Letter From Europe (About Complicit Silence)

European “Humanists”: Embarrassment or Silent Sympathy

Dawkins’ attack on disabled persons

Posted on September 5, 2014 

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

Following the world-wide astonishment and outrage over British “humanist” Richard Dawkins’ rant that mothers giving birth to children who have been diagnosed with Down Syndrome are acting “immorally”, we are surprised to find that neither the British Humanist Association (BHA), nor the European Humanist Federation (EHF), nor the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) have found it necessary to clarify whether they agree or disagree with this statement.

Mr. Dawkins is not only a well-known evolution biologist, but also pontificates as a promoter of “humanism”, “reason”, and a “scientific world view”. It is for this reason that BHA gave him their ‘Services to Humanism’ award in 2012. In fact, it seems that Mr. Dawkins is getting the same award every other year, given that already 2009 one could read that BHA and IHEU had jointly awarded him a prize for his merits in promoting reason and science across the world.

Further distinctions Mr. Dawkins has received for his “humanist” achievements include (without claim to completeness) the honorary doctorate from the (masonic) Université Libre de Bruxelles, the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year Award (1996), the 2001 and 2012 Emperor Has No Clothes Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Bicentennial Kelvin Medal of The Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (2002), or the Deschner Award, after German anti-clerical author Karlheinz  Deschner.

Pushing their adulation for Mr. Dawkins still one step further, the the Atheist Alliance International has since 2003 awarded a “Richard Dawkins Award” during its annual conference to honour outstanding atheists.

. . . maybe the silence is not one of embarrassment, but of complacency? Maybe those self-appointed “humanists” all agree that people with a handicap should be extinguished?

Mr. Dawkins callous attack against the right of life of disabled persons has caused embarrassed silence among the promoters of “humanism”, who in fact for so many years seem to have honoured a veritable anti-humanist. How will (BHA-style) “humanism” be able to claim that it stands for respect and non-discrimination, when its most prominent figurehead publicly asserts that people with handicaps should not be allowed to exist?

Or maybe the silence is not one of embarrassment, but of complacency? Maybe those self-appointed “humanists” all agree that people with a handicap should be extinguished? This would then raise further questions: for example, whether that judgment applies only to people with Down Syndrome, or also to other disabilities? Would there be any disability that the “humanists” would be prepared to accept or at least to tolerate? If so, which?

On a more practical note, there is also a question the European Commission might want to answer: is it really appropriate to continue receiving the EHF and similar organisations within the framework of the Commission’s regular meetings with “philosophical and non-confessional organisations” under Article 17 of the TFEU? What are people with Down Syndrome (or their parents) supposed think of the Commission’s rolling out the red carpet for EHF?

So there is an urgent need for clarification. Given that the representatives of EHF here in Brussels, whom I know to be assiduous followers of this blog, will not fail to read this post, I am sure they will soon explain us their point of view.

Should they prefer to remain silent, there is only one possible conclusion: QUI TACET CONSENTIRE VIDETUR.

False Prophets

A Prescient Judge Points the Way

A judge in Downunder has caused discombobulation and outrage at his suggestion that there is nothing principially wrong with incest.  That incest should be advocated from the bench ought not be surprising to Christians.  When secular humanism becomes the regnant religion, anything that can be done will be done–and will likely be endorsed and approved.  The reason is that the ethic of secular humanism runs, “I am the master of my fate; man is the measure of all things; nothing human is foreign or absolutely wrong.” 

When this ethic is applied consistently to sexual mores nothing is implicitly forbidden.  Explicit prohibitions are ignorant, primitive, time-bound prejudices and subject to change by the next more-enlightened generation.  We are in the middle of just such a sea change.

The secularists are actively pushing the boundaries.  But The Daily Telegraph in the land of Oz has been so outraged, it has called for a judge to be sacked. Why?  Because the judge has suggested that there is nothing wrong with incest, only sexual and physical mechanics which can easily be controlled.

BEYOND their role as legal arbiters, judges are supposed to offer a form of moral framework around the laws they work with. Their remarks from the bench are a broader guide to society’s proper functioning.  That is the intention. District Court Judge Garry Neilson’s comments on incest, however, run contrary to any civilised moral code.

Here is what Neilson had to say, during an April trial that has only recently been reported: “A jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now available.”

Neilson said the “only reason” incest is still a crime is because of the risk of genetic abnormalities: “But even that falls away to an extent (because) there is such ease of contraception and ready access to abortion.” In almost any context, these comments are utterly indefensible. Neilson’s remarks were made during the case of a man ­alleged to have repeatedly raped his younger sister in the 1980s.

To say that Neilson has stepped outside the accepted boundaries of a judge’s role would be to severely understate matters. There is no possibility of explaining away or rationalising these comments. He should be stood down immediately.

The paper charges Neilson with breaching “civilised moral codes”.  What, we inquire is a “civilised” moral code?  Does it prohibit abortion?  No, of course not.  That’s perfectly acceptable.  Does it proscribe no-fault divorce?  Not at all.  A civilised moral code protects the “right” to abort, and permits and facilitates divorce on grounds as frivolous as both parties mutually deciding to split apart. Why should incest be so sacrosanct, since both abortion and divorce trade upon human volition and doctrines of made-up-human rights. If humans want anything, in principle it’s OK, because “nothing human is foreign or alien to us”.

Rather than breaching any civilised moral code, abortion on-demand and divorce on-demand are regarded as the hallmarks of civilisation today.  Why then the umbrage taken over incest?  The reality is that within the secularist world-view “civilised moral codes” are perfectly circular entities.  Whatever the law code endorses is “civilised” by its presence in the code.

But if the paper is appealing to some overarching moral code that holds all humanity to account and before which we will all be judged when the editors condemn such perversions, pray tell us what it is.  Where can this code be found and what are its precepts?  Secular humanists and evolutionists–the high priestly cast of our society–have none, at least none that are arguable or defensible.

Rather, the prevailing culture of secularist Unbelief rightly should lionise Neilson and promote him, if secularism is to be consistent and taken seriously.  And in the end it will.  Judge Neilson is true believer, an apostle of the established religion of the day, an enlightened and principled man.

In truth, however, those who sow to the secularist wind, will inherit the divine whirlwind, and thus progressively destructive tornadoes are sweeping across our culture and civilisation.  God is giving up our particularly perverse “civilisation”.   He will not be mocked–thankfully.  

Standing for Nothing; Falling for Everything

Secularist Paper Tigers Confront Islam

The prevailing view of religion in the West can be characterised as one of condescending ignorance.  Religion is something belonging to a primitive past.  It is made up of superstitions, myths, and fanciful errors without any basis in truth or reality.  To extend tolerance and civic freedom to religions is considered an act of indulgence–putting up with childish notions, ideas, and behaviour until those involved in a religion grow up and become true moderns–that is, materialistic, atheistic, and humanistic.

This world-view has two Achilles heels.  The first is the failure to understand that Western secularism is indeed a religion in its own right.  A religious anti-religion.  It is a cosmology, and ultimate belief system, with no authentication outside of itself.  This places Western secularism in a vulnerable position.  It is founded on rationalism, but its rationalism cannot defend or authenticate its own position.  It is ultimately, therefore, an irrational system that is viciously circular.  It can collapse more quickly than Ukrainian Defence Forces in the Donetsk.  Because its protagonists and defenders remain unaware of its vulnerability at this point, it constantly leaves itself open to ridicule and rejection–which, given the vaunting arrogance and pride of the secular humanist religion, hurts.  That’s the first Achilles heel.

The second is its befuddled, double-minded attitude towards other religions.
  One the one hand, it condescendingly slurs all other religions as ignorance reified.  On the other, it wants to maintain a condescending acceptance or tolerance of all religions, since some of the core commandments of secular humanism involve acceptance, tolerance, and respect of another’s identity.

In the UK, it is the application of acceptance, tolerance and respect for another’s identity which is landing the secularist establishment in deep water when it comes to Islam.  That religion constantly orientates its compass needle toward intolerant militance.  Secular humanism struggles to cope.

