Maverick Philosopher

Why the Collapse of Philosophical Studies in the Islamic World?

Leo Strauss sketches an answer in his "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 221-222, bolding added:

For the Jew and the Moslem, religion is primarily not, as it is for the Christian, a faith formulated in dogmas, but a law, a code of divine origin. Accordingly, the religious science, the sacra doctrina, is not dogmatic theology, theologia revelata, but the science of the law, halaka or fiqh. The science of the law, thus understood has much less in common with philosophy than has dogmatic theology. Hence the status of philosophy is, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in the Islamic-Jewish world than it is in the Christian world. No one could become a competent Christian theologian without having studied at least a substantial part of philosophy; philosophy was an integral part of the officially authorized and even required training. On the other hand, one could become an absolutely competent halakist or faqih without having the slightest knowledge of  philosophy. This fundamental difference doubtless explains the possibility of the later complete collapse of philosophical studies in the Islamic world, a collapse which has no parallel in the West in spite of Luther.

I like the "in spite of Luther."  What is Strauss getting at? I turn to Heiko A. Oberman' s magisterial Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Yale UP, 1989, tr. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart). On p. 160, Oberman speaks of the new Wittenberg theology that Luther formulated "against the whole of scholasticism": "The whole of Aristotle is to theology as shadow is to light."

Why do I like the "in spite of Luther?" Because I am averse to Protestantism for three solid reasons: it is anti-monastic, anti-mystical, and anti-philosophical (anti-rational).  No doubt the RCC is even more corrupt now under Bergoglio the Termite than it was in Luther's day; so if this maverick decides he needs a church, he will have to make the journey to the (near) East.  Go east old man! (I plan to report later on Vladimir Lossky's The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.)  But here's a bit more Oberman to nail down my point about Protestantism (or at least Lutheranism's ) being anti-philosophical:

The knowledge that there was an infinite, qualitative distance between Heaven and earth became an established principle for Luther as early as 1509: all human thought, as noble, effective, and indispensable as it might be to solve problems in the world, does not suffice to fathom salvation because it cannot cannot reach Heaven.  Questions of faith must be resolved through the Word of God or not at all. The temptation -- or compulsion -- to sanctify the words of an and believe in them is satanic. When God is silent, man should not speak; and what God has put asunder, namely Heaven and earth, man should not join together.

Thus not even Augustine, especially Augustine the neo-Platonist, could become the new, infallible authority, because that would merely have been replacing one philosophy with another, substituting Plato for Aristotle. [. . .]

The alternative is clear: whatever transcends the perception of empirical reality is either based on God's Word or is pure fantasy. As a nominalist Luther began making a conscious distinction between knbowledge of tge world and faith in God . . . . (pp. 160-161, emphasis added)

A quick question: given sola scriptura, where in the Scriptures does God deliver his verdict on the  problem of universals and come down on the side of nominalism? And if Holy Writ is silent on the famous problem, then it is "pure fantasy" and Luther has no justification for his nominalism. 

And what about sola scriptura itself? Where in the Bible is the doctrine enunciated?

Romanists 1; Lutherans 0. And this despite the undeniable corruption of the RCC in those days that triggered Luther's protest.

Do You Pass the Israel Test?

Under five minutes. I have long believed that a major cause of Jew hatred is envy.

The Intifada Comes to America

Well, what did you expect?

Intifada refers specifically to two separate uprisings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank over the past four decades, but more broadly, it pertains to the continued resistance of the Palestinians to the existence of Israel. When they shout “Death to Israel,” they mean it. It should be a top priority of Congress now to determine whether they mean it when they shout “Death to America.”

The rise of pro-Palestinian hatred in the United States should not be a surprising development to anyone. Even before President Biden opened the southern border to millions of unvetted “newcomers,” as the global elites like to call the invaders, there has been a reckless U.S. policy going back two decades to resettle Muslim refugees from Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan in the U.S. heartland. And because immigration policy no longer treats assimilation as a worthwhile goal, many of those refugees are loyal to their homeland and their religion much more than to the nation that offered them safety and security.

I suppose that is an inevitable result of the globalist agenda of border dissolution and the merging of disparate populations for the purpose of sharing wealth and assuaging billionaires’ guilt.

But it is only inevitable if the rest of us tolerate it.

