(Looking in the mirror) I see a little silhouetto of a man.
Scaramouche! Scaramouche! Will you do the fandango?
"It’s not just that Obama ate the dog, but that he’s screwing the pooch."
By Mark Steyn
A
couple of days ago, Obama-campaign top dog David Axelrod threw in the
towel on the dog war. “I thought it was a little absurd to talk about
what the president had done as a ten-year-old boy,” he sniffed to
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, which is as near as the suddenly sheepish
attack dog will ever get to conceding that Barack Obama is the first
dog-eating president in the history of the republic. For those coming
late to the feud, the Democrats started it, assiduously promoting
accounts of a 1983 Romney vacation to Canada in which the family pooch
Seamus rode on the roof of the car. Axelrod and the boys thought they
could have some sport with this, and their poodles in the media eagerly played along. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins alone has referred to it dozens of times.
"They talk about me like a dog."
- President Barack Obama, 6 August 2010
(Hey, Barry, at least we don't eat you!)
And then Jim Treacher, the sharp-eyed wag of the Daily Caller,
uncovered this passage from Chapter Two of Obama’s bestselling but
apparently largely unread memoir Dreams from My Father, in which the author recalls childhood meals with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro:
"I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and
roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a
brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient
animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of
whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece
of tiger meat for us to share."
There followed an Internet storm of “I Ate a Dog (and I Liked It)”
gags. Axelrod, an early tweeter of Romney doggie digs, has now figured
out that the subject is no longer profitable for his boss. The dogs he
let slip aren’t quite that savvy. Jeremy Funk, communications director
of “Americans United for Change,” is still bulk-e-mailing links to the
dogsagainstromney.com video “Should We Have a President Who Isn’t Even
Qualified to Adopt a Pet?”
Confronted by the revelation that his preferred candidate only swings
by the Humane Society for the all-you-can-eat buffet, he huffs that this
is “false equivalence.” “A six-year-old with no choice in the matter”
is not the same as a grown man choosing to place his dog on the roof of
his vehicle. My Canadian compatriot Kate McMillan, a dog breeder,
advised Mr. Funk to “try this experiment–sit a normal, American 6 year
old down at a plate and tell him it’s dog meat. Watch what happens.”
For their next exploding cigar, the Democrats chose polygamy. Brian
Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of Montana, remarked that Romney was
unlikely to appeal to women because his father was “born on a polygamy
commune.” Eighty-six percent of women, noted Governor Schweitzer with a
keenly forensic demographic eye, are “not great fans of polygamy.” You
can understand the 86 percent’s ickiness at the whole freaky-weirdy idea
of a president descended from someone who had multiple wives. Eww.
Just for the record, Romney’s father was not a polygamist; Romney’s grandfather was not a polygamist; his great-grandfather was
a polygamist. Miles Park Romney died in 1904, so one can see why this
would weigh heavy on 86 percent of female voters 108 years later.
Meanwhile, back in the female-friendly party, Obama’s father was a
polygamist; his grandfather was a polygamist; and his great-grandfather
was a polygamist who had one more wife (five in total) than Romney’s
great-grandfather. It seems President Obama is the first male in his
line not to be a polygamist. So, given the “gender gap,” maybe
those 86 percent of American women are way cooler with polygamy than
Governor Schweitzer thinks. Maybe these liberal chicks really dig it.
The exploding cigars are revealing not merely of Democratic hypocrisy
but of a key difference in worldview between liberals and conservatives.
Jeremy Funk and Governor Schweitzer reflexively believe that their
dog-eating polygamy-scion is different from the other guy’s
dog-transporting polygamy-scion. This is nothing to do with young Barack
being six or ten years old and meekly eating whatever was put in front
of him. He was 34 years old when he wrote the passage quoted above and
ten years older when he recorded the audio edition. And, as both
versions make plain, he thinks it’s kinda cool, and he knows that to the
average upscale white liberal it has the electric frisson of the exotic
other.
Obama is correct that certain cultures believe a man takes on the
powers of whatever he eats. In Liberia, where presidential contests are
somewhat more primal than in this effete republic, Samuel Doe was
captured by some of his eventual successor’s, ah, campaign staff, who
cut off President Doe’s ears and then fed them to him. They then removed
His Excellency’s genitals and wound up in a fight over who should get
them, believing that the still not quite yet late president’s powers
would be transferred to whoever got to chow down on the crown jewels.