Conservative and consistent Muslims are actively working and conspiring to take control of certain government schools in the UK.  Their objective is to transform the schools into Islamic schools, reflecting and applying Islamic social mores, rules, and cultural conventions.  They also demand that the UK taxpayers fund their schools.

This has discombobulated the secular establishment.  Firstly, no-one in his right mind would take his own religion that seriously.  Such ignorance and prejudice is hard to fathom in our modern world.  Who would believe such stuff in the twenty-first century. They can’t be serious.  Secondly, if they are serious, then they threatens the core commandments of secularism: tolerance, acceptance, and respect of another’s identity.  Secularists, in resisting, might be forced to avow Muslim beliefs and historical praxis as ignorant, backward, and benighted–which does not fit secularism’s public self-narrative at all.

Thirdly, secularism fears the kind of confrontation where Islamic believers will insist their position is right, and will damn the secularist view, forcing secularism to defend its own ethics, standards, and practice–thereby exposing that it is an emperor without clothes.  Its own belief systems lack foundation.  Islam says that Female Genital Mutilation is a core practice of its religion, long authenticated by Islamic tradition.  The secularists reject it.  But–and here comes the killer– the Islamists in turn reject the secularist position as the position of “infidels”, and the secularists are left gasping, since beyond all the bluster and brouhaha, there is no objective or normative foundation for any morality, ethics, or values within secularism.  By what objective or normative law might secularism condemn Female Genital Mutilation?  Secularism struggles when its opponents adopt its own mien of condescending dismissiveness towards outsiders.

For those not yet up with the play, Birmingham schools are being infilatrated, then subjected to a conspiracy to effect an Islamic takeover.  The authorities are struggling, and secular humanist ideology is faltering.  It will be entertaining to watch it play out.  Secular humanism is not in a strong position.  It arrogant condescension has left it vulnerable and exposed.

Here is a summary of what’s going down:

Head teachers raise ‘serious concerns’ over Islamic school take-over

Concern of ‘Trojan Horse’ plot spreads to three more state primaries as head teachers’ leaders voice concerns for the first time over the Islamic infiltration at schools in Birmingham

The Telegraph
Monday 5th May, 2014

Schools across Britain are likely to have been targeted in an alleged Islamist plot to take over classrooms, head teachers have warned. The National Association of Head Teachers said it had found “concerted efforts” to infiltrate at least six schools in Birmingham. But the union also said that the scandal had “connections” to other large cities.

The Telegraph understands that there are growing concerns about the possible infiltration of schools in Bradford, Manchester and parts of east London.The acknowledgement from the professional body follows a series of exposés by The Telegraph which disclosed how a “Trojan Horse” plot in Birmingham had put schools under pressure illegally to segregate classrooms and change teaching to reflect radical Islamic beliefs.
 

On Friday, Ofsted confirmed that its investigation had spread from 18 to 21 schools in the city. The three additional schools are primaries.  In a statement, the head teachers’ association said attempts had been made to “alter their character in line with the Islamic faith”, including sidelining parts of the curriculum and attempting to influence the appointment of Muslim staff.

Russell Hobby, its general secretary, warned that the action was unlikely to be “limited to Birmingham”, adding: “I think it is connected into the large cities around the country.”  It is the first time a major teachers’ organisation has confirmed that such concerns exist. The plot involves the alleged takeover of secular state schools and the removal of secular head teachers by radical Muslim staff and governors.

Five non-Muslim heads have left their posts in a tiny area of the city over the past six months. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has ordered an inquiry into Birmingham schools.  An inspection report by the Department for Education, leaked to The Telegraph, found that girls at Park View school were made to sit at the back of the class, GCSE syllabuses were “restricted to comply with a conservative Islamic teaching” and an extremist preacher was invited to speak to children.

Last week it emerged that Tahir Alam, the alleged ringleader of the plot and chairman of governors at Park View, wrote a detailed blueprint for the “Islamisation” of state schools in 2007.

Mr Alam has form.  In a further article in The Telegraph, Andrew Gilligan reports:

The alleged ringleader of the Trojan Horse plot wrote a detailed blueprint for the radical “Islamisation” of secular state schools which closely resembles what appears to be happening in Birmingham. Tahir Alam, chairman of governors at Park View school in the city, called for “girls [to] be covered except for their hands and faces”, advocated gender segregation in some school activities, and attacked a “multicultural approach” to collective worship.

He described how state schools must be changed to “take account of Muslim sensitivities and sensibilities with respect to sexual morality” with “girlfriend/boyfriend as well as homosexual relationships” treated as “not acceptable practices according to Islamic teachings”.

The disclosure comes as teachers at Park View said a boy and a girl in their GCSE year have been suspended after being spotted holding hands, only weeks before they were due to take their exams. “They have done this to quite a few students in Year 11,” said one member of staff. “That they should continue with it, even with all the scrutiny we are under, just beggars belief.”

The secularists are scrambling.  They are faced with ardent Islamic believers who just don’t accept secularism, but regard it as “kaffir”.  In their belief, Islam conveys a definite culture of personal, family, and community life.  The community is sacrosanct; the individual is nothing, if he or she does not conform.  The One drives out the Many.  Therefore, Islamic faith is an authoritarian communal faith.  Secularism is just one of the infidel things to be driven out.

Secularism will likely prove to be a paper tiger.  Without any ethical foundations and irrational at its root it will end up standing for nothing and falling for everything. 

Gratuitous Prejudice

Established Religion

We have a kind of faith in the nature of people that we do not have in the botanical processes of nature itself–and I use the word “faith” in its full religious force.  We really do believe that all human beings have a natural telos toward becoming flowers, not weeds or poison ivy, and that aggregates of human beings have a natural predisposition to arrange themselves into gardens, not jungles or garbage heaps.

This sublime and noble faith we may call the religion of liberal humanism.  It is the dominant spiritual and intellectual orthodoxy in America today.  Indeed, despite all our chatter about the separation of church and state, one can even say it is the official religion of American society today, as against which all other religions can be criticized as divisive and parochial. 

Irving Kristol, “Thoughts on Reading About a Number of Summer-Camp Cabins Covered with Garbage,” The New York Tims Magazine, Nov. 17, 1974, p.38.

Humanist Militants

 Emergent  Self-Consciousness

There are plenty of signs that secular humanism is becoming more demanding, more militant.  We are now at the “side with us, or shut up” stage.  We stand on the verge of the next stage: “side with us, or we will shut you up“.  A cluster of secular “truths” are becoming so fundamental that militant devotees of humanism now regard them to be self-evident.  Amongst these are oddities such as global warming, saving the whales, homosexual rights, trans-gender rights, and homosexual “marriage”.  For humanist militants, all these are now “settled”.  Debate no longer tolerable .  If you don’t subscribe to these self-evident truths, you are a heretic, a danger to the body politic, and must be forced to conform or, if not, silenced. 

One of the early apostles of militant secular humanism is John Dewey.  The humanist manifesto is set forth in his book, A Common Faith, written way back in 1934. [John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934.)]  Paul Vitz observes:

John Dewey concludes his book, A Common Faith with an exhortation to make humanism an active “common faith”: in humanism “are all the elements of a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race.  Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.  It remains to make it explicit and militant. [Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: the Cult of Self-Worship (Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1977), p. 37.]

Almost a hundred years after Dewey was writing and nearly forty years after Vitz was diagnosing the increasingly religious nature of pop psychology, humanist militants are in the majority and now bold enough to demand control.
  Not only are they making the humanist religion explicit, they are becoming more militant–demanding its regimen and “orthodoxy” be enforced in schools, universities, the legal system, business corporations, the media, and in all corners of the “public square”.  The militancy is evidenced by a clarion call for the dissenters to be silenced, and if not, to be exiled from participation in any aspect of society.  When Richard Dawkins, one of their number, initially called for children of Christian parents to be removed from their homes on the grounds that Christian parents were subjecting their children to abuse by teaching them the Christian faith, he was initially laughed at.  No longer.  Amongst the militant humanists it is now an eminently sensible, self-evident position.  Of course Christians are abusing their children. 