Biden Chases 'Death to America' Vote

David Harsanyi:

Biden, it should be noted, is a vacuous political zombie who has never met a position he hasn’t dropped for a vote. Today, he is surrounded by Obama-era advisers and Hamas sympathizers . . . who have long wanted the U.S. to be aligned with mullahs of Iran, as a counterbalance to colonialist Western capitalists of Israel. And now that Democrats like Chuck Schumer have sold out the Jews to the vultures for a few votes in Dearborn, nothing holds back progressive Democrats from normalizing the antisemitism that already infects the hard left.  

That's the truth. Just so you know who you are supporting if you support Biden. You may not like Trump, but if it comes down to Trump versus Biden, you must support the former out of self-interest if for no other reason.

Richard Dawkins on Christianity and Islam

Here (HT: Catacomb Joe):

Famed atheist and self-styled intellectual Richard Dawkins shared in a recent interview that he was “horrified” to find that Oxford Street in London had lit up its public signs and displays to celebrate the Muslim fasting period called Ramadan, just days before Easter Sunday. “I have to choose my words carefully: If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time,” Dawkins declared, expressing concern over the thousands of Muslim mosques being constructed across the U.K. He added, “It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”

I hope to say more about this later. Now I have to prepare for a meeting with Brian the Calvinist.  First lunch and casual conversation about the events of the day and the latest outrages of the depredatory Left, then intense philosophical conversation about Jesus and the Powers, a stimulating albeit flawed book, and finally  two or so hours of battling over the 64 squares. 

That's the kind of socializing I like. Otherwise, solitude rules. 

Taqiyya

Gaza's Health Ministry said the Palestinian death toll from the war has climbed to 30,320. The ministry doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants in its figures, but says women and children make up around two-thirds of those killed.

That many? Could be. But the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya gives one a reason to be skeptical.

I have no doubt, however, that many more Gazans have died than Israelis. But whose fault is that? 'Gazan' is a more accurate moniker than 'Palestinian,' don't you agree?

Here is a related article by Dennis Prager.

Are Most Muslims Terrorists?

And what is a terrorist?

Top o' the Stack. Long but good. I go out on some limbs. Saw 'em off if you can. 

Jewish Disproportionality!

Not even the Hamas sexual atrocities recounted on the basis of a NYT report by Alex Berenson justify Jewish disproportionality:

On Thursday, The New York Times recounted in awful detail the sexual atrocities the men of Gaza committed during Hamas’s October 7 raid into Israel.

I know Jeffrey Gettleman, who had the piece’s lead byline. He is a serious reporter who served with distinction for many years in Africa. He doesn’t exaggerate.

Which is good, because the Times’s descriptions of these crimes nearly beggar belief. They go beyond rape, or gang rape, or even the execution of prisoners. As described by witnesses who survived, and confirmed by video and forensic evidence, Hamas’s attackers turned murder and torture into can-you-top-this sport:

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

—

Every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

Moral equivalence, anyone?

The Psychology of the Pollyanna and the Political Ponerology of Leftism

We all know pollyannas. They are more often women than men and the charm of these lovable ladies is in no small measure due to their openness to the positive in people and things and their seeming incapacity to discern the negative and evil. A most extreme example has come to my attention, one

. . . Natali Yohanan, “a 38-year-old mother of two, who never locked the doors of her house in Nir Oz, a kibbutz near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. There wasn’t even a key.” And then: “On Oct. 7, a Gazan woman walked through Yohanan’s unlocked front door and made herself at home for hours, eating, singing, and watching Netflix. Sometimes, the woman served drinks to armed terrorists who stopped by for a break from the massacre they were conducting outside.” Ms. Yohanan speaks of the impact of 10/7 on her in the 10-minute video below.

Watch the video and then ask yourself the question that I ask myself: how could an adult Israeli be so naïve, so trusting, so lacking in insight into human nature? The woman is not stupid; how then explain this blind spot? At one point Yohanan, a teacher, says that all children are good. Plainly false! Has this teacher never been on a schoolyard? Children can be vicious in a way that no animal can be vicious.  That is why they need to be socialized and, yes, indoctrinated, but in correct and ameliorative doctrines. (That 'indoctrination' is a dirty word is another piece of stupidity that you are well-advised in dropping.)

