Our Israeli correspondent MC returns with a meditation on Socialism, Atheism, Judaeo-Christianity, and the various theological and philosophical currents that created the behavioral sink known as Modernity.
And BHO? What of him? That is in our hands…
by MC
As I read about the John Doe raids in Wisconsin, I wonder at the deceit that we all have to live with in this day and age. The thing about Wisconsin is that a huge part of society sees these raids as necessary to control the ‘racism’ of conservatives. Because conservatives are ‘racist’, National Socialism may once more become popular.
We, as a society, have been inveigled into accepting this mantra as god’s own truth.
But whose god?
The answer here is, of course, any god but Yahweh, the Judeo-Christian God. But specifically the socialist god, i.e. man; but only in a very specific form. Not just any man will do, this man must firstly be male (feminism has no traction in these elevated humanist circles; it is a divisive dogma useful only to destroy the Judeo-Christian family) and well-connected, preferably from a known bloodline. He must have been privately educated and have the hereditary entry into the right circles. Alternatively, he must be stinking rich.
There is no altruism in this group. It is totally self-absorbed, but uses the illusion of ‘goodness and mercy’ to ensnare support by sending deceitful ‘virtue signals’ to those who have a passionate need to be seen to do and be ‘good’ (Lenin’s useful idiots). This group also pays its henchmen well, and it is these henchmen that the general public sees: smiling faces and benign words hiding ruthless ambitions and intentions. These are the guys that press the buttons of the human mincing machines.
At this time we are considering the various holocausts and genocides of modern history. These mass-murder events have changed our psyche; they have provided a backdrop to our notions of civilization. Many, many people are now atheists because of the question “how could god allow this to happen?”.
Again the question arises, which god? Man has free will, and the bible tells us that in the Garden of Eden he, too, became a god.
Islam holds up a man, Mahomet, as perfection. He is a god in all but name. Communism and Nazism are intrinsically humanist, and between these cults can be spread the nearly the entirety of mass murder in the 20th century.
Yet it is these same ‘man’ cults which are increasingly dictating to us the terms of our daily lives. The rise of television has placed many millions of people who would not normally succumb to coercion propaganda in the direct firing line of subliminal lies. With a tame television empire, one no longer needs brown/black/red/green shirts, one just needs JR or Teletubbies. Peppa Pig’s father is an incompetent imbecile. TV gives us the inverted stereotype, moulded by our betters to fool us into thinking that such characters are the reality from cradle to grave and back.
So Islam becomes a religion of ‘peace’, Communism is ‘benign’ and ‘RIGHTist’ Nazism is the most dangerous force on the planet. Muslims are wise and friendly, Communists are intellectuals and conservatives are nasty ‘racists’ who only think about money and the economy.
So we have a picture language, carefully built over time, with the objective of reducing us to a willing and submissive slavery, incapable of any meaningful political thought or analysis.
One may think, and indeed one is taught to think, but only within the bounds set by one’s betters. Go to a modern University and have one’s talents moulded in the image of the acceptable. Real science means that we question everything, but in reality, science is bought and paid for by the same elites that rule everything else, and if one wants to be a scientist then conformity is a prerequisite.
Television has created an age of conformity, and defines the bounds of that conformity. And television is owned by the elites.
Judeo-Christianity, and the idea of ‘do as you would be done by” works. There was a time when Jewish (and here I mean those who kept the tenets of Judaism) bankers were the epitome of honesty, and, because their system of trade credits was trustworthy, foreign trade was able to take place ; so the West, and the Judeo-Christian culture flourished through trade and innovation, but also through faith and trust.
With the bible also came the idea of one law for all; Greek, Jew, bond, free, male, female, rich or poor. But as the influence of Judeo-Christianity has waned, so these ideas are falling into disuse and are neglected. The Jewish bankers are no longer adherents of the Ten Commandments. They have aligned with the relativism of the Rockefellers and the accommodations of the Carnegies, and the world has suffers for it.
Communism built on the Darwinian proposition of an alternative to Yahweh, and the concept of the survival of the fittest, to attack the roots of Judeo-Christianity with a ‘new’ morality which is actually a very, very old morality. In it a small, supposedly intellectual elite define what is right and what is wrong for everybody else. ‘Pharisees’, one might call them. Karl Marx wrote the Communist manifesto as a commission from the ‘League of the Just’ and the ‘Communist League’. Both of these were middle-class organisations that wanted to control ‘the workers’ to gain power (and exclusivity) for themselves. They were wannabe Kings and Emperors.
Marx also wrote this:
The Fiddler
The Fiddler saws the strings,
His light brown hair he tosses and flings.