It cannot last and will not succeed.  But we are likely to have a merry old time whilst the sandy foundations of secular humanism are being exposed.  The only constant in militant humanism is that the human being is perpetually malleable and changeable and emergent.

Selfist psychology emphasizes the human capacity for change to the point of almost ignoring the idea that life has limits and that knowledge of them is the basis of wisdom.  For selfists there seem to be no acceptable duties, denials, inhibitions, or restraints.  Instead, there are only rights and opportunities for change. [Vitz, op cit., p. 38.]

Herein lies the rub.  As secular humanism becomes more overt and explicit, it also becomes more militant.  But militancy means that it ends up warring against itself.  Yesterday’s humanist cause becomes tomorrow’s heresy that must be crushed.   Militant secular humanism ends up consuming itself. 

This is an ideological and religious battle which we Christians must relish and must fight courageously and with great faith.  Our weapons are not theirs, and remain infinitely more powerful and influential.  As more and more groups and causes, which once were the celebrated humanist causes of the day, fall out of favour, devotees of the old cause become the new pariahs.  Internecine war breaks out.  We have begun to see the pattern  For example, homosexual liberals campaign for recognition of homosexual “marriage” but become disaffected when militants begin to enforce conformity to the same, asking for and securing the punishment of those who disagree.

As global warming becomes passé and is replaced by militant global cooling advocates another cohort of disaffected casualties will lie strewn in the public square.  Just as in the Soviet Union, yesterday’s orthodoxy will become tomorrow’s heterodoxy and the burgeoning population of the social (if not actual) Gulag will be more open to listen to the self-consistent Opponent of all humanist idolatry–the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

As militant humanism becomes more consistent, more epistemologically self-conscious, so Christians must likewise become more consistently Christian, more biblically self-conscious.  The humanist casualties in the inevitable internecine humanist wars will likely ripen into a field white for harvest.  We believe this will be the great battle of our age.   We relish it.  We look forward to it.  Once again the Lord’s servants will experience the joy of spiritual battle.

It was in the Gulag that the former secular humanist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn came to understand the seat of evil: 

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. [Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956]

It was in the Gulag  that the secular humanist, Solzhenitsyn became a Christian.  

She’ll Be Right, Mate

Secular Humanism’s Enlightenment

One of the great battles of our time wages in the realm of education.  Education–both what is taught to the next generation and how it is to be taught–reflects the dominant religion of the day.  This is inevitable.  The dominant religion of our age is secular humanism: its doctrines have been inevitably insinuated into our schools. 

One of the characteristics of secular humanism is that it has rotten, crumbling epistemological foundations.  Which is more important: to know multiplication tables or know how to do the rumba?  Secular humanism has no settled answer to that question.
  “It all depends, really” is the oft-heard response.  Another conundrum is whether an older generation imparting truth to children is helpful or a hindrance to the child becoming genuinely self-authenticated.  Secular humanism has no final answer to the issue.  Should one culture be dominant or should the ethic of multi-culturalism and diversity require that our education system reflect all cultures, with no certain way of discerning the good and bad in all human culture?  Secular humanism cannot decide definitively and finally: it seethes between the two polarities.

The absence of any standard by which education, educators, and the curriculum is to be judged has many consequences.  One of them is the official syllabus becomes an ever-burgeoning list of subjects to be taught in schools.  Curriculum creep is destroying the secular humanistic government education systems.  What has to be taught (officially) is now so vast that schools can only spend an inadequate amount of time on all subjects listed in the curriculum.  Pupils are graduating as jacks of all subjects, masters of none.

Is a passing grade in “community tidiness” equal to, more, or less, important than a passing grade in reading competence in the dominant language of a nation?  Secular humanism has no final, settled answer to that question.  Common sense would say, reading competence is by far the more important.  But common sense is a fickle matter.  Years ago common sense would have told you that homosexual marriage is an oxymoron.  Today’s common sense has a different narrative.  Common sense is nothing more than a reflection of the commonly held religion. 

Every so often the secular humanist pendulum swings back.  Government’s try to rein in curriculum creep and establish some subjects as core.  We are in the midst of that in New Zealand with an attempt to focus government schools on reading, writing and maths.  The UK is going through a similar phase.  We believe it will not last, nor will it be successful as long as people deny the Christ, for it is the Scripture which gives authoritative warrant to the notion that reading, writing, and mathematics are the key to all other learning and subjects of study.  Take away the Scriptural warrant and you end up with a wretched combination of “she’ll be right, mate” and “everyman must do what is right in his own eyes”. 

She’ll be right.  The epitaph of a secular humanist education system.

Abandoning Reason

We Have But One Choice

Abortion is murder.  It is the most heinous crime of the post-modern, Western world.  More than any other issue, it marks the death and destruction of secular humanism.  It represents the clash between two Lords–one genuinely so, the other a usurping wannabe.  On the one side is the Lord Jesus Christ, sovereign of the whole earth, risen from the dead, ascended to heaven, and enthroned by the Living God as King of the earth.  On the other side is Man, self-appointed, self-enthroned, pathetic in usurpation. 

The time for humanist Man to claim lordship and sovereignty over the earth and all that is in it has long since passed.  Four successive humanist empires in the ancient world came and went: Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek and Roman.  In Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (in Daniel 2) these four successive empires were represented by one giant statue of Man.  Then, in the time of the fourth empire (the Roman), God cut a stone which smashed the empire of Man into pieces.
  Thereafter the stone, cut by God, grew and filled all the earth (Daniel 2: 44)  We are told that the stone represented God’s Kingdom being set up in the earth. 

The erstwhile humanist kingdom of our modern world is a throwback to the ancient world.  But its time has passed; thus, the secular West will never achieve dominion, nor domination.  Its time was declared over long, long ago. 

But the myth of Western domination is clung to bitterly by Unbelief in our day.  Christians shake their heads at the tomfoolery on display.  Not empire can lift up its hands against the Lord’s enthroned, Anointed One and prosper.  Many have tried.  All have failed.  The secular West will be no exception. 

The clash between these two kingdoms and two Lords takes place on many fronts, but the difference between the two kingdoms is no more marked, no more vividly on display in the battle over abortion.  The Kingdom of Man appears utterly weak, self-contradictory, internally conflicted and pathetic.  It cannot mount a coherent argument justifying its evil, yet its killing fields are watered every day with fresh blood, crying out to the Lord for vengeance.  Their cry is heard. 

The vacuity of the abortionist case is everywhere apparent.  The organs of media and secularist propaganda are silent on the process and practice.  On the one hand, it is touted as one of the great freedom rights of the Modern World–a woman’s right to choose–yet descriptions of  the actual practice of abortion are hushed and kept hidden.   It remains a shameful, evil thing so much so that the conscience of the common man will not be silent: there is a general unease about the abortion which keeps pushing it into the backrooms of society. 

Every limitation upon the practice–in the attempt to make it more decent and acceptable–is immediately both artificial and contrived.  To be sure, we are thankful for every outcome where the practice ends up being constrained to some extent.  But at the level of principle, argument, justification and warrant every legal constraint on abortion is immediately spurious.  Take, for example, restrictions upon abortion tied to the term of a pregnancy: why on earth should abortion be legal in the first trimester, but not the third?  What ethical or moral principle could possibly be invoked justifying such artificial distinctions? 

The moral, religious, ethical, and legal debates over abortion always come down to two issues, and two issues only: what constitutes a human being in distinction from other forms of life, and, secondly, who has the authority, wisdom, and power to answer that question?  To the second question there are only two options: either Man declares, or God does.  Both have done so. 

