whole. We all want to be fooled; the world is awash in pandemic credulity.

Song of myself

Every one of us has a "story," the story of himself. This narrative takes all the myriad observations, expectations, and subtle indications our brains receive and arranges them into a more or less coherent plot. In reality, we can say only that A precedes B. It takes a narrative to say that A causes B.

The narrative includes both "facts" and inferences. I use quotation marks around "facts" because, pace John Adams, facts are actually squirmy, gelatinous things that we only experience second-hand, by observing the effect of the fact upon us -- for example, we don't see a Ford Mustang; we observe the light reflected from the Mustang, and our brain draws the inference that a Mustang exists at that spot. But the inferences are the interesting things, because they control or modulate everything we sense... everything we see, hear, smell, taste, or touch is really an inference we have drawn from a stimulus to some part of our brains.

In mathematics -- therefore in everything else -- inferences imply rules of inference: we must have internal rules that tell us when we can take A and B and conclude C. For example, you see a Mustang speed past you and tear around a corner. Seconds later, you hear a terrible crash. Do you draw the conclusion that the Mustang you just saw has wrecked?

Probably; I would. My rules of inference tell me that it's unlikely that a completely unrelated car just happened to have an accident at that second. But of course, I'll be wrong sometimes -- such coincidences do, in fact, happen.

The best is enemy of the workable; as Mason said to Dixon, you gotta draw the line somewhere. (This whole subject is part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, by the way: "how we know what we know.") Everybody's rules of inference are probability based: it's pretty likely that the speeding Mustang wrecked and was responsible for the accident... so that's what we tell the cops.

Believing is seeing

But the weird part of the internal narrative, the story of ourselves, is the way that the brain constantly edits the file of sensory inputs to match the eventual conclusion drawn: in our little thought experiment of the speeding Mustang, the most likely outcome is that, when the actual civil trial occurs and you're called as a witness (or even earlier, when you talk to the cops), you will say that you saw the speeding Mustang crash into the Volvo!

And you know what? You won't be lying... you will actually remember it that way. As Isaac Asimov put it in one or another of his autobiographies, we remember things the way they should have happened, not necessarily the way they actually did... which, in the absolute sense, is unknowable anyway.

Out of mind, out of sight

Which brings us back, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to the Human Consciousness Editor.

Let me quote a man I've never read (I can't get past page 5 of anything Friedrich Nietzsche wrote!): "We are all greater artists than we realize." (Actually, I have no idea if he actually said it. Or wrote it. But it's always arrtibuted to him. And anyway, the idea is the important thing, no matter who said it... what are you, a wisenheimer?)

Memory is not like a movie film; it's more like a writable DVD that is constantly being edited by the brain, to bring memory into congruence with the story of ourselves. This applies to everybody -- not just liberals. Quite literally, if an observation simply cannot exist within the central narrative of the brain... then the brain erases it from existence. "if out of sight, then out of mind" is a trivial observation; the deeper version is "if out of mind, then out of sight." In a vivid, real, and literal sense, you cannot see what you cannot believe.

We can't handle the truth

Which brings us back to journalism, the elite media, and Arafat's hit on Noel and Moore (actually, this more or less explains absolutely everything, if you think hard enough about it): Paul was wrong; it's simply not plausible that --

Arafat's role in killing American diplomats runs counter to the MSM's narrative about our world and is, therefore, information that it would prefer the public not know.

The far more likely explanation is that Arafat's role in killing American diplomats runs counter to the MSM's narrative about our world, and therefore the journalists' brains erase such "knowledge" from their memory banks. It's not that they know and they're concealing it from the rest of us; it's that we look at A, B, and C and conclude that Arafat ordered the hits -- while the MSM look at A, B, and C and conclude that Arafat didn't know a thing about it and was distressed when he found out.

We cannot even say we're right and they're wrong; scientifically, about the best we can do is that our reading requires much less editing of verifiable sources than theirs!

They literally don't see it. When liberals say that there is a "100% chance" that Gore actually won the vote in Florida and that Bush stole the election, they're not lying... they really believe it. Just as most Americans actually believe there is an invisible man with a long, white beard who knows when they are sleeping, who knows when they're awake, who knows if they've been bad or good -- and who sends the bad ones to Hell (I'll bet you were expecting someone else).

Tom Tancredo probably looks at a Mexican family crossing our border and literally sees enemy soldiers invading our country; judging from some of the comments when I talk about immigration, I reckon quite a few of you see the same reality Tom does. I see a bunch of potential entrepeneurs and consumers, but that "reality" is as much a product of my own internal narrative as your "reality" is of yours. "We are all greater artists than we realize."

That is the real dilemma of speaking to the enemy: it's not that he hasn't seen all the facts, and as soon as we enlighten him, he'll come round to our point of view. Rather, we don't even agree on what "facts" are on the table: we see one set of facts (while another batch remain stubbornly invisible); and he sees several of our invisible fnords while being unable even to detect some of our critical facts. Neither party will likely be convinced, because each draws rational conclusions from self-cooked data.

Members of the MSM literally sees no connection between Arafat and the murders, just as liberals literally see no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda; and every "fact" that "comes to light" (every observation their brain-modulator allows them to see) simply confirms those non-connections. Conservatives stubbornly refuse to see any connection between liberty and sexual deviance; libertarians refuse even to notice any connection between duty and survival; the religious see a rigid cause-effect relationship between faith and morals, while the irreligious see absolutely no connection whatsoever, unless it's an inverse relationship.

Can't we all just get a loan?

So how can we communicate?

• The first step is to recognize that each of us lives in his own reality net, his own bubble of "fact" and inference, held together in a coherent shape by the web of narrative spun by our own brains. It's counterproductive to say "I'm right and you're wrong;" it's much more effective to demonstrate that my model typically predicts future events with great success, while yours typically fails.
• Recognize that some gaps cannot be bridged; concentrate on those that can.
• Start your voyage of discussion from islands that exist both in your disputant's reality sea and your own: find overlapping subsets of reality and try to expand outward from there; that makes it harder for him to dismiss you out of hand.
• Learn to argue from within the other person's reality net: it works much better. Tell a conservative that holding a job builds character; tell a liberal that holding a job connects one to the community.
• Learn to laugh. It's the best defense mechanism against screaming.
• Remember that you're not alone in being all alone; you're part of a vast community of people who share being all alone together.
• Finally, in a more practical vein, if you want your own reality net to prevail (as who doesn't?), then make it more interesting, joyful, and hope-filled than the reality next door: people who are bored or frightened by one reality net will simply change the channel... and yes, it is that easy. Keep their attention, and they'll keep watching!

