And captures brilliantly the reason why there is no such thing as “moderate Islam“:
Two weeks ago, I pointed out how our leadership today is addling its wits and soothing its nerves when it comes to the non-negotiable agenda of orthodox Islam: an intolerant, theocratic state where non-Muslims are systematically humiliated, women are forever fixed in the status they attained in seventh-century Arabia, and other faiths are treated like venereal diseases — which must be firmly controlled if they cannot be eradicated. No, not every Muslim in the world knows his faith well enough, or practices it so devoutly, that he strives to achieve Islamic domination. There are millions who covertly drink wine, neglect to fast, and spend their money not on funding jihad but on belly-dancers … thank God! For us folks outside the umma, the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim, which tells me that the Holy See should drop its ecumenical outreach to Islamic clerics and instead strike up partnerships with the black marketeers who smuggle vodka into Iran.
This is essentially a binary situation. No Muslim whose views are compatible with Western values holds views that are particularly compatible with the Koran, or which would be treated with anything but contempt by Muslims of an orthodox bent. “Liberal” Muslims like Tarek Fatah — who profess the Islamic faith but also espouse the usual pieties that Western liberals are wont to espouse — may offer some valuable insights from time to time, but are regarded as no better (and possibly worse) than infidels by those whom they are trying to argue against, their devout co-religionists.
Whereas liberal Christians, odd ducks (and wrong) though the often are in regard to various social issues, are still regarded as Christians (if misguided) by those who aspire to orthodoxy…and are even admitted to be correct (if somewhat grudgingly) from time to time, when the criticisms they make are indeed valid.
It’s a big difference, and then one which does not bode well for the future of the idea of Western-Muslim dialogue.
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Posted in: Christianity - Islam - Men and Women | Tags: Arabia, faith, God, Islam, John Zmirak, Koran, Tarek Fatah, women
That’s about all I can think to say to describe this silliness.
Georg Northoff, research director of Mind, Brain Imaging, and Neuroethics at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Mental Health Research, will speak March 23 to several hundred theologians at the University of Marburg, in Germany. The 500-year-old school has produced such towering intellects as theologian Paul Tillich and philosopher Martin Heidegger.
Northoff, internationally recognized for his research into brain function, will be the only scientist to speak to the group.
“We will never be able to answer the existence of God,” he said this week from his office at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. “There is a limit because of the way the brain functions. (That) limit . . . is the price we to pay for consciousness.
“We can research the neuro-mechanism into belief, but we cannot say anything about God. That’s where we have to go to Philosophy.”
In other words: science has natural limits which, naturally, exist at the boundary between those things that are empirically observable in nature, and those things that are not and/or which exist beyond nature in some capacity.
In other words: science can examine every bio-electrical and bio-mechanical result of belief, but it cannot describe the object of that belief to any extent whatsoever. That’s Theology 101.
Granted, it also means that the human brain is not adequately suited to comprehend God…but again, where is the surprise in that news? One could flip open the Bible and find the same message, or observe that such a teaching is firmly embedded in the core, foundational teachings of Judaism and Christianity, at least.
I’m sure Dr. Northoff is anticipating — perhaps even hoping for — an icy reception of his speech. I’m betting that what he’ll actually get is a rousing chorus of: “Yes…and?”
(hat tip)
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Posted in: Christianity - Judaism - Philosophy - Research - Secularism makes you stupid | Tags: Christianity, Georg Northoff, God, Judaism, Martin Heidegger, Paul Tillich, Philosophy, Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, science, the Bible, University of Marburg, University of Ottawa
A US judge has ruled that it is not in young Ms. Bary’s interest to be returned to either her native Sri Lanka or her (Muslim) parents (who have been trying to either do her harm or forcibly convert her back to Islam, from Christianity).
This ruling was a necessary step toward her getting a US visa, which she needs in order to remain on American soil and yet be free of her parents’ custody.
It’s also the first piece if really good news the girl has had in a while.