In the West, Man has rebelled and usurped the declaration of God, supplanting his own idiocy–riddled with inconsistency and contradictions.  At one moment it is the “woman’s right” to determine such things; at the next  instance, it is society’s right to restrict and declare and rule.  For example, take the recent issue of sex-selection abortions.  Western society condemns using abortion for sex selection of babies–the practice of aborting baby girls because a male child is preferred–yet at the same time Western society declares that the thing in the womb is not a human being.  Go figure.  Actually, it is so self-contradictory, figuring is impossible.  The West is mad.  When such madness, such darkness descends upon a culture, God is already judging us. 

There is but one choice left: the West must become as it once was–a repentant people, bowing before the Lord of all the earth, seeking His mercy, and vowing fidelity to Him.  His yoke is easy; His burden is light.  His realm redounds with grace and truth and vivacity.  If we return, the killing fields will be banished forever.

Man the Measure of All Things

Established Religion

In a previous post we made reference to C.E.M. Joad’s testimony as to how his generation rejected the doctrine of original sin.  As G. K. Chesterton once famously observed, when people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they begin to believe in everything.  So it proved true in the Twilight Generation in Britain that lived in the first part of the twentieth century.

The Worker Has Rights

Rotting From the Inside

All of life is religious and religions have consequences.  Secular humanism–whilst formally a non-religion–is no exception.  The Christian testimony to all other religions–including secular humanism–is that they are untrue.  All are deceptive and misleading.  All are vanities.

Because each in their own way rebels against the Living God Who made the heavens and the earth out of nothing by the Word of His power they have bad consequences.  The world is “wired” to exist and function as God made and commanded it to be.  Rebellion against God means rebellion against the created order.  The consequences are never good.

There are a thousand illustrations of the point, but we will focus upon just one here.

Grand Utopian Projects

 Human Progress and Its Fruit

The quotation below is from David Bentley Hart: it is a brief de-construction of the pathogens in modern Unbelief.  Bowing to the freedom of autonomous human will has resulted in barbaric cruelty and crushing tyranny.  When the human will is regarded as sacrosanct, the State’s fangs grow long and sharp.

Idealism becomes ruthless.  The concept of freedom becomes savage.  The autonomous utopias of Man devolve into bloody dystopias. 

If the quintessential myth of modernity is that true freedom is the power of the will over nature–human or cosmic–and that we are at liberty to make ourselves what we wish to be, then it is not necessarily the case that the will of the individual should be privileged over the “will of the species”. . . . (W)ith the disappearance of the transcendent, and of its lure, and of its authority, it becomes possible to will a human future conformed to whatever ideals we choose to embrace. 

This is why it is correct to say that the sheer ruthlessness of so much of post-Christian social idealism in some sense arises from the very same concept of freedom that lies at the heart of our most precious modern values.  The savagery of triumphant Jacobinism, the clinical heartlessness of classical socialist eugenics, the Nazi movement, Stalinism–all the grand utopian projects of the modern age that have directly or indirectly spilled such oceans of human blood–are no less results of the Enlightenment myth of liberation than are the liberal democratic state or the vulgarity of late capitalist consumerism or the pettiness of bourgeois individualism.

The most pitilessly and self-righteously violent regimes of modern history–in the West or in those other quarters of the world contaminated by our worst ideas–have been those that have most explicitly cast off the Christian vision of reality and sought to replace it with a more “human” set of values.  No cause in history–no religion or imperial ambition or military adventure–has destroyed more lives with more confident enthusiasm than the cause of the “brotherhood of man”, the post-religious utopia, or the progress of the race.  [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 107.]

Another Western Utopia Unfolds

The Demons Are Coming Back

Libya is no longer in the headlines.  It’s all over, bar the torture, the killing, the destruction of human life.  C’est la vie.  Where is the clamour for helping Libyans that once stridently and passionately circled the globe?  Where are Hillary Clinton or John McCain or President Obama when you need them?  Actually we don’t need them–and we never have.

What lies before us is another testimony to the folly and stupidity and hubris and idolatry of the West.  Libya is yet another piece of damning evidence indicting the craven humanism of the West and its perverted notion of secular human rights.

When the West takes upon itself the arrogation of rights to intervene and go to war to oust dictators, what arises from the rubble and detritus of war is often ten times worse. 

We are seeing reports start to trickle through on what is presently “going down” in Libya.
  According to Western utopianism, when dictator Ghadaffi was overthrown the “free people” of Libya were going to transform that country into a Western-style democracy, wherein all their women would suddenly deck out in mini-skirts and abortifacient drugs would be feely available, funded by the state’s oil revenues.  Arabia was in the season of spring.  Wasn’t it exciting!  It was unbelievable what was happening in the Arab world.  First Morocco, then Egypt, now Libya, soon to come would be Syria. Democracies sprouting up everywhere. The chattering classes chattered.  The Commentariat commented. 

Welcome to the new, democratic republic of Libya.

Libyan militias ‘out of control,’ Amnesty International says

By the CNN Wire Staff

February 16, 2012 — Updated 0228 GMT (1028 HKT)

Libyan militia members man a checkpoint in the capital, Tripoli, in December.

(CNN) — Armed militias in Libya are committing human rights abuses with impunity, threatening to destabilize the country and hindering its efforts to rebuild, Amnesty International said Thursday.  Militias have tortured detainees, targeted migrants and displaced entire communities in revenge attacks, according to a report the organization released a year after the start of popular uprisings that eventually ended Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year rule.

“Hundreds of armed militias, widely hailed in Libya as heroes for their role in toppling the former regime, are largely out of control,” the report says.  Detainees at 10 facilities used by militia in central and western Libya told representatives from Amnesty International this year that they had been tortured or abused. Several detainees said they confessed to crimes they had not committed in order to stop the torture, Amnesty International said.

At least 12 detainees held by militias have died after being tortured since September, the human rights organization said, adding that authorities have not effectively investigated the torture allegations.

Western elites have no concept of limited, restrained civil government.  They have no idea of civil government  under the dominion of the Lord Jesus Christ.  The notion that the state must first of all be subject to Christ, before the people is abhorrent to them.  Secular civil governments answer only to themselves and their own secular notions of justice, liberty, and human rights.  But their beliefs are utterly foreign to most other human beings on the planet.

Governments throughout the West believe in the universal intrinsic moral goodness of all humanity.  Evil is extrinsic and circumstantial.  Change the circumstances, breaking the power of  (the current) evil and voila, human goodness will break out like–well, Spring.  In this deeply anti-Christian theology, the West’s military forces become false messianic deliverers and saviours.  Their military forces everywhere around the globe, blowing up the extrinsic evil-du-jour, then, lo and behold, sweet purity will burst forth from the pores of downtrodden people.

The reality is far different.  Because evil is intrinsic to the heart of every human being (“I am evil, born in sin”, lamented King David–speaking not just for himself, but for every human being) breaking down oppressive governments allows lawlessness to spew forth.  It is exactly as our Lord warned: cast out the demon, leaving the house vacant and multitudes of demons will return to take up residence. 

When will they ever learn–those secular, effete, Unbelieving elites of the post-Christian West?  Never–until we–the people–turn to the Lord Jesus Christ and bow our knees to Him.  Then, having submitted ourselves to Him, we can rise up and cast out the secular humanist demons, replacing them with wise and godly rulers who believe with deep conviction that the government which governs least–out of fear of Christ the Lord– governs best

Chris Carter, on His Merits

The Opportunities are Breathtaking

At this blog, as our readers know, we are anti-UN.  It is a hopeless, thoroughly compromised institution–as any grand Babelesque edifice erected to the praise of Man will inevitably be–but every now and again we have to acknowledge, the UN shows some smarts, and gets things right.  Praise where it is due, and all that.

Former Labour MP (and government minister) Chris Carter is off to Kabul, Afghanistan to fight corruption.  This, from the NZ Herald:

Mr Carter is leaving New Zealand next Wednesday to take up a position as a director of the Governance Unit of the UN mission in Kabul will involve battling corruption.  “I will head a team based in the Ministry of the Interior, which advises President Karzai and his ministers on effective ways of improving local governance at the provincial level with the police and the judiciary,” he said.