That last is the biggest problem the Democrats have: their reality net is one of defeatism and fatalism, two very unpleasant modulators. That's why, even when the Democrats win, they lose: they won the 2006 election, but nobody really thinks they can solve any of our problems. (And to be blunt, they're not even trying... they're simply campaigning for 2008.)

That's the secret weapon of Republicans, whether libertarian-Republican, conservative, neoconservative, or Giuliani-Republican: hope and pride. That is what, in the end, will reel 'em back in. Fill yourself with hope and pride and always aggressively follow your bliss -- not your decadence, your bliss. That way, even if you go down, you'll die a hero's death... and hey, that's something, isn't it?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 2, 2007, at the time of 5:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 10, 2006

Multiculti Smackdown

Wretchard over on the Belmont Club -- which I used to think had something to do with horse racing -- links to an interesting study by "Harvard University's Robert Putnam, one of the world's most influential political scientists"... interesting mostly for the elephant in the bedroom that Putnam (or the Financial Times) fails to notice.

The title of the piece at the Financial Times is "Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity." But Wretchard posits that what it really shows is the danger of cultural diversity... and that's the point I want to pick up on.

Here is how the Financial Times phrases it:

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone -- from their next-door neighbour to the mayor....

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. "They don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions," said Prof Putnam. "The only thing there's more of is protest marches and TV watching."

Putnam adjusted for "class, income, and other factors." But what other factors? Did he adjust for cultural beliefs, including religion, social expectations, and style of social interaction? It's hard to believe he would have done so and not made that clear to the (unnamed) reporter; but it's entirely possible he did make it clear, and the reporter simply botched the story.

Here is Wretchard's take (reparagraphed for easier digestion):

Apart from the FT summary, I can't find a summary of Putnam's work on ethnic diversity anywhere on the web.

About the only question that comes to mind is whether what is attributed to multiethnicity can really be explained by the word multiculturalism. Webster's defines ethnicity as "of or relating to large groups of people classed according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background".

Race is apparently only one aspect of ethnicity and maybe the least important one -- we find Swedes distinguished from Norwegians in one of Putnam's examples of "diversity" -- and it may be that communities which are homogenous with respect to religion, language and culture have a higher trust coefficient than communities of the same racial background but have different religious and cultural contexts.

I think he's got it right here... and this shows why we don't in general have riots in the United States, but we've had them twice in my lifetime in Los Angeles.

It's tempting to use race as shorthand for culture, just as it's easy to use party as proxy for political philosophy. However, anybody can change his culture, while nobody (except Michael Jackson) has yet managed to change his race; which should be a warning sign that Putnam may be barking up a tree of a different color. (Similarly, Republicans can range from Tom Coburn, R-OK, 100%, to Lincoln Chafee, R-RI, 12%.)

One cannot rationally dispute that Clarence Thomas and Louis Farrakhan come from and embrace wildly disparate cultures -- even though they're both black. Similarly, P. Diddy and M&M share a close cultural connection that neither shares with Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole. The vast majority of white conservatives would trust Justice Thomas, Dinesh D'Souza, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose political and lifestyle cultures they share, much more than they would trust Michael Moore or Jane Fonda, in spite of the latter having the same race and country of origin as the white conservatives.

And that brings us to America; we are the only country I know of that both allows massive levels of immigration and also expects -- and generally receives -- very strong assimilation from those immigrants. Yes, I know a lot of Mexican immigrants wave Mexican flags, speak only Spanish, and join groups like La Raza ("the Race"). But many more make a good-faith attempt to assimilate to the American way of life and American values than the yahoos we see parading around downtown L.A. in a massive protest every Columbus Day.

Oddly, Putnam is very much against the very idea of assimilation; therein lies the downfall of his research:

In an oblique criticism of Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, who revealed last week he prefers Muslim women not to wear a full veil, Prof Putnam said: "What we shouldn't do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us."

This is classic multi-culti nonsense, and it's precisely what causes the cultural dislocation that he attributes to "ethnic diversity": when aliens are not encouraged to become American but rather to make their neighborhoods into little, sovereign pieces of a foreign country, then no wonder their neighbors don't trust them!

And when these guests, egged on by scientists like Putnam, instead demand that American customs change and traditions fall to accomodate the rules of the "old country" whence came the immigrant, then cultural Americans will indeed hunker down for battle. They don't want to change and see no reason why they should.

And they're perfectly right. Many foreign customs and legalisms are completely incompatible with the culture we have built here (except in cities like Los Angeles and New York, where city leaders have applauded anti-Americanism for decades). A quick example is sharia law, which allows for "honor killings," rape, perjury, polygamy, mutilation, and other felonies if done in the name of Allah and to advance Islam; freedom, capitalism, and individualism simply cannot coexist on the same spot with a sharia-based culture, and the races of the participants are irrelevant.

In our approach, we demand that immigrants, even those from Islamic countries, conform to American standards; in exchange for this assimilation, we treat assimilated immigrants as full citizens, not just legally but culturally: no American I've ever met actually argues that immigrants should be confined to certain "foreigner zones."

In Europe, by contrast, it's commonplace for people to argue as Putnam does, that immigrants should not have to conform; that instead, society should change itself to accomodate their divisive beliefs. At the same time, they are typically restricted -- always by custom and very commonly by the law itself -- to certain areas and specific jobs.

Clearly, there is a huge difference in the level of trust engendered by these two approaches to "ethnic diversity;" there are Moslem riots in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia; Moslems are even rioting in Windsor now, in Merrie Olde England (home town of ye Merrie Olde Queen -- and I don't mean Elton John). I leave it as an exercise for the attentive reader which approach works best; but the mere fact that such massive differences exist show that for Putnam's results, the cultural element of "ethnicity" trumps the racial.

According to Wikipedia, Putnam is famous for his theories on bonding and bridging:

Putnam makes a distinction between two kinds of social capital: bonding capital and bridging capital. Bonding occurs when you are socializing with people who are like you: same age, same race, same religion, and so on. But in order to create peaceful societies in a diverse multi-etnic country, one needs to have a second kind of social capital: bridging. Bridging is what you do when you make friends with people who are not like you, like supporters from another football team. Putman argues that those two kinds of social capital, bonding and bridging, do strengthen each other.

But he appears to conflate race with culture, as does Wikipedia: "same age, same race, same religion, and so on." And I don't know if he has ever tried to separate them.