He carries a sabre at his side,
He wears a pleated habit wide.
“Fiddler, why that frantic sound?
Why do you gaze so wildly round?
Why leaps your blood, like the surging sea?
What drives your bow so desperately?”
“Why do I fiddle? Or the wild waves roar?
That they might pound the rocky shore,
That eye be blinded, that bosom swell,
That Soul’s cry carry down to Hell.”
“Fiddler, with scorn you rend your heart.
A radiant God lent you your art,
To dazzle with waves of melody,
To soar to the star-dance in the sky.”
“How so! I plunge, plunge without fail
My blood-black sabre into your soul.
That art God neither wants nor wists,
It leaps to the brain from Hell’s black mists.
“Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel:
With Satan I have struck my deal.
He chalks the signs, beats time for me,
I play the death march fast and free.”
And this:
Invocation of One in Despair
So a god has snatched from me my all
In the curse and rack of Destiny.
All his worlds are gone beyond recall!
Nothing but revenge is left to me!
On myself revenge I’ll proudly wreak,
On that being, that enthroned Lord,
Make my strength a patchwork of what’s weak,
Leave my better self without reward!
I shall build my throne high overhead,
Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.
For its bulwark — superstitious dread,
For its Marshall — blackest agony.
Who looks on it with a healthy eye,
Shall turn back, struck deathly pale and dumb;
Clutched by blind and chill Mortality
May his happiness prepare its tomb.
And the Almighty’s lightning shall rebound
From that massive iron giant.
If he bring my walls and towers down,
Eternity shall raise them up, defiant.
And defiance? Defy he did; it can be seen from his poetry, which is more likely to portray the true Marx, whose philosophy was not at all Atheist, but was, if anything, pro-Satan and anti-God.
Marx thought that he wrote about capitalism, but he really wrote about cartelism; what happens when elites gain control. In capitalism, competition creates a reasonably level playing field, in cartelism, the field is mountainous and treacherous. Ironically, Communism is the ultimate in cartelism.
So we must decide: Is the world a better place now that Communism and Socialism are replacing Judeo-Christianity? I suspect that many of those who actually understand what is going on here do not think so. The delicate fabric of civilization is falling apart. There are acts of war in our towns and cities, and there are ‘rumours’ of wars* daily (TV broadcasts would be unimaginable by the writers in the 1st century; rumours, that is ‘news’ in the 1st-century context, transmitted at the speed of light, outrageous).
Socialism brings with it a lot of pre-Christian baggage. It is not new; it is, in reality, it is a mechanism whereby those with some intellect can deceive the hoi polloi into paying for their (the socialist elites’) good life, in the (vain) hope that some of the spoils will come their (the peasants’) way.
Unfortunately, the early church eventually also picked up this same philosophy, simply moving the ‘payback’ to the heavenly realms, it is an interesting exercise to compare what we read about in the Book of Acts with what Christianity became over the next 2000 years. There are no church buildings in Acts, and no exclusive priesthood, no bible colleges and no New Testament. That came later; at the time only the Torah, the ‘Writings’ and the Prophets which comprise the Old Testament, were available.
Civilisation happened when the Protestant Reformation took Judeo-Christianity back to the bible, and particularly the Torah (Ten Commandments), and Western Europe took a leap forwards. Then in the 1760s King George thought he could inflict socialism (feudalism) on the American colonialists. He failed.
And Barack Hussein Obama? What of him?
That is in our hands…
| * | You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. (Matthew 24:6) |
MC lives in the southern Israeli city of Sderot. For his previous essays, see the MC Archives.
The deceptive virtue signaling that you mention is related to moral credentialing and moral licensing. There are controlled experiments showing this. For example:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/march4/obama-moral-credentials-favor-whites-030409.html
Interesting, moral credentialing by way of seeking ablution for a previously held attitude that has now fallen out of favor. That seems to be tantamount to whitewashing a tomb with lime to make it more visually appealing and cover up any lack of proper maintenance in the past that may have been borne out of a genuine disrespect for the person interred there.
I can speak to this because as a construction professional in my past life that included management during the last half of my career I routinely dealt with race relations in a work environment that was sufficiently dangerous in of itself so as to not need any rancor or ill will to cause a serious accident. I have seen the naked face of racism and prejudice on the part of both Latino and Negro races that have often left the Caucasian person caught in the jaws of the vise these two races represent. I have had my life threatened by both for simply being white.
I was not surprised by the response of the electorate, especially the white liberal, that was reminiscent of Shakespeare’s “Othello” in their behavior. What troubled me greatly was the emotional moral credentialing that took the place of the customary candidate vetting that placed the candidate, their history, family and associates under the proverbial high-power microscope. I wondered at how carefully scripted everything was with copious amounts of O’Bama’s past hidden from view so much so that he seemed to be a fabrication of a particular interest group. much more than Nixon ever was, (Yes, I know how, why, and where he got his start, and how he became president).
