Sometimes we wonder at what a completely secularist state would actually look like if only we could get rid of the pernicious influence of religion. What an amazing place where superstition and ignorance would be banished. We wonder about how lucky people who live there would be...

....wonder no more.

It seems that refugees from one secularist state fleeing into another secularist state are told to seek out Christians to survive.

Kirkpatrick tells the story of one abandoned, starving boy named Joseph who scrambled across the Tumen River into China in February 2005, risking the chance that he would be captured or shot on sight. (Virtually all escapees go north into China — crossing the demilitarized zone into South Korea is effectively impossible.) In the Chinese village across the river, he found no one to help him until he knocked on the door of a Christian, who fed him and told him to go to the nearest town. There an old woman advised him to find a church, because Christians helped escapees. “What’s a church?” Joseph asked. “Look for a building with a cross on it,” she told him.

He did find a church, connecting with a network of Chinese Christians that eventually helped him find refuge at the American consulate in Shenyang and, miraculously, political asylum in the United States. “The first survival tip a North Korean learns when he reaches China,” Kirkpatrick writes, is to “find a Christian.”

Untold numbers of North Koreans have converted to Christianity following their escape, and some brave ones have even returned to North Korea, at extraordinary personal risk, to serve as witnesses to their countrymen.//

This is getting to be completely insane.

Baptists are presumed to be subversive:

The U.S. Military has blocked access to the Southern Baptist Convention’s website on an unknown number of military bases because it contains “hostile content” — just weeks after an Army briefing labeled Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics as examples of religious extremism, Fox News has learned.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination known for its support of the pro-life movement and its strong belief in traditional marriage. 

Southern Baptist chaplains reported that SBC.net had been blocked at military installations around the nation. An Air Force officer told Fox News that when he tried to log on to the website he received a message that his Internet usage was being logged and monitored for trying to access a blocked site.

The censorship was made public after an Army officer tried to log onto the denomination’s website and instead — received a warning message. 

“The site you have requested has been blocked by Team CONUS (C-TNOSC/RCERT-CONUS) due to hostile content,” the message read. 

Team CONUS protects the computer network of the Dept. of Defense. The SBC’s website was not blocked at the Pentagon. 

It’s unclear what the “hostile content” might have been. The SBC is pro-life and opposed to same-sex marriage.

So, someone in our government now thinks that Southern Baptists are subversives?

That is very disturbing.

Tolerance is the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

Secularist Canadian government censors philosophy and the Catholic Catechism at a Catholic school.

Here is the story:

Education minister Scott Kent told the CBC that he ordered the document to be immediately removed from Vanier Catholic Secondary School’s website since it did not meet his department's requirements. 

But bishop Gordon, religious education director for all Catholic secondary schools in the diocese, told the CBC that the education department approved the policy last spring. “It was vetted by the Department of Education, the policy people,” he said.

The policy, quoting The Catechism of the Catholic Church, states that “homosexual acts” are “acts of grave depravity” and that “tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’”  

The policy continues quoting the Catechism: “They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” 

While condemning homosexual acts, the policy makes it clear the persons struggling with same-sex attraction must be treated with the same rights and given the same respect as everyone else. 

“All persons, share the same rights and dignity and are called to live as God's children,” states the policy. “It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard to others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.”  

Kent met with Bishop Gordon on the issue last week. The minister said that they both agreed the policy should be deleted from the school’s website.  

While Bishop Gordon agreed to remove the policy, he nevertheless stated that the policy will remain in effect for teachers at Vanier. 

Repeating the Church’s teaching on the issue, the bishop said, “Homosexual activity is always morally wrong”. He pointed out that Catholic school should be allowed to teach Catholic teaching on the issue.

Here is the secular newspaper story for those who don't trust special interests.

Water is wet, the sky is blue and...

...religious people give more to charity.

Here's the story:

Just as America is often divided between red and blue and rich and poor, a new study shows a similar gap between Americans who give more generously to charity and those who don’t. But the study says almost as much about Americans’ religious participation as it does our willingness to give.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy released a fascinating survey this week on how (and how much) America donates to charitable organizations. One of the most interesting findings shows that those who tend to give the most live in more religious areas. A substantial portion of giving in the U.S., you see, comes in the form of tithing to churches. When religion is taken out of the equation, the charitable landscape alters considerably.

And:

Take away churches as charities, however, and red states no longer dominate the world of donations. Instead, New England – a region that leans Democratic, with far fewer religiously affiliated Americans but with more affluent residents – catapults toward the top.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy found that the South gives roughly 5.2% of its discretionary income to charity– including both religious and non-religious groups – while New England only gives 4%. But if churches are excluded, the South’s percentage drops to 0.9% and New England’s only drops to 1.4%. New York state would be second in the country in giving if religion was removed from the equation, while Pennsylvania would jump from No. 40 into the top 5.

