Maverick Philosopher

Notes on Avicenna: Essence, Existence, and Creation

Time was when the Islamic world could boast world-class philosophers. The Persian Ibn Sina (980-1037 anno domini) was one of them. He is known in the West as Avicenna.  Translated into Latin, his works had a major influence on the philosophy of the 12th and 13th centuries and beyond. De Ente et Essentia of Thomas Aquinas is a well-known text that shows the Persian's influence.  In this entry I will discuss some of Avicenna's  positions in metaphysics as I understand them. My understanding is based on close study of Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, The Paradoxical Structure of Existence. Comments and corrections solicited. That Avicenna anticipates Alexius von Meinong is an idea I arrived at independently. (The exposition of this anticipation belongs in a separate post.)

1) Wilhelmsen credits Avicenna with raising a new question in philosophy: "How is existence related to the order of nature or essence?" (PSE, 40; cf. BSP, 40 ff.) What motivates the new question is the conviction that the world of beings is a world of creatures that owe their existence to a creator. If the Being or existence (esse) of a being (ens) is its being-created-and-sustained-by-God, then there must be a real distinction (distinctio realis) between existence and essence in the creature.  To exist is then not to be the same (Plato) or to be a substance (Aristotle). An existing thing is thus in some way 'composed' of essence and existence. Avicenna thus upholds a real distinction between essence and existence. (Is he the first to do so in the history of philosophy? I'm really asking!)  I myself understand the distinctio realis along the following lines. (Someone who knows Avicenna's texts can comment on how closely my understanding, which is fairly close to that of Aquinas, matches Avicenna's.) 

About anything whatsoever, including God,  we can ask two different questions: What is it? (Quid sit?) and Is it? (An sit?)  In a contingent being (ens), the distinction between what the thing is (wide essence, quiddity) and its existence (esse) is real, meaning that the distinction pertains to the thing (res) itself apart from our modes of considering it. 'Real' in this context does NOT mean that in a contingent existent such as my cat Max Black there are two things, one res being the essence, the other res being the existence. That is supposedly what Giles of Rome held, not what Aquinas or I hold. I am going to assume that Avicenna did not anticipate Giles of Rome.

Analogy: my head and my eyeglasses are really distinct in the Giles-of-Rome way: head and glasses can each exist on its own apart from the other. But the convexity and concavity of a particular lens cannot exist on their own apart from each other. And yet the convexity-concavity distinction is real, not projected by us.  The real distinction that I espouse is like the distinction between the particular convexity and the particular concavity in a particular lens. 'Like,' not 'the same as.' The real distinction between essence and existence in a contingent being such as an optical lens is sui generis: there is no adequate model for it. We acquire some understanding of the sui generis distinction only by analogy from mundane examples. 

2) A second Avicennian innovation is a distinction between modes of Being (esse) or modes of existence, different ways for an item to be or exist.   (That there are different ways of existing or different modes of Being  is a notion fiercely resisted by most contemporary analytic philosophers, but I am of the opinion that the MOB doctrine -- to give it a cute name -- can be plausibly defended quite apart from Avicenna's particular views. See Holes and Their Mode of Being and the entries in my modes of being category. See also "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds., in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75. One of the dogmas of analysis is that there are no modes of being.) The second innovation presupposes the first, the real distinction. The latter allows us to focus on the existence of the thing without conflating it with its essence or quiddity. We find this conflation in Aristotle for whom there is no difference between an F and an existing F, a man and an existing man, say. For Aristotle, then, there is no difference between Milo and existing Milo. Once one grasps the difference between the existence/existing of Milo and Milo, one can go on to ask how something like Milo exists, in what specific way he exists.  In the case of God and Socrates we surely want to say that God exists necessarily whereas Socrates exists contingently. Now it is not obvious, but it can be plausibly argued that this modal-logical  difference -- typically spelled out nowadays in analytic precincts by saying that God exists in all possible worlds whereas Socrates exists in some but not all possible worlds -- is rooted in an ontological difference between two ways (modes) of existing.  If that is right, then it is not the case that God and Socrates exist in the same way, pace such luminaries as Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen and their numerous acolytes. (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002, Chapter One, Section 4, "Contingency and Necessity as Modes of Existence," p. 22 f.) Back to the Persian.

3) For Avicenna, there are two modes of existence; there are two ways for one and the same essence/nature to exist/be. The one way is universally in mente; the other is singularly in re. Thus one and the same essence (humanity) exists singularly in the man, Milo, and in the man Socrates, and so on, and universally in the mind of anyone who knows Milo or Socrates or any man to be a man. The first mode could be called esse reale, the second esse intentionale. So if essence is really distinct from existence, then essence is really distinct both from intramental (esse intentionale) existence and extramental existence (esse reale).

4) Given (3), it follows that an essence in  itself is neither mental nor extramental, neither universal (repeatable) nor singular (unrepeatable), neither one nor many, neither abstract nor concrete, neither predicable nor impredicable, and -- mirabile dictu -- neither existent nor nonexistent. The essence in itself is thus a third item, a tertium quid. (It looks very much like a Meinongian Sosein jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein! But Meinong goes on the 'back burner' for now.)  

In sum, there are two ways for an Avicennian essence or nature to exist: either in things outside the mind, or else in the mind, and one way for an essence to be (not exist), and that is to be absolutely or indifferently, or if you prefer, amphibiously (either on the dry land of the real, or in the water of mind).  It is here that the dialectic becomes tricky and 'aporetic.' For what I take Avicenna to be saying is that the essence or nature absolutely considered, i.e., considered in its neutrality or indifference to both intramental and extramental existence,  is in itself a non-existing mind-independent item.  That is to say: the essence an sich, the essence as a modally indifferent tertium quid, is not an artifact or product of our considering.  Its absoluteness and indifference does not derive from our absolute considering;  our considering is an absolute considering because that which is being considered IS (not exists) absolutely. Get it? 

Now to exist is to be actual, whether in minds or in things. So the essence or nature in itself which exists neither in minds nor in things, is metaphysically prior to actuality and is therefore a pure possibility. "It follows that pure nature is pure possibility for being in some order. Therefore the possible is prior to the actual in an absolute sense." (Wilhelmsen, 41) Gilson puts it like this: in Avicenna's world, "essences always remain, in themselves, pure possibles, and no wonder, since the very essence of essence is possibility." (BSP, 82)

5) It follows from (4) that essentia as pure possibility is no longer internally tied to esse as etymology would suggest inasmuch as essences in themselves are what they are whether or not they exist in either of the two modes in which they exist. Avicenna thus drives a wedge between essence and existence in such a way that existence can only accede to essences and is insofar forth only accidental to them. Existence 'happens' to them while they on their part remain indifferent to existence.  

6) You will recall that for Aristotle, accidents receive their being from (primary) substances (prote ousiai) and are nothing without them.  Thus if A is an Aristotelian accident, then A cannot exist apart from some substance or other, and indeed cannot exist apart from the very substance S of which it happens to be the accident. The Islamic thinker takes the Greek's substance-accident distinction and puts it to use in a highly creative way. Whereas accidents for Aristotle derive their being from the substances of which they are the accidents, the Being (esse) of creatures is reduced by Avicenna to an accident of essences which, in themselves, as pure possibles, are beyond existence and nonexistence.

7) (6) entails interesting consequences for the notion of divine creation.  On an Avicennian scheme, creation is actualization of the merely possible.  If so, God does not create ex nihilo, but ex possibilitate. He doesn't create out of nothing; he creates out of possibles. This does not comport well with divine sovereignty. If God is sovereign, he is sovereign over all orders, including the order of the merely possible.  On the Avicennian scheme God is constrained by the ontologically prior order of mere possibles. He is therefore not free. Or at least he is no free in the libertarian sense of 'free.'

8) We have landed in a curious dialectical predicament.  On the one hand, we need the real distinction to make sense of divine creation ex nihilo.   The pagan philosophers didn't have it or need it, because their systems were not informed by divine revelation.  Aristotle's God is not a creator but merely a prime mover. His primary substances exist just in virtue of being the substances they are. For Aristotle, for a primary substance S of kind K to exist is just for S to be a member of K.  For Socrates to exist is just for Socrates to be a man. Hence there is no need for a real distinction between Socrates and his existence.  On the other hand, the Avicennian scheme, which needs the real distinction, fails to safeguard the absolute sovereignty and freedom of God and fails to capture the radicality of creatio ex nihilo. The reason, again, is that Avicenna's God creates, not out of nothing, but out of possibilities.  He is thus not a creator in the strict sense, but a mere actualizer of mere possibles that ARE independently of his will. (Cf. BSP, 83)

Death as a Boon to the Spiritual

I read the Sufi mystic Rūmī  (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. Here is an entry from my Turkish journal written on Christmas Eve morning, 1995. The following quotation is from The Masnavi.

Death is in reality a boon to the spiritual, and it is only fools who cry, "Would that this world might endure forever, and that there were no such thing as death."

Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam. Our Sufi is making two claims. One is that death is the door to eternal life. The other is that only the fool fails to perceive the profoundly unsatisfactory character of this life. You are not a fool if you deny the first, though you may be wrong; you are a fool if you deny the second. To want to live on indefinitely in this world as it is is a clear indicator of spiritual blindness.

So I say, "Up or out!" What do I mean?

Academic tenure is sometimes described as 'up or out.' You either gain tenure, within a limited probationary period, or you must leave. I tend to think of life like that: either up or out, either promotion to a Higher Life or annihilation. I wouldn't want an indefinitely prolonged stay in this vale of probation.

In plain English: I wouldn't want to live forever in this world. Thus for metaphysical reasons alone I have no interest in cryogenic or cryonic life extension. Up or out!

It would be interesting to delve into some of the issues surrounding cryonics and the trans-humanist fantasies that subserve this hare-brained scheme. The possibilities of fraud and foul play seem endless.  Some controversies reported here.   But for now I will merely note that Alcor is located in Scottsdale, Arizona. The infernal Valle del Sol would not be my first choice for such an operation. One hopes that they have good backup in case of a power outage.

The Religion of Archeological Preservation

If Islam is the religion of peace, then it is also the religion of archeological preservation.  Modus tollens or modus ponens?

Images here.

Salman Rushdie, the Left, and Free Speech

Last week's Sunday CBS Morning Show featured a segment on Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, who was recently attacked in an apparent assassination attempt by a Muslim living in New Jersey.  You may recall that the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Rushdie in 1989 in which the ayatollah called for Rushdie's death because of his depiction of Muhammad in the above-mentioned book.  Here are some observations and questions.

1) Muslims have a long memory for anything they consider an attack on them or their religion. 33 years have passed since the issuing of the fatwa calling for the author's death. They neither  forgive nor  forget.  I note in passing that a fatwa is a high-level edict that need not include a call for anyone's death.

2) True-believing, sharia-supporting Muslims have values antithetical to the Enlightenment values of our constitutional Republic, a central one of which is the value of free speech. So one might naturally wonder  what  the Muslim assailant was doing living in New Jersey. How did he get there? Did he arrive legally or illegally? Either way there are serious questions that need to be asked, but are never asked by leftists, whose ostensible aim is "fundamental transformation" (Obama), which amounts to destruction of the USA as she was founded to be. You might think that after the events of 9/11, the importance of border security would be well understood, even by leftists.  But for them open borders offer them an opportunity to so alter the demographics of the country that the Democrat Party can be expected to achieve permanent hegemony. To attain this glorious result they are willing to risk further terrorist attacks.

3) It is of course hypocritical, though typical,  for a left-leaning media outlet such as CBS to stand up for Salman Rushdie and his right to freedom of expression while uttering nary a word of criticism of the regime's suppression of conservative dissent. By the  regime I mean the deep-state apparatus in cahoots with its woke-capitalist enablers and adjuncts.  Among the latter I include Big Tech, Big Pharma, the universities, and such mainstream media outlets  as CBS.

A Christian Koan for Christmas Eve

From my Facebook page, three years ago, today. My writing is uneven in quality. But the Muse was with me below.

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Man is godlike and therefore proud. He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself. The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin. The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous, shameful, and excruciating way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.

 

Addenda (24 December 2021)

 

1) "Pride of life" above alludes to 1 John 2:16:

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. (KJV)

2) Goethe considered the cross "the most disgusting thing under the sun." See Walter Kaufmann's  essay, Goethe's Faith and Faust's Redemption. A similar attitude in Nietzsche. That the central Christian symbol is a Roman torture device shows that Christianity is a slander upon life, the only life there is.  That, in a sentence, is what I take to be Nietzsche's attitude toward the Christian cross.

3) How did we get to be so proud? Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

4) The Islamic hate for the Christian cross.  Raymond Ibrahim details the ongoing murder of Christians by Muslims.  But didn't George W. Bush tells us that Islam is the religion of peace?  What a know-nothing that pseudo-con Dubwa was and is. Living proof that being a nice, regular guy is not enough. Patriots owe a lot to Donald Trump for having put paid to both the Clinton and Bush dynasties.