I would love to see a new study by Putnam, this one of a series of churches that have racially diverse congregations and others that have racially homogenous congregations. I suspect he would find they had very similar rates of "trust" among parishoners... which should put the racial meme to bed once and for all.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 10, 2006, at the time of 7:14 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 2, 2006

A Pro-Christian Jewish Agnostic Speaks Out

Another CQ post (did I ever mention I once had a book reviewed in GQ, not CQ? It was compared to Tolstoy, but Tolstoy won). This one from July 21st, 2005.

Hm... July 7th, 14th, 21st... do I detect a pattern here?

I could have more provacatively titled this post "Are Atheists Actually Demented?" because that is the impression I get from the founder and head of the premier anti-religion organization in the country, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State -- or United Separators, as I call them for short.

Up on their website, the United Separators have come out swinging against Judge John. G. Roberts, who the president named as his nominee to the Supreme Court a couple of days ago. In "Senate Should Reject Confirmation Of John G. Roberts To Supreme Court, Says Americans United," an unsigned article posted yesterday, founder and chief anti-religion guru Barry Lynn draws his line in the sand (hat tip to Michael Medved, who mentioned this on his radio show today):

“John Roberts has long been a faithful soldier in the right wing’s war on the Bill of Rights,” said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “He does not support personal liberties and should not receive a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.”

He cites only one example of Roberts' "war on the Bill of Rights": his brief, while serving as deputy solicitor general for Bush-41 (that is the say, the position of the first Bush administration, which Roberts, as their attorney, faithfully argued to the Court), which Lynn describes as follows:

Lynn noted that Roberts, as deputy solicitor general in the first Bush White House, drafted a key legal brief urging the Supreme Court to scrap decades of settled church-state law and uphold school-sponsored prayer at public school graduation ceremonies and other forms of government-endorsed religion. (At the time, Roberts was serving as political deputy in charge of crafting policy under then Solicitor General Kenneth Starr.)

“Roberts will work to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state and open the door to majority rule on religious matters,” Lynn said. “In a game with such high stakes, this unwise crusade should disqualify him.”

What? You mean -- Roberts actually supported enforced prayer in the schools, where young tots would be forced to their knees under penalty of physical brutality and forced to mouth words against their own religious faith? Yep, that's exactly what Mr. Lynn would like you to believe. (And note the reverse name-dropping, guilt-by-employment of noting that Roberts' boss was... Kenneth Starr, gasp!)

However, the New York Times, at the end of a lengthy and surprisingly flattering bio-piece [link no longer free] on Roberts, went into somewhat more detail on this case:

The government had asked the Supreme Court to discard an earlier test and overturn a lower court ruling that held a clergyman could not give an official address at a junior high school graduation in Providence, R.I. It asked the court to rule that "civic acknowledgments of religion in public life do not offend the establishment clause" of the Constitution "as long as they neither threaten the establishment of an official religion nor coerce participation in religious activities."

At the time, officials in the first Bush administration told reporters that the reason for intervening was a tactical decision to try to draw out Justice David H. Souter, then the court's newest member, and get him on the side of the administration, which was hoping eventually to change the approach to religion in public settings.

In the end, the court voted 5 to 4 against the administration and upheld the lower court's decision. Among those in the majority were Justice Souter and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whose seat Judge Roberts has been nominated to fill.

Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said Wednesday that Judge Roberts's participation in the case makes him "unsuited for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court." He said that if confirmed to the court, Judge Roberts would "open the door to majority rule on religious matters."

So the case was actually about allowing a clergyman to speak at a junior-high graduation. Great Scott, it's a theocracy!

The hair-on-fire hysteria on the part of the United Separators at the mere idea of a guy with a backwards collar being allowed to say a word at a graduation is only marginally less irrational than the ACLU threatening to sue the County of Los Angeles unless they removed the teeny, tiny cross atop a mission in the county seal, lest some unsuspecting and easily influenced Hindu or Buddhist see it and spontaneously combust.

Full disclosure: the "Jewish agnostic" of the title is myself; I'm Jewish on my parents' side, coming from a long tradition of secular American Jews stretching back to about the 1830s. But far from sharing Mr. Lynn's frothing hatred of anyone who believes in God, I myself love widespread Christianity and Judaism in society.

I absolutely believe that it is vital for a free and civilized society that the huge majority of people believe in what Dennis Prager calls "ethical monotheism." Prager defines ethical monotheism (as I understand it) as the belief in one omniscient God who demands that human beings behave towards each other with both decency and justice. Unless ethical monotheism is at the very core of a culture, that culture will retreat from justice and mock decency, and it will become a hellish place to live.

So I hope you're forgive my bluntness, but Barry Lynn and his United Separators can just go to the Hell that I don't believe in!

For the rest of this crabby, pro-Christian, pro-Jewish rant by a secular agnostic, read on.

The necessity is clear: all of our concepts of freedom and liberty derive from belief in the divinity of the human soul, found in both Judaism and Christianity. The rule of law derives from the idea of universal right and wrong -- which derives ultimately from Judaism's belief (even before Jesus) that the law is for all, king and shepherd alike. Even the scientific method also derives from the idea of universal right and wrong: gravity in the United States in 2005 is the same as gravity in Napoleonic France, Mediæval Germany, and the Roman Empire, whether it was recognized or not... which means not only the eternal values of Western civilization and the United States but even the material benefits that derive from modernity all depend upon ethical monotheism.

Which is why the farther you stray from that societal religious belief, the more tyrannical, backwards, and poverty-stricken that society becomes. Europe has turned its back on religion, and not coincidentally, on self defense, on economic growth, and on justice and decency (examples available upon request). But they sure love their anti-American grandstanding!

We may pass lightly over economic basket-cases like Tibet, horrific "atheist" dictatorships such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Mao's China, and the Latin American thugocracies (now new and improved in Venezuela!), and... well, the less said about the recent history of sub-Saharan Africa, the less likely I'll get my mug shot up on the wall of the Daily Kos: Wanted, dead or even deader, for crimes against progressivism!

(Note that just claiming to be a Christian does not make one an ethical monotheist; it depends upon one's actual beliefs, not the label.)

And I think it also succinctly answers Professor Bernard Lewis's question, "what went wrong" with Islam? Islam is monotheistic; but it is not, in my opinion, an "ethical monotheism." This is because in Islam, the most important duty that believers owe to other men is not to treat them with decency and justice, but rather to convert them to Islam, by force if necessary; and if they will not convert, to enslave them -- or kill them.