The last two paragraphs seem to be misleading. How are we to know that if religion was "removed from the equation" the charitable states wouldn't give to non-religious charities? Clearly we know no such thing.

Another point is that what religion has going for it is that it creates and sustains a community, which, presumably, is conducive to charitable giving. What the statistics seem to indicate is that when we "remove religion from the equation," some of the charitable impulses are redirected toward non-religious charities, but the overall effect is a reduction of charitable giving.

So, isn't that really the lesson - the less religion there is, the less there is a community, and the less charity we see?

Holy Freakin' Moly.

Walter Russell Mead writes:

German Court Declares Judaism A Crime


Hard to believe, but that’s what the decision handed down by the regional court in Cologne, Germany means: circumcising a child under the age of consent is a crime, notwithstanding the religious beliefs of the parents.

Many judges who loyally served the Third Reich finished their careers in perfect peace and quiet after World War Two; in some cases, they are still collecting pensions for administering Hitler’s laws. However, Germany’s moral sensibilities are so refined and so pure today that the thought of Jewish parents (or Muslims for that matter) performing an immemorial religious rite is unacceptable.

Jews believe that the circumcision of infants is a necessary act; the command to circumcise male children at the age of eight days is the first command that God gives Abraham to mark their covenant; for thousands of years this has been a foundation of Jewish life. To ban infant circumcision is essentially to make the practice of Judaism illegal in Germany; it is now once again a crime to be a Jew in the Reich.

Here is the source.

The Liberal's greatest fear is...

...that someone, somewhere might be praying in an untaxed building.

[Note - "liberalism" meaning the intellectual tradition forming the political philosophy of modernity, which therefore encompasses Republicans as well as Democrats.]

Signature collection begins for initiative that would eliminate tax examption for religious property.

If a Jo Shaffer, who apparently lives in the hamlet of Cobb near Clear Lake, can find at least 807,615 like-minded California souls, her proposal to eliminate the property tax exemption for religious organizations could get on the ballot.

She was given the go-ahead Thursday to begin gathering the 807,615 signatures that will be needed. Under state law, those signatures have to be submitted to the Secretary of State’s office by Nov. 2.

The proposal eliminates property tax exemptions based on a property’s use for religious worship or other religious purposes, starting Jan. 1, 2013.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst and the governor’s Director of Finance say that if approved, the constitutional change could mean a windfall for state and local government. They estimate that if religious groups had to pay property taxes, local government revenue would jump by roughly $225 million a year. The state General Fund savings in most years would be about $100 million from increased local property tax revenues for school and community college districts, they say.

This is an example of liberal mindset in action. According to Steven D. Smith, traditionally the relationship of Church and State was a matter of jurisdiction; the state had no jurisdiction over the church. This meant that the state could not tax core church property, such as houses of worship. It also meant that the state could not dictate that the church act in ways that would violate its core beliefs.

Over time, as in, in recent years, the liberal impulse to treat all aspects of society as falling within the competence and scope of the liberal state has meant that the state no longer recognizes the jurisdictional claims of the church. The church is simply another constituency within society that the state has to consider in allocating rights and claim as against rights and claims of other constituencies.

Thus, rather than being a matter of jurisdiction, "justice" - specifically, the liberal conception of justice - becomes the rule for the relationship between church and state.

One problem with this change is that "liberalism" is not value-neutral. As pointed out by D.C. Schindler, liberalism comes with a pre-commitment to particular values and goals, not the least of which is the proposition that religious rights are entitled to be accorded to any special status vis a vis any other right:

16In the liberal understanding, there exists no such thing as the idea of the human person as homo religiosus, that is, as a naturally religious being in the sense affirmed by thinkers in the patristic and scholastic periods, and indeed in a significant sense by all great religious thinkers (see, for example, St. Augustine’s claim that God is
more interior to me than I am to myself). To be sure, this idea of man as homo religiosus does not attenuate the need and intrinsic importance of free acts for religion rightly conceived! I merely wish to point out that the idea—fundamental for Locke, for example—that religion is an essentially voluntary society stands at the root of the tendency no longer to grant special status to the right to religious freedom, that is, as distinct from the right to freedom in other contexts and senses. Given liberalism’s formal freedom, in other words, relation to God becomes eo ipso a matter of choice: something that is so far first enacted by me, as distinct from being originally given to me as integral to my nature and reaching to the core of my being as a creature. But a God relation to whom is first elected by me, as distinct from being naturally-originally given to me, becomes by definition an arbitrary (because voluntaristic) addition to my natural secular reality. Even if I wish to make God the center of my life, doing so can now be properly only a fabrication (from fabricor, to make, forge); logically, God remains one among many of my equally-metaphysically arbitrary choices. In short, the special status accorded the right to religious freedom finds a reasonable basis finally only in a God who
reaches to the inner meaning and depths of my secular nature as such, and thus makes a difference to everything I am and do; and this reasonable basis requires a relation to God that is first naturally-given as distinct from chosen. Given liberalism’s idea of religion as essentially a voluntary matter, therefore, the Obama administration is so far not inconsistent in denying the special status of the right to religious freedom.

