Easter Celebrations in a Storm of Postmodern Iconoclasm

Unless you've taken up residence on planet Vulcan (which is becoming a more attractive prospect by the day) you can't have helped noticing the Catholic Church coming under heavy assault. In the chain of events the story happens to culminate over Holy Week and Easter.

While the abuse at the hands of priests is entirely despicable and without wishing to whitewash the guilty, it must be said that some of the media exposure has been disproportionate, to put it mildly. The postmodern left have reacted true to nature: dialectically and entirely in line with the Alinsky tradition: hold them to live up to their own standards (which no human being can do all of the time), then come down on them like a ton of bricks.

The smear campaign unleashed this week affects many groups and entities: the Tea Party movement, Republicans, Conservatives, Geert Wilders, Israel, the Berlusconi government in Italy, Euroskeptics, warmist deniers, Georgia and its President Saakashvili, the US Constitution (now toilet paper), George Bush and Dick Cheney, Eric Cantor, the usual talk radio hosts, Fox News, banks, insurance companies, big oil and big pharma, Capitalism, the private sector, reason, the middle class, weapons, heterosexual marriage, the Pope and the Vatican - all dissent from the Neo Socialist line is fair game. See here what's happening in the UK, where the Tory leader turns out to be a follower of Lucifer "community organizer" Alinsky.

The Counter-Enlighteners have had their eye on religion for a very long time. But Catholicism, as the ultimate adversary, has been singled out for demolition from the get go (others get the "boring from within" treatment). They've had too much power for far too long. Now's the moment to strike and paint them as essentially evil. And that, they do. They've been ramming nails into the coffin all week long.

But Free Republic in a post just up entitled "Forgotten Study: Abuse in School 100 Times Worse than by Priests" have been summing up the figures and put them into some perspective:

"(...) the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests. After effectively disappearing from the radar, Shakeshaft’s study is now being revisited by commentators seeking to restore a sense of proportion to the mainstream coverage of the Church scandal. 

According to the 2004 study “the most accurate data available at this time” indicates that “nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.” (...) 

In an article published on Monday, renowned Catholic commentator George Weigel referred to the Shakeshaft study, and observed that “The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague” in which Catholic priests constitute only a small minority of perpetrators." (...) >>>

By a chance constellation the Jewish Passover, Western Easter, and Orthodox Easter, all happen to coincide this weekend. But there's no love lost in the Christian brotherhood. While the Archbishop of Canterbury has said the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has lost "all credibility", and "Experts offer opinions on whether the pope should be held responsible", Galveston-Houston Archbishop Cardinal Daniel DiNardo criticized the media coverage.

The Church has started pushing back: "several prominent European clergy on Thursday denounced suggestions that Pope Benedict XVI was anything but a vigorous defender of victims of priestly sexual abuse."

And at a Good Friday service, the Pope's personal preacher, Reverend Cantalamessa, likened allegations of the pope's involvement in an alleged cover-up to "some of the worst aspects of antisemitism". It didn't take long before that was viciously savaged in a fit of moral indignation. Antisemitism is on the order of the day, unless Jews can be exploited to attack Christians! Talk of bigotry! After the dust settled it transpired the cleric had been quoting from a letter he received from a Jewish friend. You can hardly expect postmodernists to understand the parallels in using a few rotten apples to tarnish the whole basket, or can you?

That is, unless their favorite religionists are involved! When it comes to Muslims, it is entirely outrageous and racist, indeed fascist to lump an entire religion of peace pieces, with a few assertive victims of Western imperialism who - in their desperation - have turned to asymmetric warfare (a.k.a. terrorism, or man-made disasters). Hold them to their own standards and then apply double standards, is the line.

The Jihad Jane case - "white Al Qaeda", home-grown hirabahism, is by now hardly unique. It provides ample proof that Islamic violence has nothing to do with race or culture, but has everything to do with Islam as an ideology. There must be something in it, that triggers its practitioners into bloodletting. While the older religions of Judeism and Christenity according to the Platonic mind/body dichotomy have separated the sacred from the secular, the younger religion of Islam permeates every aspect of life, including politics.

The test that liberal democracy has in store for Muslims will be if the Ummah will be able to break up its collective, and if it will manage subsequently to separate Mosque from State. That will be the sole hope of integration into Western culture, so as to avert the clash of civilizations that everyone fears so much.