Ethical monotheisms very often behave unethically; this goes all the way back to the reign of King Saul in ancient Israel. But for every King Saul there is a Prophet Samuel who can step up to point out that the Law is for all. Throughout the long and evil history of slavery in the Christian West, for but one example, there were always opponents, some clergy and some lay, who argued that the institution was inherently unjust and wicked, for all men and women had divine souls that could not be herded like cattle. For centuries, the arguments fell on ears deafened by greed and inertia... but the arguments were there, ready to be used, when civilization finally matured to the point where it became the majority view in the nineteenth century.

Those arguments were never made in other cultures, for they made no sense: they did not have the concept of universal right and wrong. And they still don't, even today; I have never heard any deep or heartfelt rejection of slavery within Islam, for example; the arguments are merely of practicality, if they are even made at all.

The highest ideal of Buddhism appears to be acceptance of one's fate, from my reading; this is the ideal of perpetual victimhood. And the highest ideal of Communism and Naziism is obedience to the current party line. As I said supra, I believe the greatest ideal of Islam is conversion by any means necessary.

Only in Judeo-Christianity is the greatest ideal justice. For this reason, hostility towards mainstream Judeo-Christianity deeply offends me as a civilized Westerner, as an American, and especially as a secularist.

I want mainstream Catholics, Protestants, and Jews on the Supreme Court. I want the president and members of Congress to be mainstream Jews or Christians of some specific and heartfelt sect. Not some vague "Christian" who changes his religion over a bicycle path (if you know what I mean, and I think you do); but somebody who actually has a firm belief in some specific religion that actually sets ethical boundaries on his decisions and behavior. To quote my favorite TV show, "no man should be allwed to govern others until he has first learned to govern himself."

To repeat myself (because I like the phrase and because I'm basically too lazy to think of a different ending)... unless ethical monotheism is at the very core of a culture, that culture will retreat from justice and mock decency, and it will become a hellish place to live.

So I hope you're forgive my bluntness, but Barry Lynn and his United Separators can just go to the Hell that I don't believe in!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 2, 2006, at the time of 3:40 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 31, 2006

Why I Like Mel Better Than Abe

First off, I should mention that despite my name, I'm a Jew. I'm not religious, but I was raised in the Jewish culture; my father was a (nonreligious) Jew; my mother converted to Judaism when they married; and I had as thorough a Jewish grandmother as ever appeared in a Jackie Mason joke. I proudly refused to be bar mitzvahed, which is about as Jewish as you can get in California.

That said, I will flatly state that absolutely nothing that Mel Gibson said during his DUI arrest makes him an antisemite. By contrast, however, Abe Foxman -- head of the (Jewish) Anti-Defamation League -- is a despicable bigot who shames us Jews... and I wish he would just dry up and blow away.

I'm sure a lot of you are already scratching your heads and wondering if I've been nipping at the cooking sherry. After all, when Gibson was arrested, two newspapers (a reasonably good one and also the Los Angeles Times) report that he kept talking about the "f***ing Jews," saying "Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," and demanding of the arresting deputy "are you a Jew?"

So why doesn't that make him an antisemite? It's very simple: I couldn't care less what somebody says when he's drunk. I care what he says and does while sober as a brass monkey.

What does it tell us that when Gibson gets pasted, he rants about the Jews? It tells us that he grew up in an antisemitic household with a father who thinks the Holocaust was "fiction." When Gibson is six sheets and a top-gallant to the wind, he is not rational... so big deal, big antisemite, he says irrational things when he's irrational. Who cares?

But by contrast, Abraham Foxman was presumably perfectly sober and in his right mind when he said of Gibson:

"It's not a proper apology because it does not go to the essence of his bigotry and his anti-Semitism," he said in a statement on the organization's Web site. "We would hope that Hollywood now would realize the bigot in their midst and that they will distance themselves from this anti-Semite."

And we have to assume Foxman was equally in his senses when he attacked the Passion of the Christ -- through an ADL press release -- thus:

ADL and its representatives have never accused Mr. Gibson of being an anti-Semite. [Well, I guess that one's out the window now!] We do not know what is in his heart. We only know what he has put on the movie screen. The images there show Romans who behave with compassion toward Jesus. The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, constantly expresses his reticence to harm Jesus. The Jews, on the other hand, are depicted as blood-thirsty. The Jewish High Priest, Caiaphas, is shown as bullying Pilate, and the hundreds and hundreds of amassed Jews demanding Jesus' death.

Oddly, however, I don't recall the ADL having any similar reaction to Jesus Christ Superstar -- which depicted exactly the same reactions among the Romans and the Pharisees, especially the cynical and murderous Caiaphas. (Or the New Testament, for that matter.) Perhaps it's only a coincidence that the 1970 play, and especially the 1973 movie version, has the sort of liberal orientation that Foxman has increasingly embraced... while the Passion is relentlessly traditional and conservative in its take on the gospels (Jesus doesn't actually order Judas to betray him, as he does in JCSS, for example).

(I myself had a different reason to reject the Passion: I found it boring. Honestly, there was no plot; and since I knew how it all turned out anyway, no suspense either. But that's all ancient hysteria now.)

Foxman is a cowardly traducer whose astonishing ability to find antisemites whenever he goes looking -- with the same zeal and success that Father Barré was able to find witches in Aldous Huxley's the Devils of Loudin -- debases and trivializes the very concept of antisemitism.

At a time when Arabs and Moslems are literally trying to wipe the Jews "from the face of the map," widely reprinting Mein Kampf in Arabic, and just one day after a bitter American Moslem shot several people at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, killing one woman... Abe Foxman is more interested in the urgent task of undermining Christianity and the "religious Right." To Foxman and the ADL, the biggest threat to Jews in the world today is that rampaging Christians, under the command of the Pope and the Rev. Louis Sheldon (the Pontiff's right arm in battle), will undertake a new crusade to recreate the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The glee with which he has jumped onto this momentary, drunken harangue by Gibson is more boorish than the rant itself. What is the danger from what Gibson said? Gibson was clearly channeling his deranged father; many slaves of the grape, when under the influence, revert to long discarded beliefs and stereotypes of their childhood, things they would never say when sober because they no longer believe what they believed when they were seven or eight years old.

When a blotto Mel Gibson bellows about the "f***ing Jews," is that going to encourage more people to become antisemites? Of course not. Far more likely is it that Foxman's demand for what amounts to a hate-speech code, preventing any Christian from expressing beliefs about the necessity of being "saved" that come straight out of their Bible, will infuriate so many of the majority religion that some, at least, will turn their backs on the Jews and on Israel.