If that's too deep, consider the fact that the taxes raised by the state will be used for abortion, contraception, war, blood transfusions, pork production, cattle production, or any of a myriad of other activities that particular religious traditions view as being contrary to their belief systems.

As things now exist, these religious traditions can maintain a jurisdictional modus vivendi with the state that advances what they see as anathemas.

Liberal rhetoric often involves a claim that some religious group is trying to force their views on non-believers. When religions are forced to subsidize the state, then that argument loses whatever force it has; religious traditions will have no choice but to play the game of politics as any other political group, endorsing particular candidates, putting up a slate of politicians to protect its interests, as occurred with the Catholic Center Party in pre-Nazi Germany.

If liberals think that religion has too much involvement in politics now, imagine what the future will hold.

Tossing a pinch of incense to the statue of the emperor.

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal says "welcome to 3rd Century Rome":

Suddenly amid this hallowed tradition, we get Barack Obama and Kathleen Sebelius (Trinity College, '70) claiming with the zeal of secular fanatics that these priests, nuns, their hospitals and the people who work in them will find a way to pay for and permit sterilizations and abortifacients. Catholics can believe what they want inside their churches, but in public they too must show belief in reproductive rights as defined in law by the state. Welcome to 3rd-century Rome.

The resisting Catholic bishops, say the administration and its factions, are "out of step" with the current American consensus on women's reproductive rights. Possibly so, but official Catholic doctrine and the HHS mandate are in opposition.

The Obama administration is effectively saying that all the practices and beliefs embedded in the Obama health-care law are established in America and consent is required, no matter what some religion purports to believe. It is this attempt to displace religious belief with an alternative belief system that goes against the American grain and has Catholics up in arms.

Perhaps the Catholic-myth people are right that most Catholics are OK now with abortifacients. And maybe the pundits dripping ridicule and bile on New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan have got the modern American Catholic pegged right. I doubt it. Not yet.

Exactly.

Can we just acknowledge that the secularist experiment has failed wherever it's been tried?

Japan faces demographic disaster:

Eberstadt has spent years writing about the challenges posed by declining fertility around the globe. But Japan, he notes, is a unique case. The Japanese birthrate hovers around just 1.3 children per woman, far below the level required to maintain a stable population. Thanks to increasing life expectancy, by 2040 “there could almost be one centenarian on hand to welcome each Japanese newborn.” Over the same period, the overall Japanese population is likely to decline by 20 percent, with grim consequences for an already-stagnant economy and an already-strained safety net.

Japan is facing such swift demographic collapse, Eberstadt’s essay suggests, because its culture combines liberalism and traditionalism in particularly disastrous ways. On the one hand, the old sexual culture, oriented around arranged marriage and family obligation, has largely collapsed. Japan is one of the world’s least religious nations, the marriage rate has plunged and the divorce rate is higher than in Northern Europe.

Yet the traditional stigma around out-of-wedlock childbearing endures, which means that unmarried Japanese are more likely to embrace “voluntary childlessness” than the unwed parenting that’s becoming an American norm. And the traditional Japanese suspicion of immigration (another possible source for demographic vitality) has endured into the 21st century as well. Eberstadt notes that “in 2009 Japan naturalized barely a third as many new citizens as Switzerland, a country with a population only 6 percent the size of Japan’s and a reputation of its own for standoffishness.”

These trends are forging a society that sometimes evokes the infertile Britain in James’s dystopia. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and there were rashes of Internet-enabled group suicides in the last decade. Rental “relatives” are available for sparsely attended wedding parties; so-called “babyloids” — furry dolls that mimic infant sounds — are being developed for lonely seniors; and Japanese researchers are at the forefront of efforts to build robots that resemble human babies. The younger generation includes millions of so-called “parasite singles” who still live with (and off) their parents, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of the “hikikomori” — “young adults,” Eberstadt writes, “who shut themselves off almost entirely by retreating into a friendless life of video games, the Internet and manga (comics) in their parents’ home.”

It seems that making the individual the measure of all things doesn't work in the long run.

My question is, why can't they do both?

I mean, "Addicting Info" apparently thinks that every other Catholic can "multi-task," so why not nuns?

You kind of get an idea where this post is coming from with the headline:

Pope Tells Nuns To Forget About Feeding The Poor And Focus On Hating The Gays.

Because "not feeding the poor" and "hating gays" is clearly what the Vatican meant when it said "stop forgetting Jesus."

What is educational, particularly in light of reading a science fiction mystery set in a future where secularism has been made the official and total ideology of the state, called "The Night Sessions," is the vile river of hate vomitted forth by the secularist commenters.

Here's the problem when someone is locked in the "iron cage of secular rationalism"...

...they may discover that other people do not agree with their view of the secular good.