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Posted in: American News - Christianity - Immigration - Islam - Men and Women | Tags: Christianity, Immigration, Islam, Rifqa Bary, Sri Lanka
From Gates of Vienna comes this charming little ditty, which I think is exactly the attitude that Westerners of all social, religious*, and economic backgrounds should adopt:
I repudiate Islam
I repudiate Islam as a Christian for its heresy
I repudiate Islam as an atheist because of its mumbo-jumbo
I repudiate Islam as a Buddhist because it’s bad for my karma
I repudiate Islam as a Jew because I’m smart
I repudiate Islam as a pagan because where the brook babbles and the flowers grow there is no need of Islam
I repudiate Islam as a Sikh because Islam murdered my ancestors
I repudiate Islam as a Hindu because it is not my wayAltogether now —-
We repudiate Islam because it’s getting up our nose
(Note: the ‘pud’ in repudiate should be pronounced as in ‘spud’)
And…bonus! I always pronounced “pud” as “pew” (e.g. the thing you sit on in church). I am duly corrected!
Note what’s at work in the above, good reader. In essence, it’s a religio-political version of what in Game circles is called “flipping the script.”
In Game, this involves shifting the frame of one’s discussion with a woman so that she is forced to play the role of the potential rejectee, rather than the rejector. This is a reversal of the traditional roles played in the fields of flirtation and dating; essentially, the man adopts the woman’s tactics for a bit, in order to upset the dynamic of the encounter and increase his chances of closing the deal with either her phone number in hand or…something more than that.
Here, what’s being done is taking Islam’s default stance toward the non-Islamic world and basically turning it back on them. It is taking their view of us as infidels, barbarians, unclean heathens, and pigs, and turning it back on them by calling out all that is ugly, primitive, and backward about their silly little Religion.
And like in Game, it just might work.
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* * *
* Yes, atheists & agnostics, you’re included in this category for the purposes of this commentary.
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Posted in: Atheism - Christianity - Hinduism - Islam - Judaism - Sikhism | Tags: Atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Game, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, paganism, Religion, Sikh
Or, more precisely, he understands that sharia law is slowly but surely taking over in some American communities.
This in regard to the four Christian missionaries arrested — yes, arrested — in Muslim-dominated Dearborn, Michigan, for exercising their right to preach and proselytize. That act is not illegal under American law; under Islam‘s barbarous legal code, however, it is. And four people are now in jail because American law is, evidently, no longer the law in Dearborn.
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Posted in: American News - American Politics - Christianity - Crime and Punishment - Islam | Tags: America, Christianity, Dearborn, Islam, Michigan, Newt Gingrich
Roissy has been flogging the concept of female hypergamy for a while now, and his latest arguments offer pretty convincing support for the principle. For the un-initiated, the concept of female hypergamy is kind of like serial monogamy: women typically pursue just one partner at a time, but are consistently looking for the partner who is most alpha, and will “trade up” when opportunity arises…absent, that is, social and/or moral/religious constraints.
In history, as he points out, this is evidenced by the fact that the average human being has twice as many female ancestors as he does male ancestors; this suggests that in its pagan antiquity, humanity bred in a manner not dissimilar to the way most other animals do: the alpha males had their pick of females; lesser males went without, or at least with much less. Perhaps 80% of our ancient female ancestors bred; only about 40% of our male ancestors did the same.
Roissy notes that “the advent of Christianity, the nuclear family, and Western civilization in general” led to the flattening of this disparate ratio, noting that at the apex of this social model (which is now in decline), “90+% of men had nominally exclusive low risk sexual access to unmarried, childless women during the women’s prime fertile years.”
He also notes, prior to reporting these details, that there is a curious disparity in the distribution of genital herpes in the human population: about twice as many women are infected as compared to men. Even allowing for the fact that it’s easier for women to contract herpes, the only explanation for this disparity is that a comparatively smaller group of men is having sex with a somewhat larger group of women, a kind of modern fusion of the concept of a harem with the transience of one-night stands and short-term hookups. Indeed, Roissy even notes the emergence of a “hookup culture” on many college campuses, and notes that one of the principal drivers of this trend is the fact that women “are slutting it up because they fear competition from other women taking their men.”
In other words, as society trends away from its Christian norms, and related concepts like the primacy of family and sexual shaming, it isn’t marching boldly into some new secular utopian future. Sexually, at least, it is instead marching right back into the same pagan abyss that it pulled itself out of lo those many thousands of years ago. With the added bonus, I might add, of not breeding at all, rather than breeding in a genetically lop-sided fashion.