Not that Foxman would care; it would only confirm everything he's always hated about Christians. And yes, I do indeed "know what is in his heart," because I take the man at his word.

When drunkards drink, they revert to their childhood and mouth words that Papa or Mama used to say. This doesn't prove them racists, bigots, or antisemites; it proves they're human.

It's much more important what people do and say when they know what they're doing and saying. For God's sake, Hitler didn't need to get drunk to hate the Jews.

All right, I'm done. I hope Foxman and all his little sycophants do not succeed in destroying Gibson's career over this pathetic incident. And I will certainly go out of my way to break any boycott of his future work.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 31, 2006, at the time of 10:59 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

July 10, 2006

Mitt the Mighty Mormon

Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics frets that Mitt Romney will be un-nominatable among Republican voters -- because Romney is a Mormon; it's the polls, you see:

On Monday The Los Angeles Times released the third batch of results from its most recent poll, dealing with religion and politics. The number with the most significance for 2008 isn't very shocking: "Thirty-seven percent of those questioned said they would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate."

But of course, they wouldn't be voting for "a Mormon presidential candidate;" they would be voting for (or against) Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts... and that can make all the difference.

I'm trying to remember the last time a candidate was rejected because he was a Mormon. Or a Catholic. Or a Jew, or because he was black or Asian, or because he was a woman or she was a man. I think the answer is "not in my lifetime."

Oh, there have been many defeated nominees who claimed they lost because of some completely ancilalry characteristic; former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley ran for governor of California in 1982 and 1986; and when state Attorney General George Deukmeijian just barely defeated him -- after early projections that Bradley would win -- many Bradley supporters (if not the mayor himself) accused Deukmejian supporters of racism (Bradley was black).

I suppose his race could have caused his defeat. Of course, a more likely explanation is that Bradley was very liberal; in addition, just before the 1982 contest, Bradley came out strongly in favor of a state initiative to ban all handguns from California. Prior to that announcement, Bradley was well ahead; but shortly thereafter, his support plummeted. Perhaps it's just a coincidence; perhaps all that latent California racism just happened, by sheer random chance, to catch up with him right after he announced he would work to disarm all Californios. But that's not how I would bet it.

So I'm still trying to think of a case where a candidate was defeated in a clear-cut case of racial, religious, or sexual bigotry... and I'm still drawing a blank, at least in the last forty or so years. All right, maybe in the deep South in the sixties, somebody might have been defeated for some office because he was the wrong religion -- Episcopalian, maybe. But it's far more likely such a person would be defeated because of the liberal or conservative positions that often come hand in hand with particular religions.

The big-C Conservative Jew Joseph Lieberman has been elected again and again from Connecticut, a state not normally associated with widespread Judaism; and of course, he was the Democratic nominee for president in 2002. And for that matter, the subject of this post, Mitt Romney -- remember him? -- was elected governor, not of Utah, but of Massachusetts.

Bevan frets that the attack on Romney would not be overt, where it could be dragged into the sunlight and dried up, but rather a whispering campaign that would lurk and fester in the damp and dark:

In addition to the LA Times poll, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that Romney's religion is going to be anywhere from a moderate to severe handicap, especially in the South (see Robert Novak and Amy Sullivan). And Ross Douthat provides a nimble description of why Romney's problem isn't just confined to the GOP primary:

So the Republican primaries would be tough on Romney, and he would be a ripe target for an enterprising Rove wannabe with a taste for dirty campaigns. A few flyers about polygamy in South Carolinian mailboxes, or some push-poll telephone calls about the weirdness of the Book of Mormon in the Catholic Midwest . . . well, you get the idea. And things wouldn't get any easier in the general election, when the media would suddenly discover all sorts of juicy details about Joseph Smith's faith that are just crying out for a Time cover story, or a 60 Minutes special. If you think that journalists have had a field day with George W. Bush's fairly banal brand of evangelical Christianity, well, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.

But neither Novak nor Sullivan cite a single objective source for assuming evangelicals will refuse, en masse, to vote for a Mormon (would they refuse to vote for a small-c conservative Jew like Dennis Prager? I think not)... just unpersuasive anecdotal predictions. Example: Novak writes:

Prominent, respectable Evangelical Christians have told me, not for quotation, that millions of their co-religionists cannot and will not vote for Romney for president solely because he is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

So some unnamed folks told Robert Novak that others -- not he, but "millions of [his] co-religionists," primarily, we suppose, in the South -- would prefer a liberal Democrat to a conservative Mormon. Among urban folklorists like Jan Harold Brunvand, this is called a "FOAF," a friend of a friend, and is one of the hallmarks of an urban legend.

Sullivan's "evidence" is even sillier. Discussing the 2002 gubernatorial race between Democrat Janet Napolitano and Republican Matt Salmon, a Mormon, she notes:

A month before election day, the race was neck-and-neck, when a third-party candidate named Dick Mahoney began running a television commercial that raised Salmon's Mormonism in the context of a Mormon fundamentalist sect that openly practices polygamy on the Arizona/Utah border. The ad was offensive and was immediately denounced by religious and political leaders. It was also effective.

On election day, Salmon lost to Napolitano by a razor-thin margin. Napolitano won in part by picking up votes among moderate female voters, but also because Salmon ran far behind congressional candidates in the most conservative and heavily evangelical districts.

So if the race was "neck and neck" before the election, and then, after the anti-Mormon ads, Napolitano won by a "razor-thin margin" -- isn't the most likely conclusion that the ads had no effect whatsoever? Sullivan reports that Salmon did poorly among evangelicals; but she doesn't tell us whether he was doing any better among evangelicals "a month before election day." (She also completely buys into the myth that John McCain was destroyed in South Carolina by vile rumors spread by "Bush surrogates," so I tend to discount her seriousness.)

Simply put, when people say, in the abstract, "I would never vote for a Mormon," it's a relatively meaningless statement from a political perspective: as I said above, nobody pulls the lever for "Mr. Mormon cult leader;" the candidate is "Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the guy who saved the Olympics in Salt Lake City and a first-rate conservative who managed to get elected in one of the bluest of blue states."

In fact, the whole suggestion that Romney will lose because "evangelicals" (translation: the evil religious Right) think he's one of those Satan-worshipping Mormons smacks not only of anti-Christian and anti-Southern bigotry but also argument by melodrama: it must be true because it would be so wild and bizarre if it were true!