Nobel peace prize winner defends law criminalising homosexuality in Liberia.

The Nobel peace prize winner and president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has defended a law that criminalises homosexual acts, saying: "We like ourselves just the way we are."

In a joint interview with Tony Blair, who was left looking visibly uncomfortable by her remarks, Sirleaf told the Guardian: "We've got certain traditional values in our society that we would like to preserve."

Liberian legislation classes "voluntary sodomy" as a misdemeanour punishable by up to one year in prison, but two new bills have been proposed that would target homosexuality with much tougher sentences.

And:

Blair, on a visit to Liberia in his capacity as the founder of the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), a charity that aims to strengthen African governments, refused to comment on Sirleaf's remarks.

When asked whether good governance and human rights went hand in hand, the British former prime minister said: "I'm not giving you an answer on it."

"One of the advantages of doing what I do now is I can choose the issues I get into and the issues I don't. For us, the priorities are around power, roads, jobs delivery," he said.

Over his 10 years as prime minister, Blair became a champion for the legal equality of gay people, pushing through laws on civil partnerships, lifting a ban on gay people in the armed forces and lowering the age of consent for gay people to 16.

A Catholic convert, he called on the pope to rethink his "entrenched" views and offer equal rights to gay people. But gay rights, he said, were not something he was prepared to get involved in as an adviser to African leaders.

Wham! Multiculturalism runs head-on into political correctness!

Because obviously you can lecture the pope, but lecturing a Nobel peace prize winning president of a Third World Country would just be presumptious of Blair.

A more serious point is that this highlights the point made in Steven D. Smith's "The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse." Today, no one can seriously say that "accepting homosexuality" has no effect on anyone else. If there is one thing that recent history shows it is that the people who start out arguing for decriminalization pretty quickly start to criminalize the conduct of other people who are minding their own business, whether it is making cakes or officiating at marriages.

In the West, the position championed by Blair has been based on a "smuggling" of concepts which have never been seriously vetted. The reason is that these concepts are not self-evident and not something that can be discovered through pure secular reasoning.

Consequently, when faced with someone like Sirleaf, what can Blair say? All he's got is his muzzy intuition that everyone ought to agree with him because he has "reason" itself on his side. If someone doesn't agree with him, all he - and other people on his side - can do is yell louder or resort to some kind of force, such as linking foreign aid to the Western politically correct agenda.

I'm tired of verbs taking the place of content.

"Hope and Change." For what?

"Choice." For what.

Content matters, and that may be why modernity and secularism hate Catholicism:

The Catholic Church adheres to an ethic of substantive human purposes — things like life, truth, and justice — that establish the parameters of ethically acceptable choices and behavior. To do the right thing is to act within these boundaries; to do what is wrong is to act outside them.

The secularist mindset, by contrast, favors a libertarian ethic of process and procedure — values like democracy, equal opportunity, and that epitome of the process ethic: the “right to choose.” To be sure, most people rightly live by a mix of values of both kinds — partly substantive, partly procedural — but the differences in emphasis are real and often extremely important.

According to the process ethic, there is in principle no such thing as absolute right and wrong — no substantive good that can’t be violated in a pinch if violating it furthers the exercise of choice by a sufficient number of persons.

So what if making religious institutions part of a system for providing contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients (this is what Obama’s February “accommodation” would do) violates the consciences of people with traditional views on matters of substantive right and wrong? The overriding procedural imperative of the secular culture requires permitting, even subsidizing, the choices of those who want these things.

A Washington Post columnist called President Obama’s purported concession to of the bishops’ objections to the contraception-sterilization-abortifacient mandate (a proposal hailed even by some Catholic individuals and groups) “a dodge — a quite clever and positive one.” So it was — a skillful procedural sleight-of-hand aimed not at upholding some strongly held standard of right and wrong but doing a deal.

Meanwhile the Catholic Church stands as the principal obstacle to realization of the secularists’ procedural paradise of all-but-unconditional choice. However the current controversy ends, this larger conflict will continue.

Explaining the Secular Atheists.

Andrew Brown in the Guardian examines militant atheism:

There are three kinds of people in Britain today who might be taken for militant secularists: that is to say people who are not just themselves unbelievers, but have an emotional investment in the extirpation of religious belief in others. There are the adolescents who have just discovered "rationality"; there are gay people who feel personally threatened by traditional monotheist morality; and, in this country, there are parents frustrated by the admissions policy of religiously controlled schools.

About the adolescents, there is nothing to be done. Some will discover Richard Dawkins the way that others discover Ayn Rand. Large confident solutions to all the world's problems, which are only held back by the stupidity and self-interest of the old, will always appeal to teenagers. Most of them will grow up and those who don't will grow old and never hear the younger selves who'd call them tragics.

The position of gay people in this culture war seems to me historical and contingent. All of the main monotheistic traditions contain strong and contradictory currents of opinion about homosexuality, ranging from unremitting hostility to much more understanding and sympathy than was found in the secular world until recently. My own feeling is that humanity will win out here. I could be wrong, but in 20 or 30 years' time we will know.