Happy Passover, a happy and blessed Easter, Kali Anastasi kai Kalo Pascha ...

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• Williams critical of Irish Church (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Child abuse scandal 'left Catholic church with no credibility', says Rowan Williams (telegraph.co.uk)

The Unholy Alliance: a Work in Progress

As dumbing down continued to the point of now even Socialists coming out against their own "equality of outcome" policies in education, and as anti authoritarianism abdicated parental autonomy, smart asses in the religion of piece are preparing to strike the fatal blow with false equivalence.

Parlour games for a relativized season of good will: find the theological mistakes in the Jesus4Sharia campaign?

Hat Tip: Tea & Politics (Angry Infidel)

Sarah Palin's “Servant’s Heart”

Yesss, the muck failing to stick, we have now unavoidably arrived at the stage where Palin's religious views are dissected and ridiculed by the self-proclaimed experts on theology who are infesting the liberal blogs and media.

Some - like Free Thought - aren't aware that their own atheism and faith in evolution in themselves have become virulently dogmatic and fundamentalist, yes - fascist to boot. If anything reminds of a schoolyard witch hunt it's "the Christian zealot named as Republican John McCain’s running-mate", her "tendency to run off at the mouth about GOD and JEEE-SUS! at the drop of a blueberry muffin", and "Sarah Palin's (...) puke-inducing church performance". Prove it!

Our contribution to the rumor machine is the news we've got for Messrs Duke and Finkelstein: far from being 'the Jews' worst nightmare', daddy's probably a Jewish apostate turned Catholic. The anti-semitism card is really tasteless and easily the cheapest shot yet: it says it all about the baseness of our time. Yuk ...

So much for freedom of conscience and free thinking (pocket Hitlers ...)!

For those who are taking the matter seriously, here's what we've got on Palin's church relations and religious persuations from our regular, reliable media authority on matters of the faith:

National Catholic Reporter: "What’s behind candidate Palin’s ‘God talk’", by Tom Roberts

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claims no denomination when asked what kind of Christian she is, confining her description to “Bible believing.” (...) the scrutiny of Palin that everyone says is inevitable will include a look at her religious biography. And it’s a bit more complex than that simple phrase. (...)

If she is a “post denominationalist” today (see the analysis earlier by NCR senior correspondent John Allen (McCain's VP choice a woman -- and a post-denominationalist) her language at times clearly comes out of her earlier Pentecostal formation. (...) Cecil M. Robeck Jr., a Pentecostal and director of the David du Plessis Center for Christian Spirituality at Fuller Theological Seminary, said the language may not contain as stark an assertion as it appears. (...)

“Pentecostals, he said, “make no attempt to sound ‘humble’ when speaking about the will of God.” (...) He emphasized that discerning God’s will within Pentecostal denominations is not a matter of “hoodoo” or some magically determined direction. Determining the will of God, he said, occurs in a variety of ways, through using Scripture, for instance; or common sense and personal feelings about a situation; or seeking direction in concert with others in the church or family.

Questions such as “Where can I make a difference or where can I do the greatest good?” are also means for discovering the will of God, he said. "Often times, within our circles,” he added, “people will say that they think something is God's will if they have a strong inner sense that something is right.” (Tom Roberts is NCR editor at large. His e-mail address is troberts@ncronline.org.)

Read it all for 'discerning God�s will as public policy' >>>

With Palin we say, "pray (...) that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." That would be far more attractive than the "world historical events" cabal who pretend their machinations are Acts of God, while in actual fact they are thought up and steered by their own One World Totalitarian Collectivist agenda.

If it weren't for the clarity of Palin's ideas in public policy, much more worrying would be the association of denominational Christianity with the Postmodernist Emergent Church! Remember, the Christians who manage to combine the message of Christ with agnosticism in relation to truth? John Allen has the details.

- Filed on Articles in the "McCain-Palin Ticket" -

The Anti-Human Philosophy of Darwinism

An article by Dinesh d'Souza on Townhall in clarification of a recent al Jazeera broadcast in which he was juxtapositioned to Richard Dawkins, shoots once again to the forefront the fruitless discourse on Darwin's Theory of Evolution on the one hand, versus Creationism and Intelligent Design (ID) on the other (the latter a legal collation).

D'Souza, author of "What's so Great About Christianity," before joining the Hoover Institution, was the John M. Olin Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Dawkins authored "The God Delusion" and is a well known Skepticist whose wiki biography fails to disclose any political activities other than anti Vietnam and anti Iraq War reflexes.