It likewise depends upon believing that those "rightwingnut Christians" hate Mormons, call them cultists, and are so bigotted, they would never, ever vote for one. Big Lizards says, regardless of how they answered in a Los Angeles Times poll, when the time comes, evangelicals will step up and vote for the conservative over the liberal... not the secular Christian over the conservative Mormon.

If Romney loses the primary, it will be because of something he said or something he did... not because of something be believes.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 10, 2006, at the time of 5:20 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 12, 2006

Clinton Reveals Bush Is God

Former President William Jefferson "Big Bible" Clinton revealed today that President George W. "Burning" Bush is, in fact, God. One can only conclude, therefore, that the rest of the Republican leadership are the Archangels, Thrones, and Powers of the heavenly heirarchy:

Clinton Links GOP Policies to More Storms

As Tropical Storm Alberto threatened to strengthen into the ninth hurricane in 22 months to affect Florida, former President Clinton predicted Monday that Republican environmental policies will lead to more severe storms.

"It is now generally recognized that while Al Gore and I were ridiculed, we were right about global warming," Clinton said at a fundraiser for the Florida Democratic Party. "It's a serious problem. It's going to lead to more hurricanes."

The Florida Republicans responded in their usual hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners style:

Jeff Sadosky, spokesman for the state Republican Party, decried Clinton's rhetoric. "Bill Clinton's class warfare and race-baiting message gets us no closer to solutions for the issues he brings up," he said.

Sadosky referred in part to Clinton's comments earlier this month in Arizona. At that event, Clinton characterized Republican Party leaders as right-wing, white Southerners.

Thus spake Clinton -- left-wing, white Southerner and the country's first black president. (At least Florida Republican spokesman Jeff Sadosky didn't refer to "the failed policies of the past.")

It is notable that Sadosky, while denouncing other things Clinton said, failed to repudiate Clinton's claim of divine powers for the current president and his party; in the tradition of the antique media, Big Lizards takes silence as assent... thus, the divinity of George W. Bush is now a bipartisan policy position.

Bush prayer rugs will shortly be available via HughHewitt.com; the White House Cathedral and Carniceria recently named Hewitt Archbishop of Blogoberry.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 12, 2006, at the time of 6:18 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

May 19, 2006

The Value of Uniqueness

The most typical response from those who support same-sex marriage to anyone who opposes it is this: "suppose your state adopted same-sex marriage; would that somehow hurt your own relationship with your wife? Would you love her any less just because two guys or two girls could also get married?"

The second question masquerades as a restatement or clarification of the first, but it's actually an insulting irrelevancy. We're not talking about love; pure love between any number of people has never been illegal. Only certain manifestations of love have been legally proscribed.

One such manifestation is sex. Sex other than within a traditional marriage used to be illegal nearly everywhere within Christendom (and Jewishdom); over the centuries, societies recognized the foolishness of trying to enforce marital fidelity by law.

Then, until recently, what were considered the most extreme versions of sex (to some people) were outlawed by the all-purpose word "sodomy," which typically referred, it seemed, to anything the judge wouldn't do with his own wife. I have argued for nearly twenty years that our organic documents -- especially the Declaration of Independence -- recognize a general "liberty interest" that more or less says the government should not try to regulate purely private "matters of conscience."

This, the Libertarian Axiom, has never been accepted as generally true; but in specific cases it has. And in particular, in the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court struck down all laws banning "sodomy," however defined.

So let's drop the "love" and "sex" stuff and get back to marriage.

First, same-sex marriage is not itself a "liberty interest." Liberty is the freedom to do something, to undertake some action -- from saying something to assembling to transacting business to having sex. But legal recognition of a same-sex union as "marriage" does not confer any freedom of action; you are already free to have gay sex, to live together, to call yourselves married in other than legal circumstances.

Rather, it's a demand for social approval of certain actions... and "social approval" is never a liberty interest.

Thus, society can restrict what kinds of relationships get dubbed "marriages" without restricting liberty. But should it? Does same-sex marriage actually harm society... and more specifically, does it actually harm already existing marriages?

The answer to the first question above -- does legal same-sex marriage somehow hurt my relationship with my wife? -- is Yes, of course it does... because it cheapens the unique value of that relationship.

Semantic note, it wouldn't hurt my relations with my wife (we would still interact the same)... but it would hurt the relationship as a separate entity, just as it would if we suddenly discovered the rabbi who married us was really an imposter, and we weren't actually legally married.

The reason is that uniqueness is itself a value; take away the unique nature of marriage, and the value is greatly diminished. All that stands between marriage and shacking up is that unique nature.

Illustration: suppose you go out with the girl of your dreams. Or, if you are a girl, the boy of your dreams. (If you are gay, please reverse those... see how ecumenical I am?) You have been friends with this person for some time, and you secretly love her. Him. Whatever.

At the end of the date, this person turns to you, takes you by the hands, and says "Pat" -- let's hope your name actually is Pat -- "I love you." Then the person kisses you passionately.

You're ecstatic. You're walking on air. All the way hope, it's like a Fred Astaire movie.

Then the next day, you tell you friends... and they solemnly inform you that she (or he) says that to every person she dates... kiss and all.

Now how do you feel? You feel like crap, because you realize that there was no uniqueness in that proclamation: she loves everybody, which is the same as saying she doesn't love anybody, especially not you. What made the three words valuable (even holy or sacred) was your mistaken idea that they were unique, something she shared with you and with nobody else. As soon as you realize those same words were offered to every Tom, Joaquin, and Yuri, they cease to have any value.

So we agree, I hope, that uniqueness itself is a quality that can imbue a situation or relationship with high, even holy value. Make the unique universal, and the value it adds vanishes altogether.

Back to marriage. Relationships have value not only to individuals but to the groups and societies those individuals form. A lawyer-client relationship, for example; it's useful to the individuals involved, but it's also useful to society to have an avenue where people can get advice without having to worry that their problems will be spread all over the community.

So we reward such relationships with special privileges (confidentiality, for example) -- and we confine them by special rules (defining who is a lawyer and who is a client of that lawyer). This is because we, as a society, believe that lawyer-client relationships benefit our society -- so we want to encourage them, and we also want to regulate them to ensure people are not just taking advantage of rights without fulfilling the obligations.

