timeimmortal

Kevin Myers crime? Well, as a man who spent some years living in Africa, he had the temerity to speak what he knew to be true about the problems on that troubled continent, and he did so in print:

When I went to Ethiopia* just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported — such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect).

I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children — not cold, unpopular and even “racist” accusations about African male culpability.

This follows from an earlier article that he penned, in which he noted still more problems:

The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

There is, no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system; but I do not know what it is. There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column like this.

…

Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world.

They are now — one way or another — virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

…

How much Morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.

For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.

And for saying as much, all of it good common sense, Mr. Myers could potentially be jailed…without benefit of trial. In Ireland, which is supposedly a free and democratic nation.

On the one hand, I expected some uproar in Ireland over my piece about Ethiopia on July 10. But there really wasn’t any. On the other, I didn’t expect an attempt to jail me by a state-sponsored body. Yet Denise Charlton, of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, has urged An Garda Siochana to investigate me under a special law, by which I could be tried and imprisoned for two years without even the benefit of a jury.

Oh, Denise, Denise, you silly, silly little girl: have you nothing better to do with your time and talents than to try to get someone jailed for saying something you dislike? So there we are. The apparatchiks of the equality industry merely have to contemplate the sector of their psyche wherein their self-righteous emotions reside: and if these are sufficiently overwrought, they decide that a hate-crime has been committed.

…

So, “a lot of Africans” are “all very offended”, are they? All of them? The poor dears. Well, if the countries on whose behalf they get so easily offended are so bloody marvellous — Sudan? Rwanda? Zimbabwe? Sierre Leone? Congo? Somalia? Eritrea? Etcetera? — why aren’t they enjoying themselves back home?

Just so.

The above are not easy words to read; I personally doubt that Mr. Myers intended for them to be easy to read. The reality of Africa — and even of the outcomes of the various aid monies that flow in to that troubled continent — is not an easy truth to hear, and I doubt there is any way to put it to paper in a palatable manner, save to gloss over the really nasty bits in favour of heart-wrenching stories about babies with bloated bellies.

And make no mistake: starvation, especially of infants, is a damnable tragedy. But nothing is really being done about this by simply pouring more money into the various countries that make up Africa — in the end, what is achieved is that governments are propped up which have no business being in power in the first place. The cycle of injustice is thus free to continue.

Positive developments do occasionally occur in Africa, admittedly, but one notes that many of these are intrinsically linked with foreign missions that see Westerners come in to Africa (once more) to take an active role in e.g. the construction of bridges and water systems.

But now, apparently, a man stands to be jailed in Ireland for saying as much.

* a quick note, for those who will attempt to lay blame for all this at the feet of the colonial escapades of e.g. Britain and France: Ethiopia was never a colony.

Nicholas, who we’ve not heard from in a while, writes in with some relieving clarification concerning the controversy in Bristol, England, over a proposed plan to trim the hedges in a spot notorious for being a gay rendezvous (and the charge made by an LGBT group there that trimming the verge is tantamount to a hate crime, essentially).

Not quite. Bristol City Council is clearing some scrub, as part of their management plan for the Downs. The LGB group of Council employees commented that this might be seen as discriminatory. The Council’s Downs Committee decided that it isn’t, and they will carry on clearing the scrub.
(This Is Bristol)

The report of the Downs Ranger is here:
(Link)

Well, that’s something of a relief! And looky here…another Brit not afraid to speak with a bit of common sense!

..former Lord Mayor, Tory councillor for Stoke Bishop, and Downs Committee member Peter Abraham rubbished suggestions of discrimination.

“How can it be discriminatory to clear land that might stop what is an illegal practice?” he said.

The report says: “It is important to recognise that the area is part of the Avon Gorge Site of Special Scientific Interest and removal of scrub is in fact driven by policy imperatives to open up this part of the Downs and Gorge landscape, which has become overgrown over the past two decades, damaging the area’s wildlife value — in particular the gorge’s plant communities.”

So it looks like the brush clearing will go ahead. Thank goodness that at least one town council in Britain has demonstrated a refusal to cave in to absurd complaints from the thin-skinned. And pace what Mr. Abraham noted, if this process of cleaning up an area to improve its wildlife value and reduce damage to the local flora also happens to make the place unfeasible as a gay hookup spot, more’s the better.

David Cameron’s remarks aside, not all is well in Britain. This may just be the most insane thing I’ve ever heard, and it doesn’t even have anything to do with Islam!

A council has been accused of discriminating against homosexuals over plans to clear undergrowth from a notorious gay cruising spot.

Bristol City Council wants to prune bushes and remove cover from an area known as the Downs to improve the landscape and encourage rare wildlife.

But its own gay rights group has opposed the move, claiming that cutting back the bushes was “discriminating” to homosexual men who used the area for late night outdoor sex known as dogging.

To which, I think, the best comment that can be made is:

…it would be a THREAT TO GAY RIGHTS if you made it harder for them to bone each other where children may come across them. I just don’t think I’ve ever beheld a more perfected set of priorities in my entire stupid bigoted American life.