I would suggest that America, beginning with me, take a good long look at this moral credentialing that has the very real potential to cloud our judgment which is in dire need at this critical juncture of our country’s history. Liberty is a two-edged sword, as is personal responsibility. Just as we are given the privilege in choosing who will govern us, we are also required to accept responsibility for the choices we make.
As a final thought, we may very well need to consider our neighbor ahead of ourselves if we are to survive as a nation, as that is how we were founded.
want to develop this into an essay? Would only take a few more paragraphs, using your last sentence as the wrap. But you’d need a link for the Nixon stuff…or was that about BHO??
This is a turn of the lens:
What troubled me greatly was the emotional moral credentialing that took the place of the customary candidate vetting that placed the candidate, their history, family and associates under the proverbial high-power microscope.
Let us know if you have the time.
“And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”
This profound and essential grace is summed up in the all-purpose proverb, “this, too, shall pass.” Man, knowing good and evil, and choosing evil more than good, will not live forever in sin, nor will any of the evil works of man endure forever. The impermanence of our failings is our greatest cause for optimism.
Not “Hope and Change”, but hope because of change.
In time, every evil imagining of man, however great for a season, comes to the same end. No pride or glory of man will withstand the inexorable advance of time. There will be no truly ‘final solution’. Only that which is genuinely eternal will be everlasting, for the lord of the grave cannot be dissuaded from claiming what is rightfully his own in due time. The mathematicians have proved that the idea of random mutation giving rise to successive improvements for nature to select is a simple impossibility. And as God is implicitly necessary for organic life to originate and persist from generation to generation, so too are the eternal principles of divinely ordained morality essential to the perpetuation of society.
“Progress” has taken a long time to devour the greatness that was Western Civilization. But once that greatness is fully consumed, the beast must die in hardly the span of a generation. Only those with the seed of God’s commandments in their hearts can survive, and only those which nurture that seed into a living faith in the Almighty can build society anew. It has ever been thus, and ever shall be, until the great and last day.
Which may be soon, according to all the signs. But don’t expect the wicked to fare well in that case either.
The above article and your reply are what have been on my heart recently. Thanks to both of you for placing those thoughts so well in prose. I would add one thing, however. The Lord God YA has seen all of this and is NOT surprised. The cry of Jesus Christ from the Cross on Calvary was a shout of triumph over a completed job well done. YA’s righteousness will have Jesus Christ come for His Body the Church BEFORE the judgments commence. When the judgments are completed and the planet is cleansed Jesus Christ will return with His Bride the Church and begin His Millennial rule. That is the Change that I Hope for and watch for daily. It is written that the trees will clap their hands, the seas will roar in praise and every creature on the earth, under the earth and in the ocean will praise Him. Whales wailing and porpoise-full praise is something I am looking forward to seeing. As for the rest who imagine themselves as kings at this present time, all I have to say to them is, “Enjoy your hour, for that is all you get.” Sadly.
“The mathematicians have proved that the idea of random mutation giving rise to successive improvements for nature to select is a simple impossibility. And as God is implicitly necessary for organic life to originate and persist from generation to generation, so too are the eternal principles of divinely ordained morality essential to the perpetuation of society.”
Chiu,
You are saying, because science has been unable to yet find a predictive, quantifiable model for inter-species evolution, that all of a sudden we assume there is no such model, and leap to the “intelligent design” answer. The “intelligent design” model assumes that the variation of species bypasses any past or future science, and is simply in the hands of god (small or large g, as you prefer).
I prefer to maintain the scientific model, assuming that in the future such models will be found, along with advances in intra-nuclear and extra-nuclear genetics.
And yes, my belief is as much a belief as your assumption that god sits in a throne pulling strings to push the development of species beyond any knowable scientific principle. It is as fallacious for a pseudo-scientist to use “scientific” socialism as it is for a creationist to deny the many independent but converging indicators of the age of the earth, solar system, and the universe.
as for the age of the earth et al, have you studied Lambert Dolphin’s research into the speed of light, Einstein’s “C” ?
The answer is “no”.
Could you please summarize the point you want to make, and save me the trouble of trying to guess it, with no information?
BTW, and Gregor Mendel’s experiments with the longpole pea plant. A copy of the treatise was given to Darwin who never opened it. After Darwin died Mendel’s treatise was found on a shelf, still in its original packaging.
Molecular Biology has proven Mendel correct. So if intelligent design is plausible, who designed the designer?