And:

Their real offence, though, is that they don't understand the rules of secular debate. I know that this will appear a contradiction in terms: how can a secularist misunderstand the rules of secular debate? But Baggini's definition provides a way to understand this. A secularist, he says, is someone who appeals to natural reason, and not to divine law. And this kind of reason is by definition something shared by both sides in the argument. But the militant secularist takes for granted that "the religious" have no access to reason. There can be no reasoning with his opponents. All he can do is to repeat himself more loudly until the idiots understand.

This is a character trait, rather than a set of beliefs. It's certainly not confined to atheists. George Carey has it to an excruciating degree. And, of course, in Britain today, no militant has the power to persecute his enemies with the force of law. But that's not because we're nicer than other people, but because our political system is better.

Seen that approach, which consists of repeating the phrase "superstitious" and how "they want to control your life" while making incoherent, contradictory assertions.

It's really lame.

Tolerance - the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

Glen Reynolds observes:

FREE SPEECH: Government Employer Free to Fire Human Resources Officials Who Publicly Criticize the Propriety of Gay Rights Laws. See, once we stopped persecuting commies, the value of dissent quickly became unappreciated.

The Volokh Conspiracy writes:

So holds Dixon v. University of Toledo (N.D. Ohio Feb, 6, 2012). (I blogged about this case when it was filed.) A few thoughts:

(1) Some of the analysis seems limited to high-level “policymaking” employees, such as a university Associate Vice President.

(2) But some of the argument suggests that any time any government manager with hiring and firing authority — or even with substantial input into hiring and firing decisions — speaks out in opposition to civil rights laws protecting gays, the government may fire the manager on the grounds that the speech (a) “could disrupt the … [d]epartment by making homosexual employees uncomfortable or disgruntled,” (b) might lead “homosexual prospective employees [to] reconsider applications,” and (c) might “lead to challenges to her personnel decisions.”

(3) This in turn highlights the danger to government managerial employees who want to participate in, for instance, campaigns opposing same-sex marriage or proposed laws banning sexual orientation discrimination. If you’re such an employee, you’d be wise to keep your mouth shut on such matters, whether it comes to letters to the editor, to blog posts, to yard signs, to campaign donations, or to signatures on initiative or referendum petitions (in states that disclose such signatures). After all, any of these might be noticed by people who will publicize what you said or did, and who will directly or indirectly inform your supervisors about it.

Maybe that’s an acceptable price to pay for effective functioning of government workplaces — the Pickering test is generally not very speech-protective, on this subject or others — and maybe it’s not. But in any case that seems to be where things are headed, at least in many such workplaces.

So, basically, Catholics, Evangelicals and others who dissent from secular orthodoxy need not apply.

Of course, sauce for the goose, etc. Does this mean that HR employees who participate in pro-gay marriage campaigns might be suspected of invidious discriminatory attitudes against Catholics, Evangelicals and others who dissent from secular orthodoxy?

Probably not, under the legal principle of "heads I win, tails you lose."

Terrific.

Concerning Richard Dawkins' crisis of faith ...

...demonstrated by his refusal to debate William Lane Craig.

The faith, in this case, being the liberal faith in reason and dialogue.

Richard Dawkins is noteworthy for making his vitriolic statements against religion and people who believe in religion only where he has the benefit of controlling the forum.  His comfort level in dealing with real confrontation is negligible.  His "debates" are usually with fringe fundamentalists or elderly English Churchmen who are clearly befuddled by his over the top statements against religion.

But he absolutely refuses to interact with the noted Evangelical apologist William Lane Craig, whose machine-like approach to debates tends to cut through the chuffing of strawmen and red-herrings that is the forte of the New Atheists.

Dawkins is desparately casting about for an explanation as to why he won't debate Craig, but the more he explains, the more his explanation seem to undermine the liberal credentials of the New Atheism. Dawkins has tried to explain his refusal to debate William Lane Craig with a series of strawmen and ad hominem attacks:

Oh, the poor soldiers. Let's hope they received counselling after their traumatic experience. A later post by Craig is – if possible – even more shocking. Referring to his earlier article (above) he says:

"I have come to appreciate as a result of a closer reading of the biblical text that God's command to Israel was not primarily to exterminate the Canaanites but to drive them out of the land.[…] Canaan was being given over to Israel, whom God had now brought out of Egypt. If the Canaanite tribes, seeing the armies of Israel, had simply chosen to flee, no one would have been killed at all. There was no command to pursue and hunt down the Canaanite peoples.

It is therefore completely misleading to characterise God's command to Israel as a command to commit genocide. Rather it was first and foremost a command to drive the tribes out of the land and to occupy it. Only those who remained behind were to be utterly exterminated. No one had to die in this whole affair."