Dawkins is a proud Skepticist. Skepticism itself is a Naturalistic theory which holds that man is incapable of acquiring knowledge about reality. It even rejects consciousness and reduces man to the animal level. The term Skepticism by its Greek root σκεπτω, to think, suggests reason, but on the contrary, the theory excludes it. Skepticism is endemic in current academia.

Dawkins' credentials as a Postmodern anti-humanist are indicated by his involvement in the Great Apes Project, which seeks to reduce humans to the moral level of gorillas, and his close association with bio-ethicist Peter Singer, a well-known advocate of infanticide in the service of animal liberation, both suggesting that the distinction between man and animal is meaningless to Dawkins.

Returning to the discourse on evolution versus creation, it is clear from the outset that this false, unscientific dichotomy is leading nowhere. Any explanation for the origin of life other than the two polarized options are a priori excluded from the debate for reasons of Postmodern sophistry. The reason lies in a rather dishonest debating technique, a parlor trick in which Postmodernists excel: recasting the subject in a caricature of itself after which - exposed to ridicule - it can safely be condemned as 'obviously invalid.'

As d'Souza explains the reason why relativist thinkers cling dogmatically to Darwin's unproved theory is that it provides them with the 'scientific' basis for the atheist ideology. This in turn explains the fanaticism and the close-mindedness displayed since the 1880's and why Charles Darwin - like Sigmund Freud - has been included in the Marxist pantheon.

Out-of-the-box, often exact scientists (the real ones) working in the field known collectively as Intelligent Design, are lumped in with Creationists proper after a US lawsuit (see Part I) declared the two metaphysical explanations legally 'identical.' But compare the Biblical story with this explanation of ID and it becomes plain that equivalencing the two only exists in terms of a political agenda: the Darwinists'.

Since then any suggestions, other than evolutionist, are confined to a particularly nasty corner of the atheist hell specially reserved for 'Christians and other primitive Flat Earthers.' The picture is meant to conjure up the vista of Galileo's enlightened heliocentricity, said to have been suppressed by the obscurantist Renaissance Church.

The cases are is not dissimilar, but the Catholic Church authorities displayed a far more open, scientific mind-set than Galileo and Postmodern Darwinian absolutists combined: the Galileo denunciation by the Church lay in the fact that he insisted on his theory being taken as empirically proved, while in fact this was not the case.

The same is true for Darwin's theory. Luckily for Galileo, he later turned out to be right; this remains however to be seen in the case of Darwin and his pomo followers, who prefer shutting up dissent: the result is that their theory increasingly takes the shape of dogma, and that scientists think twice before publicly venturing a fresh hypotheses. As far as research in the field of the origins of life are concerned, we are in a scientific dark age.

The application of Darwinism to other fields is rejected by both debaters, but in the case of Dawkins, this position is questionable: like Muslims, pomos are allowed to lie to their opponents.

D'Souza - himself a Darwin follower - explains that the theory as posited by Darwin had no bearing on the origin of life itself, or indeed on human consciousness.

Dawkins for his part - although he declared Darwinism to be applicable to cultural traits (memes) - in Part II of the program rejects social Darwinism: not its existence, but advocating it. Of course Dawkins would reject social Darwinism: in the eyes of its adherents socialism does little else but counter it and compensate its perceived victims from the negative effects; the core tenet of the dialectic is progress through strife and conflict between 'the Oppressors and the historically Oppressed'. Of racial Darwinism as invoked by Nazi ideology, Dawkins pretends not to be aware; he prefers to patronize his interlocutor and ridicules him as 'illogical,' a flat earther.

Typically Dawkins prefers to start indoctrination of the dogma as early as possible: children ideally should be exposed to the correct ideology from the age of eight, rather than their middle teens when the faulty epistemological basis has already been formed; after Fichte it is well known that free enquiry and dissent must be crushed as early as possible.

We see that relativist thinkers use the Christian approach as an excuse for the relativist anti-humanism. The Biblical principle that God created man in His image leads not only to the fundamental objectivity that all men are created equal (also rejected by relativism); but the same teaching laid the cornerstone as well for the anthropocentrism that relativists so fiercely denounce. Man is not Nature's lord and custodian, but its usurper. Down with civilization, long live Rousseau's noble savage!