Computational science HAS developed predictive, quantifiable models for interspecies evolution. And these models tell us that it is impossible at the level of genetic complexity demonstrated by existing organisms without non-random beneficial mutations. If you want to categorize that as “intelligent design”, then so be it.
Every significant advance in genetics has only made it clear that the system is even more complex than previously believed possible. That steadily moves us further away from the possibility that random mutation can result in beneficial changes outweighing the deterioration rate from harmful changes. The only hope now is to discover that the entire system was designed in the first place to ensure that beneficial changes would occur…but that’s even worse, because then we’re dealing with a single, grand, overarching design of a complexity greater than current human science can match. Call that “intelligent” if you will, it doesn’t change the fact that it cannot be random.
As for the hope of an explicitly atheistic society…that’s your religion, and I won’t deny you the freedom to espouse it. But it is nothing more than the assertion of a clearly irrational and counter-factual dogma, based on your instinctive desire to assert your existence conflicting with your instinct to avoid acknowledging a superior existence to your own. You are free to assert your desires, but you are not free to silence all criticism of them.
MC, I’m a (secular) humanist, and detest Communism and Nazism. With respect, I don’t think you’ve thought this through.
I think MC’s position is reasonable for a man of faith, and yours is for a nonbeliever. The way to accomodate both is to realize that the various “isms” were spawned by evil man with an outsize will to power, but the reason they flourished is that people who were once of the Christian or Jewish faith transferred and sublimated their religious yearnings into these new ideologies.
You look at the fanaticism of Scandinawian multiculti-feminist Socialists and you realize it’s a malignant mutation of the harsh, dogmatic austerity of Northern Lutheranism — with God expunged. You meet bitter, “progressive,” childless feminists in the United States, you realize that in the old days they might have become nuns and perhaps brought some real good to this world. Now being a nun is not an option, so they poison young minds and emasculate young boys in their capacity as “progressive” school teachers.
But people who don’t have the “religious gene” in their system and are no longer followers of religious faith, don’t have the innate need to find for themselves a new secular religion with which “to change the world.”
So think it through for me…..
You’ve just made a classic ad hominem……
“With respect”?? Where is the respect in your comment? It’s a version of “I know better than you do, mate. Don’t worry your tiny little mind.”
Seriously “with respect”?? This reminds me of the faux-polite policemen who would pat my hand over the death of yet another battered woman and tell me to leave it to the professionals…different content, same process.
@Mark H: So you’re telling us that by self-identifying as a secular humanist, you’re actually saying that you’re an atheist. But how can that one be? I’m left scratching my head, because you say that you don’t support Communism or Nazism, but those two things spring directly from atheism.
Secular humanism is what “God” has been replaced with in the US public schools today. (Acknowledgement of God NOT to be confused with promoting a specific religion, which most modern-day heretics simply forget.)
Actually, they spring directly from secular humanism (the worship of mankind as supreme in the temporal sphere, while denying the existence of any higher reality).
Secular humanism may or may not spring directly from atheism…if it did, then it took a VERY long time to do it. Many other evil ideologies have arisen directly from atheism, and they mostly took the same form, the cult of a self-appointed “god-king” generally obsessed with instituting some kind of personal immortalization at the expense of his followers. Secular humanism seems to me like an extraordinary invention, approaching true genius. It has had an incalculable influence on the world really incomparable with the kind of simple autocratic tyranny that usually springs from mere atheism.
You are wrong. Do Buddhists have a “God”? And weren’t there many thousands Nazis, even SS, Gestapo etc. who were pious Christians, particularly Catholic? Do you know that Heinrich Himmler himself was a mass-attending, devout Catholic, son of a principal of a Catholic school, brother of a Benedictine monk and nephew of a canon of the Catholic church?
Please, things are not so simple. The enemies of our civilization flatten us by seizing blanket inaccuracies like yours and hanging us then in the nooses of “ignorance,” “prejudice,” “chauvinism,” “bigotry” etc. More importantly, unless we form a correct picture of reality, we can do very little to shape it effectively.
The answer to the “Do Buddhists have a god?” question is somewhat complicated.
Siddhartha Gotama (referred to as the historical Buddha to distinguish him from claimed supernatural figures like Amitabha which didn’t appear in texts/traditions until hundreds of years later), according to the Tipitaka, claimed that his knowledge of cause-and-effect was self-discovered and did not come from some other being. So he was not claiming to be a prophet any more than Newton or Einstein were.