I’m not suggesting that President Obama has eaten a human penis,
because, if he had, he’d almost certainly have boasted about it to the
impressionable NPR ninnies who gobbled up his memoirs. But I am
suggesting that Mitt Romney might like to consider it for next year’s Inauguration Day.
I jest — just in case the Secret Service are taking a break from
their Colombian hookers and are minded to investigate me for a threat
against what Joe Biden would call the “big stick.” My point is that
self-loathing cultural relativism is so deeply ingrained on the left
that any revulsion to dog-eating is trumped by revulsion to criticizing
any of the rich, vibrant cultural diversity out there in Indonesia or
anywhere else.
Most polygamy in the developed world is nothing to do
with Mormons: It’s widely practiced by Western Muslims, whose plural
marriages are recognized de facto by French and Ontario welfare
departments and de jure by Britain’s pensions department. But “edgy”
“transgressive” leftie comics on sad, pandering standup shows will
reserve their polygamy jokes for Mormons until the last stern-faced
elder in Utah keels over at the age of 112.
In the United Kingdom, 57
percent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, with
attendant increases in their children’s congenital birth defects. Bur
the comics save their inbreeding jokes for stump-toothed West Virginians
enjoying a jigger of moonshine and a bunk-up with their sisters. The
editor of Washington’s leading gay newspaper was gay-bashed in
Amsterdam, “the most tolerant city in Europe,” but by Muslims rather
than the pasty rednecks who killed Matthew Shepard, so liberals don’t
have a dog in this fight. Likewise, the epidemic of black-on-black
murder vs. the once-in-a-blue-moon Trayvon Martin: To the liberal
mindset, certain dogs won’t hunt. In one of his many bestsellers,
Ayatollah Khomeini produced a hierarchy of “the uncleans”: Dogs are at
Number Six,
Infidels are at Number Eight, and Number Eleven is “the
sweat of an unlawful ejaculation.” In the liberal hierarchy,
conservative infidels are at Number One, dogs are somewhere between
Eight and Eleven, and the sweat of an unlawful ejaculation isn’t on the
list at all.
Axelrod is right. Obama’s appetite for dogs isn’t as critical as his
appetite for spending and statism. But it was part of his cool. “Mitt
Romney isn’t cool,” declared Brian Montopoli of CBS News this week in a
story headlined “Can Mitt
Romney Make Boring Sexy”? For economically beleaguered Americans, the
more pertinent question is: “Can Barack Obama Make Cool Affordable”?
It’s not just that Obama ate the dog, but that he’s screwing the pooch.
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
I'm just a poor boy (poor boy), I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
little high, little low
Anyway the wind blows, doesn't really matter to me, to me
Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head
Pulled my trigger, now he's dead
Mama, life had just begun
But now I've gone and thrown it all away
Mama, ooo
Didn't mean to make you cry
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow
Carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters
It's too late, my time has come
Sends shivers down my spine
Body's aching all the time
Goodbye everybody - I've got to go
Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth
Mama, ooo - (anyway the wind blows)
I don't want to die
I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all
I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango?
Thunderbolts and lightning - very very frightening me
Galileo, Galileo,
Galileo, Galileo,
Galileo Figaro - magnifico-o-o-o
I'm just a poor boy nobody loves me
He's just a poor boy from a poor family
Spare him his life from this monstrosity
Easy come easy go - will you let me go
Bismillah! No - we will not let you go - let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go - let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go - let me go
Will not let you go - let me go (never)
Never let you go - let me go
Never let me go - ooo
No, no, no, no, no, no, no -
Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia let me go
Beelzebub has the devil put aside for me
for me
for me
for me
So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?
So you think you can love me and leave me to die?
Oh baby - can't do this to me baby
Just gotta get out - just gotta get right outta here
Ooh yeah, ooh yeah
Nothing really matters
Anyone can see
Nothing really matters, nothing really matters, to me
Gloria In te Domine Gloria Exultate Oh, Lord, if I had anything, anything at all I'd give it to you.
To judge from what we are reading and hearing almost
every day at the moment, it would seem Britain is in the throes of a war of
religion. A war, that is, between religion and atheism.
Professor Richard
Dawkins, the Savonarola of atheism, regularly hurls his thunderbolts at
believers. Christianity, says the church, is under siege. Christians are being
prevented from wearing the crucifix at work, being barred from adoption panels.
Even Delia Smith has now brought her rolling pin to the fight to defend the
faith.