5) On the other hand, Daniel Pipes reports that Muslims are converting to Christianity like never before. But a word of caution. Some of the converters are pious frauds:

Some Muslims convert tactically for practical reasons, especially to facilitate emigration to the West. A Church of God pastor, Said Deeb, quotes desperate Muslims telling him, “Just baptize me, I will believe in whoever just to leave here.” National Public Radio paraphrases Şebnem Köşer Akçapar of Koç University in Istanbul to the effect that “only some of the refugees are genuine converts. Others are using religious persecution as a way to get to the West.” Aiman Mazyek, head of the Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland, reacts with acute skepticism about growing numbers of Muslim converts to Christianity.

6) Vito Caiati sends this excerpt from W. H. Auden's For the Time Being:

Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.

What does Populism Threaten?

First posted on my Facebook page on this date three years ago.

 

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POPULISM is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to prove to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn't be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn't be a white supremacist.) And of course there needn't be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about either nationalism or populism. It is a mistake to confuse nationalism with white nationalism, a mistake deliberately promoted by leftists.

 

Populism in the style of Trump is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned and which contemporary 'liberals' confuse with the classically liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these 'liberals' constantly use the word 'democracy' as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is a democratic republic. Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be.

 

Those who think that democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years. Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who 'the people' are and who are not 'the people.' The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain't democracy wonderful?

 

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may or more likely will decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word 'migrant?' It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

 

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. There is need of cultural coherence. A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

 

Can you show I'm wrong?

What is Islam?

A religion like the other great religions?  A Christian heresy? A totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion? A hybrid political-religious ideology?

Islam is Government.

On Transcending Tribalism

Jonathan Haidt:

Humans are tribal, but tribalism can be transcended. It exists in tension with our extraordinary ability to develop bonds with other human beings. Romeo and Juliet fell in love. French, British and German soldiers came out of their trenches in World War I to exchange food, cigarettes and Christmas greetings.

The key, as Cicero observed, is proximity, and a great deal of modern research backs him up. Students are more likely to become friends with the student whose dorm room is one door away than with the student whose room is four doors away. People who have at least one friend from the other political party are less likely to hate the supporters of that party.

But tragically, Americans are losing their proximity to those on the other side and are spending more time in politically purified settings. [. . .]

Haidt is right that tribalism can be transcended, at least to some extent, and that proximity and interaction can facilitate the transcending.  But he is far more optimistic that I am.

What Haidt ignores is that there is no comity without commonality, as I like to put it.  You and I can live and work together in harmony only within a common space of shared values and assumptions and recognized facts.  But that common space is shrinking.

Take any 'hot button' issue, Second Amendment rights, for example.  What do I have in common with the anti-gunner who favors confiscation of all civilian firearms, or only slightly less radically, wants to ban all hand guns or semi-automatic weapons?  To me it is evident that my right to life grounds a right to self-defense, and with it a right to acquire the appropriate means of self-defense.  If you deny this, then we have no common ground, at least not on this topic.  On this topic, we would then be at loggerheads.  If you then work politically or extra-politically  to violate what here in the States are called Second Amendment rights, then you become my enemy.  And the consequences of enmity can become unpleasant in the extreme. Push can come to shove, and shove to shoot.

In a situation like this, proximity and interaction only exacerbate the problem.  Even the calm interaction of scholarly argument and counter-argument does no good.  No matter how carefully and rigorously I argue my position, I will not succeed in convincing the opponent, with only a few exceptions.  This is a fact of experience over a wide range of controversial topics, and not just in politics.  The only good thing that comes of the dialectical interaction is a clarification and deeper understanding of one's position and what it entails.  If you think, say, that semi-automatic weapons ought to be banned for civilian use, then you and I will never find common ground.  But I will perfect my understanding of my position and its presuppositions and better understand what I reject in yours.

After we have clarified, but not resolved, our differences, anger at the intransigence of the other is the likely upshot if we continue to interact in close proximity whether in the same academic department, the same church, the same club, the same neighborhood, the same family . . . .  This is why there are schisms and splits and factions and wars and all manner of contention.

Anger at the intransigence of the other can then lead on to the thought that  there must be something morally defective, and perhaps also intellectually defective, about the opponent if he holds, say, that a pre-natal human is just a clump of cells.  One advances -- if that is the word -- to the view that the opponent is morally censurable for holding the position he holds, that he is being willfully morally obtuse and deserves moral condemnation.  And then the word 'evil' may slip in and the word 'lie': "The bastard is not just wrong; he is an evil son-of-a-bitch for promoting the lie that an unborn child is just a clump of cells, or a disposable part of woman's body like a wart." The arguably false statements of the other get treated as lies and therefore as statements at the back of which in an intent to deceive. And from there it ramps up to 'Hillary is Satan' and 'Trump is Hitler.'

One possible cure for  this unproductive warfare is mutual, voluntary, segregation via a return to federalism.   I develop the thought in A Case for Voluntary Segregation.  I say 'possible' because I am not sure the federalist route is sufficient.  Secession and partition are other options, not to mention the one no sane person could want: full-on hot civil war.  We are already beyond cold civil war, what with the Left's violent Stalinist erasure of monuments and memorials (and not just that).

So while Haidt is right that proximity and interaction can promote mutual understanding and mitigate hostility, that is true only up to a point and works only within a common space of shared assumptions, values, and recognized facts.  (His examples, by the way, were poorly chosen: Romeo and Juliet were young Italians; the French, German, and British soldiers were Europeans.)  Absent the common space, the opposite is true: proximity and interaction are precisely what must be avoided to preserve peace.  

The Problem and Three Main Solutions

The problem is how to transcend tribalism.  I count three main solutions, the Liberal, the Alt Right, and the Sane (which is of course my view!)

There is first what I take to be Haidt's rather silly liberal solution, namely, that what will bring us together is proximity and interaction. He assumes that if we all come together and get to know each other  we will overcome tribalism.  This borders on utopian nonsense.  It is precisely because of proximity and interaction that many decide to self-segregate.  The more I know about certain individuals and groups the less I want to have to do with them.  The Marxist thugs of Black Lives Matter, for example.  By the way, 'thug' is not code for 'nigger.'  'Thug' means thug.  Look it up.  The Antifa fascists are another example. The anti-white White Fragility racists. I could go on.

At the other extreme we find the 'alties' and neo-reactionaries.  They have a sound insight, namely, that there are unassimilable elements and that they must be kept out.  For example, Sharia-supporting Muslims are unassimilable into the U. S. because their values are antithetical to ours, perhaps not all of their values, but enough to make for huge problems.   

The success of e pluribus unum depends on the nature of the pluribus.  A viable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many.  (Cute formulation, eh?) The members of the manifold must be unifiable under some umbrella of common values, assumptions, and recognized facts.  One proposition nation cannot be made out of many tribes of immigrants unless the many tribes of immigrants accept OUR values, American values, and our propositions.  The tribalism is overcome or at least mitigated by acceptance of a unifying set of American values and ideas.

The alt-rightists, however, do not really offer a solution to the problem of transcending tribalism since their 'solution' is to embrace an opposing tribalism. They are right about the reality of race, as against the foolish notion that race is a social construct, but they push this realism in an ugly and extreme direction when they construe American identity as white identity, where this excludes Jews. American identity is rooted in a set of ideas and values.  It must be granted, however, that not all racial and ethnic groups are equally able to assimilate and implement these ideas and values.  Immigration policy must favor those that are.  

The sane way is the middle way.  To liberals we ought to concede that diversity is a value, but at the same time insist that it is a value that has to be kept in check by the opposing value of unity.   Muslims who refuse to accept our values must not be allowed to immigrate.  They have no right to immigrate, but we have every right to select those who will benefit us.  That is just common sense.  The good sort of diversity is not enhanced by the presence of terror-prone fanatics. Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. 

What we need, then, to mitigate tribal hostility is not more proximity and interaction, but less; fewer 'conversations' not more; less government, more toleration, voluntary segregation, a return to federalism, a total stoppage of illegal immigration, and a reform of current immigration law.

Will any of this happen?  Trump has taken steps in the right direction.  Flawed as he is, he is all we have, and best we have who is ready, willing, able, and electable. You know what you have to do come November.

Islam and Civilization

The following just over the transom. I thought I was being appropriately critical of what is undoubtedly the worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), but apparently I haven't gone far enough for one of my  readers.   Balanced and reasonable positions don't have much of a chance in this age of polarization and extremism.  There are people to my Right who think that women should not have the right to vote, and there are people to my Left who think that children and illegal aliens should have the right to vote.  I am tempted by the self-serving thought that I am one of the few sane people left.

 

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You write: "Has Islam played any role in the civilizing of the peoples in the lands where it has held sway? Yes, of course."

 

This strikes me as extremely doubtful. About a year ago, I read "Mohamed & Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy" by Emmett Scott, and it was eye-opening. Islam conquered a peaceful, highly civilized Christian civilization in Asia, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, and absolutely destroyed them, to the point where there is virtually no history of those lands from 650 to 950 AD--no writing, no archaeological signs of building or commerce. The devastation is so complete that some historians argue that the years did not exist at all--that it is a mistake in the calendar (I get the impression this is largely considered a crank theory, but the fact that it has any currency at all gives evidence to the devastation of the Muslim conquests). There are stories of the great Muslim cities built during that time, but archaeology has not been able to find evidence of them.

 

As to civilized behavior: In Roman times, the harshest punishment Christians usually doled out to heretics was banishment. Then they interacted with the Muslims for several centuries, and the Spanish Inquisition was born to copy Muslim practices. There is strong evidence that the Viking raids which ravaged the coasts of Europe for nearly a century were inspired by Muslims who were paying a premium for blonde-haired blue-eyed girls (and probably boys). There were a tiny number of Muslim scholars worth reading, but primarily by Muslim converts, non-Muslims living in Muslim lands, or Muslims copying the work of non-Muslims in other non-Muslim lands.

 

The legacy of Islam is war, devastation, piracy, cruelty, totalitarianism, and slavery. Every large-scale culture must have a few innovations, but as far as I can see, all the evidence says there is nothing like a systematic improvement of the human condition that comes out of Islam.

 

Regards,

 

David Gudeman

http://www.unobtainabol.com

Christianity has Civilized Us. But Islam?

Has Islam played any role in the civilizing of the peoples in the lands where it has held sway? Yes, of course. But when we consider Islamic penology, it is positively barbaric compared to that of the West.  Of the five great religions, Islam seems to have had the least civilizing effect. 

Here:

Iran’s judicial system remains among the most brutal in the world. Iran executes more people per capita than any other country and carries out more total executions than any nation but China (whose population is over 17 times the size of Iran’s). Tehran continues to target political dissidents and ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities for execution. Capital punishment can be—and often is—carried out against juvenile offenders and for nonviolent crimes.

Here:

In Somalia, a 13-year-old girl was buried up to her neck and stoned to death by 50 men in a stadium with 1000 spectators. After her death it was revealed she had been raped by three men and she was arrested after trying to report the rape to militants who control the city.

Here:  A graphic that details how people, including women and children, are stoned to death.  Imagine a death by stoning that takes two hours. Physicians (under duress) are on hand to determine when enough stoning has taken place. You wouldn't want to waste good stones on a dead girl.

Gruesome video of amputation. The actual amputation of a hand begins around 1:30.  Watch it, especially you leftist reality deniers.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Islamic fundamentalists want to impose sharia law on the entire world, not just where they live. They believe the law is sacred and just and the best way to preserve order.

In the video, two thieves are condemned, and they each provide a taped confession. Finally, their hands are cut off in a semi-medical environment. During the procedure the men are awake and fully conscious. Each forced amputation takes nearly a minute and there's blood and bone, naturally.

These are not Islamic extremists, but rather this is how Islam is practiced in many parts of the world with the full sanction of the law. This is the face of Islam. Although this punishment has been carried out under a militant force, it also happens in sharia countries with the police as opposed to a local militia carrying out the sentence.

In Islam, the right hand is cut off. This is because in that culture the left is unclean, reserved for sanitary reasons. Without their right hand, these people will be compelled to handle things with their left, including their food. It's a subtle form of permanent psychological punishment that goes beyond the simplicity of amputation.

Just as these people punish their neighbors, imagine how they might treat you, the non-Muslim. You are an atheist in their eyes and worthy of far more gruesome punishment.

WARNING: VIDEO IS EXTREMELY GRAPHIC

Is every Muslim a terrorist? No, but most terrorists are Muslims. Islam is the main source of terrorism in the world today.

Are there Buddhist terrorists? Yes, a few. But their terrorism is accidental to their being Buddhists: it does not flow from Buddhist teaching. Quite the contrary is the case with Islam.

Were cruel and unusual punishments ever inflicted by law in the West? Yes, of course.  But to bring this up is anachronistic and irrelevant.  

Is every Muslim a barbarian who supports the practices detailed above? No, but Muslim lands are lands where these barbaric practices take place. And the good Muslims have had no effect in reversing them.  (Turkey under Ataturk's influence an exception.  But did you ever see Midnight Express? I saw it the night before leaving for a year in Turkey!)

Is every leftist an apologist for radical Islam and its barbaric practices? No, but leftism is the main source of support of radical Islam in the West. The "unholy alliance" -- to cop a title from a book by David Horowitz -- between leftism and Islam is explored in my Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam and What Explains the Left's Toleration of Radical Islam?

Are some Muslim immigrants to the West willing to assimilate and accept the West's values? Yes, but they are in a small minority.

Is there a right to immigrate? No. Immigration is at the discretion of the host country and must benefit the host country.