So, apparently it was the Canaanites' own fault for not running away. Right.

Would you shake hands with a man who could write stuff like that? Would you share a platform with him? I wouldn't, and I won't. Even if I were not engaged to be in London on the day in question, I would be proud to leave that chair in Oxford eloquently empty.

Here is one atheist's perspective from the same source:

In his latest undignified rant, Dawkins claims that it is because Craig is "an apologist for genocide" that he won't share a platform with him. Dawkins is referring to Craig's defence of God's commandment in Deuteronomy 20: 15-17 to wipe out the Canannites. Here is Craig's offending passage:

"[If] God's grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of [the Canannite] children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven's incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives."

I am disinclined to defend the God of the Old Testament's infanticide policy. But as a matter of logic, Craig is probably right: if an infinite good is made possible by a finite evil, then it might reasonably be said that that evil has been offset. However, I doubt whether Craig would be guided by logic himself in this regard and conduct infanticide. I doubt, that is, that he would wish it to be adopted as a general moral principle that we should massacre children because they will receive immediate salvation.

But whatever you make of Craig's view on this issue, it is irrelevant to the question of whether or not God exists. Hence it is quite obvious that Dawkins is opportunistically using these remarks as a smokescreen to hide the real reasons for his refusal to debate with Craig – which has a history that long predates Craig's comments on the Canaanites.

As a sceptic, I tend to agree with Dawkins's conclusion regarding the falsehood of theism, but the tactics deployed by him and the other New Atheists, it seems to me, are fundamentally ignoble and potentially harmful to public intellectual life. For there is something cynical, ominously patronising, and anti-intellectualist in their modus operandi, with its implicit assumption that hurling insults is an effective way to influence people's beliefs about religion. The presumption is that their largely non-academic readership doesn't care about, or is incapable of, thinking things through; that passion prevails over reason. On the contrary, people's attitudes towards religious belief can and should be shaped by reason, not bile and invective. By ignoring this, the New Atheists seek to replace one form of irrationality with another.

 And here is another atheist who finds Dawkins' explanation to be a betrayal of his stated principles:

The titles of [Craig's] UK lectures give a clue to his breadth: "Does God Exist?", "Can We be Good without God?", "The Origins of the Universe – Has Stephen Hawking Eliminated God?", "The Historicity of Jesus's Resurrection". He is unafraid to range across ontological theology and moral philosophy and talks with ease about new developments in cosmology, mathematics and physics. He has a ready command of easy analogy and can be funny. He is a million miles away from the evangelical rhetoric that amuses and bemuses our secularist and modernist establishment. Proof, he says, is not about scientific or mathematical certainty; it is about a cogent and logical argument which is more plausible than what opponents argue.


This is not the style of the Dawkinsites' preferred adversaries. Their debating techniques tend to be catalogues of religion's historical atrocities, coupled with psychological sideswipes about the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas. Dawkins in the past has been notable for seeking out extreme oddball fundamentalists. He and his followers routinely erect a straw man – defining religion in ways unrecognisable to many mainstream believers – and then knock their caricature to the ground. But Craig is an opponent of a different calibre who focuses ruthlessly on failures of internal logic in his rivals' arguments.

What is striking to the outsider is the ad hominem abuse that has been hurled his way. Dawkins has blogged of his "almost visceral loathing" of Craig's "odiously unctuous, smug and self-satisfied tone of voice". Craig, he says, is a "deeply unimpressive... ponderous buffoon" who uses "chopped logic" for "bamboozling his faith-head audience". On Dawkins's website his supporters have called Craig a "debased freak" and "snakeoil salesman".

When A C Grayling was invited to debate Craig's assertion that, without religion, there are no objective moral values, only social conventions, he scornfully replied: "I would be happy to debate him on the question of the existence of fairies and water-nymphs." So much for the assertion by the British Humanist Association, of which Grayling is a luminary, that one of its core values is "engaging in debate rationally, intelligently and with attention to evidence".

Remember, though, that the Catholic Church is responsible for the spread of AIDS in Africa.

Irony alert -

Contraceptive Used in Africa May Double Risk of H.I.V.

The most popular contraceptive for women in eastern and southern Africa, a hormone shot given every three months, appears to double the risk the women will become infected with H.I.V., according to a large study published Monday. And when it is used by H.I.V.-positive women, their male partners are twice as likely to become infected than if the women had used no contraception.


The findings potentially present an alarming quandary for women in Africa. Hundreds of thousands of them suffer injuries, bleeding, infections and even death in childbirth from unintended pregnancies. Finding affordable and convenient contraceptives is a pressing goal for international health authorities.

So, if a person followed Catholic doctrine and only had sex within marriage to someone who also followed Catholic doctrine, then the chance of catching AIDS would be, well, zero.
 
On the other hand, following the advice of modernist secularists seems to be a good recipe for spreading HIV in Africa.
 
Ironic, what?
 