Yohanan is an Israeli. Surely she knows something about how her state came to be and why it came to be. Her kibbutz is right next to the Gaza Strip. Did she know nothing of Hamas and their genocidal intentions? They make plain their antisemitism and their anti-Zionism in their charter.  Does she know nothing about Islam? (See this excellent article by Raymond Ibrahim.) 

As I say elsewhere, homo homini lupus does not capture the depth of human depravity, and is an insult to the wolves to boot. Man is not a wolf to man; man is a demon to man. 

I am touching upon one of the roots, perhaps the deepest, of the delusional Left, namely the insane notion that everyone, deep down inside, is basically good. Not only is this conceit a characteristically leftist bit of delusionality, it also serves to distinguish conservative from leftist. No conservative accepts that crazy conceit.

And let's not forget that those who accept the crazy conceit that people are basically good refute their own false theory by being the most murderous of all. In the 20th century alone communist governments have murdered some 85-100 million people according to The Black Book of Communism.

Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

This is a redacted repost from 21 June 2015. In the subsequent eight years, we in the West are 'infinitely' worse off than before.  Time to re-visit the topic and re-assess. Mournful was the tocsin Malcolm Pollack sounded in 2015; what must its sound be today?

.............................

Malcolm laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation. 

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or, to invoke an even more appropriate analogy from physics, jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up.  And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the  older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack.  So if you would-be owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties.  As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it.  Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list, and about the items that must now be added to the 2015 list such as the erasure of our national borders, the destruction of our memorial statuary, the institution of Sino-styled surveillance, 'lawfare,' the trashing of the Constitution and the rule of law, et cetera ad nauseam.

But is the Enlightenment the problem?  Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the 18th century Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed.  Now science brings enlightenment and the  enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia.  Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought.  Mythos gave way to logos. (Ernst Cassirer is well-worth reading on this.)  Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down.  The cosmogonic myths were called into question.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Doubt is the motor of scientia.  Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden.  Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious.  But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and traditional narratives  that had been passed on from time immemorial, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense, and tribal tales of who smote whom and when, where and why.  In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment.  Doubt, its driver, is therefore good.

Skepsis can be but need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus.  But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt.  If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle.  I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise."  (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.)  I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment  involved a commitment to Reason and its power Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot. There can be no doubt that the human lot has been immeasurably improved by the scientific advances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, advances made possible in large part by a deep questioning of traditional teachings (Aristotle in the main) and traditional authorities (the Roman church, for example). 

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical.  (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses and interprets their deliverances by rational canons.) Doubt is good.  But good things can be taken too far.  So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable.  Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the evidence or certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right.  But it one-sided to accentuate the negative while ignoring the positive.   The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically, and put it to the test empirically as Galileo did with various Aristotelian dogmas.  Doubt is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following:  Is it real as people say?  Is it truly valuable?  Is it true?  Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense?  Is the explanation truly explanatory?  Is a certain hypothesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)?  Is there evidence for it?  Does the earth really rest on a turtle?  Is it turtles all the way down?  Does this doctrine function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor?  Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving power and influence by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing?  Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power.  But is also Janus-faced, and bears a diabolical aspect.  Lucifer the light-bearer became drunk on his own power and was blinded by his own light. He would not obey.  He would not recognize any authority other than his own will.  His mind was not one for minding any antecedent reality.  He would not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself.  He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another.  In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates."  

I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) -- not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.)  Zwei --> zwo --> two --> duplicity.  Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity. 

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition.  How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests? 

I don't know.  I do know that Islam is not the answer.  And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment. (This is why Sharia-supporting Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate to the West.) And the same goes for keeping in check communism, wokery, and theocracy. 

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas.  What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry.  It needs skepticism.  It needs philosophy.  What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.  Athens needs Jerusalem as Jerusalem needs Athens.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world.  This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess.  Kant's "Copernican revolution" came before conceptual relativism, but Kant was  not a conceptual relativist.  One has to beware of the history-of-ideas post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Enlightenment came before our current malaise and cultural sickness-unto-death, but it will take a lot of arguing to make a plausible case that the former 'paved the way' for the latter, let alone made the latter inevitable a term Malcolm uses above. 

This is a redacted repost from 21 June 2015. In the subsequent eight years, we in the West are 'infinitely' worse off than before.  Time to re-visit the topic and re-assess. Mournful was the tocsin Malcolm Pollack sounded in 2015; what must its sound be today?