Is there any net benefit to the West of Muslim immigration?  I'll leave this question for the reader to ponder. As you ponder it, bear in mind that immigrants bring their culture with them.  (Sicilians brought the mafia.) You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.

Reader Considers Converting to Islam. Would Christian Unitarianism Satisfy his Scruples?

Here is the beginning of the letter he sent me:

I've been considering converting to Islam.

You've had a big part in this, though I know it won't please you to hear it. Your arguments against the coherency of the Incarnation are hard to get past.

My arguments against the Chalcedonian, 'two-natures-one-person' theology of the Incarnation may or may not have merit. In any case, this is not the place to rehearse or defend them. What I want to say to my young reader is that it would be a mistake to reject Christianity because of the problems of the Trinitarian-Incarnational version thereof.   Someone who rejects Trinity and Incarnation as classically conceived might remain a Christian by becoming a Unitarian. My friend Dale Tuggy represents a version of Unitarianism. You will have no trouble finding his writings on the Web.

There are any number of better choices than Islam if one wants a religion and cannot accept orthodox -- miniscule 'o' -- Christianity. There is, in addition to Unitarian Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, all vastly superior to "the saddest and poorest form of theism" (Schopenhauer) . . . . 

I will conclude this entry by posting some quotations from William Ellery Channing, the 19th century American Unitarian. These are from Unitarian Christianity (1819). (HT: Dave Bagwill) Bolding added.

In the first place, we believe in the doctrine of God's UNITY, or that there is one God, and one only. To this truth we give infinite importance, and we feel ourselves bound to take heed, lest any man spoil us of it by vain philosophy. The proposition, that there is one God, seems to us exceedingly plain. We understand by it, that there is one being, one mind, one person, one intelligent agent, and one only, to whom underived and infinite perfection and dominion belong. We conceive, that these words could have conveyed no other meaning to the simple and uncultivated people who were set apart to be the depositaries of this great truth, and who were utterly incapable of understanding those hair- breadth distinctions between being and person [substance and supposit?], which the sagacity of later ages has discovered. We find no intimation, that this language was to be taken in an unusual sense, or that God's unity was a quite different thing from the oneness of other intelligent beings.

We note here a similarity to Islam: "There is no god but God."  

We also note that unity is defined in terms of 'one' taken in an ordinary numerical way.  Reading the above and the sequel I am struck at how similar this is to the way Tuggy thinks. God is a being among beings, and his unity is no different than the unity of Socrates. There are of course many men, and Socrates is but one of them. But if Socrates were the only man, then he would be the one man in the way God is the one god. Unity in classical Christianity has a deeper meaning: God is not just numerically one; he is also one in a way nothing else is one. God is not the sole instance of deity; God is his deity; God does not have (instantiate) his attributes; he is his attributes.  God is not only unique, like  everything else; he is uniquely unique unlike anything else.  God is not just the sole instance of his kind; he is unique in the further sense that there is no real distinction in God between instance and kind.

We object to the doctrine of the Trinity, that, whilst acknowledging in words, it subverts in effect, the unity of God. According to this doctrine, there are three infinite and equal persons, possessing supreme divinity, called the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Each of these persons, as described by theologians, has his own particular consciousness, will, and perceptions. They love each other, converse with each other, and delight in each other's society. They perform different parts in man's redemption, each having his appropriate office, and neither doing the work of the other. The Son is mediator and not the Father. The Father sends the Son, and is not himself sent; nor is he conscious, like the Son, of taking flesh. Here, then, we have three intelligent agents, possessed of different consciousness[es], different wills, and different perceptions, performing different acts, and sustaining different relations; and if these things do not imply and constitute three minds or beings, we are utterly at a loss to know how three minds or beings are to be formed. It is difference of properties, and acts, and consciousness, which leads us to the belief of different intelligent beings, and, if this mark fails us, our whole knowledge fall; we have no proof, that all the agents and persons in the universe are not one and the same mind. When we attempt to conceive of three Gods, we can do nothing more than represent to ourselves three agents, distinguished from each other by similar marks and peculiarities to those which separate the persons of the Trinity; and when common Christians hear these persons spoken of as conversing with each other, loving each other, and performing different acts, how can they help regarding them as different beings, different minds?

For Channing, Trinitarianism is indistinguishable from tri-theism. His too suggests a comparison with Islam. From the point of view of a radical monotheist, Trinitarianism smacks of polytheism. 

Having thus given our views of the unity of God, I proceed in the second place to observe, that we believe in the unity of Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God. We complain of the doctrine of the Trinity, that, not satisfied with making God three beings, it makes; Jesus Christ two beings, and thus introduces infinite confusion into our conceptions of his character. This corruption of Christianity, alike repugnant to common sense and to the general strain of Scripture, is a remarkable proof of the power of a false philosophy in disfiguring the simple truth of Jesus.

According to this doctrine, Jesus Christ, instead of being one mind, one conscious intelligent principle, whom we can understand, consists of two souls, two minds; the one divine, the other human; the one weak, the other almighty; the one ignorant, the other omniscient. Now we maintain, that this is to make Christ two beings. To denominate him one person, one being, and yet to suppose him made up of two minds, infinitely different from each other, is to abuse and confound language, and to throw darkness over all our conceptions of intelligent natures. According to the common doctrine, each of these two minds in Christ has its own consciousness, its own will, its own perceptions. They have, in fact, no common properties. The divine mind feels none of the wants and sorrows of the human, and the human is infinitely removed from the perfection and happiness of the divine. Can you conceive of two beings in the universe more distinct? We have always thought that one person was constituted and distinguished by one consciousness. The doctrine, that one and the same person should have two consciousness, two wills, two souls, infinitely different from each other, this we think an enormous tax on human credulity.

There are closely related difficult questions about how one person or supposit can have two distinct individualized natures, one human and one divine.

And so I say to my young friend, "Don't do anything rash!" First consider whether there is a less deadly form of religion you can adopt that will satisfy your intellectual scruples.

Hatred of Apostates

This is another similarity between leftists and radical Muslims.

Kevin Kim on John Pepple on Sweden as Europe's Sacrificial Lamb

A tip of the hat to Bill Keezer, and greetings to fellow bloggers Kim and Pepple. The titles of their blogs do not, however, earn the coveted MavPhil transparency of content award.

Feed: BigHominid's Hairy Chasms
Posted on: Thursday, September 5, 2019 1:22 AM
Author: Kevin Kim
Subject: Pepple on Sweden

Is Sweden Europe's sacrificial lamb, to be laid out as a bloody example of what happens when you heedlessly allow an influx of Muslims who refuse to assimilate into your culture? In John Pepple's grim blog post, Dr. Pepple quotes a Frenchwoman who immigrated to Sweden, but who is now leaving the country for Budapest because the crime has gotten so bad, and because PC politicians, who fear being branded as racists, refuse to recognize that there's any problem with current immigration policy and law enforcement. Here's an excerpt of something the woman wrote—one long, cri de coeur sentence: I can no longer live under this immense mental stress, insecurity, murder, shooting, executions, explosions, rapes and gang rapes, robberies, home burglaries, beatings, car fires, school fires, serious criminals who, after a relatively short prison stay, may again be released to move freely among us, an increasingly dismantled welfare system, lack of health care staff, teachers, elderly housing, lack of elderly care, an increasing number of poor pensioners, municipalities in principle bankrupt or in bankruptcy, all these no-go zones called something else, lack of police resources where it may take 1.5-2 hours for them to arrive at the scene of ongoing crimes if they arrive at all, the lying politicians regardless of political color and the accomplished so-called PC media, the demonization of people who think differently, the shrinking freedom of expression, the increasingly diminishing democracy, and last, but not least, the ongoing and widespread Islamization of the country. Go read the rest. A similar picture is being painted of countries like France, which is dealing with its own immigration/assimilation problem. France has a built-in cultural immune system called laïcité or, roughly, secularism. This is why French law has made no bones about disallowing the wearing of religious items like Muslim veils (hijab, etc.). But in the area surrounding Paris, which is filled with tenements and housing projects, there are the same no-go zones, with plenty of robbery, rape, car fires, and so on. In Paris itself, tent cities—with their attendant filth and violence—can be found as well. But once you leave Paris, you'd be forgiven for thinking France is still France. In the area where my buddy Dominique lives, in the small town of Le Vanneau-Irleau, life goes on much as it has for decades, utterly untouched by what's happening in France's big cities. In the United States, there's a similar state of affairs, albeit with somewhat different demographics. Still, the heart of the US problem has much in common with Europe's problem: a lack of political will when it comes to things like immigration and the true causes of poverty, and a lack of will when it comes to law enforcement. Any teacher knows that losing control of the classroom means the students will rule and nothing of significance will be learned. This is basic human psychology: people need structure if they are to live in harmony and to flourish. Without structure, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This is the paradox of freedom: true freedom is, far from being unstructured, veined throughout with structure. The creative freedom and amazing technique you can see in a great painter or martial artist is the result of focus and discipline. It's strange, but it's strictures that allow humans to flourish. And a society is no different from an individual in this regard: a society without strictures—an organic system of rules and laws and unspoken social contracts—becomes flabby and moribund. Look at New York City before and after Rudy Giuliani's two terms: Giuliani enforced the law, and his policies resulted in a few years of glorious prosperity between long periods of poverty and crime. Sweden is experiencing this problem now; so is France, at least in its big cities. The US has its own similar urban problems. As the folk song goes, When will they ever learn?

View article...

Christianity has civilized us . . .

. . . but it has also weakened us.  Our virtues, which once were strengths, are now weaknesses.  Some of our virtues have come to vitiate as much as some of our vices. 

We in the West no longer crucify malefactors or break them on the wheel. We now wring our hands, absurdly, over whether lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment."  A nation that has lost the will to execute its worst and most destructive criminals is a nation not long for this earth.  Can the will to live exist in a people who under no circumstances can muster the will to kill?

One of the fruits of civilization is toleration, that touchstone of classical liberalism.  It is a beautiful thing. It becomes a weakness, however, when it extends to the toleration of those who crucify and behead and throw homosexuals off of buildings.

Crucifixion in Islam:

It is all too common to view the practice of crucifixion as a form of torture and execution from antiquity which hasn’t been used in nearly two millennia, yet this is hardly the case. In fact, crucifixion is a standard means of execution in Saudi Arabia, and there is a growing movement among Islamists to bring back crucifixion as the preferred means of punishment for a variety of crimes, including apostasy from Islam, “fitna,” which is a pliable term which can refer to unbelief or mischief-making, or anything which goes against Islam and Shariah. This is explicitly taught in the Qur’an:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this: that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off… (Qur’an 5:33).

Ominously for Christians, strongly associated with fitna is “shirk,” the associating of partners with Allah. Believing Jesus to be the Son of God is, for Muslims, one of the worst forms of shirk, and is therefore punishable by death, including crucifixion. (There is a dark irony here, as Muslims do not believe Jesus was crucified, yet they prescribe crucifixion as punishment for Christians.)

Read it all. Disturbing images.

Stealth-Jihad and the Hijab

William Kilpatrick:

After all the years that have passed since 9/11, many American still misunderstand the nature of the Islamic threat. The main way that Islamic power advances in the West is not through terror attacks, but through stealth-jihad—the slow-motion co-option of our cultural and political institutions.

[. . .]

Cultural battles are won—or lost—by cultural institutions. Most stealth jihadists don’t hope to impose sharia law through armed struggle, but rather through influence operations designed to enlist these institutions on their side. They already seem to have enlisted two major cultural institutions on their side—universities and media.

Many universities, for example, seem to have adopted a pro-hijab stance. Faculty and student groups present the hijab as a symbol of a woman’s right to choose—in this case, to choose what clothes she will wear. Thus, on International Hijab Day, students are encouraged to don the hijab in order to show solidarity with their Muslim sisters.

Having thus been primed to see the hijab as a symbol of choice and diversity, the typical college grad will have no difficulty understanding the decision by Fox News to suspend Judge Jeanine Pirro for her criticism of Representative Ilhan Omar’s wearing of the hijab. Pirro suggested that Omar’s hijab might be “indicative of her adherence to sharia law.”  And that was enough to bring on the two week suspension.

Read it all.

Prager, the Left, and 'Easter Worshippers'

Why Hillary and Obama Tweeted About ‘Easter Worshippers’

amgreatness.com/2019/04/23/why-hillary-and-obama-tweeted-about-easter-worshippers/

 

Dennis PragerApril 24, 2019

Sometimes, a few sentences tell you more about a person—and, more importantly, an ideology—than a learned thesis. That is the case with tweets from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in response to the mass murder of more than 300 Christians and others in Sri Lanka.

Their tweets are worth serious analysis because they reveal a great deal about the Left. Of course, they reveal a great deal about Clinton and Obama, too, but that doesn’t interest me.

And that, too, is important. Many Americans—especially conservatives and “independents”—are more interested in individual politicians than in political ideologies.

Many conservatives have long been fixated on Clinton—so much so that probably any other Democrat would have defeated Donald Trump, as conservative anger specifically toward her propelled many people to the polls. Similarly, Republican NeverTrumpers are fixated on Trump rather than policy. They care more about Trump’s personal flaws than about the mortal dangers the Left poses to America and the West or about the uniquely successful conservative policies Trump promulgates.