Lawn and garden maintenance is now an anti-homosexual hate crime in England. It is more important that gay couples be provided with underbrush in which to hide their late-night sexual antics than it is for a town council to arrange for someone to trim the verge on public property.

Some things are just to absurd to be fiction. This one is totally going in the “Asteroid Overdue” category.

Update: Ace sums it up rather well: “Britain is the Florida of Europe.”

I don’t know what to think of David Cameron. Peter Hitchens, whom I use as a barometer of conservative attitude in England, doesn’t seem to think much of the leader of Britain’s conservatives, and if memory serves Cameron has made more than a few major gaffes that have seen him tarred as a social liberal.

Still, here he is saying what needs to be said, and perhaps repeated very often indeed.

‘We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people’s feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgemental, we have failed to say what needs to be said. We have seen a decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification.

“‘Instead we prefer moral neutrality, a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong behaviour. Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more.’”

…

“We talk about people being ‘at risk of obesity’ instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise. We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things - obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction - are purely external events like a plague or bad weather.

“Of course, circumstances - where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school, and the choices your parents make - have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices that people make.”

He added: “There is a danger of becoming quite literally a de-moralised society, where nobody will tell the truth anymore about what is good and bad, right and wrong. That is why children are growing up without boundaries, thinking they can do as they please, and why no adult will intervene to stop them - including, often, their parents. If we are going to get any where near solving some of these problems, that has to stop.”

One word: responsibility. Our society seems paralzyed with fear of it. Fewer and fewer people want to admit that they are responsible for e.g. their own weight, for their own sexuality, for their own health, and for the consequences of activities that transgress against the normal ordered function of one or more of those things. Fewer and fewer people want to admit that they are responsible for educating their offspring in areas such as manners and morality. Fewer and fewer people want to do anything other than find some faceless “other” to blame for all that afflicts them, without ever once pausing to consider all that they have done to affect themselves.

It’s nice, then, that at least a few people in power still have the guts to call us out on such matters.

Update: Perhaps predictably, Peter Hitchens looks askance at Mr. Cameron’s statement:

You must have seen the gloopy sighs of praise and wonder from gullible ‘commentators’ who have learned nothing from the 11-year Blair-Brown fraud (remember ‘tough on crime’?). There wasn’t a single specific pledge.

He pretended to attack moral neutrality, saying: ‘Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more.’

I decided to see if he would dare use them himself.

So I asked his Press office if he would care to say if the following were right or wrong, bad or good: taking illegal drugs; owning up to taking illegal drugs and saying it was wrong; living together while not being married; punishing criminals.

And do you know? There was no answer.

With benefit of hindsight, this was probably predictable. Rare indeed is the politician who can be taken at his word.

Seriously.

If Muslim passengers can circumvent security protocols because sniffer dogs are “unclean” and body scanners are the theological equivalent of a strip search, then I think the transit authority in London, England should have every right to refuse service to Muslim passengers, and to any passengers that wish to be exempted from security checks.

It’s only reasonable, after all.

Of course, the better solution would be for someone at some level of the British government to summon up the courage to tell the people making complaints against the scanners and dogs that if they are not at home with the practices and means of Britain, they are of course welcome to leave, rather than attempting to force their minority view onto the national character.

But who in Britain has the guts to say that anymore?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

This is the question that bothers Peter Hitchens this week, and it’s a good one to reflect on given the recent confrontation with police had by Christian preachers Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, who were told by police officers that the area in which they were handing out literature was a Muslim community, that their evangelism was a “hate crime,” and that if they returned to the area ever again and were perchance beaten…well, they’d already been warned.

A police constable who was present during the incident in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham is also alleged to have told the preachers not to return to the district.

It comes amid growing concern over the development of Islamic ‘no-go areas’.

The preachers, Americans Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, are demanding an apology and compensation from West Midlands Police.

They say their treatment breaks the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of religious expression.

The preachers, who have the backing of the Christian Institute pressure group, say they will take the force to court for breaching their human rights if they don’t receive an apology.

They have accused the officer, PCSO Naeem Naguthney, of behaving in an ‘aggressive and threatening’ manner. A complaint by their lawyers said he interrupted as they spoke to Muslim youths about their beliefs.

Mr Abraham, 65, who was born a Muslim in Egypt and is a convert to Christianity, said: ‘He told us we were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity and that that was a hate crime.

‘He was very intimidating and it concerns me that somebody holding his views can become a police officer, albeit at PCSO level.’

Mr Cunningham, 48, a fellow American Baptist missionary, said: ‘He realised we were Americans and then started ranting at us about George Bush and American foreign policy.

‘He said we were in a Muslim area and were not allowed to spread our Christian message. He said he was going to take us to the police station.’