Marriage is the same: society has decided (rightly, in my opinion) that traditional marriage is a huge benefit not just to the individuals involved (typically more than two: husband, wife, but also children and potentially Grandma and Grandpa), but also to society as a whole: it nurtures children in the best possible environment, it combines the male with the female principles, it civilizes men, it protects women, and it provides an axis around which the wheels of larger institutions rotate, including property ownership, parental obligations, and our interaction with the government from testimony to taxes.

So we encourage it. But such encouragement is meaningless and useless if it's universally applied to every imaginable relationship of one or more human beings.

A "marriage" of thirteen women and six men is not the same as a traditional marriage: it does not have the same qualities, it does not have the same effect, it does not underpin our society the same way as does the particular relationship we have always called Marriage.

When society jettisons all distinctions between different types of relationships and chooses (or is forced) to call everything "marriage," then Marriage loses its uniqueness as an institution, hence its value to society and the individuals within the marriage.

It's like saying that any two or three or fifty chums chatting with each other are the same as a lawyer talking with his client, and they get all the same rights and privileges. There are rights of universalism and rights of exclusion; marriage is the latter. When an exclusive right is granted to all, it loses any value it obtained from uniqueness... which means all value whatsoever.

So the answer is yes: if California were to change the law to allow same-sex couples to legally marry (or groups larger than two, or persons already married, or consanguineous groups, or groups that do not obtain a license or go through a marriage ceremony), it would indeed damage my relationship (not relations) with my wife: the change would diminish its value, because it would remove the quality of uniqueness that underpins that value.

Thus, there is real damage to society from opening "marriage" up to all sorts of other relationships. And make no mistake: those advocating same-sex marriage also advocate the other changes listed in the paragraph above, because they rightly recognize that their real enemy is the very concept that any form of relationship at all can be excluded from the state of matrimony. If you recognize that society, in the form of the State, has any say whatsoever in determining who is "married," then there is no reason why it cannot restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples.

Their only consistent argument is to say "marriage for all, under any form of relationship." And marriage-for-all is ths same thing as marriage-for-none: definitions are by nature exclusionary; and Humpty-Dumpty aside, when you can simply redefine a word to mean anything convenient at the moment -- then that word actually means nothing at all.

There is a fancy word for this: nihilism. And those who are most forceful in advocating same-sex marriage are by and large marital nihilists who simply want to eliminate legal marriage altogether. Bear that in mind when you listen to their blandishment; substitute "polygamy" for "same-sex marriage," and you'll see that their arguments survive intact.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 19, 2006, at the time of 2:49 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

March 11, 2006

Wafa Wafting Into View

Sachi and I followed the Power Line link a few days ago and very much enjoyed watching MEMRI's video of Dr. Wafa Sultan -- a psychiatrist, but don't hold that against her -- rip apart some hapless Imam somewhere in debate.

It was carried on al-Jazeera, and MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) added English subtitles.

Well, "debate" is somewhat misleading. The Moslem cleric simply stood there, opening and closing his mouth like a turbaned carp, while Dr. Sultan danced up and down his spine in hobnailed pumps. (If you dislike watching online verbal dissections -- or you have a dial-up connection -- you can read a partial transcript here to whet your appetite. But the video is fuller and much funner!)

One taste:

The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the Holocaust), and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists.

15 million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people.

The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies.

This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.

Now she's hit the "big time," being profiled by a two-pager in the New York Times. And it's even a sympathetic story! I find that amazing, considering that she compared the battle between Islam and the West to "a clash between... barbarity and rationality." I would have thought the Times would do one of its patented hatchet jobs, perhaps implying she had helped George Bush drag James Byrd behind that pickup truck.

If you haven't checked these out yet, it's time.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 11, 2006, at the time of 6:16 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

February 3, 2006

Bride of Radical Prophetism

A commenter raised a couple of good arguments against my previous post, When Radical Prophetism Eats Radical Secularism, arguments that deserve a wider response.

• If artists can caricature icons of other religions but not Islam, then that means Islam is more important than the rest.

Let's think about this one. When Andres Serrano produced the photograph Piss Christ, what was the general reaction among believing Christians and among conservatives? It wasn't that long ago, and I remember quite well: the reaction was outrage -- absolute outrage. The argument then was that the only possible reason to immerse a crucifix in urine (Serrano claimed it was his own) and take a picture of it was to blaspheme Jesus Christ and inflame and insult Christians for no valid purpose.

Nobody on the right suggested censorship, and I'm not suggesting it here. But they argued that simple decency should restrain artists from needlessly offending people just to watch them hop about.

Those objecting to Piss Christ didn't kill or attack anyone, of course, because modern-day Christianity and conservatism are civilized belief systems; but that speaks only to their reaction, not the original provocation. Such provocation is equally morally offensive whether the target is civilized or savage.

Fast forward to today. What is the argument here? That while it's wrong to childishly insult and outrage Christians and conservatives, who are civilized, it's perfectly all right to do exactly the same thing to Moslems, because they're more likely to react violently?

Anybody here see the Mel Brooks movie High Anxiety? When Dr. Richard Thorndyke (Brooks) visits the Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, VERY Nervous for the first time, one of the doctors there, Dr. Charles Montague (Harvey Korman), introduces Thorndyke to a patient who thinks he's being chased by vampires.

When the patient appears calm (and thus might provoke Thorndyke into releasing him, costing the Institute money), Montague puts fake "vampire teeth" in his mouth and growls at the patient to provoke him into hysteria.

Is that the argument we now make? That because a great many Moslems are psychotic, it's perfectly all right to play to their worst psychoses and provoke them into a frenzy of religious agony just to watch them squirm? This is like teasing the retarded kid. And to hell (of course) with any people they may kill, after we've poked them sufficiently; can't make an omlet without breaking a few heads.

This is sheer lunacy, and I mean on the European newspapers' side as much as on the Moslems' side. And it's also sheer hypocrisy, because many of the same sources egging on the newspapers today demanded that Piss Christ not be shown back in the 1980s.

• If Moslems want to live in a European democracy, they must accept the fundamental rights and liberties.

All right... so what would be the reaction here if a German newspaper -- Der Spiegel, let's say -- began running pornographic, antisemitic cartoons straight out of Der Stürmer of the Nazi days? When German Jews felt humiliated, insulted, and outraged, would we applaud Der Spiegel's "courage" for bucking the PC trend against antisemitism?

Bear in mind that I never once argued that European governments should clamp down on the newspapers and prevent them running it; I argue that the newspapers themselves should have made the decision not to publish, that there is nothing wrong with decency and discretion, and that it's as valid a principle as freedom of speech.