BV Comments:  This is an extremely important point, one I have been making for years. It is profoundly STUPID and demonstrative of a failure to grasp the nature of practical politics for a never-trumping conservative to fixate upon, and stumble over, the barnacles and carbuncles of Trump's character while ignoring the roughly equal characterological flaws of leftists such as Hillary Clinton.  It is the ideas, the principles, the values, the programs, policies, and presuppositions that matter. Would that the pearl-clutchers could see this. 

And independents all claim to vote “for the person, not the party.”

BV: Well, I am registered Independent, but I don't make this stupid claim.

Only leftists understand that one must vote left no matter who the Democrat is, no matter who the Republican opponent is. Leftists are completely interchangeable: There is no ideological difference among the 20 or so Democrats running for president. Mayor Pete Buttigieg is not one degree to the right of Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.

BV: That's right. They say the same things using almost identical formulations.

That is why it is important to understand Clinton and Obama’s tweets: to understand the left, not to understand her or him.

Here are the tweets:

Obama: “The attacks on tourists and Easter worshippers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity. On a day devoted to love, redemption, and renewal, we pray for the victims and stand with the people of Sri Lanka.”

Three hours later, Clinton tweeted: “On this holy weekend for many faiths, we must stand united against hatred and violence. I’m praying for everyone affected by today’s horrific attacks on Easter worshippers and travelers in Sri Lanka.”

As they both spelled “worshipers” the same idiosyncratic way and used the term “Easter worshippers,” it is likely they either had the same writers or Clinton copied Obama.

Here’s what’s critical: Neither used the word “Christians.” And in order to avoid doing so, they went so far as to make up a new term—”Easter worshippers”—heretofore unknown to any Christian.

BV: Christians don't worship Easter; they worship the risen Christ.

When Jews were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Clinton mentioned the synagogue in a tweet. But in her post-Sri Lanka tweet, despite the bombing of three churches filled with Christians, Clinton made no mention of church or churches. In a tweet after the massacre of Muslims in New Zealand, she wrote that her heart broke for “the global Muslim community.” But in her latest tweet, not a word about Christians or the global Christian community.

Obama similarly wrote in his tweet about New Zealand that he was grieving with “the Muslim community” over the “horrible massacre in the Mosques.” But in his tweet about Sri Lanka, there is no mention of Christians or churches.

The reason neither of them mentioned Christians or churches is that the left has essentially forbidden mention of all the anti-Christian murders perpetrated by Muslims in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and of all the Muslim desecration of churches in Europe, Africa and anywhere else. This is part of the same phenomenon—that I and others have documented—of British police and politicians covering up six years of rape of 1,400 of English girls by Muslim “grooming gangs” in Rotherham and elsewhere in England. (emphasis added by BV)

Essentially, the left’s rule is that nothing bad—no matter how true—may be said about Muslims or Islam and nothing good—no matter how true—may be said of Christians or Christianity.

BV: It certainly seems that way, doesn't it?

Clinton’s post-New Zealand tweet also included these words: “We must continue to fight the perpetuation and normalization of Islamophobia and racism in all its forms. White supremacist terrorists must be condemned by leaders everywhere. Their murderous hatred must be stopped.”

She made sure to condemn “Islamophobia,” but she wrote not a word about the far more destructive and widespread hatred of Christians in the Muslim world, seen in Muslims’ virtual elimination of the Christian communities in the Middle East, the regular murder and kidnappings of Coptic Christians in Egypt and the murder of Christians in Nigeria. She calls on “leaders everywhere” to condemn “white supremacist terrorists,” one of the smallest hate groups on Earth, but never calls on leaders everywhere to condemn Islamist terrorists, the largest hate group on Earth.

These two tweets tell you a lot about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But far more importantly, they tell you a lot about the Left.

BV: Prager should have pointed out that there is no such thing as 'Islamophobia.' The term was invented by the Left to prevent rational discourse. Fear of Islamic terrorism is entirely rational, and therefore not a phobia. It is the foolish conservative who uses the made-up word as if it is a legitimate term.

Prager should also have proffered an explanation of why the Left is in cahoots with radical Islam.  I address the question here.

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Photo credit: Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images

Banning Guns and Banning Muslims

Conservatives are not opposed to gun control, but they strenuously oppose gun confiscation and proposals to ban civilian ownership of semi-automatic weapons. These include semi-auto handguns of .22 caliber,  semi-auto rifles such as the AR-15, and semi-auto shotguns. Most of these same conservatives, however, support a reduction of, or moratorium on, Muslim immigration, either across the board or from selected terror-sponsoring states.  

This raises a question. Is the differential stance of these conservatives reasonable?  According to Libertarian Michael Huemer,

The threat of mass shootings is vastly overblown. The U.S. murder rate is about 4.9 per 100,000 population per year. The comparable *mass shooting* death rate is about 0.002. We should stop freaking out about a relatively tiny risk.

He also maintains that

The threat of terrorism is vastly overblown. In the last 50 years or so, about 3,300 Americans were murdered by terrorists, while about 800,000 were murdered by non-terrorists. We should stop freaking out about a relatively tiny risk.

I will assume that Huemer's numbers are correct, at least  for Americans on American soil. The numbers seem about right. Going by the numbers alone, it is not rational for a random individual to worry about dying either in a mass shooting or in a terrorist attack.  So why the differential stance? is it not irrational for conservatives to support the right of civilians to own semi-auto weapons while wanting to reduce Muslim immigration out of concern that some Muslims will engage in terrorist attacks?

I say it is entirely rational to stand for gun rights while also demanding special vetting of Muslims and a reduction in Muslim immigration.  This is because immigrants bring their culture with them, and in the case of Muslims, their culture, based as it is on sharia, Islamic law, is antithetical to American values of the sort that libertarians and classical liberals tend to uphold.  These include freedom of thought and expression, even unto the mocking of their Prophet, religious liberty including the liberty to eschew religion, and separation of church/mosque and state.  Muslims, bringing their culture with them, are not interested in assimilating, but in remaking our culture in their image.  Taking advantage of our excessive tolerance, they seek to replace our tolerant culture with their intolerant culture.   

Libertarians, however, understand none of this since they tend to think in a narrowly economic way.  Blind to culture, libertarians are blind to the cultural damage that Muslims do by refusing to assimilate to American values and ways.  So they tally up how many are killed by berserk shooters and how many by berserk Muslims.  But that involves vicious abstraction. Once cannot reasonably abstract from the cultural impact of Muslim immigration.

When Americans stand for their Second Amendment rights, they are not altering American culture but insisting on it. Ours is a culture of liberty and self-reliance and limited government. It is a culture that prizes freedom of expression and open inquiry. It is anti-totalitarian in a way that theocratic Muslim culture is not.

Libertarians strike me as embarrassingly un-self-aware. They don't seem to realize that a culture in which they and their ideas can flourish is not a culture re-made along the lines of sharia.  For the sake of their own survival they need to realize that the threat that Muslim immigration poses is not merely the terrorist threat but the broader cultural threat.

More on the Left's Toleration of Militant Islam

Just over the transom from Kai Frederik Lorentzen:

The French writer Pascal Bruckner, adding a historical dimension, traces the issue back not only to the Iranian revolution of 1979 but even to early Bolshevism:

" ... And here is where the strangest factor in the whole Islamophobia controversy emerges: the enlistment of a part of the American and European Left in the defense of the most radical form of Islam—what one might call the neo-Bolshevik bigotry of the lost believers of Marxism. Having lost everything—the working class, the Third World—the Left clings to this illusion: Islam, rebaptized as the religion of the poor, becomes the last utopia, replacing those of Communism and decolonization for disenchanted militants. The Muslim takes the place of the proletarian.

The baton seems to have been passed at about the time of the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, with the resulting rise to power of Islamist revolutionaries, which was the occasion for enthusiastic commentary by Michel Foucault, among others on the left. God’s return on history’s stage had finally rendered Marxist and anticolonialist programs obsolete. The faith moved the masses better than the socialist hope. Now, it was the believer in the Koran who embodied the global hope for justice, who refused to conform to the order of things, who transcended borders and created a new international order, under the aegis of the Prophet: a green Comintern. Too bad for feminism, women’s equality, salvific doubt, the critical spirit; in short, too bad for everything traditionally associated with a progressive position.

This political attitude is manifest in progressives’ scrupulous idolatry of Muslim practices and rites, especially the Islamic veil: “modest fashion” is praised to the skies, so much so that, for certain leftist commentators, an unveiled Muslim woman who claims this right can only be a traitor, a turncoat, a woman for sale. The irony of this neocolonial solicitude for bearded men and veiled women—and for everything that suggests an oriental bazaar—is that Morocco itself, whose king is the “Commander of the Faithful,” recently forbade the wearing, sale, and manufacture of the burka in his country. Shall we call the Cherifian monarchy “Islamophobic”? Shall we be more royalist than the king?

It’s worth considering this Islamo-leftism more closely, this hope nourished by a revolutionary fringe that Islam might spearhead a new uprising, a “holy war” against global capitalism, exactly as in Baku in 1920, when Bolshevik leaders, including Zinoviev, published a joint appeal with the pan-Islamists to unleash jihad against Western imperialism. It was an English Trotskyite, Chris Harman, leader of the Socialist Workers Party, who, in 1994, provided a theory for this alliance between militant revolutionaries and radical Muslim associations, arguing for their unity, in certain circumstances, against the common enemy of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they transferred their hopes to the Islamists ... "

In autumn, Bruckner published a book where he elaborates the theses of his essay. I haven't read it yet, but the table of contents looks promising. While I have doubts that the political fight against the Sharia can still be won in Western Europe, things may take a turn for the better on your side of the big water. At least I hope so.

Mit besten Wünschen!

Kai
 
https://www.city-journal.org/html/theres-no-such-thing-islamophobia-15324.html
https://www.wiley.com/en-ax/An+Imaginary+Racism%3A+Islamophobia+and+Guilt-p-9781509530663
https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2019/03/what-explains-the-lefts-toleration-of-militant-islam.html

What Explains the Left's Toleration of Militant Islam?

From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, its voluntaristic suppression of reason, and its opposition to gender equality.

So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam?  The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that they long to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?

1. One point of similarity between radical leftists and Islamists is that both are totalitarians. As David Horowitz writes in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery, 2004) , "Both movements are totalitarian in their desire to extend the revolutionary law into the sphere of private life, and both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand." (p. 124)

2. Horowitz points to another similarity when he writes, "The radical Islamist believes that by conquering nations and instituting sharia, he can redeem the world for Allah. The socialist’s faith is in using state power and violent means to eliminate private property and thereby usher in the millenium." (129)

Perhaps we could say that the utopianism of the Left is a quasi-religion with a sort of secular eschatology. The leftist dreams of an eschaton ushered in by human effort alone, a millenial state that could be described as pie-in-the-future as opposed to pie-in-the-sky. When this millenial state is achieved, religion in its traditional form will disappear. Its narcotic satisfactions will no longer be in demand. Religion is the "sigh of the oppressed creature," (Marx) a sigh that arises within a contingent socioeconomic arrangement that can be overturned. When it is overturned, religion will disappear.

3. This allows us to explain why the secular radical does not take seriously the religious pathology of radical Islam. "The secular radical believes that religion itself is merely an expression of real-world misery, for which capitalist property is ultimately responsible." (129) The overthrow of capitalist America will eliminate the need for religion. This "will liberate Islamic fanatics from the need to be Islamic and fanatic." (130)

Building on Horowitz’s point, I would say the leftist in his naïveté  fails to grasp that religion, however we finally resolve the question of its validity or lack thereof, is deeply rooted in human nature. As Schopenhauer points out, man is a metaphysical animal, and religion is one expression of the metaphysical urge.  Every temple, church, and mosque is evidence of man's being an animal metaphysicum.   As such, religion is not a merely contingent expression of a contingent misery produced by a contingent state of society. On the contrary, as grounded in human nature, religion answers to a misery, sense of abandonment, and need for meaning essential to the human predicament as such, a predicament the amelioration of which cannot be brought about by any merely human effort, whether individual or collective. Whether or not religion can deliver what it promises, it answers to real and ineradicable human needs for meaning and purpose, needs that only a utopian could imagine being satisfied in a state of society brought about by human effort alone.

In their dangerous naïveté, leftists thinks that they can use radical Islam to help destroy the capitalist USA, and, once that is accomplished, radical Islam will ‘wither away.’ But they will ‘wither away’ before Islamo-fanaticism does. They think they can use genuine fascist theocracy to defeat the ‘fascist theocracy’ of the USA. They are deluding themselves.

Residing in their utopian Wolkenskukuheim -- a wonderful word I found in Schopenhauer translatable as 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' -- radical leftists are wrong about religion, wrong about human nature, wrong about the terrorist threat, wrong about the ‘fascist theocracy’ of conservatives, wrong about economics; in short, they are wrong about reality.

Leftists  are delusional reality-deniers.  Now that they are in our government, we are in grave danger.  I sincerely hope that people do not need a 'nuclear event' to wake them up.  Political Correctness can get you killed.

From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, its voluntaristic suppression of reason, and its opposition to gender equality.

So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam?  The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that they long to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?