Via Mark Shea at his new Patheos digs.

Contemplating the Approaching Intolerance.

For Catholics - and some others - this is Brave New World we will be facing in very short order.

From Red Cardigan:

My pledge


Newsflash: Republicans in New York are as much a bunch of cowardly traitors as Republicans everywhere else in America.

Republicans apparently have no problem using the force of the law to define every single Catholic in America as a "bigot," from here on out.

I pledge by my faith that I will never, ever vote for a Republican again, as long as I live.

As Mark Shea observes:

The Chattering Classes are, of course, hailing the NY Gay "Marriage" revolt against western civilization as a triumph. In fact, of course, it is the resuscitation of the corpse of marrige (murdered with a bullet through the brain by no fault divorce) as a sort of murdering Frankenstein monster whose principal target will be the Church. Very soon, it will be used as a legal cudgel to bash the Church for "hate crimes" because of its failure to recognize it.

After all, if it's perfectly constitutional for San Francisco to stigmatize Catholics as adhering to a belief system that is bigoted and antithetical to the norms of decency and all that is San Francisco, why would it be unconstitutional to extend that definition to the entire United States?

And it's not like secularism is viewed even by secularists like Sam Harris as a wall against killing people for holding "dangerous beliefs."

Tolerance is a virtue, which means that it is not natural.

Tolerance - a "live and let live" attitude - is a virtue, which means that it is not natural.  It is a developed skill, a habit, something learned by people who are confronted with a choice of reaction or tolerance, and something learned by watching other people who are confronted with that choice.

Secular liberals seem to think that tolerance is natural, perhaps because, to them, tolerance is something that is applied to things they are completely indifferent to, i.e., religion or race.  When it comes to things that secular liberals do care about, they are famously intolerant, as can be seen from their shouting down people who oppose their views, such as a fourteen year old speaker at a Tea Party rally.

As a learned habit - as a virtue - tolerance depends on social consensus that tolerance is in fact a good thing.  So, it's probably not surprising to see that tolerance will start breaking down everywhere if it breaks down anywhere.  A social attitude that says that it is good for you to be tolerant of my views when I don't have to tolerate yours is not a virtue, it is a species of tyranny.

Hence, this story about French protestors destroying the infamous "Piss Christ" exhibit seems timely:

Armed with hammers and screwdrivers, four protestors in Avignon destroyed a blasphemous 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. Frederic Mitterand, the nation’s culture minister, denounced the act as an “attack on the freedom of creation.”


In an impassioned April 8 statement, Archbishop Jean-Pierre Marie Cattenoz had blasted local officials who permitted the display of the photograph in . Comparing the officials to Pontius Pilate, the prelate noted that they would not have tolerated the display of a similar photograph of the Qur’an.

Here is the story from another source:

Christian fundamentalists in France destroy "Piss Christ" artwork


A group of Christian fundamentalists armed with hammers and screwdrivers destroyed two artworks in an exhibition in the southern French city of Avignon at the weekend, one of which depicted a crucifix immersed in urine, French media reported Monday.


The attack on the photographs of US artist Andres Serrano, which were being shown as part the I Believe in Miracles exhibition of contemporary art followed calls by the local Catholic archbishop for the 'Piss Christ' photograph to be taken down.

The photograph, taken by Serrano in 1987, shows a plastic crucifix wallowing in a glass of the artist's urine. The Christ figure appears to glow in the image, which caused a scandal when it was first exhibited in 1989 and which has since toured the world.

Civitas, a lobby group which says it aims to 're-Christianize France,' called the piece 'sacrilege vis-a-vis God and Catholics' and launched a petition for it to be removed from the exhibition at the residence housing the Yvon Lambert collection.

On Saturday a group of around 500 people shouting Christian slogans demonstrated outside the building, Liberation reported.

The following day four youths wearing sunglasses entered the building and surrounded two security guards stationed in front of the artwork, while others began hacking at it and another of Serrano's photographs, showing a nun meditating.

Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand denounced the incident as an 'attack on the freedom of creation.'

While 'recognizing that the (Piss Christ) artwork could shock certain audiences,' Mitterand said 'any act of violence, destruction and intolerance is unacceptable.'

The attack is not the first involving the artwork. A copy of Piss Christ was vandalized at the National Gallery of Victoria in the Australian city of Melbourne in 1997, during a Serrano retrospective.

The Melbourne gallery later cancelled the show.

Eric Mezil, the director of the Lambert collection, said he would leave the shattered artworks hanging so that the public could 'appreciate the barbarity committed by extremists.'

This story describes the action as being performed by "Christian fundamentalists."  It would have been useful and informative if the story had actually given information telling us who these people were and whether the term "fundamentalist" means anything more than "people with whom the writer disagrees."  

Is it the case that anyone who is offended sufficiently to engage in conduct other than protest is a "fundamentalist"?  If so, is it, therefore, proper to refer to the many Democrat "fundamentalists" who called in death threats to Republicans and spay painted graffiti on statues?