At the heart of this great argument lies the assumption
on the part of the anti-religion camp that this is a battle between reason and
obscurantism, between rationality on the one hand and knuckle-dragging
ignorance and prejudice on the other. And of course, that anti-religion camp is
on the side of reason, and thus of intelligence, science, progress and freedom;
whereas religious believers would undo the Enlightenment and take us all back
to the dark ages of credulity, superstition and the shackling of the mind.
This assumption is based on a further given: that in
the West this is the age of reason. And we think this, in large measure,
because we have put religion, or faith, in a box labelled in very large
letters, "Un-reason". Faith and reason, religion and science are
supposedly inimical to each other. There is no overlap. They knock each other
out.
"Piss Christ" by Andres Serrano, 1987.
So it follows that people who are intelligent can have
no religious faith; those who are religious are either imbeciles or insane. Not
only that, religious people are narrow, dogmatic, intolerant and unpleasant.
Those with no religious faith are broad-minded, open, liberal and thoroughly
splendid people whom you'd be delighted to meet at a dinner party. Little casts
a chill over a fashionable table more than the disclosure that a guest believes
in God.
I have a rather different take on this great division
of our age. My view is that while we may be in a post-biblical — and post-moral
— age, we have not disposed of belief. Far from it. We have just changed what
we believe in. Our society may have junked the Judaeo-Christian
foundations of the West for secularism. But this has given rise to a set of
other religions. Secular religions. Anti-religion religions.
These are also based on a set of dogmas. They
proselytise. They involve faith. But unlike the Judaeo-Christian thinking they
usurp, these secular anti-religions suspend truth and reason. What's more, I
would say that it was the Judaic foundations of the West which, far from
denying reason, gave the world both reason and science in the first place.
God has been pronounced dead, and in his place have
come man-made ideologies — in which people worship not a divine presence but an
idea.
These ideas, which brook no dissent, give rise
inescapably to intolerance and indeed to tyranny. Indeed, they are far more
tyrannical in their effect than the God of the Hebrew Bible who gets such a bad
press for being so authoritarian. In fact, he has a truly terrible time getting
his way. His people are always complaining, refusing to do what he tells them,
blaming him for everything and always, always arguing with him. But ideologies
which represent the will of man bend everything to the governing idea, which
cannot be gainsaid.
"There can be no argument with them."
Rather than being rational, I suggest these are
irrational; not tolerant at all, but deeply illiberal; not open to other ideas,
but as dogmatic as any medieval pope. Indeed, these atheistic ideologies are reminiscent
not just of religion but of medieval persecutions, witch-hunts and
inquisitions.
Let me illustrate all this with an anecdote. After a
debate in which he took part some time ago, I pressed Richard Dawkins on his
belief that the origin of all matter was most likely to have been an entirely
spontaneous event — which meant he therefore surely believed that something
could be created out of nothing. Since this ran counter to the scientific
principle of verifiable evidence which he tells us should govern all our
thinking, this itself seemed to be precisely the kind of irrationality which he
scorns.
In reply, he acknowledged that I had a point but said
that the alternative explanation — God — was more incredible. But then he
remarked that he was not necessarily averse to the idea that life on Earth had
been created by a governing intelligence — provided, however, that such an
intelligence had arrived on Earth from another planet. Leaving aside the
question of how that extra-terrestrial intelligence had itself been created in
the first place, I put it to him that he appeared to be saying that
"little green men" provided a more plausible explanation for the origin
of life on Earth than God. Strangely, he didn't react to this well at all.
However, Dawkins is not the first scientist to have
suggested this. It is a theory which was put forward by no less than Professor
Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA.
A committed atheist, Francis Crick found it impossible
to believe that DNA could have been the product of evolution. In 1973, Crick
and the chemist Leslie Orgel published a paper in the journal Icarus
suggesting that life may have arrived on Earth through "directed
panspermia". According to this theory, micro-organisms were supposed to
have travelled in the head of an unmanned spaceship sent to Earth by a higher
civilisation which had developed elsewhere some billions of years ago. The
spaceship was unmanned so that its range would be as great as possible. Life
started here when these organisms were dropped into the primitive ocean and
began to multiply. Subsequently, Crick abandoned this theory and returned to
the idea of the spontaneous origin of life from purely natural mechanisms.
How can someone so committed to reason be so irrational
as to entertain such a fantasy?
The answer, at its deepest level, lies in the very fact
that they have repudiated the religion they scorn as irrational. Religion, or
more precisely the religion of the Bible, and more precisely still the Judaism
at its core, is the real crucible of reason. Those who reject the religion of
the Bible are rejecting reason itself.