.............................

Malcolm laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation. 

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or, to invoke an even more appropriate analogy from physics, jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up.  And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the  older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack.  So if you would-be owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties.  As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it.  Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list, and about the items that must now be added to the 2015 list such as the erasure of our national borders, the destruction of our memorial statuary, the institution of Sino-styled surveillance, 'lawfare,' the trashing of the Constitution and the rule of law, et cetera ad nauseam.

But is the Enlightenment the problem?  Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the 18th century Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed.  Now science brings enlightenment and the  enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia.  Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought.  Mythos gave way to logos. (Ernst Cassirer is well-worth reading on this.)  Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down.  The cosmogonic myths were called into question.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Doubt is the motor of scientia.  Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden.  Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious.  But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and traditional narratives  that had been passed on from time immemorial, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense, and tribal tales of who smote whom and when, where and why.  In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment.  Doubt, its driver, is therefore good.

Skepsis can be but need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus.  But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt.  If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle.  I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise."  (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.)  I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment  involved a commitment to Reason and its power Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot. There can be no doubt that the human lot has been immeasurably improved by the scientific advances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, advances made possible in large part by a deep questioning of traditional teachings (Aristotle in the main) and traditional authorities (the Roman church, for example). 

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical.  (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses and interprets their deliverances by rational canons.) Doubt is good.  But good things can be taken too far.  So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable.  Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the evidence or certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right.  But it one-sided to accentuate the negative while ignoring the positive.   The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically, and put it to the test empirically as Galileo did with various Aristotelian dogmas.  Doubt is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following:  Is it real as people say?  Is it truly valuable?  Is it true?  Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense?  Is the explanation truly explanatory?  Is a certain hypothesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)?  Is there evidence for it?  Does the earth really rest on a turtle?  Is it turtles all the way down?  Does this doctrine function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor?  Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving power and influence by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing?  Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power.  But is also Janus-faced, and bears a diabolical aspect.  Lucifer the light-bearer became drunk on his own power and was blinded by his own light. He would not obey.  He would not recognize any authority other than his own will.  His mind was not one for minding any antecedent reality.  He would not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself.  He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another.  In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates."  

I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) -- not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.)  Zwei --> zwo --> two --> duplicity.  Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity. 

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition.  How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests? 

I don't know.  I do know that Islam is not the answer.  And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment. (This is why Sharia-supporting Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate to the West.) And the same goes for keeping in check communism, wokery, and theocracy. 

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas.  What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry.  It needs skepticism.  It needs philosophy.  What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.  Athens needs Jerusalem as Jerusalem needs Athens.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world.  This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess.  Kant's "Copernican revolution" came before conceptual relativism, but Kant was  not a conceptual relativist.  One has to beware of the history-of-ideas post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Enlightenment came before our current malaise and cultural sickness-unto-death, but it will take a lot of arguing to make a plausible case that the former 'paved the way' for the latter, let alone made the latter inevitable a term Malcolm uses above. 

This is a redacted repost from 21 June 2015. In the subsequent eight years, we in the West are 'infinitely' worse off than before.  Time to re-visit the topic and re-assess. Mournful was the tocsin Malcolm Pollack sounded in 2015; what must its sound be today?

.............................

Malcolm laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation. 

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or, to invoke an even more appropriate analogy from physics, jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up.  And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the  older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack.  So if you would-be owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties.  As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it.  Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list, and about the items that must now be added to the 2015 list such as the erasure of our national borders, the destruction of our memorial statuary, the institution of Sino-styled surveillance, 'lawfare,' the trashing of the Constitution and the rule of law, et cetera ad nauseam.

But is the Enlightenment the problem?  Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the 18th century Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed.  Now science brings enlightenment and the  enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia.  Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought.  Mythos gave way to logos. (Ernst Cassirer is well-worth reading on this.)  Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down.  The cosmogonic myths were called into question.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Doubt is the motor of scientia.  Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden.  Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious.  But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and traditional narratives  that had been passed on from time immemorial, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense, and tribal tales of who smote whom and when, where and why.  In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment.  Doubt, its driver, is therefore good.