I am a libertarian of the Right: I believe very strongly in the civil liberty of freedom of speech. But liberty and responsibility are two sides of the same coin, something the "civil libertarians" on the Left regularly forget. The simple reality is that widespread acceptance of the former is predicated upon widespread fulfillment of the latter. Freedom is never free; it depends upon people by and large doing the right thing, without coercion, simply because it is the right thing.

The Founding Fathers had a great fear of tyranny, but they had just as great a fear of the mob: and that's the only way to view the knee-jerk reaction applauding newspapers for needlessly outraging and inciting Moslems: it's the same impluse that drives the chanting mob at a bear baiting.

It's disgusting; it's low; and it should be beneath us.

There are many areas where we need to confront Islam, most obviously the attempt of some Moslems to conquer the world and impose Sharia law on the unwilling rest of us. But this does not help that cause; if it does anything, it cripples it, because it drives moderate Moslems (yes, they exist) towards their radical brethren and away from the sanity of liberal democracy.

And the ugliest point is that I can see only one reason why people don't argue, as I do, that while newspapers have the "right" to do this, they should exercise their discretion and refrain; only one reason why folks should instead stand on a chair and egg them on: simple anti-Moslem bigotry. Actually cheerleading for anti-Mohammed cartoons is acting the part of a bigot; there is no other reason for applauding those -- while condemning Ted Rall and that disgusting cartoon of the quadruple amputee soldier and Dr. Rumsfeld classifying him as "battle hardened."

If we're going to win the war against militant Islamism, we must fight it from high ground... which includes not merely "rights" but also the responsibility to behave as adults and the duty to stand and fight only when there is a reason to stand and fight... not just anytime we feel feisty.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 3, 2006, at the time of 2:38 PM | Comments (46) | TrackBack

When Radical Prophetism Eats Radical Secularism

Did I write "eats?" My error; I must have meant "meets."

It takes a great deal of courage to tug on Superman's cape -- or the Prophet's beard. Courage, that is, if the tugger has sense and reason and actually understands what the hell he's doing -- and the likely reaction.

Suffice to say, I do not believe the European newspapers publishing the mild cartoons of Mohammed are actually courageous. I think instead that they're functionally illiterate in the language of religion: their defiance is like a drunken sixteen year old who picks a fight with Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) in Goodfellas.

This whole thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth: Europeans are such radical secularists, I'm not sure they really understand that some people actually believe in religion and are willing to die -- or kill -- for it. Here is the editor in chief of a French newspaper that ran the cartoons:

The Egyptian publisher of France Soir, which printed the controversial caricatures Wednesday, fired the paper's managing editor, Jacques LeFranc, late Wednesday night, saying, "We present our regrets to the Muslim community and to all people who have been shocked or made indignant by this publication."

But the dismissed editor's boss, Faubert, wrote an unrepentant editorial in Thursday's editions: "We had no desire to add oil to the fire as some may think. A fundamental principle of democracy and secularism is being threatened."

What fundamental principle is that -- that actions have no consequences? I believe the newspapers have the right to publish the pictures; and if they were dealing with a sane religion (Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Odin worship), it might even be salutory... I'm not sure what the point would be to call all Christians "Jesus freaks," as Ted Turner did, but at least it gives Christians the opportunity to turn the other cheek.

But they're not dealing with a modern, civilized religion; there aren't many "Moslem Methodists," as I noted back in September. One needn't always rush to do whatever one has the "right" to do; a bit of circumspection is often in order. In this case, shouldn't somebody ask "is this the right time and place for a war, and is a cartoon the cause under whose banner we march?"

This is imbecilic. I would love to see Europe pick a real fight with militant Islamism... but the first rule of war is only to declare it on people you really want to fight -- not on a billion people at once, many of whom would be your allies under better circumstances. Here's another example of European tone-deafness when it comes to religion:

In another day of confrontation between the largely secular nations of Europe and Muslim countries where religion remains a strong force in daily life, Islamic activists threatened more widespread protests and boycotts of European businesses. While some European officials sought to defuse the crisis, many journalists insisted that despite Islamic outrage, religious sensibilities should not result in censorship.

"We would have done exactly the same thing if it had been a pope, rabbi or priest caricature," wrote Editor in Chief Serge Faubert in Thursday's editions of France Soir, one of the newspapers that printed the cartoons.

Yes, you slope-browed, prognathic buffoon; but Catholics, Jews, and Protestants won't strap on bombs and blow up your newspaper offices. This isn't courage, it's adolescent recklessness.

If they want to demonstrate courage and respect for freedom of speech, they can editorialize in favor of the Iraq war or put out an Arabic-language version of their newspaper in the Middle East -- one that promotes civilization, not the antisemitic, anti-American insanity European newspapers so often validate. They can have the guts to face up squarely to the fact that most people in the world believe in some form of God and religion, instead of pretending that the extreme secularism of Europe is the global norm.

Courage? How about a series of articles about the economic fecklessness of European socialism, with its twenty-eight hour workweeks, month-long vacations, and semiweekly general strikes? Or how about a call that the governments of Europe start spending at least half as big a percent of GDP on defense and their "militaries" as the United States does, rather than their typical one-tenth as much?

Those might take some courage; the fine citizens of the City of Lights might start heaving overbaked baguets through newspaper windows. But at least the battle would actually be in service to some cause other than provocation solely for sake of Europe's ego!

Newspapers in Denmark, France, the UK, and elsewhere across Europe act as if voluntarily choosing not to publish something that is needlessly and foolishly inflammatory is "censorship," as if they have never even heard the word "discretion."

There are many battles we must fight against militant Islamism; but this isn't one of them. This banal donnybrook blurs the distinction between terrorism and mere religious hysteria, which is a traditional component of even moderate Islam. It drives together the Moslem groups we have so carefully pried apart over the last year and a half. It angers those whom we had rather calm down and heartens those we should rather anger. It's blind, lame, ham-fisted, and typically obtuse, as only those who are well protected by their betters can be.

This isn't an act of courage, for God's sake; it's poking a stick into a scorpion's nest to see what comes bubbling out.

God, do I dislike Europeans.

(Hat tip Scott at Power Line, who reads this stuff so the rest of us don't have to.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 3, 2006, at the time of 6:25 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

January 27, 2006

Freedom From Religion

So now we know:

Priest May Be Tried for Saying Jesus Existed
Associated Press
January 27, 2006

VITERBO, Italy — An Italian judge heard arguments Friday on whether a small-town parish priest should