However, Right View (the beliefs needed to support the process of Unbinding, more commonly known as Nibanna or Nirvana which literally means Unbinding) requires that one at least believe “there exist beings that are superior to humans”. It is not necessary to worship those beings to achieve Unbinding, but it isn’t prohibited either. The greatest of those beings would be described as “the Great Brahma” which corresponds to God except that no entity is completely 100% omnipotent or omniscient. (He could be 99.999999%, but some shortcoming is needed at least to avoid the useless “can’t/won’t create immovable object” philosophical paradoxes.)
Based on other clear statements that beliefs have consequences, my best guess is that the belief in superior beings is necessary to negate a belief in human narcissism regardless of whether one can empirically prove that they exist.
Buddhism is very poorly understood. This is because it’s less of a religion in the usual sense and more of a set of instruction codes for bringing about a very poorly understood (and impossible to describe) mental phenomenon.
One might say that a belief in karma is sufficient for good conduct in this life. But yes, a belief in something transcendent is necessary, whether one calls it Yahveh or Brahman or Wheel of Karma or the Great Tao. Note, also, that there are fascinating archetypes that apply across religious boundaries — Joseph Cambell was an expert on that. For instance, St. Mary is amazingly like the oriental Kwanon — a boddhisatva of mercy whose figures, at least in Japan, even look sometimes like the blue-cloaked Mary.
I would say that what is more necessary than belief in something that transcends human limitations is the desire to transcend those limits. As someone mentioned, there were people who “believed” in God who lack that essential desire to follow Him. As it is written, “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?”
Of course it seems difficult to have the aspiration without the belief, the works without the faith. But I don’t really care about the belief except as it is evidenced through works. God, being able to see into the heart, can care about that as He pleases.
That said, I’ve found God to be pretty clever about predicting future performance from present conscience.
MC: “And Barack Hussein Obama? What of him? That is in our hands…”
How simple. If only. How can I see that?
With respect, Mark H’s “With respect, I don’t think you’ve thought this through.” is true.
Anne: “self-identifying as a secular humanist, you’re actually saying that you’re an atheist. But how can that one be?” It can, I am too. And I detest Communism and Nazism, whatever they spring from. Will you be trying to convince me that I am not a secular humanist or that I don’t detest C & N?
Maybe it is true, but until you let us into YOUR thoughts on the matter then there can be no constructive dialogue, just complaining that it is too simplistic is ducking the issue, tell us WHY it is too simple rather that perpetuating the Ad Hominem.
BHO is destroying the USA, and indeed the world, because most people have better things to do (watch the TV) than make sure he is disposed of. How simple do you want it?
Generally speaking, we are always in danger of falling into this trap when dealing with the various religious motivations to value Western Civilization and protect it against the threat of Islam and other totalitarian ideologies.
An essential component of Western Civilization is the idea of freedom of conscience, that there is a sphere of beliefs concerning the ultimate purpose and destiny of humans, whether as individuals or as a race, which must be decided by personal belief. This is not an essential component of, say, Chinese Civilization. It is not even an essential tenet of Japanese Civilization, despite the radical polytheism of traditional Japanese religion (with its countless highly localized gods). It is an essential component of Western Civilization because of the strong claim based on Christian scripture that true faith cannot be constrained by temporal authority, which emerged as the solution to the dissolution of Catholicism’s long monopoly. This concept has served many minority religious communities well, and it ended the warfare between Catholics and the various other Christian denominations which emerged as a result of the failure of the Catholic Church to accept serious reformation in a timely fashion. So there is a sense in which we can say that, even though the concept is rooted in Christian teaching, it is not exclusively Christian.
One of the great problems of Islam and other totalitarian ideologies is that they reject this foundational concept of freedom of conscience, the prohibition against temporal power being used to dictate what people may believe about the ultimate purpose and destiny of humans. And this problem is fundamentally shared by secular humanism, which is founded on the premise of eventually exterminating all competing beliefs about the place of humanity in the universe. My own form of realistic nihilism* does not offer any objection to the idea of people believing what they will as long as they accept the consequences of their own behavior. It is thus fully compatible with the freedom of conscience for others.
I have mentioned before that I do not regard the rejection of freedom of conscience in Koranic Islam as being an insuperable barrier to establishing a form of Islam which does not actively promote the destruction of such freedom. I believe the same is true of secular humanism, simply because secular humanism was founded on the essential presumption of abolishing all competing religious impulses in humanity, that does not mean that no form of secular humanism can exist in which religious diversity is accepted as a tolerable or even desirable characteristic of humanity. However, just as we take it as a presumption that Muslims who claim to be assimilable must overtly demonstrate that they embrace the principle of freedom of other religions to exist and be expressed in the public sphere, we also must make this presumption for secular humanists. They must declare and demonstrate their willingness to allow other religious opinions and beliefs.