1. One point of similarity between radical leftists and Islamists is that both are totalitarians. As David Horowitz writes in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery, 2004) , "Both movements are totalitarian in their desire to extend the revolutionary law into the sphere of private life, and both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand." (p. 124)

2. Horowitz points to another similarity when he writes, "The radical Islamist believes that by conquering nations and instituting sharia, he can redeem the world for Allah. The socialist’s faith is in using state power and violent means to eliminate private property and thereby usher in the millenium." (129)

Perhaps we could say that the utopianism of the Left is a quasi-religion with a sort of secular eschatology. The leftist dreams of an eschaton ushered in by human effort alone, a millenial state that could be described as pie-in-the-future as opposed to pie-in-the-sky. When this millenial state is achieved, religion in its traditional form will disappear. Its narcotic satisfactions will no longer be in demand. Religion is the "sigh of the oppressed creature," (Marx) a sigh that arises within a contingent socioeconomic arrangement that can be overturned. When it is overturned, religion will disappear.

3. This allows us to explain why the secular radical does not take seriously the religious pathology of radical Islam. "The secular radical believes that religion itself is merely an expression of real-world misery, for which capitalist property is ultimately responsible." (129) The overthrow of capitalist America will eliminate the need for religion. This "will liberate Islamic fanatics from the need to be Islamic and fanatic." (130)

Building on Horowitz’s point, I would say the leftist in his naïveté  fails to grasp that religion, however we finally resolve the question of its validity or lack thereof, is deeply rooted in human nature. As Schopenhauer points out, man is a metaphysical animal, and religion is one expression of the metaphysical urge.  Every temple, church, and mosque is evidence of man's being an animal metaphysicum.   As such, religion is not a merely contingent expression of a contingent misery produced by a contingent state of society. On the contrary, as grounded in human nature, religion answers to a misery, sense of abandonment, and need for meaning essential to the human predicament as such, a predicament the amelioration of which cannot be brought about by any merely human effort, whether individual or collective. Whether or not religion can deliver what it promises, it answers to real and ineradicable human needs for meaning and purpose, needs that only a utopian could imagine being satisfied in a state of society brought about by human effort alone.

In their dangerous naïveté, leftists thinks that they can use radical Islam to help destroy the capitalist USA, and, once that is accomplished, radical Islam will ‘wither away.’ But they will ‘wither away’ before Islamo-fanaticism does. They think they can use genuine fascist theocracy to defeat the ‘fascist theocracy’ of the USA. They are deluding themselves.

Residing in their utopian Wolkenskukuheim -- a wonderful word I found in Schopenhauer translatable as 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' -- radical leftists are wrong about religion, wrong about human nature, wrong about the terrorist threat, wrong about the ‘fascist theocracy’ of conservatives, wrong about economics; in short, they are wrong about reality.

Leftists  are delusional reality-deniers.  Now that they are in our government, we are in grave danger.  I sincerely hope that people do not need a 'nuclear event' to wake them up.  Political Correctness can get you killed.

Why Would Anyone Consider Islam a Race?

Islam is obviously not a race, but a religion.  If you hesitate to call Islam a religion, then it is either a political ideology masquerading as a religion, or a hybrid ideology that blends features of religion and political ideology, or a Christian heresy.  On any of these interpretations it is not a race.  That should be perfectly clear.

No race has apostates. Islam has apostates. Ergo, etc.

With respect to religions and political ideologies, there are conversions and de-conversions. One cannot convert to, or de-convert from, one's race. Ergo, etc.

Why then do some want to call Islam a race?  Here is a very plausible answer. I know of no better:

Criticizing Islam is not racism.  There is no such thing as "anti-Muslim racism" any more than there is "anti-Christian racism," "anti-Republican racism," or "anti-Capitalist racism." 

So why would anyone claim differently?

It is because the battle over Islam is being fought in the West, the only arena in which it can still be critically debated.  It is also here that repugnance toward racism is strong and nearly universal.  From politics to high-risk mortgages and illegal immigration, fear of the race card is one of the strongest influences on public policy.

At the same time, it is nearly impossible to defend Islam on its own merits in the West in free and open debate.  According to its own texts, the religion was founded in terror.  Its political and social code is deeply incompatible with liberal values.

Muslims societies usually rely on threat of violence to suppress intellectual critique of Islam and the freedom of other religion to fairly compete, which, if allowed, would be the slow death of Islam.  Their counterparts in the West have learned to rely on the race card.  If they can paint any criticism of their religion as "racism," then the massive evidence against Islam can be dismissed out of hand without having to contend with it.

Slinging the worst of all slurs to compensate for deficiency of fact and logic is weak enough, but it is ironic given that what is being defended in such cheap fashion is an ideology that is overtly supremacist in nature. 

That's right. Islam is supremacist in nature. Not racially supremacist, but ideologically supremacist. Leftists try to hide this fact by calling critics of Islam racists, from which they then slide to the vicious slur that these critics are white supremacists, which brings them back to the 'race card,' the only card in their deck and the one they never leave home without.

Islam as religion’s most virulent subspecies?

I agree with the gist of Claude Boisson's statement below (via e-mail) who takes minor issue with what he quotes me as saying in the header, turning my declarative into an interrogative. (I haven't checked all his factual statements.) I myself have referred to Islam as a 'hybrid' ideology: it is as much a political ideology as it is a religion.  It is a terrible threat to the West and its values, and it speaks volumes about the Left that leftists refuse to see this.

 

I would rather say that Islam corresponds to an *intersection* between “religion” (as we understand it) and politics, law, etiquette, etc. This is in fact what ulamas have always taught, and they consider this fact as a proof of Islam’s superiority over, in particular, Christianity, a mere religion. 

 

That is why we have the recently revived traditional Arabic phrase “al-dīn wa al-dawla”, the religion and the state. This is what Islam actually is, not a mere dīn. 

 

Hence, for example, the following facts, otherwise uninterpretable:

 

(1) The Islamic era does not begin with, say, Muhammad’s first revelation in the cave on mount Hira in 610 AD, but with the Hegira in 622, the flight from Mecca (where he was not very successful as a “spiritual” leader) to Medina. There Muhammad, already a prophet, became additionally a social, political and (ruthless) military leader and a lawgiver for the Umma, the community. Islam is thus a Gesamtkunstwerk, not simply what we term a religion. 

 

(2) The Islamic scriptures (the Sunna very considerably more than the Qur’an) are full of “lay” rules which seem very strange to the followers of many other religions: a man should urinate holding his penis with his left hand; Muhammad (the beautiful model that the muslimin should imitate) disliked onions, dogs, salamanders, musical instruments; these are the rules for dividing the spoils in warfare, etc.

 

(3) I have collected a list of no fewer than 27 mosques in 15 countries, from Morocco to Indonesia, bearing the name of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the most celebrated of the Muslim generals who conquered Hispania starting in 711. There are notably 2 such mosques in Spain(!), one in Gibraltar (the mountain is named after Tariq), 2 in France, 2 in Belgium, 1 in Germany. This is as odd as if one had Christian religious services in the “Cathédrale Bonaparte” (he invaded Egypt) or a Catholic church named after one of the French generals who defeated Muslim armies in the conquest of Algeria in the 19th c., or Italian churches bearing the name of Italian generals who fought in Libya. 

 

Related: More on "No Religious Test"

Niall Ferguson on Christine Blasey Ford and #MeToo

Well worth reading. Especially this:

The #MeToo movement is revolutionary feminism. Like all revolutionary movements, it favors summary justice. Since April 2017, more than 200 men have been publicly accused of some form of sexual offense, ranging from rape to inappropriate language. A few of these men seem likely to have committed crimes and are being prosecuted accordingly — notably the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. But #MeToo seems to have created a single catch-all crime, in which rape, assault, clumsy passes, and banter are elided into one.

With a few exceptions, reputations have been destroyed and careers ended without due process. "I believe her" are the fateful words that, if uttered by enough people, perform the roles of judge and jury.

Sexual harassment is bad, no question. And yet a much bigger threat to women's rights is largely ignored by Western feminists. As my wife likes to point out, verse 2:282 of the Koran states that a woman's testimony is worth only half of a man's testimony in court. (Some people want the opposite to apply in Ford v. Kavanaugh.) Wherever sharia law is imposed — from the armed camps of Boko Haram or ISIS to the sharia courts found in most Muslim-majority countries — it is women who lose out. Do Senate Democrats care? No. When my wife testified on this subject last year, they literally ignored her.

Read it all. I mean it. It gets even better!  If you've seen Ferguson in action on C-Span or on Fox you know he is tops -- assuming you have my level of good judgment.

Against Iconoclasm and the Erasure of History

Muslims are well-known for their iconoclasm, hostility to the arts, and destruction of cultural artifacts. Leftists are like unto Muslims in this regard too.

The trouble with iconoclasm is that all parties can play the game. 

Mass-murdering communist regimes are responsible for some 94 million deaths in the 20th century. Why not then destroy all the statues and monuments that honor the likes of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Fidel Castro and all others who either laid the foundations for or carried out mass murder?  

 

You understand, of course, that I am not advocating this.  For one thing, the erasure of history would make it rather more difficult to learn from it. For another thing, there would be no end to it.  Why not destroy the Colosseum in Rome? You know what went on there.

Or how about St. Robert Bellarmine, S. J. ?  Should paintings and statues of him be destroyed?  He had a hand in the burning at the stake of the philosopher Giordano Bruno! According to Wikipedia:

Bellarmine was made rector of the Roman College in 1592, examiner of bishops in 1598, and cardinal in 1599. Immediately after his appointment as Cardinal, Pope Clement made him a Cardinal Inquisitor, in which capacity he served as one of the judges at the trial of Giordano Bruno, and concurred in the decision which condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake as a heretic.^[5]

Better known is the fact that Bellarmine is the man who hauled the great Galileo Galilei before the Inquisition. 

Calling all philosophers and scientists! To your sledge hammers and blow torches!

And then there are the paintings, statues, etc. of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarist and adulterer. Yes, King plagiarized (portions of) his Boston University dissertation. 

Anyone with sense should be able to understand that high merit worthy of honor can exist alongside deep character flaws.

There is no need to multiply examples. You should be getting the point along about now.

I now assign Victor Davis Hanson, The Ideology of Statue Smashing. Yes, kiddies, this will be on the final.

SCOTUS Rules 5-4 to Uphold 'Muslim' Travel Ban

Yet another victory for President Trump and for common sense. And yet another embarrassment for the Never-Trumpers who refused to support Trump and who, by their refusal, indirectly supported Hillary who would never have supported any such travel ban.

And of course, if the Never-Trumpers had their way, the composition of the Court would not have been favorable to conservative rulings.

(Once more: a Never-Trumper is a conservative of some sort or other who opposes Trump. Bill Kristol for example. Remember him? Every Never-Trumper is an Anti-Trumper, but not conversely. Is this just an arbitrary stipulation on my part? No. This is the way the terms are used by those in the know who value clarity of thought and the distinctions that support it.)

Predictably, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent that is rather less than intelligent:

“This repackaging does little to cleanse [the policy] of the appearance of discrimination that the president’s words have created,” she said. “Based on the evidence in the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.”

On the contrary, a reasonable observer would conclude that Sotomayor should not be sitting on the Supreme Court. I'll give her this, though: she has a beautiful name.

Imagine the composition of the Court after eight years of Hillarity. 

Seeing as how we are in the vicinity of Islamist issues, I now refer you to William Kilpatrick's latest,  Islamization in the Schools.

Is the Burqa a Mere Fashion Accessory?

William Kilpatrick:

You may look upon the wearing of the burqa as a civil rights issue, but many Muslims look upon it as key element in the Islamization process. Like the Ku Klux Klan hood or the Guy Fawkes mask, the burqa works, in part, through intimidation. Suppose a burqa clad woman (or is she a woman?) enters the bus you are riding. Do your thoughts turn to the riches of diversity, or do you begin to wonder if you just bought a bus ticket to eternity? Do you reflexively think that multiculturalism makes life more interesting, or do you think that it may be time to move to another neighborhood? Oh sure, you know that, realistically, the chances of having drawn the short straw are remote … but still.

The burqa, in short, is not just a personal fashion preference; rather, it’s one way that fundamentalist Muslims have of staking a territorial claim. Where burqas abound, sharia, no-go-zones, and virtue patrols soon follow. And non-Muslims begin to move out. So the burqa is far more than a statement of modesty. It’s a statement on the part of the Muslim community that these streets belong to us. Thus, the burqa can become an effective weapon for advancing Islamic law and culture.

Read the whole of this penetrating essay by Kilpatrick the courageous.

Is William Kilpatrick Too Soft on Pope Francis?

Dr. Vito Caiati writes,

I read your post on “The Church and Islam: Dangerous Illusions,” and while I share your appreciation of Kilpatrick’s continuing commentary on the real nature of Islam, I am uncomfortable with his statement that “It seems clear to me that the pope and others in the hierarchy are enabling the spread of an evil ideology; however, it’s not at all clear that they understand what they’re doing. Francis, for instance, seems to sincerely believe that all religions are roughly equal in goodness. Thus for him, the spread of any religion must seem like a good thing. It’s an exceedingly naïve view, but one that seems honestly held.”