What seems at first glance to be a legitimate debate on a existential issue which may be approached from a religious, philosophical or sccientific angle, can on analysis be reduced to the usual boring banalities of the Postmodern political agenda: a ploy for the deconstruction of Western civilization through the anti-modern dialectic (sigh ...).

Links to the Al Jazeera broadcast:

- Part I
- Part II
- ID explained: for followers of 'thought creates matter' ID is only one step away

- Filed on Articles in "The Dialectics" and "Life Ethics" -

Review: "Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and The Revolt of Islam"

The political video documentary"Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and The Revolt of Islam", written and directed by Joel Gilbert is - on the whole - a beautifully produced opus that delves into the origins of the confrontation between Islam and the Jews at the time of the Prophet Mohammed and is insightful in that respect, to say the least.

It is introduced as "a historic journey from the birth of Islam, through its 1,200 year reign over the civilized world, to the last 300 years is Islamic decline, overtaken and dominated by the West - then humiliated by a Jewish state. Islam's historic trials with Jews, and its relationship with conquered non believers, help illustrate the Islamic world view - all through the eyes of Muslims."

And this is exactly where the problem with this effort lies, resulting in part omission, part subjectivism, part revisionism. While it is appreciated that Judeo-Christian history is not part of this 'narrative', it is a serious objection to completely ignore the scene in which Islam from its inception, found itself. History begins with Mohammed, the measure of everything, so is the message.

The suggestion is made, that Christendom emerged from 'the obscurantism of the Dark Ages with the discovery of the Americas', ignoring centuries of social, cultural, religious, scientific and philosophical development under the influence of the Roman Church, and everything else for that matter, that has taken place before AD 610. The suggestion is ludicrous.

The author also missed the opportunity to stress the emergence and conquests of the Turkish tribes in the twelth and thirteeth centory, which could have clarified the Christian origins of the Levant and Asia Minor. Likewise, that the Crusades were as much a reconquest as the Spanish Reconquista.

The rich roots of pre Christian Greco-Roman culture, of which Islam was the custodian during the often praised 'Golden Age of Islam', is ignored altogether, as is Middle Eastern paganism. Islam, apparently, is an island. In that respect Gilbert indeed paints an accurate ' version of reality' .

On the other hand, an important insight is provided by describing more recent history. During the course of the last century Amin Al Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem between 1921 and 1948 and uncle to Yassir Arafat, is correctly identified as the link between the precedent of the massacre of the Jewish tribes at M'dina at the hand of Mohammed for failing to accept Dhimmitude, and the justification of the Turkish genocides of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in the aftermath of World War I, as well as the Nazi Holocaust (recommended video) during World War II.

The last two occasions of genocide and alleged genocide were encouraged and sanctified by Amin al Husseini on the grounds of the M'dina precedent: Dhimmis behaving in a manner unbecoming of their status. The M'dina Jews refused conversion as well as taxation, resulting in their 'justified' annihilation.

As Mohammed is the measure of everything in Islam, the less than loyal attitude of the Dhimmi groups that were subjugated and unwillingly integrated into the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire, likewise resulted in their mass murder.

Strikingly Adolf Hitler came up with the so-called Dolchstoss legend against the Jews, 'treason' resulting in the loss of World War I on the part of the German-Turko side - a similar justification for Holocaust. (More on the Unholy Alliance between (National) Socialism and Islam on files, Part I and Part II.)

Interesting is the suggestion that Anwar Sadat's 1977 Camp David Accords with Israel actually constituted not an offer of peace, but an attempt at destroying Israel by diplomatic efforts. The question is such case is, why was he assassinated by Al Zawahiri c.s. Apparently the effort was wasted on the Muslim Brotherhood.

The document' s central assertion is that - contrary to what is suggested by the title - the Islamic world doesn't seek as much the destruction of the state of Israel, as the wish to reduce it to Dhimmi status - tributaries under Islamic rule - the natural and solely acceptable status of infidels under Islamic rule. This suggestion is a fresh attempt at literally playing dice with Evil at the price of a second Holocaust. The very notion is despicable and worthy of denunciation as a irresponsible, Postmodern piece of amorality!

Nonsensical is the idea that the Bush administration played into Al Qaeda's hands after 9/11 by attacking Islamic lands. The suggestion is, that this would so much outrage Muslims that they'd dispose of their despotic rulers on a mass scale. In effect, the only changes of regime that have occurred have taken place in the countries thus liberated by the Coalition.