“The UN has a lot of pilot projects in Afghanistan and I will advise New York as to the effectiveness of those.”

We know that corruption is endemic in Afghanistan and Mr Carter’s services will be in great demand. He denies that his appointment has anything to do with his relationship with Helen Clark, former political ally, now Numero Tria  in the UN.  He got his job solely on his merits.

This denial has a ring of credibility.  We all know that Mr Carter has a lengthy resume when it comes to corruption–practising it, that is.  He has been a serial “trougher” exploiting his taxpayer funded credit card to the full, travelling all over the world at their expense, staying in the best hotels with his (male) lover, under the thin pretext of travelling for NZ government business–even long after he lost his ministerial warrants and was reduced to the ranks of the opposition benches. His trips to Britain usually co-incided with the UK equivalent of “Gay-pride” events.

We would argue that this is precisely why Mr Carter would have got the job on his merits.  For once the UN has been smart, and “set a thief to catch a thief.”  We expect that Mr Carter will perform his UN duties with distinction. 

Asked this morning on Morning Report whether Ms Clark had played a part in his appointment, Mr Carter replied “none whatsoever”.  He said he had three referees from the Labour caucus, who he declined to name but did confirm leader Phil Goff was not one of them.

He said he went to Afghanistan with a lot of experience to bring to the job.  “I guess they’ve judged I’m the most competent to do it.”

While it is true that normally self-praise is no recommendation, in this case we believe he has got it right.  He will certainly bring a great deal of personal experience to the job; his nose for being on-the-take will be much more sensitive than the ordinary run-of-the-mill UN functionary–and that, dear friends, is saying something..  All that US and NATO money flooding into Afghanistan, all that idealistic “nation building”  naivete, all the drugs, all the bribery, that oh-so-thick lining-of-the-pockets, all the fortunes being made and cannily deposited offshore–Mr Carter’s practised eye will see it all immediately with his experienced street-craft.

Mind you, he will have to keep his hand in, as it were, just for practice sake.  We presume he has already got his offshore accounts opened and ready for those invisible electronic transfers just waiting to be snared and sent on their way to a nice home. 

>Without God, Without Creed, Part VIII

>The End Game Gambit

Terry Eagleton, writing in the New Statesman, claims that post-Christian Western societies are ceaselessly searching for a God-substitute, an idol.

Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.

Eagleton has hit the nail on the head.
It is important to understand that this pathetic and perilous position did not just happen.  It was over three hundred years in the making–as secularism gradually replaced Christendom.  This development was neither “natural” nor inevitable.

>The Coming Race

>An Offensive Mirror

We are simple souls, and so find ourselves “conflicted” (to use pop psych jargon) over the public vituperate musings about one Macsyna King.  How we love a mob.  All heat and no light.  A dirty bomb.

Macsyna is coming out of the closet via a book, written by Ian Wishart.  The mob has called for the book to be banned, via boycott, successfully pressuring booksellers not to carry it.  She was the mother of murdered (or manslaughtered) infant twins, Chris and Cru Kahui.  The court acquitted her current boyfriend (and father of the twins) of responsibility for their deaths.  No-one else has been charged.  The defence argued that Macsyna was their killer.
If the court evidence is to be believed, King has been both wretched and depraved.

>The Humanist Gospel

>Egypt and the Snake-Oilers

The secular West has a secular gospel. It is the good news of democracy. When problems assail a nation, all would be assuaged if not solved if it had more democracy. And so it has come to pass with respect to Egypt.

The West is not unique in that it has its own version of gospel. All human cultures, religions, and peoples have a gospel of some kind. The word “gospel” of course means good news. The gospel of any society is the proclamation of what that society believes will make things right. Whatever a culture looks to as the “super problem solver” is its saviour. Proclaiming and touting that “saviour” is its gospel. That gospel reaches the status of being established in a society when its promises and claims are seen as self-evident and beyond question. Whenever a culture fails to achieve a consensus view of what its saviour is, it has no gospel: fracturing is inevitable. In the West, under the aegis of its established religion of secular humanism, democracy is it.

It is easy to understand why democracy has become the West’s established gospel of choice.  The West is primarily about the glorification and celebration of man.  Democracy is that form of government which does respectful obeisance  to man–it is the system of government which seems to accord most closely with the idea that man is his own self-saviour.  If man is his own self-saviour, then democracy is the form of government which brings man into a position of institutional supremacy in society.  The will of the people is the voice of our god.  So, if any society has problems (and all do), a system of government which institionalises and reifies the will and wisdom of man must be better, if not best.  Democracy facilitates man taking control of his own destiny and this will result in the solving and resolution of all problems. 

As the West opines and pontificates over Egypt it cannot help but project its gospel upon that country. The future for Egypt would be much more assured and all problems would be mitigated if the government were to become less authoritarian. If free and fair elections were held and the people had a voice all would be well, or at least better. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who come proclaiming the gospel of democracy. What a tingle goes up the spine when our high priests in the West proclaim our secular liturgical chants.

Problem number one. Egypt already has a democratic government. The political party of President Mubarak is called the National Democratic Party. “Don’t be an idiot,” we hear you retort.  “The name is nothing.  The substance is everything.”  If we inquire what the “substance” might be, no doubt our Western gospellers would point to “the people” electing and controlling their government, so that the government reflects them: their hopes, aspirations, beliefs, and desires.  If Egypt were to have that kind of government–that is, a democratic government–all its problems would be solved or at least mitigated.  Democracy is the good news of salvation.

The Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has conducted a survey in Egypt and six other Muslim countries (Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Nigeria) on public attitudes to the Western gospel of democracy.  A majority (59 percent) in Egypt think that democracy is the best form of government for Egypt.  Clearly, the Western missionaries have been influential in that country.  It bodes well for a peaceful transition to modern, western secular democratic government.

But even more people (85 percent) believe that Islam has a positive influence on politics.  This implies that a large section of the population in Egypt (around 35 percent) can take or leave the West’s gospel.  The real deal gospel in Egypt is Islam.  No surprises there.  All will be solved by submission to Allah.  But it gets more problematic.  Two out of three Egyptians believe that the Islamic fundamentalists are right; moderates are wrong.  Twenty percent of Egyptians favour or approve of suicide bombing and other terrorist acts.  And there is overwhelming support (84 percent) for anyone who abandons Islam to be put to death.  (This view is held, we are told, by “men and women, old and young, educated and uneducated, without distinction.”)

It would appear, then, that the will of the people in Egypt portrays a profoundly different view of humanity  from that trumpeted and believed upon by the gospellers of the West.  

Democracy as gospel is a complete fraud.  It is embarrassing that it ever came to be a prevailing Western gospel.  How confused and stupid and self-righteously arrogant the West has become.  But, then, every culture, every nation has to have a gospel.  And the West has a right doozy.

No doubt some would resort to Winston Churchill’s apologia for democracy: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”  Maybe.  Tell that to the Athenians who suffered under the tyranny of the 51 percent.  Tell that to the executed Egyptians if they end up getting a truly representative democracy.  

Others would point to the need for “higher laws” superintending democracy, so that the rights and freedoms of minorities are protected.  But at this point, democracy as gospel starts to shape up as a pretty thin reed.  It turns out that there is democracy and qualified democracy.  Which is pretty much what Egypt would end up with, right?  It all depends where the qualifiers go in.  What the West hopes for is a certain kind of democracy that presupposes its own ideology of western secular humanism.  But to stand up and say that to Egypt would be embarrassing.  It would be like taking one’s real religion out of the closet. 

Still others would retort–at least with democracy people get the government they deserve.  Even if it turns out badly, it is their bad, and there is an implicit justice in that.  Maybe.  But just to say this is evidence that the great gospel of the West is a fraud.  Once again the West has backed a loser and its posturing on the “global stage” is that of the unctuous snake-oiler. Democracy cannot bear the weight of being touted and believed upon as the great problem solver of mankind.  Why?  Mankind might have pretensions to deity but whilst his neck might be suitably stiff, his shoulders are neither sufficiently broad, nor his legs sufficiently strong to bear the load.  Only the blind and the foolish pretend otherwise. Western secular democracy is an idol doomed to destruction.