Skepsis can be but need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus.  But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt.  If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle.  I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise."  (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.)  I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment  involved a commitment to Reason and its power Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot. There can be no doubt that the human lot has been immeasurably improved by the scientific advances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, advances made possible in large part by a deep questioning of traditional teachings (Aristotle in the main) and traditional authorities (the Roman church, for example). 

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical.  (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses and interprets their deliverances by rational canons.) Doubt is good.  But good things can be taken too far.  So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable.  Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the evidence or certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right.  But it one-sided to accentuate the negative while ignoring the positive.   The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically, and put it to the test empirically as Galileo did with various Aristotelian dogmas.  Doubt is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following:  Is it real as people say?  Is it truly valuable?  Is it true?  Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense?  Is the explanation truly explanatory?  Is a certain hypothesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)?  Is there evidence for it?  Does the earth really rest on a turtle?  Is it turtles all the way down?  Does this doctrine function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor?  Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving power and influence by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing?  Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power.  But is also Janus-faced, and bears a diabolical aspect.  Lucifer the light-bearer became drunk on his own power and was blinded by his own light. He would not obey.  He would not recognize any authority other than his own will.  His mind was not one for minding any antecedent reality.  He would not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself.  He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another.  In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates."  

I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) -- not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.)  Zwei --> zwo --> two --> duplicity.  Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity. 

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition.  How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests? 

I don't know.  I do know that Islam is not the answer.  And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment. (This is why Sharia-supporting Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate to the West.) And the same goes for keeping in check communism, wokery, and theocracy. 

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas.  What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry.  It needs skepticism.  It needs philosophy.  What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.  Athens needs Jerusalem as Jerusalem needs Athens.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world.  This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess.  Kant's "Copernican revolution" came before conceptual relativism, but Kant was  not a conceptual relativist.  One has to beware of the history-of-ideas post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Enlightenment came before our current malaise and cultural sickness-unto-death, but it will take a lot of arguing to make a plausible case that the former 'paved the way' for the latter, let alone made the latter inevitable a term Malcolm uses above. 

Political Polarization: the Radical Cure

Political polarization is deep and wide. We are 'siloed' into our positions and things threaten to go 'thermonuclear.'  The usual cures cannot be dismissed out of hand, but are mostly blather served up by squishy, bien-pensant 'liberals' for their own insipid and clueless ilk. No doubt we should listen to others respectfully, but how many of our political opponents are worth listening to or are worthy of respect? No doubt we should seek common ground. But is they any left to be found?

Go ahead, take a civility pledge, but civility is only for the civil, and how many of our political enemies are civil? Civility is like toleration: it is a good thing but it has limits.

And so it falls to me to point out a cure for polarization that is never mentioned: eliminate one of the poles. The Hamas-Jew polarization, for example, is solved by eliminating Hamas. For here there is and can be no common ground, no mutual respect, no 'conversation' or 'negotiations.' Palliation is out of the question; amputation is the answer. Examples are easily multiplied. The side that is in the right should destroy the side that isn't.  

You say that war is never the answer? It depends on the question. Sometimes you have to give war a chance. 

Radical Islam's Threat to the Left

Substack latest.

Why don't leftists — who obviously do not share the characteristic values and beliefs of Islamists — grant what is spectacularly obvious to everyone else, namely, that radical Islam poses a grave threat to what we in the West cherish as civilization, which includes commitments to free speech, open inquiry, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom to reject religion, universal suffrage, the emancipation of women, opposition to cruel and unusual penal practices, and so on?   In particular, why don't leftists recognize the grave threat radical Islam poses to them?  Why do leftists either deny the threat or downplay its gravity? Given their atheism and pronounced libertine ‘wobble,’ they would be among the first to lose their heads under Islamic law (Sharia).

Here is a quickly-composed  list of twelve related reasons based on my own thinking and reading and on discussions with friends. 

Christianity Civilizes

Does Islam? To the same extent?

Top o' the Stack.

Jews, Muslims, Science and Technology

Which group has contributed more to science and technology? Jews or Muslims?  And why?

Question prompted by this:

Today, Jewish and Israeli MIT students were physically prevented from attending class by a hostile group of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel MIT students that call themselves the CAA [Coalition Against Apartheid, apparently].

Up on the Roof

Not "The Drifters" version.