Nothing in the behavior of Christians or observant Jews in relation to the advance of the principle of religious liberty gives cause for a similar presumption. Christians and observant Jews have always been the greatest champions of real religious freedom, at every stage of its development. Only with the presumption that freedom of religion was really supposed to be freedom FROM religion, or at least religions other than secular humanism, have Christians and observant Jews been cast as enemies of religious freedom. But to any neutral observer (and we are admittedly rare), it is clear that it was secular humanists who were seeking to impose their own religion through the abuse of temporal authority. Indeed, it has been secular humanists who have done most of the damage to religious freedom in the West, opening the door to Koranic Islam’s claims that other religions should be suppressed even further.
That said, I have no more interest in eradicating secular humanist beliefs than in abolishing Islam, as long as Muslims and secular humanists can refrain from using government power to suppress other religious beliefs.
*probably not what most people realistically mean when they talk about nihilism
Chiu ChunLing: “Christians … always been the greatest champions of real religious freedom, at every stage of its development. “
What I know about German history, makes me very skeptical about that, see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottlieb_Fichte#Atheism_Dispute
After weathering a couple of academic storms, he was finally dismissed from Jena in 1799 as a result of a charge of atheism. He was accused of atheism in 1798 after publishing his essay
And would you count Orthodox Christians as the greatest champions of “real religious freedom”? That would fly into the face of everything I know about them.
I could have said that Christians and observant Jews have historically been the ONLY sincere champions of religious freedom, but that would be a stretch and require making judgments about the sincerity of a number of people whom I do not personally know.
No, not all or even most Christians and observant Jews have historically been champions of religious freedom. But there isn’t really any serious competition from anyone else. Atheists have managed to compare unfavorably with Muslims in their support for religious freedom, so it isn’t really fair to bring up ‘persecution’ of atheists as somehow being inconsistent with support for religious freedom.
Generally, I don’t count anyone as a champion of religious freedom unless they openly and consistently support the right of OTHER PEOPLE to believe what they will about the ultimate purpose and destiny of humankind. Supporting your own right to your own beliefs doesn’t make you a champion of anything but your own interests, which isn’t what “champion” means.
I’m not a champion of religious freedom as such, I’m an advocate of Western Civilization, of which the principle of religious freedom is a foundational element. But I would see no point in going and advocating for religious freedom separate from the principles of rule of law and individual responsibility for personal behavior, two other foundational elements of Western Civilization which interest me far more. But as understood in the context of Western Civilization, they necessarily entail distinctions between belief, advocacy, and actions.
As an aside, Wikipedia should never be referenced in any serious discussion. While there is value to the user-edited wiki in many applications, it is not a helpful tool for examining questions on which there exists any significant dispute.
Note that, 200 years ago, Christians were not killing dissenters, unlike most other political and religious groups; in the late 18th century, I would not have liked a professor teaching in my University whilst supporting those who perpetrated the ‘Reign of Terror’ of Danton and Robespierre! I would have regarded it as synonymous with being a Nazi in the modern day.
Well, I think that is a matter of perspective, which I do not really share. Someone as deliberately obscure as Fitche must necessarily be characterized on the basis of those statements which he did make in a clear fashion, but the Terror and the Holocaust were different in form and in kind. Still, not being paid to express an opinion can hardly be considered an infringement on the right to freedom to have that opinion…unless it is commonplace for everyone to be paid to express their opinions, and I find that prospect almost more horrifying than nobody being allowed to express any opinions at all.
In a pluralistic society, professional opinionators should be readily able to find employment with an institution that shares their views, or freelance directly to their audience, however small. But you can’t get to that pluralistic society by forcing people to fund opinions they don’t like. You can only increase the superficial appearance of pluralism, while hollowing out the freedom of expression with legal caveats about which opinions are to be sacrosanct, and this leads to a divided society, not pluralism.
MCin Sderot: “200 years ago, Christians were not killing dissenters, unlike most other political and religious groups”
Can you name a few other political and religious groups which, 200 years ago, were killing dissenters?
If you can, I’ll learn. If you can’t, shame on you for making baseless statements.
With that, I’ll skip further arguments on the topic of the Christianity and religious freedoms and try to answer your call “Maybe it is true, but until you let us into YOUR thoughts on the matter then there can be no constructive dialogue, just complaining that it is too simplistic is ducking the issue, tell us WHY it is too simple rather that perpetuating the Ad Hominem.”
“perpetuating the Ad Hominem”… Could you speak plainer? If you did, the fallacy of your statement “And Barack Hussein Obama? What of him? That is in our hands… might become obvious to you without my help, which follows.