Gilbert further suggests that the establishment of democracy will merely result in radical Islamist regimes being voted in all over the Middle East. Indeed, the Hamas regime in Palestine has nothing to do with Fatah corruption and mismanagement, and everything with spiting the West.

Artistically "Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and The Revolt of Islam" is a fine piece of work. Historically it is insuffient, it is politically wanting, and moraly irrelevant.

- Filed on Articles in "The Unholy Alliance", Part II -

Postmodern Delusion Without Cognitive Dissonance

Serendipity never fails to excite. No sooner had I wrapped up yesterday's "Sunday School Theology for a Time of Crisis" on the unhealthy state of Christianity, or my attention was drawn to a post written by Professor Comparative Religion Justin Halter on the subject of the schism within the Episcopalian Church: he's got it ... Narcissism's the word! Christians in name only, these people are entirely following their own council, having internalized what in Postmodernism passes for 'morality'.

Thankfully Halter - a white elephant in higher education - has not been infected in any way by Relativist thought and can still see the wood for the trees, thank you very much! His suggestion? If you don't like the 'homophobic' morality of the Christian God, then by all means, apostate!

He's entirely right, but misses the underlying political point. The sole aim of these exercises is to destroy the Christian Churches from within. If simply abandoned by these fiends, they might stand a chance of survival, and that would never do. So what we have instead is people within the faith offering a new perspective - say the Emergent Church, or the Homophilic Episcopalians. This allows adherents to be still nominally Christians, when in fact offering to the Marxist God of the Socialist dialectic.

It defies belief, but somehow they have managed to marry the delusion that there is no truth to the word of Christ without the slightest hint of cognitive dissonance. The other central role, the one of the four Apostles within the new system on the other hand, is still any one's guess. Not all details of the new crede have been hammered out yet. But hey, it took Christianity two millennia to work out a comprehensive, organized belief system, so there's hope yet for the heresies of Narcissus. I'm sure some solution will be found once the dogma takes shape, to define it as anything other than that, considering the taboo that rests on the axiom.

It will take some doing though to defy the laws of reason altogether. Even professionals working in the field of psychology are having trouble. Take Dr Sanity in her post yesterday "The Democratic Party 2008 Platform: "Truth Doesn't Exist and We Possess It"":

"What they possess is a moral and intellectual confusion that is so pronounced, I hesitate to even call it psychosis. It is more like a deliberate dementia."

If that wasn't enough brilliance for one day, she's quoting Gagdad Bob of One Cosmos who in "Life Amidst the Postmodern Ruins" provides a series of insights that warrant extensive quoting and - above all - dissemination amongst the fallen Christians that haven't passed beyond salvation. I highly recommend reading it all, but here's a sample:

(...) Chesterton could prophecize in this manner because he could see directly into the 'principal' world of timeless truth embodied in revelation. Again, revelation instantiates metaphysical truths with which it is possible to 'think beyond the surface,' both in space and in time, interior and exterior. Thus, unlike postmodernists who believe that "perception is reality," he writes that "man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert -- himself." This leads to the erosion of universality and the elevation of particularity to the ultimate -- which quickly devolves into nihilism.

Conversely, the part that a man doubts "is exactly the part he ought not doubt -- the Divine Reason." But this inversion obviously persists -- indeed, it is practically the fault line that runs between left and right -- and is responsible for a range of pathological ideas, from multiculturalism, to moral relativism, to the belief in "self esteem," to reducing standards in general to achieve some preconceived end.

The left also practices a "false humility." After all, it can sound like a plea for humility when the postmodern multiculturalist asks, "who am I to say that I can possess the truth, or that one culture is better than another?" But this attitude is a "more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic." That is -- and this is apparently a subtle point, so listen closely -- "The old humility was a spur that prevented man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

This is one of the reasons that the left habitually attacks motives instead of substance, for they first undermine the idea that you can know anything objectively, and then insist that the purpose of knowledge is domination and oppression anyway. For the last several years, "job one" of the left has been to make us doubtful of our aims in Iraq, in the hope that we will simply become demoralized and surrender.

But they do this so selectively that it is mind-boggling. (...) just as the left engages in the moral inversion of detaching virtue from tradition, they engage in a weird "cognitive inversion" that combines "intellectual helplessness" with a kind of monstrously arrogant omniscience. This is how you can spend some $100,000 plus on an elite university education, only to learn that truth doesn't exist and we possess it.