I do not claim that the Pope is a “collaborator,” but I think that Kilpatrick overlooks the deep anti-Western politics and ideology of Bergoglio, who has expressed open contempt for the advanced capitalist nations to exercise their sovereign rights to control illegal immigration (all his asinine remarks on “walls, the obligation to admit endless streams of “migrants,” and so on);  who offered only a highly muted response to the wholesale murder and displacement of Christians in the Middle East by Islamic fanatics (remember the plane full of refugees that he took back to Italy with him: All Muslims?); and who works tirelessly to undermine Roman Catholic doctrine and traditions, which remain fundamental to many Catholics in Eastern and Southern Europe and in the United States and which constitute an important part of the cultural inheritance of Europe.  His embrace of Islam is part of the leftist embrace of this highly dangerous and alien religious-political ideology under the banners of  diversity and globalism. His perspective on Islam is thus not so “naïve” as Kilpatrick would have us believe. Kilpatrick, like so many Catholics, seems fearful of going the full distance and exposing the Pope and most of the hierarchy of the Church as active participants in the ongoing leftist assault on the nation state and Western civilization.

I fear Dr. Caiati is correct.

On Opposing a Dangerous Ideology that is also a Religion

This article by William Kilpatrick bears on my ongoing conversation with a Canadian philosopher about Islam, religious tests, and constitutional interpretation. Last exchange here.  I'll pull a few quotations from Professor Kilpatrick and add some comments.

The idea of opposing dangerous ideologies is not foreign to Americans, but the idea of opposing an ideology that is also a religion is more problematic. It has become increasingly problematic now that we live in an era in which merely disagreeing with another’s opinions is tantamount to a hate crime.

But obviously, to dissent from a proposition is not to hate a person.  Nor is dissent on the part of the dissenter a sign of mental malfunction. Liberals who would smear Kilpatrick by calling him an 'Islamophobe' are either ignorant or vicious. Ignorant, if they do not understand that a phobia is an irrational fear. Vicious, if they mean to silence such a truth-teller by questioning his sanity.

The U.S. Constitution in the first and second clauses of its First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion. But does Islam fall under this protection? Ought there be freedom of religion for a religion that seeks to eliminate every other religion? Obviously not. The Constitition is not a suicide pact. I argue this out in painful detail in my last exchange with the Canadian.

I don't deny that Islam is a religion. It may even be a way to God for some who know of no better Way. (The allusion is to via, veritas, vita.)But Islam is just as much, if not more, a political ideology that seeks to subvert the principles and values of the American founding. Let us note en passant that this explains what would otherwise be very hard to explain, namely, why the Left is in cahoots with Islam. For the Left too is out to subvert said principles and values. Islamists must view leftists as useful idiots who will be sent packing to the realm of the black-eyed virgins should the former gain the (knife-wielding) upper hand. Leftists are in for a surprise if they think that they can use Islamists for leftist purposes.

I feel a rant coming on, so back to the sober Irishman:

Under Pope Benedict XVI there were signs—such as his Regensburg Address—that the Church was developing a more realistic view of Islam. But whatever ground was gained by Benedict was given up by Francis. Indeed, it seems fair to say that under Francis, the Church’s understanding of Islam regressed. Perhaps the most glaring example of this regression can be found in the Pope’s assertion that “authentic Islam and a proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” It’s hard to imagine any of his predecessors or any of their advisors making a similar claim.

Holy moly! Could Bergoglio the Boneheaded be that benighted?  Yes, take a gander at this:

By contrast, Church leaders and Pope Francis in particular, have become, in effect, enablers of Islam. Pope Francis has denied that Islam sanctions violence, has drawn a moral equivalence between Islam and Catholicism (“If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence”), and has campaigned for the admittance of millions of Muslim migrants into Europe. Moreover, he has criticized those who oppose his open borders policy as hard-hearted xenophobes. In return for his efforts, he has been publicly thanked by several Muslim leaders for his “defense of Islam.”

One might be tempted to use the word “collaborator” instead of “enabler.” But collaborator is too strong a word. In its World War II context, it implies a knowing consent to and cooperation with an evil enterprise. It seems clear to me that the pope and others in the hierarchy are enabling the spread of an evil ideology; however, it’s not at all clear that they understand what they’re doing. Francis, for instance, seems to sincerely believe that all religions are roughly equal in goodness. Thus for him, the spread of any religion must seem like a good thing. It’s an exceedingly naïve view, but one that seems honestly held.

Related: Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity

More on "No Religious Test"

A Canadian reader comments and I reply:

I've been thinking about the problem of interpreting "no religious test" in light of your post.  It's actually a very difficult problem!  I'm almost convinced the correct response is that, unfortunately, if the Constitution is interpreted correctly then fundamentalist Muslims do indeed have the right to hold public office--given the most natural and reasonable interpretation of word meanings and even taking into account the likely intentions of the founding fathers, the history of legal interpretation, etc.  It's very hard to get around this.  Maybe rather than saying that the Constitution is not a suicide pact on any sane interpretation, we have to say that a sane person would reject both suicide pacts and some parts of the US Constitution.

I grant that it is a very difficult problem, and I am aware that few will be convinced by what I wrote earlier. Ask anybody what Islam is and he will tell you that it is a religion. And then, given that

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.(Article VI)

it seems to follow via some uncontroversial auxiliary premises that no Muslim shall be barred from running for office simply because he is a Muslim. 

But of course among those Muslims are those who have no intention of assimilating and accepting our values but instead seek to impose Sharia on us thereby rejecting our values and principles and subverting our system of government.

So the question I would put to my fellow citizens is: Are you comfortable with an interpretation of the Constitution that allows for its elimination and the values and principles it enshrines?

I am not.

There are those who will say: let anyone immigrate from anywhere and then let the people who have immigrated decide what they want. They call that democracy, and they are all for it.  The people are the residents within certain geographical borders, and residency constitutes citizenship. If the residents want blasphemy laws, then we shall have blasphemy laws.  

You point out that Islam is not just a religion but also a political ideology.  But does that really help?  It still is a religion, and if the Constitution forbids any "religious test", without ever saying anything about the scope of "religion", the most natural interpretation is that even religions that double as political ideologies--most religions, really--are subject to the "no religious test" rule.  You say that we could declare Islam an inadmissible religion, but then wouldn't effectively mean that the Constitution is self-contradictory?  On the one hand, there is to be freedom of religion and no religious test--the subject here being surely just religion in general.  On the other hand, only some religions are protected by the "no religious test" rule, and for other religions there can be a religious test after all.  That seems incoherent, no?

Islam is a religion, but not a religion in the sense in which Hinduism, Buddhism Judaism, and Christianity are religions. Will you grant me that? Or must I argue it out?  

There is no contradiction or incoherence such as you imagine. I take it you find no incoherence in what the logic books call exceptive propositions. For example, "All citizens of the United States are guaranteed freedom of religion except those whose religions are incompatible with the values and principles of the American founding." The following propositions are logically consistent. (1) The Constitution guarantees  freedom of religion and disallows religious tests.  (2) The Constitution guarantees these things subject to the proviso that the religion in question is compatible with the principles of the American founding.

Now the Constitution does not contain these formulations.  But we will agree that the document is subject to interpretation. My claim is that it is most reasonable interpreted along the lines I have suggested.

As for incoherence, I should think that your account is more justly charged with it. A constitution that allows for its own subversion is incoherent if not strictly self-contradictory in the logical sense.  The provisions of such a constitution do not cohere with its own continued existence.

Actually I don't know that the idea of a church/state or religion/politics distinction will make sense if we allow that some religions are also political ideologies.  If the two can be separated, wouldn't that mean that the religions that are also political must be either banned or else somehow reformulated so that they're only religious?  Otherwise, the effect would be to prevent the normal or traditional practice of those religions--since normally or by their nature they'd function as political entities.  But then wouldn't that be incompatible with the ideal of freedom of religion?  I don't know.  Just some rambling thoughts.  The issue seems very confusing.  The US Constitution was never meant to apply to this bizarre multicultural situation that's been induced.  

But why on earth would you want the normal or traditional practice of (radical) Islam in the U. S. , Canada, France, the West generally?  I know you don't want that.

The Founders figured something out. They figured out that a modicum of civil peace can be had if government is kept limited in scope and kept separate from religion.

Freedom of religion, like freedom of speech, and like toleration, has limits.  As you know, Islam does not recognize freedom of religion. You either convert, accept dhimmitude, or are put to the sword. It is therefore entirely reasonable to place restrictions on freedom of religion and ban politically subversive religions.

A commitment to freedom of religion becomes incoherent and suicidal when it is taken to imply freedom for all religions including those that reject freedom of religion.  Similarly for freedom of speech and toleration. A sane toleration must be intolerant of the intolerant.

Related articles

"No Religious Test"

Islam on Urination, Defecation, and Jihad

Dr. Claude Boisson writes,

 

One mile from where I live in the French city of Lyon, there is an Islamicized neighborhood where I recently bought this (elegantly printed and bound) book in French. 

 

Four pages (46-49) are devoted to how you should urinate and defecate if you are an observant Muslim. And a very elaborate affair it is. Hold your penis with your left hand. Remember that it is forbidden to wipe your bottom with fewer than three stones or with a bone. The description of these 7th century customs from Arabia are piously reprinted in the textbook supposedly read by serious 20th century French-speaking Muslims. 

 

Are we instructed as to the proper disposal of the three soiled stones?  Why wouldn't the bone of an infidel be an appropriate instrument of anal cleansing? 

 

But since I am not a Muslim, I was more interested in the final chapters. Chapter XVI is devoted to jihad (the real thing, not “internal spiritual struggle”) and chapter XVII to the freeing of slaves. For five dollars infidel readers can thus become more knowledgeable about what may await them. 

 

You learn all there is to know about the war booty, the dhimma and such matters. Also please note the Prophet said that if you want to free a slave, it is advisable to do this during a solar eclipse. 

 

You might imagine that this is an edition of an old treatise penned in the fifteenth century. 

 

No. Time has stood still. 

It is a compendium of fiqh written by an Egyptian scholar born in 1954 (not in 1054 or 1454), a former student of al-Azhar. The French translation was published in 2011 by The International Islamic Publishing House, Riyadh.

 

Yes, Islam is a religion. It is also, intrinsically, “political Islam”. Since when? Since the Hegira. 

The main thing is that Islam is a violent, oppressive, totalitarian system inimical to the values and traditions of the West, one which has the support of destructive leftists. It may be too late for Europe and the U. K., but we here in the USA still have a fighting chance of beating back the barbarians.

 

Leftists evince a pronounced libertine 'wobble' en rapport as they are with sexual perversions and 'alternative lifestyles' and are therefore in danger of 'losing their heads' should the Sharia boys come to power.  So their collusion with the latter is a curious thing to behold.

 

What explains it?  My detailed answer in Why the Left Will not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam.

 

I am coming to the view that the qualifier 'radical' in 'radical Islam' is redundant: True Islam is radical by its very nature. Could there be such a person as a moderate Nazi?  I think not. Is 'moderate Muslim' in the same logical boat, a phrase that perhaps applies only to Zuhdi Jasser and a few others? 

 

"No Religious Test"

 In Article VI of the U. S. Constitution we read:

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Does it follow that the U. S. Constitution should be so interpreted as to allow a Muslim citizen who supports sharia (Islamic law) to run for public office?  No!  For the same Constitution, in its First Amendment, enjoins a salutary separation of church/synagogue/mosque and state, though not in those words.  Sharia and the values and principles enshrined in the founding documents are incompatible.  On no sane interpretation is our great Constitution a suicide pact.

It is important to realize that Islam is as much  an anti-Enlightenment political ideology as it is a religion.  Our Enlightenment founders must be rolling around in their graves at the very suggestion that sharia-subscribing Muslims are eligible for the presidency and other public offices. 

Many assume that no restriction may be placed on admissible religions for the purposes of the implementation  of Article VI.  I deny it. A religion that requires the subverting of the U. S. Constitution is not an admissible religion when it comes to applying the "no religious Test" provision. One could argue that on a sane interpretation of the Constitution, Islam, though a religion, is not an admissible religion where an admissible religion is one that does not contain core doctrines which, if implemented, would subvert the Constitution.

Or one might argue that Islam is not a religion at all.  Damn near anything can and will be called a religion by somebody.  Some say with a straight face that leftism is a religion, others that Communism is a religion.  Neither is a religion on any adequate definition of 'religion.'  I have heard it said that atheism is a religion.  Surely it isn't.  Is a heresy of a genuine religion itself a religion?  Arguably not.  Hillaire Belloc and others have maintained that Islam is a Christian heresy.  Or one could argue that Islam, or perhaps radical Islam,  is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.  If an X masquerades as a Y, then the X is not a Y. How to define religion is a hotly contested issue in the philosophy of religion. 

The point here is that "religious" in ". . . no religious Test shall ever be required" is subject to interpretation.  We are under no obligation to give it a latitudinarian reading that allows in a destructive ideology incompatible with our values and principles.

Related articles

Christians Flogged For Not Being Good Muslims In Indonesia

What Should We Call Secular Ideologies like Marxism and Social Justice?