I haven’t seen BHO losing any of his moves, giving up any position, since I started to watch him, before he became President. He gets everything he cares to get. He could cancel the next presidential elections and be our President for life. What will “our hands” do then — the same they did with the Obamacare and his Amnesty?
BHO is destroying the USA, and indeed the world, because most people have better things to do (watch the TV) than make sure he is disposed of.
(True, true, probably true.) This simple sentence is really the opposite of your earlier That is in our hands. We are in his hands, not he is in ours. A sad fact.
How simple do you want it? I want the simple to be true.
And on the practical aspects of our survival: did you read the recent Derb’s presentation, http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-the-american-political-system-can-solve-the-race-problem-for-a-given-meaning-of-solve? Please do it. Read other materials at http://www.vdare.com — the blueprint for our salvation is there. This is a useful reading, too: http://takimag.com/article/12_steps_for_america_gavin_mcinnes#axzz3YZJp1t8o .
Most important: donate. Donate even if only symbolically, if your means are scarce. Donate to VDARE before you donate anywhere else. If we, the people of Occident, have a chance for survival (I still believe we do, but only within a quickly narrowing time window), our best hope are the brave VDARE authors, led by the brilliant Peter Brimelow. Are you familiar with his two main positive ideas for America? (You’ll find them at vdare.com.)
Having watched a few pro-America (let me call them this way) Web sites over the last seven years, I regretfully concluded that some of them are just a fluff: they may be originally interesting to read but don’t exhibit any influence on the important political events. Donating to the most efficient centers of the independent thought and influence is, for most people, the best thing they can do for helping to turn things around and restore the lost freedoms.
Unfortunately, the donation picture is dispiriting. Within a month of the Spring Appeal, VDARE raised $36,000, with $40,000 targeted. With a modest donation of $50, one would need just 800 people to meet the goal. So, there are apparently fewer than 800 people who care or can. In this country with a huge white population. And if “we” have a problem collecting $40K every three months, what is the value of “our hands”? “We”, as a group, suck, and BHO will keep doing his doing unobstructed.
And what’s your argument for him being in “our hands”?
36,000?? In a month?? They need 40K every three months?? That’s 160,000 a year!
Good heavens, why are your complaining on our blog?? And FIFTY DOLLARS is “modest”?? That’s five donations.
I will forgive your lack of couth coming onto our blog as we wrap up our fundraiser, feeling VERY happy to have a bit more than ten percent of their proposed total and darned glad to have it. (from which we tithe to Vlad Tepes for his great work). You sure know how to ruin a party.
Nonetheless if they’re down $4,000, then it must have ended up here cuz that’s what we’re so happy about.
I like VDARE, but I know their emphasis on WHITENESS is going to make some turn away. I’m not even sure that’s a path I’d ever take, though some of our readers like them a lot. Just ain’t my interest.
There’s goals and goals. We set ours at about 10% of VDare’s …and we make it and we manage on it. Sometimes we even get a bit more and it goes into rainy days…
But if I were going to donate to something it would be to poverty-stricken Sderot. I already do that indirectly with my Amazon shopping: I signed up for Sderot through Amazon’s Smile program. When I buy vitamins or socks or a frying pan, a small percentage goes to help the even poorer people of Sderot.
There are people out there doing things with their own money to save their own people, literally. MC in Sderot does that. He walks the walk, he crawls to the bomb shelter, he gives his all. Another commenter here gives her donation to Pizzas for the IDF. The Baron reminded me that I did that back when we had money. People are entitled to give to organizations that appeal to THEM; it is rude at best to question their motives or abilities.
Your mean-spirted lecture was neither necessary nor efficacious. If we had 40,000 in three months, we wouldn’t need to have another fund-raiser until the following year.
Dymphna: That’s 160,000 a year!
Considering the amount of quality of VDARE’s work, that’s not a lot. Peter Brimelow pays his writers and fact checkers — and they all are amazing.
VERY happy to have a bit more than ten percent
That’s another indication of where “we” stand. Because yours is generally, a very good place, too. Some of your materials are amazing.
You sure know how to ruin a party.
Only at the times when I don’t make a donation to you.
I like VDARE, but I know their emphasis on WHITENESS is going to make some turn away. I’m not even sure that’s a path I’d ever take, though some of our readers like them a lot. Just ain’t my interest.
What’s your interest then? Can it be expressed in a few sentences?
Your mean-spirted lecture was neither necessary nor efficacious.
Thank you and my best wishes to you.
D: That’s 160,000 a year!
P: Considering the amount of quality of VDARE’s work, that’s not a lot. Peter Brimelow pays his writers and fact checkers — and they all are amazing.