So why do I make this counter-intuitive suggestion that
Judaism gave rise to rationality?
The popular belief is that the roots of reason and
science lie in ancient Greece. Now undoubtedly Greece contributed much to
modernity and to the development of Western thought down the ages.
Nevertheless, in certain crucial respects Greek thinking was inimical to a
rational view of the universe. The Greeks, who transformed heavenly bodies into
gods, explained the natural world by abstract general principles.
By contrast, science grew from the novel idea that the
universe was rational; and that belief was given to us by Genesis, which set
out the revolutionary proposition that the Universe had a rational Creator.
Without such a purposeful intelligence behind it, the universe could not have
been rational; and so there would have been no place for reason in the world
because there would have been no truths or natural laws for reason to uncover.
Science could only proceed on the basis that the universe was rational and
coherent and thus nature behaved in accordance with unchanging laws.
The other vital factor was the Bible's linear concept
of time. This meant history was progressive; every event was significant;
experience could be built upon. Progress was thus made possible by learning
more about the laws of the universe and how it worked.
It is atheism, in fact, that is innately hostile to
reason. Instead of worshipping God, man worshipped man. To be more precise,
man's ideas became the articles of faith. But instead of wrestling with God,
man's ideas brook no dissent, no argument. That's because they are not actually
ways of making sense of the world, of asking the great questions of why am I
here, what is the purpose to my life, how should I behave in ways that give my
life meaning. The ideas that man worships are instead ideas he invents to gain
power over his fellow human beings. They are ways not of explaining the world
but of controlling the world. Therefore they cannot be resisted or argued
against. There cannot be any alternative set of propositions. There cannot be
any debate. They are a doctrinal belief system of power.
Indeed, atheism has given us through such ideologies a
faith which repels reason. Ideologies such as environmentalism, or the belief
in the innate harmony of the natural world; scientism, or the belief that
everything in the universe has a scientific explanation; moral relativism, or
the belief that everyone's value system is equal to everyone else's;
multiculturalism, or the belief that no culture can take precedence over any
other; egalitarianism, or the belief that everyone is entitled to identical
outcomes regardless of their behaviour. These all repel reason because, instead
of looking at evidence to reach a conclusion, they start with the governing
idea and force the evidence to fit it.
All these ideologies are secular, undermining some
aspect of Judaeo-Christian belief or ethics. But here's the strange thing: they
all display characteristics not just of Christian religious belief — a body of
doctrine, a belief that their story is the sole pathway to virtue, an instinct
to evangelise — they also share a feature common to the religious fanaticism of
previous centuries (and past and present Islam): millenarianism.
Millenarianism is a religious belief in the perfection
of mankind and life on earth, often associated with an apocalypse. It is a
doctrine of collective and total salvation, and it leads inescapably to a
totalitarian mindset. Because it is an unchallengeable doctrine of perfecting
the world, any dissenter must be evil and so must be destroyed.
It is generally assumed that the Enlightenment put an
end to that kind of religious fanaticism which gave rise to the terrible
religious persecutions in the medieval world. In fact, the Enlightenment merely
served to secularise millenarian fantasies. This was embodied in the core idea,
no less, of the Enlightenment itself: that reason would bring about perfection
on Earth, and that "progress" was the process by which utopia would
be attained.
In the 18th century the Enlightenment thinker Condorcet
wrote: "No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human race.
The perfectibility of man is absolutely infinite..." In the 19th century
Herbert Spencer, the apostle of Social Darwinism, similarly believed that life
would get better all the time. He wrote: "Progress is not an accident but
a necessity. Surely must evil and immorality disappear; surely must man become
perfect." It was reason that would redeem religious superstition and bring
about the kingdom of man on Earth.
Just as Lenin believed, whatever fosters the revolution
is therefore good; whatever hinders it is bad. In the millenarian and
totalitarian mind, there is never any middle ground; and truth and reason are
turned upside down to fit.
Unlike Soviet Communism, the mass movements of today
are not so much political as cultural: anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism,
anti-Zionism, environmentalism, scientism, egalitarianism, anti-racism,
libertinism and multiculturalism. These are all not merely quasi-religious
movements — evangelical, dogmatic, fanatical and with enforcement mechanisms
ranging from demonisation to expulsion in order to stamp out any heresies. They
are also millenarian and even apocalyptic in their visions of the perfect
society and what needs to be swept aside in order to attain it.