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Posted in: Atheism - Christianity - Diseases - Men and Women - Reproduction - Sex | Tags: Atheism, Christianity, herpes, hypergamy, men, paganism, Sex, women
There is a good, though frustrating, article up at TakiMag, which talks about the inability of liberals to accept facts which contradict their deeply held beliefs. Or, at least, it starts out being about liberals, and expands to include ideologues in general, of all stripes. The article lists several truthful statements which fly in the face of what could be termed liberal orthodoxy, and I’d like to look at each of those just briefly.
But first, a quibble. The article’s author, Jim Goad, needs to take a bit of his own medicine where investigating and accepting facts is concerned. When speaking of his rejection of Christianity in his teens, he observes thusly:
I was around sixteen when I stopped believing in Jesus Christ as my savior. I reached the point where I’d read enough of the Bible to realize it contained several items that couldn’t possibly be true simultaneously. For instance, no infallible God would establish an “eternal” covenant, only to change His mind, revoke it later, and then suddenly pull a New Covenant out of his ass. A perfect God simply wouldn’t roll like that.
Even a cursory search of Wikipedia would have set Mr. Goad straight on his mistaken beliefs in this regard. Or, alternatively, he could have flipped to the Book of Jeremiah, chapter 31, and read:
- “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, `Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
In one sense, Mr. Goad is correct: “no infallible God would establish an “eternal” covenant, only to change His mind, revoke it later, and then suddenly pull a New Covenant out of his ass.” But then, God did not revoke the Old Covenant; human beings violated it and broke their part of it. Man made it necessary; God did not revoke it arbitrarily.
Mr. Goad is also somewhat cringe-worthy at the end of his article, when he notes:
…I don’t look right or left—only up and down. When I look down, I see hard-line ideologues and weak-willed compromisers. When I look up, I see skeptics, who are our only hope. Skepticism and curiosity, not Jesus and Mary, are what made the West great. We need to elevate our skeptics and demote our ideologues. Our national motto should be “Don’t stop disbelievin’.”
This, of course, is a very improper form of skepticism and, moreover, is not the form that Mr. Goad exhorts his readers to practice in the parts of the article which precede this silly declaration. Proper skepticism is not the automatic rejection of belief in things as a rule, but rather a process of testing and inquiry that will lead to some beliefs being discarded and others being adopted.
The form of skepticism that Mr. Goad idealizes above is exactly the sort that Chesterton warned against. Like as not, both proper skepticism and a healthy dose of Jesus and Mary are what made the West, and in particular the United States, great.
It’s a pity that Mr. Goad frames his otherwise excellent argument with such village Atheism, though, because the points he makes regarding the inability of, especially, liberals to accept facts which directly challenge their worldview are excellent. And the list of facts he rattles off as evidence of this is…telling. Try some of these on your liberal friends:
Communist governments killed perhaps a hundred million more people than the Nazis did.
Easily verifiable and well-documented
Women commit acts of domestic violence at a higher rate than men do.
The major reasons why this one sounds hard to believe are because men are less likely to classify pushing and slapping as “violence” than are women, and because men are much less likely than women to report being assaulted by a wife or girlfriend. However, once these discrepancies are adjusted for, women do come out on top as the more common initiators of violence.
Blacks commit interracial violence at a rate far in excess of their representation in the general population.
Blacks represent about 12.4% of the US population. Yet in looking at crime statistics, over 45% of racially motivated crimes committed by blacks were targeted at white people. (By comparison, whites make up about 75% of the US population, yet the white-on-black race crime rate comes in at 54.1%.)
Sex has a lot to do with rape.
This one should be self-evident.
Race is a biologically quantifiable reality in addition to something that can be manipulated as a social construct.
Here’s just one example. Alternatively, walk by any school and take note of the demographic breakdown of a) the kids playing basketball vs. b) the kids sitting under a tree working a calculator.
Black-on-black murders in the USA every year are roughly double the total number of blacks lynched in America throughout history.
There were over 14,000 murders in the United States in 2008. Of those, 47.8% of the victims were black – 6,778 victims, roughly. Of those, fully 90% were killed by another black person – 6100 victims.
By comparison, there are at most 3,446 lynchings of blacks recorded in US history, and then over a span of nearly a century.
Islam is far more misogynistic and anti-Semitic than most white male Christians are.
There are too many examples of this easily discoverable via Google for me to even bother linking a handful of choice ones.