Hat Tip: Maria at NZ Convervative

>Human Rights Utopianism

>An Empire of Law

Fixating upon human rights as the key objective of governments and foreign relations is a relatively recent development.  However, we would argue, it is an inevitable development of Western established religion.  Rights-based political ideologies that are understood to transcend nations, cultures, and religions are a completely consistent application of the West’s established idolatry of rationalistic secular humanism.

John Grey, writing in The National Interest has reviewed Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,2010)http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0674048725&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr. Moyn deals with the emergence of human rights as the dominant overarching political ideology of our generation. He rightly calls it utopian. But, to the surprise of many no doubt, he argues that the emergence of this utopian ideology is a very recent phenomenon.

“From Jimmy Carter onward, this tenet came to be invoked as “the guiding rationale of the foreign policy of states.” Almost never used in English before the 1940s, “human rights” were mentioned in the New York Times five times as often in 1977 as in any prior year of the newspaper’s history. By the nineties, human rights had become central to the thinking not only of liberals but also of neoconservatives, who urged military intervention and regime change in the faith that these freedoms would blossom once tyranny was toppled. From being almost peripheral, the human-rights agenda found itself at the heart of politics and international relations.

“In fact, it has become entrenched in extremis . . .”

The dominant political ideology in the West is that human rights are abstract and universal. They exist independently of any particular society, state, or culture. They are considered to be above all historical contingencies as secular version of Holy Scripture or the absolute law of God.

It is partly the loss of the insight that human rights can only be secured by an effective state that explains the failure of the regime-change policies promoted by neoconservatives and liberal hawks over the past decade. If rights are what humans possess in the absence of a repressive regime, all that needs to be done to secure human rights is to remove the despot in question. But if rights are empty without the state to protect them, then the nature of the government that can be reasonably expected to emerge when tyranny has been overthrown becomes of crucial importance. . . .

A willed ignorance of history was also at work. If rights are universally human, embodying a kind of natural freedom that appears as the accretions of history are wiped away, the past has little significance. But if human rights are artifacts that have been constructed in specific circumstances, as I would argue, history is all-important; and history tells us that when authoritarian regimes are suddenly swept aside, the result is often anarchy or a new form of tyranny—and quite often a mix of the two.

Universal human rights utopianism has resulted in an awful lot of blood being shed. All gods and idolatries require sacrifices–the idolatry of universal human rights is no exception. But once the ideology is adopted as a governing paradigm it also has the effect of removing government from the will of the people. It undermines democratic institutions. Under this utopian vision, governments may be elected by the people in Western democracies, but they view themselves as not fundamentally accountable to the people. Rather they are accountable to their compelled pursuit of realising abstract absolute human rights for all human kind. They see themselves as having a higher calling and a higher legitimacy. This has encouraged an offensive elitism on the part of those who govern. When leaders and rulers, judges and legislators, presidents and senators see themselves as embodiments of a higher vision for humanity, they tend to look down upon lesser mortals who have not yet understood the holy work being done. This, in turn, has led to a profound disconnect between electors and the elected.

One reason this human rights utopianism has gained such dominant control is that it offers a humanistic alternative to failed utopian ideologies of the twentieth century. We like the idea of utopianism, says the intellectual, but not Nazism, nor Communism. Why, then, have human rights ideologies seized the minds of the ruling and intellectual classes so comprehensively?

The answer, Moyn suggests, is in the fact that the idea of rights has seized hold of the utopian imagination. Human rights provide “a moral alternative to bankrupt political utopias”—a replacement for the universal political projects that shaped much of the dark history of the twentieth century.

The human-rights movement shared the vision that fueled utopian politics—not just the anticapitalist politics of old-fashioned Communist parties, but also internationalist and anticolonialist movements, liberation theology and vain attempts to forge “socialism with a human face.” Communist rule proved to be unprecedentedly tyrannical, postcolonial regimes were sometimes as repressive as their predecessors and even heroic dissidents against totalitarian rule (such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) were not always the liberals that Western supporters imagined them to be.

Real-world politics never delivered the utopian dream, so human-rights activists insulated themselves from these disillusioning facts by assuming a moral stance that affected to transcend politics. Not having to make the painful choices and shabby compromises that always go with active political engagement, they could enjoy an uplifting sense of moral purity along with the comforting conviction that if anything went wrong, it was not their fault.

John Grey offers this final warning:

Where the human-rights project has become harmful is in nurturing the sickly dream of a time when the intractable dilemmas of ethics and politics will be overcome, transcended in an empire of law.

Enter, stage left, the Internationalists who want all governments to be subject to the ideology and institutions of internationalism, of global law, of a galactic empire.

>Hypocritical Chutzpah

>The Education Unions are Only Being Consistent

We always knew the education unions would resist mightily the introduction of national standards testing in reading, writing, and arithmetic for government schools in New Zealand. We always knew, as well, that their resistance would be couched in “harmful to children” messaging. And so it has proved to be. Ten percent of primary schools have decided not to comply with the testing regime. It appears as though there has been little or no consultation with parents in their decision. It is becoming more apparent by the day that non-compliance is at the behest and pressure of union functionaries (whether the union of principals or the union of teachers). It is also apparent that behind the unions, the opposition Labour Party is pushing and shoving and agitating.

Now one might be left wondering, Why the brouhaha? The stated reason is that national standards testing will damage children. How come? It will brand up to fifty percent of them as failures. The psychological damage to children, we are gravely told, will be devastating. How asinine is this!

Yes, maybe, but, actually, we well understand their point of view. Government education has long been an operational arm of secular humanism. It has functioned as the church of our established religion.  Man is intrinsically good and perfectible. If children are left to mature without harmful influences they will grow up to make their perfection a reality. All evil is externally sourced. Wrongs, harms, evils are environmentally conditioned. Thus, if a child is told that they have “failed” to achieve a certain standard it will likely damage their self-esteem–their sense of worth and worthiness–thus inhibiting their gradual (and otherwise inevitable) evolution to adult perfection. This damage is merely an environmental, even political construct. Standards are man-made. They are nothing more than fashionable conventions of the day. Thus they artificially cut across the nascent perfection of the child and inhibit the child from achieving true self-actualisation. Ergo, national standards testing in primary schools will be damaging to children.

But if national standards are damaging to children, they are equally damaging to teachers. If a teacher is exposed as having failed to teach his or her charges so that can meet and even surpass the required standards of reading, writing, and arithmetic, great damage will be done to the teacher as well. The teacher will be told by the system that he or she has failed.

Now, we need to be fair here. New Zealand’s dominant culture and overwhelming established religion is secular humanism. The Living God does not exist. Man charts his own destiny and is evolving ever higher. The beginning and end of all referents for truth is Man himself. What the educational unions are doing, how they are thinking, and their political agitating is entirely consistent with the entire state education system. The unions are the true sons of the system and the religion upon which it is based. Therefore they can hardly be condemned by their co-religionists–at least not without breathtakingly hypocritical chutzpah.

Our challenge to all the secular humanists who are advocating for national standards and are expressing outrage against the union actions is to at least be honest. The educational unions are being far more consistent with your religious beliefs than you are. State schools have to reflect the established religion of the day; the educational sector has taken the religion of secular humanism and has diligently applied it to its doctrine of the child, its doctrine of the teacher, and of its understanding of truth, and to its doctrines of pedagogy and so forth. The end result is a growing failure to read and write and do maths. But don’t blame the unions, and don’t blame the system. Focus instead upon the wretchedness of your established religion upon which they are based and which they consistently reflect.