The Inquisition of
Climate Change
They name the crimes committed by humanity — oppression
of third world peoples, despoliation of the natural world, bigotry, war — and
offer redemption and salvation by returning to the true faith. Dissenters are
heretics forming diabolical conspiracies against the one revealed truth. Since
it is believed that the decision to invade Iraq, Israel's military operations,
opposition to man-made global warming and the persistence of religious faith
cannot possibly have any reasonable basis because they all deny the absolute
and unchallengeable truths of anti-imperialism, environmentalism and scientific
materialism, the only explanation for them must lie in conspiracies by the
neocons, the Jews, Big Oil and the creationists, whose various hidden hands are
detected in every development.
In today's society the left-wing intelligentsia, the environmentalists
and the Darwinists are the modern equivalent of the Gnostics, the priestly
millenarian caste whose higher knowledge of perfect truths puts them on to a
superior plane from the rest of humanity: us lesser mortals who have to be
exhorted to change our ways in order to be saved from blood-curdling
apocalyptic scenarios — war and social disorder, floods, famine and pestilence,
genocidal slaughter perpetrated (only) by religious fanatics but never by
atheists (the many millions who perished under Stalin or Mao are brushed
aside).
The environmentalists, for example, possess through
their scientific credentials sole access to the truth that the planet is being
destroyed. They preach that the Earth has been sinned against by capitalism,
consumerism, the West, science, technology, mankind. Only when these are purged
and materialism in all its aspects rejected will the Earth be saved and the
innate harmony of the world restored.
In a similar vein, Richard Dawkins asserts from his
position as chief Gnostic of the natural sciences that all must comply with his
pronouncements on pain of being excommunicated from the realm of rationality.
By redeeming its original sin of religious belief mankind can create an
unbelievers' paradise, an anti-Eden, with no war, bigotry, persecution,
tyranny, violence — indeed, no ills apparently of any kind. Gehinnom replaced
by John Lennon heaven. Imagine!
And the religion that gives us John Lennon heaven is
materialism — which has led atheist scientists to morph from science into
scientism.
"Scientism" is the belief that there is a
material explanation for everything in the Universe and beyond. Of course,
there are — and always have been — many scientists who are also religious
believers and see no conflict in these two parallel spheres of science and
religion. Indeed, they think that each informs and deepens the other. By
contrast, scientism holds that there is no place for religious faith at all
because everything has an empirical explanation. Thus Oxford chemistry professor
Peter Atkins has claimed: "There is no reason to suppose that science
cannot deal with every aspect of existence."
But there are clearly many aspects of existence which
lie beyond the province of science — love, appreciation of beauty, belief in
right and wrong. Only dogmatism gives rise to the belief that there is no such
thing as understanding aesthetic phenomena. Nevertheless, such dogmatism is
precisely what is on display amongst scientists for whom science defines the
world.
Since they don't accept that there can possibly be any
questions science can't answer, the fact that it cannot answer such questions
only proves that they should not be asked at all. The fact that science can't
answer questions of ultimate purpose proves that there is no such thing as any
ultimate purpose. The fact that science cannot prove the existence of God
merely proves that God does not exist.
Yet as the theoretical particle physicist Stephen Barr
observed, "materialism" is not actually science at all but a school
of philosophy defined by the belief that nothing exists except matter. And this
was also a "passionately held ideology" — with a purpose.
"Its adherents see science as having a mission that goes
beyond the mere investigation of nature or the discovery of physical laws. That
mission is to free mankind from superstition in all its forms, and especially
in the form of religious belief."
In other words, the "materialism explains
everything" school had less to do with explaining the world — the true aim
of science — and more to do with changing the world.
This goes right back to the 16th century and the father
of science, Francis Bacon, who thought the point of scientific inquiry was not
the advancement of knowledge but to bring about utopia. Then scroll down to the
19th century when Auguste Comte propounded the doctrine of
"positivism", in which science would supplant Christianity in Europe
in an attempt to liberate humanity by reason from the "arbitrary"
wishes of an absolute Being to whom men were deemed to be slaves.
Comte openly presented positivism as a religion with
scientists becoming the new clergy. And as the priesthood of humanity,
positivists would allow no deviation from the one received truth. They alone
would decide what was to be thought; there would be no freedom of thought or
conscience in the form of any dissent.
But here's the thing. Comte wanted reason to replace
religion. But he also thought that knowledge had to be based upon experience.
And since experience is subjective, his thinking inevitably detached the mind
from objectivity — and thus eventually from science.
The Virgin Mary lays shattered after its home church in Rome was ransacked by Occupy Rome.