D:Do you mean they have to be paid or the work wouldn’t get done?? I find that hard to believe. We have essayists from around the world, in addition to translators, “fact checkers”, video people, transcribers, etc… all unpaid volunteers who are concerned about the Islamic takeover of the West and feel strongly enough to contribute their work.
And many of those, plus others, do work that will never be known.
In other words, our “model” isn’t based on money. Enough to get by on is necessary but it’s hardly a sufficient motive to fuel the daily work the Baron does in keeping this network going. If it ever reaches the point that people don’t find that work useful to them, then we’ll know it…and find another way to continue the fight.
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P:Only at the times when I don’t make a donation to you.
What is *that* about?? I have no idea if you’ve ever donated here or not, and that was never the point of my comeback to your angry diatribe about others’ failure to give sufficiently to you cause. I took you to task for two things.
The first was your timing: just at the moment our own fundraiser was wrapping up you came on the comments to rail against those who hadn’t given to something you find vital.
The second was the level of tone-deafness in your comment. Your angry diatribe that people give an extraordinarily high amount for your cause. It was, and is, astonishing. We have many readers who aren’t donors; that’s never been the way we look at it and never will – i.e., who donates and who doesn’t. Our donors give of their material resources, our commenters share their ideas, our volunteers provide their expertise. We also have a considerable email conversation with readers who have ideas and concerns to share.
Beyond basic survival, this is NOT about the money. If that were the case we’d have closed down long ago.
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D: I like VDARE, but I know their emphasis on WHITENESS is going to make some turn away. I’m not even sure that’s a path I’d ever take, though some of our readers like them a lot. Just ain’t my interest.
P:What’s your interest then? Can it be expressed in a few sentences?
D: If you’d ever read our blog, surely you wouldn’t need my one-word “expression of our interest”: JIHAD. It’s not an “interest”, it’s our raison d’être. As I recall, it was the Baron who coined the term “Counterjihad” way back when. He needed one term to explain the larger battle being pitched against us and to point to the historical fact that Islam never gives up and that it has a strategy for its eventual world conquest -i.e., JIHAD.
In more words, the war being waged in the West is a long march against our culture’s survival. And our “culture” includes many sub-cultures. It always has. Europe’s dynasties could never learn to work together; bloody centuries of internecine warfare, of white people against white people, their own citizens being nothing more than cannon fodder. Many times it was a class warfare. Had the discovery of North America not happened the destruction on European soil would’ve continued unabated: in the beginning the fight was continued here by the main players in the Old World but ultimately the settlers in the New World refused.
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D: Your mean-spirited lecture was neither necessary nor efficacious.
P:Thank you and my best wishes to you.
D: See, that’s just what I mean about your tactics. I hope you have better luck on other websites drumming up donations for a cause you believe in. But if you continue to use the the ones you displayed here, you’ll lose more money for your cause than you’ll gain. People don’t like being beaten over the head for their moral failure in not following your lead.
All God’s troubles ain’t a black man.
YES – now go and troll elsewhere
Um, is VDARE about anything other than race?
I mean, it references a lot of things I find useful, but it seems to be making the case that the reason these things matter is because they support the idea of ensuring the genetic survival (of white people) rather than because those things are important in and of themselves or towards some higher end than race.
I mean…I AM sorta planning to basically bring about the genetic extinction of the human race (as such) in the end, and I tend to think that what comes after genetic humanity (as currently understood) is something that has enough significance that most people, when they understand the higher values involved, won’t worry about the genetic issue in comparison with the fundamental issues of freedom and personal autonomy which can only ever be realized by transcending the biological inheritance of the human body. I don’t usually lead with making explicit that I don’t intend to permit the existing genetic heritage of humanity to persist after the point where it has no further utility in advancing the development of individual freedom and personal responsibility, because someone always think that means killing people, which isn’t the point. The point is making it so that people can live without the biological limitations of the human race.
Or letting them die if they can’t rise above those biological limits. I’m a bit neutral on that point. But the deaths of individual specimens of humanity as well as the eventual biological extinction of the human race are fundamental biological limitations. It would be illogical to force humans who can’t transcend those limits to not remain subject to them. Actually, it would be a merely fatuous contradiction in terms, but I’m also interested in the ability of people to overcome other biological limitations imposed by membership in the human race. Surpassing the mental and moral limits of human biology are more important than the physical limitations.
And getting people to confront and exceed those hurdles (or at least strongly aspire to do so) is most of the point of biological humanity in the first place. If it turns out that people just can’t, well, then there isn’t any real point in continuing the project even if it could be extended indefinitely (which it cannot).
Heck, if I didn’t care about other things more than race, I would just let Beijing win.