Is Fear Born of Ignorance? Only Sometimes

William Kilpatrick is the best writer at Crisis Magazine. Because he invariably talks sense, I have linked to his work on numerous occasions. It is important that he remain a writer there given that squishy liberal shallow-pates are 'over-represented' among Catholics and have been for a good 60 years, with the current pope, Bergoglio the Benighted, leading the bunch.  The beauty of blog is that I can be appropriately disrespectful of the leftist knucklehead where Kilpatrick cannot.

Here he makes an important point: 

One of the misleading assumptions of our times is that fear is born of ignorance. Its corollary is the belief that increased education or increased familiarity with the “other” will banish fear. For example, after the Italian election results, Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, said that the Church would have to continue its “work of education.”

But, in fact, Italians along with Germans, French, Brits, Dutch, and so on have been drenched for decades in the kind of education that Cardinal Parolin favors. A large part of the curriculum in European schools is devoted to teaching youngsters to respect different races and cultures. Indeed, many European students are given the distinct impression that other cultures are morally superior to their own.

[. . .]

Nice sentiments. But it doesn’t always work that way. For example, the more that Jews in Germany became familiar with the Nazis and their ideology, the more they properly feared them. Likewise, Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs were right to fear the communist takeover of Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, many Europeans and Americans were not fearful enough about the twin threats posed by Nazism and communism. Their naiveté and lack of prudent fear was a major factor in enabling first the Nazis and then the communists to enslave half of Europe.

The same might be said of the pope’s almost complete lack of rational, prudential fear. By encouraging people not to be fearful of a real danger, the pope only adds to the danger. For example, attacks on European Jews have risen sharply in recent years. Jews in Europe are fearful once again—not because of some irrational prejudice on their part, but because of the rise of an ideology every bit as anti-Semitic as that fostered by the Nazis.

Now read the whole thing.

I'll say it again. Xenophobia is an irrational fear of foreigners and things foreign. But not all fear is irrational. If you refuse to make these simple distinctions, then you are being willfully stupid and deserve moral condemnation. It is morally wrong to refuse to use your intellect, especially if you consider it to be God-given.  

Leftist Cultural Demolition and Islamist Subversion

The first aids and abets the second. Another great article by William Kilpatrick. 

Islamists can’t do the job of subversion all by themselves. They need help. Other people have to prepare the ground for them. Luckily for the Islamists, liberals, leftists, and secularists have been busy preparing the ground for years—in schools, in academia, in the media, in government, in the corporate world, and elsewhere.

[. . .]

The chief aim of cultural jihad is the imposition of sharia law. And one of the key features of sharia is its blasphemy laws. Where sharia rules, criticism of Islam or its prophet is a crime. It may be hard to imagine blasphemy laws being introduced to the U.S., but criticism of Islam is already a crime in much of Europe. If blasphemy laws did come to the U.S.—if it became a crime to criticize Islam—where would the Simmons librarians stand? Whose side would they take? Would they suddenly think, “This has gone too far. I never realized where all this would lead”? Not likely. If you think “Merry Christmas” is a micro-aggression against Muslims, you’ve already got one foot planted in the sharia camp.

Of course, the librarians of Simmons College are a small group. But it’s easy to imagine that much larger groups in our society would go along with a law limiting the right to question Islam. Take registered Democrats, for instance. That’s a pretty big group. A 2017 Rasmussen poll showed that “Democrats are more likely to think that Muslims are mistreated in America than to think that Christians are persecuted in the Islamic world.” Considering that 90,000 Christians died for their faith in 2016 compared to a reported 127 Muslim victims of assault in the U.S., that’s quite a disconnect from reality. But of course, it’s not reality that rules in much of modern America, it’s the narrative. For many Democrats, anti-blasphemy laws would be seen as simply another form of affirmative action—just compensation for years of hatred against Muslims.

And you are still a Democrat?  Have you been paying attention? 

As for narratives, the beauty of a narrative is that it doesn't have to be true to be a narrative. It suffices that it serves the agenda of those whose narrative it is.

Related articles

Christians Flogged For Not Being Good Muslims In Indonesia

Why Won't We Admit the Truth About Islam?

Andrew C. McCarthy

Pakistani Humanist Denied UK Asylum . . .

. . . after failing to identify Plato! Holy Guacamole! (HT: Karl White)

A Pakistani man who renounced his Muslim faith and became a humanist has had his application for asylum in the UK rejected after failing to correctly answer questions about ancient Greek philosophers.

The Home Office said Hamza bin Walayat’s failure to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers indicated his knowledge of humanism was “rudimentary at best”.

This is very strange in several ways. For one thing, how could anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the divine Plato call him a humanist? Later in the piece we get a definition that is on the right track:

In a letter in support of Walayat’s asylum application, Bob Churchill, of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, said: “For many, the broad descriptive ‘humanist’ is just a softer way of saying atheist, especially if you come from a place where identifying as atheist may be regarded as a deeply offensive statement.”

My astute readers don't need it explained to them why Plato is not a humanist by this definition.

Perhaps the Pakistani man should be given asylum. But there is a far more important, an 'existential,' issue:

If the Brits had any sense they would curtail the influx of Muslims into their homeland, at least for the time being, until the Muslim world reforms itself.  (This assumes that Brits still care about their wonderful culture which is parent to our American culture.) Far too many Muslims, not having gone through the Enlightenment, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, retain their backward fanaticism, a fanaticism and 'true belief' that makes them extremely dangerous to civilized and skeptical and sometimes decadent Brits who are prone to doubt and therefore not inclined to defend their superior culture.  As we read:

Apostates are subject to discrimination, persecution and violence in Pakistan. In March last year, a student who had stated he was a humanist on his Facebook page was murdered at his university. 

Blasphemy is punishable by death under Pakistani law. In August, 24 British politicians wrote to the Pakistani government urging it to repeal its draconian blasphemy law, which has been used against religious minorities and humanists.

Immigrants bring their culture with them. If those with antithetical values are allowed to immigrate in huge numbers they will not assimilate, even if a few of them are willing and able to assimilate.  And then the Brits will have in their midst subversive elements who believe the evil nonsense described in the quotation immediately preceding. Eventually, the invaders will take over the host country.

Now how stupid is that?  No comity without commonality. Do the U. K. and Europe have a death wish?

Think about it. You have a superior culture that allows itself to be destroyed by an inferior culture that exploits features of the superior culture that make it superior. I am thinking of such classically liberal Western values as tolerance, religious liberty (which includes the liberty to be irreligious), and free speech. 

We must not allow our virtues to vitiate us. For then our virtues become vices. The values mentioned have limits. For example, does religious toleration extend to a religion which is also, and indissolubly, a destructive political ideology antithetical to Western values?

This is a crucial question, but have you ever heard anyone raise it? Now you have.

The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Alain Finkielkraut:

Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.

I haven't read anything by Finkielkraut except the above and a few other excerpts translated and edited by Ann Sterzinger.  But that won't stop me from explaining what I take to be the  brilliant insight embedded in the above quotation.  

Laicity is French secularity, the absence of religious influence and involvement in government affairs.  It has had the salutary effect of preventing civil strife over religion.  But to appreciate why laicity is important and salutary one must understand that the roots of religion lie deep in human nature.  Religion is even less likely to "wither away" (V. I. Lenin) than the State. Leftists, however, are constitutionally  incapable of understanding that man by nature is homo religiosus and that  the roots of religion in human nature are ineradicable. 

The Radicals don't understand the radicality (deep-going rootedness) of religion. (Radix is Latin for 'root.')  In their superficial way, leftists think that religion is merely "the sigh of the oppressed creature" (Marx) and will vanish when the oppression of man by man is eliminated, which of course will never happen by human effort alone, though they fancy that they can bring it about if only they throw enough people into enough gulags.  Leftists cannot take religion seriously and they don't think anyone else really takes it seriously either, not even Muslims.  They don't believe that most Muslims really do believe in Allah and the divine origin of the Koran and the 72 black-eyed virgins and the obligation to make jihad.  They project their failure to understand religion and its grip into others.  See my Does Anyone Really Believe in the Muslim Paradise in which I report on the Sam Harris vs. Scott Atran debate.

The issue at present is not whether religion is true but whether it answers to deep human needs that cannot be met in any other way.  My point is not that leftists think that religion is false or delusional, although they do think it to be such; my point  that they don't appreciate the depth of the religious need even if it is a need that, in the nature of things, cannot be met.

Not understanding religion, leftists fail to understand how important laicity is to prevent civil strife over religion.  And so they don't properly uphold it. They cave in to the Muslims who reject it.  Why don't they understand the dire existential threat that radical Islam poses to European culture?  I suspect that it is because they think that Muslims don't really believe in all their official claptrap and what Muslims really want are mundane things such as jobs and material security and panem et circenses. They cherish the foolish leftist belief that 'deep down' we are all the same and that Muslims want the same things that decadent Europeans want.

In nuce:  leftists, who are resolutely secular, fail to uphold the secularity that they must uphold if they are to preserve their loose and libertine way of life, and they fail to uphold it  by failing to understand the dangers of religion, dangers they do not understand because they fail to take religion seriously and to appreciate the deep roots it has in human nature.  Here is an even pithier formulation:

Leftists, whose shallow heads cannot grasp religion, are in danger of losing their heads to radical jihadi.  This is cause and effect of the lapse of laicity.

Two quibbles with Finkielkraut.  

First, it is not that leftists "do not believe in religion," but that they do not believe that religion is a powerful and ineradicable force in human affairs.  You don't have to believe in religion to believe facts about it. 

Second, if I remember my Marx, the superstructure (Ueberbau), though a repository of fantastic ideas devoid of truth such as religious ideas and the ideas of bourgeois law and morality, also contains all ideology and therefore the 'liberating' Marxist ideology as well.  It too is a reflection of the Unterbau, the social base and the means of production.  So not everything  in the superstructure is "fantastic," as Finkelkraut implies above.  This Marxian notion that all is ideology leads to relativism, but that's not my problem.

Related:  Alain Finkielkraut vs. the End of Civility

The Religion of Archeological Preservation

If Islam is the religion of peace, then it is also the religion of archeological preservation.  Modus tollens or modus ponens?

Images here.

What is the Quran?

A 'racist' screed by James V. Schall. Do not click on this link!

Islam in the Public Square

William Kilpatrick:

. . . Islam is now well on its way to controlling the public square in parts of Europe. And, were it not for the election of Donald Trump and the defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Clinton machine, the U.S. would now be playing catch-up.

As has often been observed, Islam is a political religion. Some, like Dutch MP Geert Wilders, contend that it is almost totally political with only a thin and deceptive veneer of religiosity. Whatever the exact proportion of politics to religion, it’s hard to deny that the political dimension looms large in Islam. Muhammad, after all, was a warlord. He conquered all of Arabia, and within a relatively short time after his death, his followers conquered an area larger than the Roman Empire. Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, one of the most important twentieth-century Islamic theorists, wrote that “Islam requires the earth—not just a portion, but the whole planet.”

In 1949, sociologist Jules Monnerot described Communism as 20th century Islam.  To which I add:  Islam is the Communism of the 21st century. Like Communism, it is totalitarian, with tentacles reaching into every aspect of life. And like Communism, it is internationalist in its aspiration and projected reach.

Some say that Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion. That appears to be the view of Geert Wilders mentioned above. I don't go that far. Nor can it be dismissed as a Christian heresy. I view Islam as a hybrid ideology in which religion and political ideology are combined. As such, it ought not be tolerated in the West, and not just because of its vicious hostility to Christianity and other genuine religions of peace, but because it includes no provision for mosque-state separation.

Is a reformed Islam possible, one that is respectful of American values and principles? The moderate Muslim Zuhdi Jasser thinks so, but he is in a tiny minority.  Maybe someday Islam will join the civilized world. Until then a moratorium on Muslim immigration is a wise course.  

The Leftist-Islamist Axis of Evil and Divine Sovereignty

James S. writes,

Your point about the twin threats coming from the Left and from Islam reminded me of an email I received from Fr. Schall some months ago when I shared a draft of the Syllabus with him.  He made the same point, as both the Left and Islam are voluntarist systems where will is exalted over reason.  He called the parallel between them the main issue of our time.  Many of the points in the Syllabus were paraphrases of an earlier Schall essay on voluntarism. 

Fr. Schall is right. But the issue may be a bit more complicated than the good father appreciates. As I say in Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Insensitivity:

Benedict is not denigrating Islam or its prophet but setting forth a theological problem, one that arises within Christianity itself, namely the problem of the tension between the intellectualism of Augustine and Aquinas and the voluntarism of Duns Scotus. "Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?" Roughly, does the transcendence of God -- which both Christianity and Islam affirm though in different ways -- imply that God is beyond our categories, including that of rationality?

Perhaps a better way to put the question would be in terms of divine sovereignty. Is God absolutely sovereign and thus unlimited in knowledge and power? Or are there logical and non-logical limits on his knowledge and power?  For example, is a law of logic such as Non-Contradiction within God's power? In his 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Hugh McCann argues that God is not only sovereign over the natural order, but also over the moral order, the conceptual/abstract order, and the divine nature itself. That seems to give the palm to voluntarism, does it not?

I consider McCann's view to be highly problematic as I argue in my long discussion article, "Hugh McCann on the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 149-161. 