As a result, so-called "rational" positivism
plunged headfirst into deepest irrationality as Comte eulogised fetishism, or
the worship of objects which were invested with spiritual qualities.
In a similar way, "directed panspermia" — or
"little green men" planting the first seeds of life on Earth — also
shows how, by fetishising material explanations, scientific atheism leads
directly into irrationality and absurdity.
Scientism, materialism, environmentalism and all the
other secular ideologies claim to be based on unchallengeable truths. In fact,
they all manipulate, twist and distort the evidence to support and
"prove" their governing idea. False beliefs are thus presented as
axiomatically true. Moreover, because they proclaim the exclusive truth they
have to maintain at all costs the integrity of the lie. So all dissent has to
be resisted through coercive means. Knowledge is thus forced to give way to
power. Reason is replaced by bullying, intimidation and the suppression of
debate.
Have you
ever heard the assertion: "More wars have been fought and more blood has
been shed in the name of God than any other cause"? As it turns out
atheism scores the highest body count. The greatest evil has not come from
people zealous for God. It has resulted when people are convinced there is no
God to whom they must answer.*
In the 20th century, the political totalitarianism of
both Communism and fascism echoed the pre-modern despotism of the church in
declaring themselves the arbiters of a totalising worldview which would crush
all dissent. With both Communism and fascism defeated, however, the West has
fallen victim to a third variation on the theme: not religious or political but
cultural totalitarianism.
If religious totalitarianism was rule by the church and
political totalitarianism was rule by the "general will", cultural
totalitarianism is rule by the subjective individual. With morality privatised
so that everyone becomes his or her own moral authority, the laws and
traditions of the West rooted in Christianity and the Hebrew Bible have come
under explicit attack. With no purpose or order in the world, it's everyone for
himself. Moral and cultural relativism are the order of the day. Any attempt to
prioritise any culture or lifestyle over any other is illegitimate. Subjective
individualism is the one revealed truth, the old order of Western civilisation
has to be destroyed and any dissent is to be stamped out.
Medieval Christianity — like contemporary Islamism —
stamped out dissent by killing or conversion; Western liberals do it by social
and professional ostracism and legal discrimination. It is a kind of secular
Inquisition. And the grand inquisitors are to be found within the
intelligentsia — the universities, the media, the law and the political and professional
classes — who not only have systematically undermined the foundations of
Western society but are heavily engaged in attempting to suppress any challenge
or protest.
It is hard to overstate the influence of these
left-wing doctrines on our culture. They form the unchallengeable orthodoxy
within academia, from which base-camp they have set forth on their "long
march through the institutions" which they have colonised with stunning
success. They have managed, furthermore, to shift the centre of political
gravity so that anyone who does not share these values is defined as
extreme.
For the Left believes that its secular, materialistic,
individualistic and utilitarian values represent not a point of view but virtue
itself. No decent person can therefore oppose them. Anyone who does so is
automatically "right-wing". In fact, such opponents may have no
ideological position. But the Left cannot acknowledge such a possibility. In
Manichean fashion it divides the world into two opposing and exclusive camps, good
and evil; and so it creates as the sole alternative to itself a demonic
political camp, to which everyone who challenges it is automatically
consigned. Since anything that is not the Left is therefore "the
Right", and since "the Right" is by definition evil, to
challenge any left-wing shibboleth is to be labelled "right-wing" and
put oneself totally beyond the moral pale.
So there can be no dissent or argument at all. Only one
world-view is to be permitted and all other views are to be suppressed or destroyed.
And because all that is evil is "right-wing" and all that is
"right-wing" is evil, anyone who supports Israel or the Americans in
Iraq, is sceptical of anthropogenic global warming, opposes multiculturalism or
utilitarianism, supports capitalism or is a believing Christian is not only
evil but also "right-wing".
In a follow-up to our "little green men"
conversation, Richard Dawkins once again provided an example of what I'm
talking about. In a lecture to the American Atheists' Association, which was
mainly an attack upon a Christian professor of mathematics who is one of his
fiercest critics, he also claimed — falsely — that I had selectively quoted him
in order to misrepresent what he had said. In fact, since he was ascribing to
me something that someone else altogether had written, it was he who had
misquoted me. Nevertheless, the point of this anecdote is that, intent as he
was on dramatising to the American Atheists' Association the full depth of my
iniquity, he displayed on screen just three words to sum up what both I and the
maths professor had done. Those words were "Lying for Jesus".