Given the pronounced 'libertine wobble' of leftists, it is passing strange that they would support Islamists who are anti-libertine and anti-liberal in excelsis.  The loons of the Left appear to have lost their minds so much so  that they care not whether they lose their heads.  

Tony Flood, who sent me the graphic, remarks, "This is the outward expression of a fifth column movement that doesn't care about any cognitive dissonance we detect. On a brighter note, take a gander at page one of this week's The Militant!"

Socialists make for strange bedfellows, but we need a broad coalition to defeat the forces of anti-civilization. Exciting times up ahead, my friends. I advise investing in 'precious metals,' in a broad sense of the term to include Pb and its delivery systems.

And You Call for a Cease-Fire?

Take a look at the massacre map. Then read this:

The world is yet again staring at the near inevitability of another global conflagration.   The flashpoint is in the Middle East and the Hitler of our time: the Mullahs of Iran.   The West, led by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have chosen to follow in the footsteps of the self-absorbed European leaders of the 1930’s in dealing with Iran and their terrorist legions of Hamas, Hezb’allah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Ansar Allah (Houthis) among others.

The Obama/Biden policy in dealing with Iran has been to facilitate Iran in becoming a dominant player in the region in the naïve belief that if the West, and in particular the United States, treats the Mullahs of Iran as equals, they will evolve into non-belligerent leaders who can be trusted.  Even if that means the acquisition of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles and sacrificing America’s only resolute ally in the region, Israel.

But is the disastrous Obama-Biden policy naïve, or is it something worse: a deliberate attempt to "fundamentally transform" (in Obama's words), and thus destroy the USA?  For example, why are no steps being taken by the Biden administration to control the southern (and northern) borders when it is a known fact that jihadis are entering the homeland?

Before 7 October it was clear enough that the purpose of the open border policy was to change the demographics of the USA in such a way as to make possible the permanent ascendancy of the Democrat Party. But now it can be seen that more nefarious motives were and are at work: to increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks within the homeland.  And what would they accomplish? They would give the current regime the excuse it needs for an even more draconian assault on the middle class and traditional American liberties.

UPDATE 1 (11/1)

Senator Hawley in a Congressional hearing hammers Alejandro Mayorkas who bears the Orwellian appellation "Director of Homeland Security." Is there anyone in the Biden administration more emblematic of the abysmal mendacity of said administration? 

These are very dangerous times. You'd best prepare for the immediate here and the possibly soon-to-arrive hereafter.

UPDATE 2 (11/1)

Pope Francis has called for a cease-fire:

"Ceasefire," he said, mentioning a recent television appeal by Father Ibrahim Faltas, one of the Vatican's representatives in the Holy Land.

He then added in his own words: "We say 'ceasefire, ceasefire'. Brothers and sisters, stop! War is always a defeat, always".

What he means, presumably, is that war is always a defeat for humanity. Is Bergoglio ignorant of recent European history and in particular the Second World War? If the Allies had not defeated the Axis powers, humanity (in the normative sense) and the high civilization of the Judeo-Christian type that the good pope supposedly represents, would have ceased to exist.

 

John Lennon famously if foolishly sang, "Give peace a chance." What he and Bergoglio the Benighted fail to understand is that sometimes we have to give war a chance.

 

Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. The price of peace is a credible deterrent. Weakness and appeasement invite attack. Joe Biden is weak on multiple fronts; no surprise then that the upshot is war on multiple fronts.  

 

Conciliation is obviously a very high value. But how conciliate those who are religiously committed to your extermination? How conciliate those who would rather die than permit you to live?

 

 

 

 

'Islamophobia' and 'Hoplophobia'

A very polite Substack chiding of the stupid and often vicious use of these terms. My entry shows how to make a point rationally and stylishly without any use of invective and only the slightest trace of sarcasm. You have to cultivate the ability to write in a civil and respectful way. But you must also know how to pummel and deride scum like the present POTUS and his sorry entourage who, in their willful self-enstupidation, mindlessly repeat phrases they have heard with nary a concern for what they mean or ought to mean.

Different strokes for different folks. Sweet reason for some; the hard fist of unreason for others. The 'hard fist' comes in two flavors, one verbal, the other meta-verbal. 