Discrimination in America.

Professor Timothy Larsen offers a story that brought back some memories:

John had been a straight-A student until he enrolled in English writing. The assignment was an “opinion” piece and the required theme was “traditional marriage.” John is a Southern Baptist and he felt it was his duty to give his honest opinion and explain how it was grounded in his faith. The professor was annoyed that John claimed the support of the Bible for his views, scribbling in the margin, “Which Bible would that be?” On the very same page, John’s phrase, “Christians who read the Bible,” provoked the same retort, “Would that be the Aramaic Bible, the Greek Bible, or the Hebrew Bible?” (What could the point of this be? Did the professor want John to imagine that while the Greek text might support his view of traditional marriage, the Aramaic version did not?) The paper was rejected as a “sermon,” and given an F, with the words, “I reject your dogmatism,” written at the bottom by way of explanation.


Thereafter, John could never get better than a C for papers without any marked errors or corrections. When he asked for a reason why yet another grade was so poor he was told that it was inappropriate to quote C. S. Lewis in work for an English class because he was “a pastor.” (Lewis, of course, was actually an English professor at Cambridge University. Perhaps it was wrong to quote Lewis simply because he had said something recognizably Christian.) Eventually John complained to the department chair, who said curtly that he could do nothing until the course was over. John took this to mean that the chair would do nothing and just accepted the bad grade.

In my case, it was an Economics class in 1979 where I defended nuclear power in the face of the TA's condemnation of nuclear power.  After that, I couldn't get better than a "B", which made Econ my worst grade in college.

It happens.

Killing the "Life Unworthy of Life" - It's not just for Nazis anymore.

Lydia McGrew at What's Wrong with the World points out a reader's letter to Human Life Review which goes as follows:

I am 91 years old, had my first heart attack in January 2009. In December 2009 I paid a routine visit to my cardiologist. He checked, found no real change in condition. "Come back in four months" was the verdict. Then he added something that on reflection really shook me up. He suggested that I should, with my loved ones, consider the possibility of termination of my life.


...Understand that I am restrictively active to the extent advisable for my years and heart condition. I am well aware that I am declining physically but my Christian faith assures me that I will meet my Lord in heaven possibly not too far in the future. But I want it to be the Lord that calls me...

That's got to be reassuring.

Lydia McGrew points out that we don't know where this letter comes from.  If it's from Belgium - the home of Eurotopia - it's about par for course.  If it's from the United States, it shows that European values are making their way here.

This is right out of Science Fiction, but, then, what isn't these days?

Surprise! In Flanders, where euthanasia is legal, doctors seem to be killing elderly patients without their consent as often as they kill them with consent.

I suppose this shouldn't really be a surprise, but it's useful to have it documented. In Flanders, where active euthanasia is legal, doctors are killing nearly as many people without their request as with it. The study (based on the doctors' own answers to a questionnaire) found that the people killed without their own request were primarily 80 years old or more and were usually unable to be part of the "decision" because of dementia or coma.


While the authors of the study make some feeble gestures in the direction of wishing to reduce the number of terminations without request, their preferred solution is...ta-dum!--end-of-life planning. In other words, if we can just get the old people to say ahead of time that they want to be killed if they become demented, then when we kill them later, that will be with their consent. Problem solved.

Here is the CMAJ - Canadian Medical Association Journal - abstract coyly entitled "Physician-assisted deaths under the euthanasia law in Belgium: a population-based survey."  The summary reports:

Methods: We mailed a questionnaire regarding the use of life-ending drugs with or without explicit patient request to physicians who certified a representative sample (n =6927) of death certificates of patients who died in Flanders between June and November 2007.

Results: The response rate was 58.4%. Overall, 208 deaths involving the use of life-ending drugs were reported: 142 (weighted prevalence 2.0%) were with an explicit patient request (euthanasia or assisted suicide) and 66 (weighted prevalence 1.8%) were without an explicit request. Euthanasia and assisted suicide mostly involved patients less than 80 years of age, those with cancer and those dying at home. Use of life-ending drugs without an explicit request mostly involved patients 80 years of older, those with a disease other than cancer and those in hospital. Of the deaths without an explicit request, the decision was not discussed with the patient in 77.9% of cases. Compared with assisted deaths with the patient’s explicit request, those without an explicit request were more likely to have a shorter length of treatment of the terminal illness, to have cure as a goal of treatment in the last week, to have a shorter estimated time by which life was shortened and to involve the administration of opioids.

Get the euphemism - "without an explicit request"?

If the request wasn't explicit, how was the request made?  As indicated from the bolded portion of the summary, it sure wasn't discussed.  Were these elderly patients communicating their "requests" by telepathy? 

Or are Belgian doctors just particularly intutive when it comes to discerning that their elderly patients want to be murdered?
Terrific, the secular gnomes of Belgium have turned the medical profession into mass murderers.