In other words, just as the Left assume that all evil
people are "right-wing' and all "right-wing" people are evil, so
Dawkins appears to think that everyone who opposes scientism and evangelical
atheism is an evil Christian. Since I am actually a Jew, I'm not sure quite
where that places me on the spectrum of infamy.
Dawkins's star may now be on the wane, since his
extremism has begun to grate even among his erstwhile fans. But the
witch-hunting of dissenters from the revealed truths of secular ideology
continues to escalate.
For the millenarian, the high-minded belief in creating
a perfect world requires the imperfect world to be purified by the true
believers. From the French Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety to Iran's
moral police, from Stalin's purges of dissidents to British and American
"hate crime" laws, utopians of every stripe have instigated coercive
or tyrannical regimes to save the world by ridding it of its perceived
corruption.
"Surely
it's time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed
on their bodies. Not
necessarily on the forehead; I'm a reasonable man. Just something along their
arm or across their chest so their grandchildren could say, ''Really? You were
one of the ones who tried to stop the world doing something? And why exactly
was that, granddad?''
- Richard Glover, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June, 2011
The symmetry today is as obvious as it is striking. At
a time when radical Islam is attempting to purify the world by conquering it
for Islam and thus create the kingdom of God on earth, the West is also trying
to purify the world in order to create a secular utopia in which war will
become a thing of the past, prejudice, hatred and selfishness will be
eradicated from the human heart, reason will replace superstition, humanity
will live in harmony with the earth and all division will yield to the
brotherhood of man.
The result is actually a culture in which injustice is
rampant and morality has been negated. With "discrimination" now the
supreme crime and the very idea of a hierarchy of cultures, beliefs or
lifestyles deemed to be discriminatory, self-designated "victim
groups" can do no wrong while the majority culture can do no right. Any
objective evidence of harm that may be done by such "victim" groups
has been swept away. All that matters is that they must not be made to feel bad
about themselves, nor be put at any disadvantage even if this results from
their own actions.
Activities previously marginalised or considered
transgressive are privileged. Those considered to embody normative values are
actively discriminated against. In the cause of non-judgmentalism, only those
who are in favour of moral judgments based on the ethical codes of the Bible
are to be judged and condemned. In the cause of anti-discrimination, only those
who believe in a level playing-field are to be discriminated against. In the
cause of freedom, those who seek to limit its absolute and anarchic expression
in order to prevent harm to others are to be denied the freedom to do so.
But there is a further curiosity — that in doing this,
the secular, post-religious West is not merely adopting a quasi-religious
posture but a specifically Christian one. The governing story of Christianity
is of sin, guilt and redemption. And, remarkably, that is precisely the pattern
lying behind the utopian agendas of Western secular progressives.
There have been calls to conduct mass executions of "climate change deniers," the burning of their homes, the interment of "deniers" in reeducation or concentration camps.
For the Left, the West is guilty of the exploitation of
the poor, the marginalised and the oppressed. Britain has to do penance for the
sins of imperialism and racism. Israel has to do penance for the sins of
colonialism and racism. America has to do penance for the sins of imperialism,
slavery and racism.
For the environmentalists, the West is guilty of the
sins of consumerism and greed, acquisition, and luxury which have given it far
more than it needs. So these things must be taken away and the West must return
to a simpler, austere, pre-industrial way of life.
And because of its sins, the West is being punished
through the wars and terrorism being waged against it. The West "had it
coming to it" on account of its manifold iniquities. So America is
responsible for Islamic terrorism that murders American innocents. Israel is
responsible for Palestinian terrorism that murders Israeli innocents. And
Britain is responsible for the radicalisation of British Muslims and the 7/7 London
bus and Tube attacks in which dozens of British innocents were murdered,
because it has backed America and Israel and is guilty of
"Islamophobia".
As a result of all this sin, guilt and punishment the
Western progressive soul yearns for expiation and redemption. By electing
Barack Obama as president of the United States, Americans wanted to redeem
their country's original sins of slavery and racism. Through the demonisation
of Israel, Christian Europe wants to redeem its original sin of anti-Semitism. By
campaigning against carbon emissions, environmentalists want to redeem the
original sin of human existence.
As for the scientific materialists, the sin to be
redeemed is not by man against God but by God against man. Their governing
story is that uncorrupted man fell from the Garden of Reason when he partook of
the forbidden fruit of religion — which now has to be purged from the world to
create the kingdom of man on earth.