There is not a shred of evidence to support the idea of innate cognitive and physical equality between human ethnic groups.
This gets back to a point discussed above.
Many of the nations that wound up being colonized were not innately peaceful and were only subjugated due to their inferior defensive technology.
The noble savage myth has been well-documented for a while now, and we often find new evidence of just how warlike and, yes, barbaric, the various tribal cultures that inhabited the lands that Britain, France, and other countries colonized actually were.
Now, what’s curious is that in the last two items he lists, Mr. Goad gets back to sound Christian reaoning:
Collective, intergenerational guilt is a fantasy that doesn’t exist.
The ends do not justify the means.
These are not statements which can be demonstrably be proven true using empirical or statistical evidence, but which are demonstrably true from reason and Philosophy. But of course, try and reason with someone on the Left and see how far that gets you.
Mr. Goad nails the analysis of the basic problem: “Over the years, I watched as liberals slowly became the group most likely to flat-out refuse discussing certain topics and answering certain questions, their purportedly “open” minds snapping shut like a giant clam. They became the group most likely to try and silence their opponents by shouting them down, defaming them, assaulting them, and even urging legislation to ban the use and expression of certain terms and sentiments. They became the group most disposed toward emotional appeals, double standards, wishful thinking, and wretchedly malodorous sanctimony…With modern American liberalism, it’s as if their cute, multicolored, and sincerely curious little 1960s caterpillar had blossomed into a hardened grey butterfly fossil. Liberalism had become an emotion-driven folk Religion that somehow had convinced itself science and logic were on its side.”
Just so. Liberalism might once have meant the advancement of the ideal of liberty, of human freedoms, but has become instead conflated with the socially destructive and immensely flawed idea of progressivism. And progressivism is best understood not as a function of reason and logic, but as a function of emotion…and thus both opposed and immune to reason and logic. One could even posit a masculine/feminine distinction between classical liberalism and modern liberalism…and one would be correct in doing so.
One would probably also end up before a human rights commission for doing so, but that is a separate matter.
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Posted in: American Politics - Atheism - Christianity - Men and Women - Philosophy | Tags: Atheism, Book of Jeremiah, Britain, Chesterton, Christ, Christianity, Communism, domestic violence, France, God, Google, human rights commission, interracial violence, Islam, Jesus, Jim Goad, logic, men, Philosophy, rape, reason, Religion, science, Sex, skepticism, TakiMag, the Bible, United States, USA, women
An artist has recreated key scenes from the Bible such as Jesus‘s crucifixion and the parting of the Red Sea to show what they would have looked like from space.
The ‘God‘s eye view’ re-enacts moments including Noah’s Ark in the floods and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as seen from a satellite.
James Dive spent more than three months painstakingly researching the Biblical locations on Google Earth.
Here’s his “Parting of the Red Sea” composition:
Not pictured: Egyptian Chariots
There’s a couple of other good ones at the Daily Mail link, and more still in the guy’s gallery show.
Ah, the wondrous things that can be done with Google Earth and Photoshop! And is it just me, or is it nice to see art concerning the Bible and the people and events therein which is not intended to be blasphemous?
(via)
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Posted in: Christianity - Editing Software - History - Might just be interesting | Tags: Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden, God, Google, Google Earth, James Dive, Jesus, Photoshop, Red Sea, the Bible
The Toronto Star (naturally) is all in a huff (naturally) about the tendency of men (naturally) to “choose macho foods if given sufficient time to contemplate a menu”. Apparently this is because men are concerned with looking tough (naturally), which is evidently a problem (this is the Star, after all).
(If I had a steak sandwich, fries, and gravy in front of me right now, I’d write the rest of this article in between bites of potato and cooked-till-it’s-barely-rare beef. As I lack such a delectable feast, I’ll just have to settle for writing this article in between sips of coffee.)
First off, let’s grant the point that repeatedly consuming so-called “macho” food (I say “so-called” because I can’t think of any guy who would term it as such) can contribute to poor heart health. But equally: so what? There may be reasons why dying at 52 isn’t all that awesome, but satisfying the concerns of an over-concerned woman and appearing less “macho” aren’t two of them. There are also ways to offset those negative impacts to some extent, including several other so-called “macho” activities (that’s what gyms are for).