Having said all that, as Christians we would prefer that national standards go ahead and they are properly employed, both to help young pupils and to rank teachers. We also hope that national standards will reflect fundamental competencies in literacy and numeracy. The reason we take this position is a religious one. The Almighty Maker of the heavens and the earth has ordained and commanded that language and numeracy are part of the DNA code of His entire creation–of all that He has made. We cannot serve Him, nor can we fulfil our responsibilities in any sphere without reading, writing, and arithmetic. Since even unbelievers serve His purposes and are His (unwitting, even unwilling) servants, numeracy and literacy are fundamental to human life and society. Therefore, everyone needs to learn to read and write and compute, which means that they need to be taught.

But the pervasive influence of our established and official Unbelief leads us to doubt that the national standards policy will survive. The established religion is just too strong, too pervasive, and too consistently interwoven throughout the fabric of the state school system–as you would expect it to be. So, here is how we expect it will play out: the educational unions will continue their dissent and campaign of opposition. Ninety percent of schools will comply with the new government testing programme. The educational establishment will ostensibly embrace national standards, then morph them until they become moribund. Firstly, they will call for national standards in more than just reading, writing, and maths. (“National testing is good. It’s just too narrow and restricted. We need to extend it to other equally important subjects”, etc.) Secondly, they will tweak the standards to reduce their meaning and usefulness. (“Language testing must reflect the diversity of our multi-cultural society. We need reading and writing tests in ‘bro-talk’ and ‘txting’ and other wonderfully vibrant lingual dynamic evolving lingual developments.”). Testing in arithmetic will extend to IT skills and competency, computer use, keyboard facility, and so on.

Within five to seven years the national standards will be as meaningless as NCEA is today.

They used to say, “You can’t fight City Hall”. You cannot fight the educational establishment because it is such a consistent operational expression of the overwhelming, dominant established religion of our day–secular humanism. It will always win–until secular humanism itself is discredited and disgraced, and our people repent of their folly and return to “God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”

In the meantime, Christian schools and universities are the only viable long term alternative.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>The Overton Thingy

Culture and Politics – Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 8:20 am

Yesterday I finished The Overton Window by Glenn Beck, the only Beck book I have read. This is what I posted at my Goodreads account about it.

I picked this one up in an airport on a whim. I had been hearing people froth about it, and wanted to see if it was as bad as they were saying, which apparently was bad enough to make the back teeth ache. But, as it turns out, it wasn’t. Beck wrote a fictional pop-thriller, which means the prose has to be assembled out of two by fours, but as a result it was sturdy. And Beck is clever, and so gets a number of good lines off. But not surprisingly his main problem is theological, which I may write more about over at Blog and Mablog. As much as Beck loves his country, and wants to fight for it, his theological anthropology is the rot in our foundational timbers.

Our problem is humanism, and we cannot effectively counter radical leftist humanism with apparently milder right wing forms of it. The humanist believes that mankind is basically good and, going back to Socrates, the explanation for evil is ignorance. If man is basically good, where does all this evil come from? It has to come from ignorance, and the solution to ignorance is education. The solution to the political pathologies we see in Washington today is to get involved and “get informed.” But the biblical answer is repentance, and repentance all the way down. Our solution is not to get angry at what “they” are doing to us, but rather to be grieved at what we have done to ourselves. One of the basic things we have done in this regard is flatter ourselves — and Beck’s approach here is part of the problem.

The protagonist is named Noah Gardner, and his father is Arthur. The archvillain in this book is the protagonist’s father and, in a nice touch, is going to enslave the world through his PR agency.
As Noah is starting the process of becoming a real patriot, his father asks him this question. “Do you believe that people, human beings, are basically good? That — as your loyal friend Molly would no doubt preach to us — all they must do is awaken and embrace liberty and the highest potentials of mankind will be realized?” (p. 208). The answer, eventually, is “Then yes. I do believe that people are basically good.”

Just as Grendel was a straight line descendant from Cain, so all the wickedness in Washington (which Beck, to his credit, does see) is a straight line descendant from that chirrupy Pelagianism. But this is a monster that cannot be fought unless we acknowledge its paternity.

>Hitler Was a Reasonable Man

>Tricks Played By the Living Upon the Dead

We have been following a doco series on the Sky History channel on the rise to power of the Nazi Party in Germany. This series has been particularly valuable because it effectively sets the rise of National Socialism in the economic, social and political context of Europe. It shows that the emergence of Nazism was “mainstream-normal” and inevitable. It also uses actual, former Nazi participants as interviewees and commentators. These are people who knew Hitler personally and interacted frequently with the Fuehrer and top Nazis.

Revisionist history has cast Hitler as insane. This documentary series shows that Hitler was a perfectly rational and reasonable man, as were the Nazis generally. The views he held were perfectly understandable then, and, we may add, now. The Nazis were of course operating within the world-view of Unbelief. They were both rationalistic and humanistic. They believed in the ascendency of the human race over animals; they were also strongly Darwinistic and evolutionistic in their outlook–as is Unbelief today.

Last night’s episode discussed at some length how Hitler was fascinated with the concept of the survival of the fittest and that one could only achieve and maintain superiority of being through struggle. Fighting against and defeating less advanced beings was critical to establish and maintain superiority. This struggle was part of the natural order–it was how human life came into being and preserved itself. Now this was, and is, pretty standard stuff amongst biological darwinists–although since the advent of the Nazis the biological darwinists have squirmed and weaseled and sought to “tone things down” a bit.

Given this standard mainstream humanist world view, it was perfectly reasonable and understandable for Hitler and his colleagues, his academicians and scientists, to argue that the human race consisted of species that were inferior and superior, that there were those more and those less human. The Jews, of course, were sub-human. Uber-humanity could only be achieved and maintained by struggling against Jews (and gypsies and the handicapped) and destroying them. This was simply standard, text book, mainstream applications of the Darwinian cosmology–which, needless to say, is still the dominant Unbelieving cosmology to this day.

For the past two centuries, the Darwinistic cosmology has been at the centre of Unbelief. Ideologically, Hitler and the Nazis were mainstream Darwinists. As Unbelievers they were not insane, nor stupid, nor ignorant, nor extremist. They were perfectly reasonable and rational: every position they took was understandable (and compelling) within the paradigm of Unbelief. For a modern Unbeliever to argue against the Nazis, without acknowledging their moral, ethical and philosophical legitimacy, their reasonableness, and their legitimacy-within-the tent, is hypocritical, so say the least.

Modern Unbelief has, of course, resiled from the Nazis, and now profess their horror. But this is merely revisionist history, where the living are playing tricks upon the dead. It is both fashionable and comforting to present Hitler as a raving lunatic. Actually, he was a mainstream Unbeliever, just like the stock-standard Unbelievers of our day. He was a family member, and a mainstream one at that.

Take the idea of the human race consisting of a continuum–with some more human, some less human than others. This is straight out of the Darwinian Unbelieving cosmology. Today those that are considered lesser human are not blacks or Jews–but they might as well be. Today, to be sure, it is unfashionable and so yesterday to consider black and Jews to be sub-human. Fashions change.  Then they change back.  Today, the sub-human are yet-to-be-born children. The Darwinian struggle against inferior humans, necessary to achieve and maintain true self-realisation and uber-humanity, now takes place in the womb of mothers, who kill and abort to assert their true human autonomy. They assert rights over those they consider sub-humans, even as the Nazis asserted rights over Jews and gypsies. Academicians and scientists, politicians and press applaud and cheer as loudly and fanatically as any crowd clamouring before the Fuehrer. Given the world-view of Unbelief it is perfectly reasonable and understandable for them to do so. If you stand where the Unbeliever stands, how can you demur?

Or, take the euphemistically misnamed practice of euthanasia. The Nazis openly practised eugenics. Once again, given the world-view of Unbelief it was a perfectly reasonable stance to take. Equally reasonable and understandable is the modern appetite for killing the old, the sick, and suffering, and the terminally ill. As blogger MacDoctor put it:

Governments being what they are, as soon as euthanasia is legalised, there will immediately be a subtle drive to euthanase dying people. It will not escape bureaucratic attention that having granny die a few months earlier will save the government health budget millions a year. Recall that the bulk of expenditure in healthcare is spent on the last year of life. The vast majority of these people are clearly terminal in the last three to six months of this period. Imagine the cost-savings of involuntary euthanasia.