And for all these millenarians and apocalypticists and
utopians, religious and secular, the target is the West. As Ian Buruma and
Avishai Margalit write in their book Occidentalism, the West is seen as
a threat "not because it offers an alternative system of values but
because its promises of material comfort, individual freedom and dignity of
unexceptional lives deflate all utopian pretensions. The anti-heroic,
anti-utopian nature of Western liberalism is the greatest enemy of religious
radicals, priest-kings and collective seekers after purity and heroic
salvation."
That's why the West is squarely in the sights of all
who want to create utopia and are determined to remove all the obstacles it
places in its way. For environmentalists, that obstacle is industrialisation.
For scientific materialists, it's religion. For transnational progressives,
it's the nation. For anti-imperialists, it's American exceptionalism. For the
Western intelligentsia, it's Israel. And for the Islamic world, it's the entire
un-Islamic world.
I hope I've shown how these false faiths of ideology
have not only sought to replace biblical religion but have used the
characteristics of religious extremism to do so. The curiosity is that in their
warped way they are all types of belief, types of faith. Moreover, in a society
that prides itself on rationality there is a huge growth in paganism, the
occult, parapsychology and the like. Of course it brings to mind the famous
quote attributed (not necessarily correctly) to G.K. Chesterton: "When a
man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing, he'll believe in anything."
Whoever actually said that, it's clearly true. So the
great question is this: why do people continue to believe, even when they scorn
organised religion as irrational or irrelevant?
Religious people would say that this shows the
existence of God. Richard Dawkins would say it's a "meme", a kind of
thought-gene which transmits itself from one generation to another. But memes
don't exist — another example of the retreat into fantasy which atheists call
being rational.
The obvious answer is that people have a profound need
for something to exist outside themselves, something that gives a purpose to
life. And when they deny the belief that there is something beyond this world,
you could say that they seek that purpose within this world in secular ideologies.
Except that doesn't quite answer the question. Because
one might assume that the reason they turn away from organised religion is
because they reject any non-materialist beliefs as irrational mumbo-jumbo. Yet
as I have tried to show, so much of what they do believe is irrational
mumbo-jumbo. So there has to be some other explanation.
To help solve the conundrum, let's turn the question on
its head. Rather than ask what causes people to believe, let's ask instead what
causes militant atheists to hate religious belief so much. Why does it matter
so much to them that people have religious faith? Why don't they just dismiss
them as cranks and just leave it at that? Why does it matter so much, as the
geneticist Richard Lewontin candidly admitted, that scientists will come up
with crazy propositions in order to prevent "the divine foot in the
door"?
One clue, I think, lay in the slogan on the side of the
bus hired by atheists back in 2009 to spread the non-believing word. That
slogan read: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your
life." In other words, nasty religion puts constraints on your behaviour
and makes you miserable. In order to enjoy life you just have to shake off religion
and lose those constraints and then you will be happy.
I think this fatuous slogan gets to the heart of why
people have turned away from biblical religion — not because it is irrational
but because it puts constraints on their behaviour. This is the source of the
hatred — that biblical religion is seen as a restraint on the ability to behave
exactly as you want. What such people don't realise is that true freedom only
exists within constraints; and far from expanding freedom, unconstrained libertinism
leads straight to abuses of power. As we can see from the ideological false
faiths that are filling the vacuum.
Which leads me to my conclusion. The only way out of
this, the slow throttling of freedom of thought by secular ideologies and the
corresponding erosion of morality and order, is to return to the true faith of
biblical religion. To which people say: this is impossible in a world governed
by reason. But as I hope I have shown, it's not reason at all. People currently
believe all kinds of rubbish. If they are prepared to believe a dozen
impossible things before breakfast, there's surely no reason why they can't
believe the one allegedly impossible thing for which there exist centuries of
scholarly exegesis and an impressive measure of supporting evidence. All that's
needed is for God to have some rather better PR — for rabbis and priests to
start marketing their brands in more imaginative and attractive ways. Ways
which don't duck the mystery at the heart of existence which the false faiths
of ideology, no less than organised religion itself, are patently quite unable
to explain.
Sophie: IIRC, Melanie Phillips is a Jewess by birth, but an atheist by choice.
* Grab an
older copy of the Guinness Book of World Records and turn to the category
"Judicial," subheading "Crimes: Mass Killings." You'll find
that carnage of unimaginable proportions resulted not from religion, but from
institutionalised atheism: over 66 million wiped out under Lenin, Stalin, and
Khrushchev; between 32 and 61 million under Chinese Communist regimes since
1949; one third of the eight million Khmers - 2.7 million people - were killed
between 1975 and 1979 under the communist Khmer Rouge.