The State of Things When the 'Leader' of the 'Free World' is a Puppet

I asked Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, whether Donald Trump's being in office would have made any difference to the present geopolitical mess, and this is what he wrote:

As for the present miserable state of the world, I think that had Trump remained in office neither the war in the Ukraine nor the war in the Middle East would have occurred, or if the former occurred, it would have been resolved on the basis of a territorial compromise concerning the Crimea and robust autonomy for the eastern, Russian majority oblasts.  Leaving aside the origins of the conflict (US interference in the internal politics of the Ukraine and the expansion of NATO eastward), Trump would have put Zelensky and company on tight rein. As for Israel, can we doubt that the appeasement of the Obama-Biden regime towards Iran encouraged the reemergence of terrorism? Now, the plan is to provide public support to Israel, while privately restraining her once again to conduct the war in a way that would deny the complete victory that she requires. With Trump, the war would have not occurred, and if it did, he would not have tied Israel’s hands.

As for the danger of WWIII, it appears to me that the Ukraine mess is a potential trigger for it.  There is no way that the Ukraine can defeat Russia, and I fear that a protracted conflict could lead to further American involvement and the real chance of a great power clash.

With regard to demons and such, I call your attention to what appeared on the Vatican Synod website this week (page 29): “What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, for all that exists.” Thus, the diabolical evil that first showed its face with the Pachamama desecration of St. Peter’s advances further in the Bergoglian Church.    

I agree in the main, but Caiati's final sentence prompts me to ask: Is Bergoglio proposing mercy for demons in which he believes? Or is the truly Bergoglian termiticism and diabolism due to his tacit denial of the reality of demons?

No doubt demons are creatures, but does Bergoglio and his fellow clerical termites believe in their existence? I don't know but I suspect he doesn't and they don't. How many Catholic priests today believe in the  preternatural? I suspect it is a minority.  The preternatural is the sphere within which demonic agents operate. It lies between the natural  and the supernatural.  See Ralph Weimann, Sacramentals: Their Meaning and Use, p. 196: "In the period after the Second Vatican Council, and under the influence of rationalism, it was increasingly considered 'unscientific' to speak about angels and even more unscientific to speak about demons."

At a time when the RCC should be standing as a bulwark against the anti-civilizational forces of Chinese Communism, Islamism, and  Leftism, it is transforming itself under the termitic influence of Bergoglio & Co. into just another pile of secular leftist junk. 

But how could anyone in this enlightened age believe in such medieval superstitions as the existence of demons?  Hasn't humanity finally put paid to this old nonsense?  Maybe not. Maybe there is no naturalistic explanation of the depth and depravity of human behavior. Perhaps an adequate explanation must posit the preternatural. See my Substack article, The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence wherein I write:

As a sort of inference to the best explanation we can say that moral evil in its extreme manifestations has a supernatural source. It cannot be explained adequately in naturalistic terms.  There is an Evil Principle (and Principal) the positing of which is reasonable. The undeniable reality of evil has  a metaphysical ground.  Call it Satan or whatever you like.

In that passage I am using 'supernatural' to cover both the supernatural proper and the preternatural. 'Preternatural' would have been the better, because more specific, word choice. But then I would have had to explain 'preternatural' which would have lengthened the piece. Brevity is the soul of Stack and not just of blog.

Now I would like you to take a gander at this Daily Mail article and rub your noses in recent Hamas-Islamist barbarity. Could the source of this evil be merely natural?

Robert Paul Wollf on Benjamin Netanyahu

Substack latest.

When People Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them

Bari Weiss:

Here you can watch people gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering “gas the Jews” and “death to the Jews.” People are rejoicing in the slaughter on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York. (Scroll down to read our Free Press dispatch on the celebrations in Manhattan.)

At our most prestigious universities there is silence from administrations that leapt to speak out on George Floyd’s killing and on the war in Ukraine. Meantime, the social justice crowd offers explanations for the massacre—a massacre that, in part, targeted a group of progressive Israelis at a music festival. Terrorists came to that festival on paragliders carrying machine guns to start their slaughter. They raped women there next to the dead bodies of their friends.

Sam Harris on the Moral Difference between Israel and her Enemies

On this topic Harris is right.

The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians.

The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there widespread Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews.

[. . .]

What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen.

There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews—not just in Israel but everywhere.

Related: America's Betrayal of Israel

Watch this video. That’s a Hamas drone taking down an Israeli Merkava tank. A drone operated by an organization sponsored and trained by Iran applying both Iranian tactics and, most likely, Iranian hardware to attack Israel. This happened weeks after America sent Iran $6 billion, and one week after we learned that the American government had over the past years ceded whole parts of its own intelligence units to Iranian spies.