While I am fairly certain involuntary euthanasia will never become a healthcare cost-cutting tool, there is no doubt in my mind that pressure will be subtly placed on the terminally ill to “end it all”. It will be put as an “escape from suffering” or “to spare the family” or “to not be a nuisance/burden”. But it will still be coercion no matter how it is dressed.

Is this really how we want our society to be? Driving the elderly and infirm to a premature death in the name of convenience? Are we really so unable to train our physicians in the proper care of the terminally ill? Or is the word compassion only reserved for those who would kill rather than care?

Ah, yes–in the Darwinist cosmology–the dominant cosmology of Unbelief in our day–compassion is to be ascribed to those who dispatch the sub-human. It is an act of compassion upon and caring for us all who remain. As Neil Simon wrote: “these are the days of miracles and wonders.”

The Christian grants that, within the framework of Unbelief, Nazism, genocide, abortion and euthanasia are eminently rational, reasonable and understandable. But the rational is not the right. Unmitigated and eternal evils they remain. They are sinful and abhorrently wicked beliefs and practices. Those who advocate and practise them–whether they be yesterday’s Nazis or today’s mainstream liberal modern–are under the condemnation of God. Whoever lifts his hand in arrogant Unbelief to strike against any other man falls under the condemnation of the God whose image that man bears. The Bible is very clear: the blood of the fallen cries out from the ground to God  for vengeance.

God always hears the eloquent plea of the blood of the slain.

>Secularism in the Twilight

>The Mermaids Sing, But Not to Me

It’s always amusing and gratifying when Unbelief has gnawing doubts about its so-called emerging ascendency. A profound belief in the inevitable triumph of the cause has always proved deeply motivational to all chiliasts. Secular humanists have been no exception.

For the past forty years or so the ideology of secular humanism has included a belief in the inevitable triumph of its cause. The West was becoming progressively more secular, less religious; scientific rationalism would inevitably reign supreme. It was just a matter of time. The tide of history was running strongly down secular main street. But no longer, it seems.

In a recent article in the New Humanist, entitled, Battle of the Babies, Caspar Melville captures the gradually emerging despondency amongst the secularists. A prescient few are starting to realise that, far from achieving ascendency, their anti-Christian ideology is going to fail.

The reason: non-secular fundamentalist groups (by which is meant anyone whose religious beliefs are held sufficiently seriously that they actually shape one’s life) are reproducing well above their replacement rate, whereas secular humanists are (demographically) a dying breed.

His article is based on an interview with “political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books.” http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1846681448&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrKaufmann is “joining the dots”, as it were, between the undeniable fact of far higher birth rates amongst serious religious people in the West, and the demographic death spiral amongst secular humanists.

What Kaufmann is arguing is that the secularisation thesis, the assumption that modernity leads inexorably to a lessening of religious belief and a day when we are all rational humanists, is wrong – at one point Kaufmann approvingly quotes Rodney Stark and Roger Finke’s view that this is “a failed prophecy”. Further he is saying that there is something about our current form of liberal secularism that contains (here’s another headline) the seeds of its own destruction. Since the birth rate of individualistic secular people the world over is way below replacement level (2.1 in the West), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists is way above (between 5 and 7.5 depending on sect), then through the sheer force of demography religious fundamentalism is going to become a much bigger force in the world and gain considerable political muscle. Literalist religious conservatism is being reborn and we secular liberals are the midwives.

In this view, secular humanism is self-destructing. The first reason is that it is narcissistically individualistic. Children are “rug-rats” which spoil the indulgent lifestyles of the secularists. Secondly, the toleration ethic in secular humanism means that it tends to indulge fundamentalists, not oppose them up front. In former days, he notes, governments went to war to deal with religious zealots, such as Mormons. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0813536332&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr Hardly acceptable today, he admits somewhat wistfully. Finally, and in our view, by far the more serious reason is that secularism has nothing “big” to live for any longer. It is a broken down ideology which is unable to stand for much any longer. It no longer has any “big ideas”.

These three things mean that secularism is anaemic and weak in the face of people with fundamental religious beliefs.

The article notes that committed Christian groups and movements in the United States are linking together fecundity and larger families, with a longer term plan to make the United States part of a new Christendom. This agenda is identified as being “sinister”.

What can be done? Well, firstly there could be active policies to restrict people having lots of children.

“Well, I don’t think we want to get in a population footrace. It may be necessary for secular people to have slightly more children but it would be nicer if we could get fundamentalists to have fewer children.” A strangely authoritarian notion to fall from the lips of a self-confessed liberal. “Yes,” he admits, “imposing restrictions would be condemned as discriminatory. But there are carrots as well as sticks.”

Secondly, there is the option of converting the Christians.

Another scenario he imagines in his conclusion is that secularism might start to do a better job of winning over the children of religious fundamentalism. But at the moment he sees no statistical sign of this, and he seems gloomy about the prospect. Why? “Part of my argument is that religion does provide that enchantment, that meaning and emotion, and in our current moment we lack that. This is the challenge for secularism: can it come up with such an ideology?”

To my mind this looks a worrying prospect. Counter religion by producing a new kind of secular enchantment? Doesn’t it also betray a lack of conviction about the values that underpin our current society and the appeal they might hold for anyone who comes into contact with them?

Secular enchantment? Good luck with that. The only enchantment it will ever have is the age-old enchantment of sin itself–and that will not get any traction amongst truly converted Believers. Secular humanism is now world-weary. It has nothing left to live for, as one of its cheerleaders has noted:

Kenan Malik undercuts the scaremongering that so often accompanies discussion of demography by suggesting that we already have a powerful weapon against the trends, if only we could see it. “What has eroded,” he argues, “is faith in the idea that it is possible to win peoples of different backgrounds to a common set of secular, humanist, enlightened values. And that is the real problem: not immigration, nor Muslim immigration, but the lack of conviction in a progressive, secular, humanist project.”

What Kaufmann and Malik are certainly in accord on is the need to displace the multicultural “celebration of difference” model of toleration with one that contains a far more robust sense of common values and a far more stringent rejection of reactionary fundamentalism. “We need a stronger sense of liberal values,” Kaufmann told me. “We should answer back to all fundamentalisms.”

But secularism and values are always uneasy bed-fellows. Values have to be based upon something other than brute matter. Go too far down that track, and the foundations of secularism crumble, and it ends up looking more and more as it truly is–just one more faux-fundamentalist religion, albeit one lacking any cultural power.

Kaufmann wants to give a final bit of advice to salvage the cause: secular humanism needs to find common ground with “moderate” religious people (by which is meant, religious people who keep their religion strictly private and to themselves, and who have eschewed bringing their religious beliefs with them into the public square.) New Zealanders will recall that this was attempted recently by the Labour government under Helen Clark. It failed miserably, as one would have expected. Such folk are really just secularists in drag. Their cultural enervation is already complete.

(S)ecularists might need to collaborate more with religious moderates – find common cause in the way fundamentalists are doing. “The issue is not belief in God, but organised religion, especially fundamentalism. Non-believers can still have a rich conversation with moderate people who believe in God. You can’t have a conversation with a fundamentalist.”

If Kaufmann admits that his scary headlines somewhat belie the provisional nature of his findings, he has an answer: “I am trying to force a certain rethink of the idea that we are moving naturally toward secularism. To shake up our complacency and, perhaps, stir up some debate.”

Secularists may well be shaken by his book, but will they be stirred?

We believe secularists will be neither shaken, nor stirred. Once its inevitable attendant narcissism has captured the soul, one’s attention span can only have an ever diminishing half-life.

Welcome to the world-weary existence of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Meanwhile, the people of God will go from strength to strength because Zion has already been established as the greatest, above all mountains.