Related: Muslim Atrocities Against Christians and their Churches 

Time is Not on Europe's Side

Another warning from William Kilpatrick.  Excerpt:

The Importance of Will

Just as conversions can accelerate after a tipping point has been reached, so can emigration. But there’s also a third factor that seems to have been left out of the Pew Center’s calculations. It’s difficult to measure, but it may be the prime factor in determining which culture predominates in Europe. The crucial factor is will. If they want their culture to survive, people must be willing to defend it, and they must be willing to bring children into the world who will carry on the culture.

You can call it “will,” or “cultural confidence,” or “fighting spirit,” but whatever you call it, Europeans seem to be losing it. The problem begins in school. As Melanie Phillips noted eleven years ago in Londonistan:

The British education system simply ceased transmitting either the values or the story of the nation to successive generations, delivering instead the message that truth was an illusion and that the nation and its values were whatever anyone wanted them to be.

It's probably too late for Europe and the UK.  But we still have a little  time, and with Trump in the saddle, a fighting chance.  Hillary, you will recall, refused even to name the threat.

If Islam is a Religion of Peace . . .

. . . why is it a provocation to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel? Here is how another penetrating article by William Kilpatrick ends:

So on the one hand, Muslim believers are ready to commit mayhem over an academic talk or the moving of an embassy, and on the other hand, Christians remain peaceful even though their brethren are being slaughtered and burned alive. How much longer, one wonders, will Church leaders collaborate in the false assertion that Islam and Christianity are equally peaceful faiths?

Religious and secular leaders are caught in a flagrant contradiction. They tell us that Islam is a religion of peace and justice, yet they warn us not to provoke its followers in any way. Don’t recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Don’t draw cartoons that might offend Muslims. Don’t wear religious symbols that might provoke them. Cover your women and your statutes. Don’t ring church bells in the vicinity of Muslims. Don’t criticize them for persecuting Christians because, as Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University told Pope Francis, such criticism is a “red line” that must not be crossed.

“Just stay quiet and you’ll be okay.” That’s what Mohamed Atta told the passengers on American Airlines flight 11 shortly before it flew into the World Trade Center. It wasn’t good advice then. And it’s not good advice now. As Islam expands its global reach, it’s becoming increasingly evident that the “don’t-do-anything-to-provoke-them” policy isn’t working, and never will. 

Why Don't Catholics Fight Back?

William Kilpatrick:

The chief reason is that Catholics are receiving little guidance about Islam from their leaders. And what little information they receive is misleading. The hierarchy is still sticking with the message that Islam is a religion of peace which has recently been given a bad name by a tiny handful of terrorists who misunderstand the beneficent nature of their faith.

Meanwhile, while Catholic leaders have been pedaling this rosy picture of Islam, 90,000 Christians were murdered for their faith in 2016. Between 2005 and 2015, 900,000 Christians were martyred. In most cases the executioners were Muslims.

Let those numbers sink in. Donald J. Trump would make a better pope than  Bergoglio the Benighted. 

Related articles

Islam and the Decalogue

Islam and the Decalogue

Earlier today I wrote that ". . . the Decalogue is common to the three Abrahamic religions." Then I received a note from Claude Boisson that referred me to Howard Kainz, Islam and the Decalogue:

Just as Islam teaches the reverse of the Golden Rule, it teaches the reverse of the last seven of the Ten Commandments, which have to do with morality . . . .

If Kainz is right, and he may well be for all I know, the argument I alluded to is not affected. My point was simply that the public posting of the Ten Commandments, which are found in the Old Testament, and are common to both Judaism and Christianity, and are therefore not specific to Christianity, cannot be reasonably taken to aid and abet the establishment, let alone establish, Christianity as the state religion of the United States in violation of that clause of the First Amendment that reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ."

I am sorry to have to say something so painfully obvious. But liberals, being the destructive knuckleheads they are, need to be hit over the head on a regular basis with simple truths that even they should be able to understand.  

Islam: A Giant Step Backward for Humanity

So far, everything I've read by William Kilpatrick on this depressing topic has been good.

The Gaza Underground

Here

Why Are Leftists So Tolerant of Radical Islam?

William Kilpatrick uncorked a powerful insight in a must-read piece to which I linked yesterday:

Because so many Americans still live mentally in a time when intolerance was considered the greatest evil, they have difficulty understanding that an indiscriminate tolerance can father just as many sins.

That is part of the explanation.

Related: Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam

Islam: The Religion of Submission

What follows are excerpts from a powerful and penetrating essay by William Kilpatrick who deserves an award for his insight and courage. Please read the entire piece.  Emphases added.

Submission. That’s what the word “Islam” means. Muslims must submit to Allah, and the rest of the world must eventually submit to Islam. Submission does not necessarily require conversion, but it does require that one acknowledge the superiority of Islam, pay the jizya tax, and, in general, keep one’s head down.

Europe is currently in the process of submitting to Islam, and America also seems destined to eventually submit. If you have young children or grandchildren, it’s likely that they will have to adapt at some point to living in a Muslim-dominated society. It won’t necessarily be a Muslim-majority society because, as history testifies, Muslims don’t need a majority in order to successfully take control of non-Muslim societies.

[. . .]

A culture war can only be fought by cultural institutions—schools, churches, political and civic organizations, and so on. As things stand, however, none of our cultural institutions have shown much evidence that they are equipped to fight a culture war with cultural jihadists. The chief reason this is so is that most of these institutions are still fighting the last culture war—the civil rights struggle and the concomitant war against intolerance, racism, and bigotry. This “old-war” mentality makes it nearly impossible for our cultural and civic leaders to resist Islamization. Because so many Americans still live mentally in a time when intolerance was considered the greatest evil, they have difficulty understanding that an indiscriminate tolerance can father just as many sins.

One way of grasping the vulnerability of our society to Islamization is to ask “Who’s going to stop it?” Where, exactly, are the forces of resistance?

The university? American universities are bastions of political correctness and mandatory tolerance. Most of them are already quite sympathetic to the Islamic point of view. A combination of intimidation (from both Muslim and leftist groups), Saudi money, and multicultural ideology has ensured that when push comes to shove, the universities will line up with the Islamist camp. If present trends continue, American universities will fold to Islam just as German universities once folded to the Nazis.

The media? The media is still trying to find a motive for the 9-11 attack. That’s because it still won’t make the connection between Islamic terror and Islamic belief. In general, media people see it as their duty to put the best possible face on all things Islamic. Scratch the media as a source of resistance.

The Church? As with college administrators, many Church leaders are deeply mired in multicultural ideology. They are constantly on the lookout for offenses against the “other.” Accordingly, American bishops seem to think that “Islamophobia” poses a grave threat to society. Many of them seem more concerned about anti-Muslim bigotry than about the victims of Islamic terror. To prove that they themselves are not “Islamophobes,” the USCCB operates one of the largest programs for resettling refugees from Muslim countries into the U.S. Besides facilitating Muslim migration, American, as well as European bishops, have facilitated the migration of Islamic beliefs. On numerous occasions, prominent clergy have pronounced these beliefs to be benign and peaceful, and thus deserving of a warm welcome. In general, Church leaders see themselves as friends and protectors of Islam. Given their current mindset, the bishops are unlikely to recognize an Islamic cultural putsch, let alone resist it.

Big Business? Corporations also qualify as cultural institutions. Much of our understanding of what is culturally acceptable and unacceptable is picked up in the workplace. This can be a good thing and often was in the past. Unfortunately, many corporations now reflect and magnify some of the worst cultural trends: arbitrary speech codes, draconian diversity policies, transgenderism, and the like. Currently, several large corporations are using their leverage to suppress speech that is critical of Islam. Giant companies such as PayPal, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are actively trying to shut down websites and individuals that provide accurate information about Islamic cultural jihad. The media monopolies are playing the role that the Ministry of Truth played in Orwell’s 1984. All the really useful information about Islam that has been painfully accumulated in recent years is being quietly dropped down the memory hole.

Why are the counter-jihad sites being shut down? Because they supposedly are “intolerant” and “racist.” Here we come back to the “old-war” mentality. The corporations, the schools, the churches, and the media are ready to do battle with racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and transgenderphobes, but they lack the mindset that would allow them to resist the long march through the institutions being conducted by determined and skillful cultural jihadists. In short, their energies are focused on evils that have long been in retreat or on non-existent evils (transgenderphobia, etc.). Meanwhile, the much larger threat posed by Islam draws ever closer.

The people who might be expected to fight this new culture war are scarcely aware of its existence. They are too busy championing the cause of newly invented “civil rights.” Fifty years ago they would have been on the cutting edge, now they are on the edge of irrelevancy.

Nowadays, the cutting edge is elsewhere. And when the “cutting-edge” cultural and business elites meet the cutting-edge of Islamization, they will almost inevitably submit to it. That is what they have already begun to do. And as the culture war with Islam heats up, the submission process will only accelerate.

"Cutting edge" is right. It's a good bet that the leftist enablers of Islam will be the first of the infidels to have their throats cut. They will learn the hard way, too late.

The Most Radical Form of Islam: Neo-Bolshevik Post-Marxist Islamo-Leftism

Pascal Bruckner:

And here is where the strangest factor in the whole Islamophobia controversy emerges: the enlistment of a part of the American and European Left in the defense of the most radical form of Islam—what one might call the neo-Bolshevik bigotry of the lost believers of Marxism. Having lost everything—the working class, the Third World—the Left clings to this illusion: Islam, rebaptized as the religion of the poor, becomes the last utopia, replacing those of Communism and decolonization for disenchanted militants. The Muslim takes the place of the proletarian.

The baton seems to have been passed at about the time of the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, with the resulting rise to power of Islamist revolutionaries, which was the occasion for enthusiastic commentary by Michel Foucault, among others on the left. God’s return on history’s stage had finally rendered Marxist and anticolonialist programs obsolete. The faith moved the masses better than the socialist hope. Now, it was the believer in the Koran who embodied the global hope for justice, who refused to conform to the order of things, who transcended borders and created a new international order, under the aegis of the Prophet: a green Comintern. Too bad for feminism, women’s equality, salvific doubt, the critical spirit; in short, too bad for everything traditionally associated with a progressive position.

This political attitude is manifest in progressives’ scrupulous idolatry of Muslim practices and rites, especially the Islamic veil: “modest fashion” is praised to the skies, so much so that, for certain leftist commentators, an unveiled Muslim woman who claims this right can only be a traitor, a turncoat, a woman for sale. The irony of this neocolonial solicitude for bearded men and veiled women—and for everything that suggests an oriental bazaar—is that Morocco itself, whose king is the “Commander of the Faithful,” recently forbade the wearing, sale, and manufacture of the burka in his country. Shall we call the Cherifian monarchy “Islamophobic”? Shall we be more royalist than the king?

It’s worth considering this Islamo-leftism more closely, this hope nourished by a revolutionary fringe that Islam might spearhead a new uprising, a “holy war” against global capitalism, exactly as in Baku in 1920, when Bolshevik leaders, including Zinoviev, published a joint appeal with the pan-Islamists to unleash jihad against Western imperialism. It was an English Trotskyite, Chris Harman, leader of the Socialist Workers Party, who, in 1994, provided a theory for this alliance between militant revolutionaries and radical Muslim associations, arguing for their unity, in certain circumstances, against the common enemy of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they transferred their hopes to the Islamists. (Emphasis added.)

Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

A video by Aayan Hirsi Ali. 5:09. Can you spare five minutes to improve your thinking on this topic?

Is Islam a religion of peace? Is it compatible with Western liberalism? Or does Islam need a reformation, just as Christianity had the Protestant Reformation? Somali-born author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains.

Iconoclasm: Another Similarity Between Muslims and Leftists

Muslims are well-known for their iconoclasm, hostility to the arts, and destruction of cultural artifacts. Leftists are like unto Muslims in this regard too. There is also the iconoclasm of the Left. For now, a couple of links to introduce the topic.

Leftist Iconoclasm Must Stop

Stomping on Jesus: The Iconoclasm of the Left

The trouble with iconoclasm is that all parties can play the game. 

Mass-murdering communist regimes are responsible for some 94 million deaths in the 20th century. Why not then destroy all the statues and monuments that honor the likes of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Fidel Castro and all others who either laid the foundations for or carried out mass murder?  

You understand, of course, that I am not advocating this.  For one thing, the erasure of history would make it rather more difficult to learn from it. For another thing, there would be no end to it.  Why not destroy the Colosseum in Rome? You know what went on there.

Or how about St. Robert Bellarmine, S. J. ?  Should paintings and statues of him be destroyed?  He had a hand in the burning at the stake of the philosopher Giordano Bruno! According to Wikipedia:

Bellarmine was made rector of the Roman College in 1592, examiner of bishops in 1598, and cardinal in 1599. Immediately after his appointment as Cardinal, Pope Clement made him a Cardinal Inquisitor, in which capacity he served as one of the judges at the trial of Giordano Bruno, and concurred in the decision which condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake as a heretic.^[5]

Better known is the fact that Bellarmine is the man who hauled the great Galileo before the Inquisition. 

Calling all philosophers and scientists! To your sledge hammers and blow torches!

And then there are the paintings, statues, etc. of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarist and adulterer.

There is no need to multiply examples. You should be getting the point along about now.

The Statue of Lenin is a 16-foot (4.9 m) bronze sculpture of Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin located in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Initially installed in Czechoslovakia in 1988, the sculpture was removed after the Velvet Revolution and brought to the United States in the 1990s.