Let me also point out that the author of the piece, one Nicole Baute, is probably female. Although, the use of the term “macho” in a semi-serious context should have given that fact away; as noted, it’s not really a guy term (except perhaps in jest). This is a key observation, because (as I am coming to learn) of the core assumptions, or axioms, of the social phenomena called Game.
- There are plenty of girls on the girl tree.
- Do not mistake physical beauty for positive character.
- Always err on the side of too much boldness.
- Never show fear, doubt, insecurity or indecision.
- Remember that a woman’s words are not meant to be taken at face value.
Game, as Vox Day puts it, “is essentially a guide to simulating alpha behavior for the majority of men who are non-alphas. Although developed by pick-up artists with a focus on plowing through scores of women like a Panzer division through 1940s France, it is arguably even more useful for the man who wishes to find a good, attractive woman and provide her with what she most desires, which is marriage to a man she perceives to be of high value.”
Per Axiom #5, then, there’s little about Ms. Baute’s article that one should really give too much weight to, and in so doing one will generally do well. This in turn is due to Axiom #3, which is in many respects the core of the advice that the five axioms give, and is the advice that is most generally applicable in everyday pursuits. What she says about heart health is worth consideration on its factual merits. The derision she heaps upon alpha males (real or merely portrayed) or the notion that men should be raised to act like men can be safely ignored.
We can even posit that Ms. Baute herself probably prefers and desires in person the very same “manly men” she bemoans in print. That’s what makes Game work as well as it does: even though they may outwardly declare preference for some other male archetype (a beta male/delta male/gamma male, depending on whose ranking system you care to use), their primal selves will be drawn to the bolder, more decisive, more “manly” men.
Now, Game in the Christian context is a little bit different…especially in the Christian marital context.
In a genuinely Christian marriage, Axiom #1 is of course to be set aside, and even Axiom #2 diminishes in usefulness. It hopefully goes without saying that no Christian husband should be contemplating moving on to the next girl, and hopefully a Christian husband who has married wisely has chosen for himself a bride who has a beautiful character (and who hopefully is not herself hard on the eyes) brimming with faith and love for her husband. That said, a Christian husband can still apply the last three axioms to great effect in discharging his role as the head of the household, and an unmarried Christian man can use all five axioms to capture and win the affections of a woman whom he could then pursue marriage with.
The trick, for the Christian man, is not to fall into the trap that so many do, which is to pedestalize one’s wife and assert that one was a hopeless, lost fool before meeting and marrying her.
It may well be — indeed, it should probably always be the case — that marrying a Christian bride should serve to improve a man’s lot in life. Chesterton very correctly noted that “[w]omen are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.” (Conspicuously, and deliberately, there is no exhortation there for men to not display “extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism.”)
And contra Ms. Baute’s printed assertions, and even in spite of the health implications, it is in some ways in a man’s best interest to act with that “extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism,” and to do so repeatedly. That includes opting for “macho” foods over salads. Why? Because that actually is what men who are men do. And women are drawn to that, despite what they might say on the printed page.
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Posted in: Christianity - Men and Women - Sex | Tags: Chesterton, food, Game, marriage, men, Nicole Baute, Toronto Star, Vox Day, women
…how the small but vocal minority who e.g. lobby to ban crucifixes from Italian classrooms always dress up their reasoning in the language of self-determination, of seeking the right to raise their children as they see fit (as though the presence of a religious icon hanging — usually unremarked upon — on a wall were some manner of impairment to doing so), or something along those lines?
What about the 90% of Italians who self-identify as Christian? Do they likewise desire the right to raise their children as they see fit, and do they likewise deserve to exercise that right? What if a component of that right, for at least some of them, includes a crucifix on the wall? In a sane society, this wouldn’t even be a question: the larger group would not have their rights diminished to satisfy the demands of the smaller group (since, really, the smaller group is not, in any reasonable sense being denied its rights or otherwise oppressed).
But then, the West has long since parted ways with sanity, hasn’t it?
Or perhaps it has only mostly done so. Italy is attempting to reverse the banning of crucifixes from its classrooms, though it is a pity that Italians themselves can’t be moved to return to a more typically Catholic birthrate, even if only in the interests of keeping Italy Italian.
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Posted in: Atheism - Catholicism - Christianity - Education - European News - European Politics - Law | Tags: Catholicism, Christianity, crucifix, Italy