The stage for this attack was not set in or by Israel. It was set by the United States.

But even worse, and not only for us, is America's betrayal of America. Our borders, Southern but also Northern, are open to every terrorist and every criminal group in the world. They are busy establishing their sleeper cells and installations in the homeland, all with the tacit approval of the Director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas and his boss Joe Biden. Tacit approval by action, or rather inaction, masked by explicit and brazenly mendacious denial. That is your government at work, with your tax dollars, working to destroy your country and way of life. So long as you remain Democrat you go right along with it.

Our Islamist enemies want to destroy the Little Satan, but even more, the Big Satan. You might want to think about that.

You might also want to think about why there is a mere inquiry into the possible impeachment of Joe Biden which, you know, is not the same as his removal from office, on the ground of bribery and influence peddling when there is a much more grievous "high crime and misdemeanor" for which he ought already to have been impeached and removed, namely, his violation of his oath of office and dereliction of duty. I refer you to the U. S. Constitution which Biden took an oath to uphold and defend:

Article 4, Sec. 4 of The United States Constitution makes it clear the Federal government must stop such an incursion of foreigners into the country exactly like the one we are seeing. Here is what was written by our Founding Fathers concerning our republican form of government.

"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."

The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Substack leader. In this entry I unpack what I consider to be a brilliant insight of Finkielkraut.

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.

9/11 Twenty-Two Years Later

Top o' the Stack.

Was 9/11 an 'inside job'? I take no position on this question. Here is a review of David Ray Griffin's latest.

To say it again: linkage does not constitute endorsement in whole or in part.

UPDATE

New York Tony writes:

Since I was a kid, I would annually see the demolition of public housing, buildings imploding and pancaking into their footprint in the last half-minute of a local news broadcast. So had millions of others. But in a macabre illustration of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, nearly everyone, including me, fell for it on 9/11: the Towers fell after the planes hit, therefore they fell because they hit, imploding and pancaking into their footprint, so geometrically conveniently.  And Tower 7 wasn't hit at all. (In Iran, a jet slammed into a smaller building which burned for three days but didn't collapse.) It was a controlled demolition (see videos here), so the only question, which I remember posing to you then as I do now, is who strategically placed and who detonated the explosives? And why did we not instinctively connect what we saw with what we remembered and so easily accept the official narrative? Someone did, even if we can't agree on who. 

If two different spatiotemporally contiguous events, E1 and E2, occur with E1 temporally prior to E2, one cannot validly infer that E1 caused E2. To think otherwise would be to commit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. There has to be more to causation than spatiotemporal contiguity and temporal succession. To show that 9/11 was an 'inside job,' however, one has to do a lot more than avoid the fallacy in question. One has to work out the details of a plausible account of who placed the explosives without being detected and who detonated them, and why.

 

I suspect Tony will agree with what I just wrote. Twenty-two years ago I looked into the matter and was unconvinced of the 'truther' allegations. To mollify Tony, I will now make a major concession. We now have a mountain of evidence that Deep State apparatchiki are hard at work in nefarious and lawless ways destroying our republic and "fundamentally transforming" -- you know the origin of the phrase -- the U.S. into something like the S. U.  These undeniable facts make me more receptive to the 'truther' allegations.

 

The hard Left's takeover of the Democrat Party also explains why the events of 9/11/01 were not taken as an impetus to bring the southern border under control. Uncontrolled illegal immigration without assimilation is a most effective means of bringing a democratic, constitutionally-based republic to its knees. 

 

Orwellian globalists love the word 'democracy,' but please note that what they mean by it is oligarchy. As I have said more than once, the subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

 

UPDATE 9/13)

 

1) Rod Dreher asks: Was 9/11 a metaphysical event?

I have never gone in my interpretation beyond the conclusion that in some real sense, God had removed His hand from America, and had given us over to our sins, as He had done in ages past with Biblical Israel. Of course I have no proof of that, but if you look at the trajectory of our country since that terrible September day, you will find ample evidence to confirm the thesis.

2) Hugh Murray on 9/11.

 

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.

................................

 

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.

 

....................................

 

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.

 

......................................

 

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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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