At any rate, Peter Hitchens — the sane Hitchens brother, mind — muses thusly:

Why did we have to wait for Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, born and raised in Muslim Pakistan, to remind us that, as he put it, ‘the beliefs, values and virtues of Great Britain have been formed by the Christian faith’?

Just as important, why did we have to wait for him to urge us to do something about restoring that faith before we either sink into a yelling chaos of knives, fists and boots, or swoon into the strong, implacable arms of Islam?

Most of our homegrown prelates are more interested in homosexuality or in spreading doubt about the gospel or urging the adoption of Sharia law.

Then again, why did it take the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to explain to us that our parliamentary system was the best guarantee of liberty in the world and to remind us of the courage and valour of our people in war?

This is not what British leaders say or even think, not least because they are busy pulling the constitution to pieces.

It is not what our children are taught in schools.

In fact, any expression of national pride is viewed with suspicion by the state, by the education system and above all by the BBC.

It was not always so. Half a century ago, we had churchmen, broadcasters, academics and military men who thought it normal to love their own country, normal to support the Christian faith which made us what we are, and were willing to defend it.

The question of what happened in the years between is one of the most interesting in history.

I suggest reading the whole thing — it isn’t terribly long, but is a good summation of just what has gone wrong with modern Britain.

There was a time when the British had the gumption and courage to stand up to all manner of menaces, internal and foreign alike, and when the British people took pride in their nation. Those days would seem to have expired, as Britain sinks more and more into two separate chasms: that of rampant, primitive and violent Islam in its immigrant communities, and that of demoralized, nihilistic secularism everywhere else. And the latter does not have the desire, strength, or courage to resist the advance of the former.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Gastric bypasses. Stomach stapling, as I gather the procedure is also known — a last-ditch treatment for obesity, to stave off a heart attack or stroke.

Being married to a nurse, I occasionally get to hear about this kind of procedure, and I gather that it really is intended to be last-ditch. The long-term survival prospects aren’t exactly stellar, nor are the odds of the surgery really doing all that much to help a person*. It does, I gather, occasionally work as intended, but not often.

Still, as more and more people in society are becoming obese, such procedures are expected to be commonplace. Britain has seen a 41% rise in the number of bypasses done in the last year, at an average cost of 7,000 pounds per operation.

It’s on the rise here in Canada too, although I don’t know by what percentage.

The problem is: surgeries like this are, more often than not, like rearranging deck chairs on…well, you know which ship, O Reader. Treatment is one thing, but a problem like obesity has more and deeper causes that are, frankly, not always addressed, nor always rectified:

I worry that not enough is being done to make sure people don’t gain the weight back. See, a lot of people think the surgery is a miracle cure. It’s not. I have talked to dozens of people who have had it done, only to go back to their old habits and gain all the weight back. This is not a good use of public money. I realize that obesity is a serious issue (my fat ass reminds me of that every day!), but I would rather see the price of green peppers go down before I would want to see so much being spent on a cosmetic surgery that may not solve the long-term problem. Progressives are always on about “root causes”, and this is one area where I agree with them. You cannot change a lifetime of habit in a 3 hour surgery. A person has to be in the right headspace in order to lose weight. Sometimes it takes a health scare. Sometimes it’s a nasty comment from a trusted loved-one. Sometimes it is a positive, like wanting to be more fertile and start a family.

But like going into detox for that last time, you need to have hit your bottom (no fat pun intended) before you can lose the weight. The NHS is spending a lot of money on the symptom, not the disease.

This is something Grace and I talk about every once in a while. The plain fact is, a lot of people who go in for this and other forms of surgery related to complications from obesity do not change their own lifestyles, which are the real cause of the problem in the wake of the surgery. If a person’s liver fails because the last time they didn’t eat at McDonald’s was sometime in the 90s, they expect a new one. And when they get a new one, they finish the post-surgical healing time and go right back to the Big Macs.

(Basically, it’s the culture entitlement at work again, with the usual lack of understanding that rights are tempered and accompanied by responsibilities. People have the inalienable right to eat at McDonald’s, and when something fails in their own body they demand, as though they are owed, corrective treatment. God forbid it cross their minds to amend their own destructive habits to prevent a re-occurrence of the failure!)

To be fair, some people do transform their lifestyles, and they deserve to be commended for that; this is especially true from within a Christian understanding of the world, since we should rejoice every time someone turns his or her life around, in same way that God rejoices over every sinner who repents.

But I agree with my wife when she observes that responsive treatments like this are, ultimately, a losing battle. As long as people in places like Canada and England know that the government will foot the bill when their body craps out, there’s no real incentive for them to change…especially when that same government mandates and enforces a human rights regime that basically encourages people to feel entitled to…well, everything.

What ultimately needs to happen, and this is hinted at in the excerpt above (i.e. “green peppers”), is that health care services need to focus more on preventative medicine, instead of just on responsive medicine. Surgery is all well and good, but we could do more and better to fight obesity if we focused on responding to people at risk of becoming obese, and getting them to change their lifestyles accordingly. Yes, programmes of this nature would still have quite a cost associated with them, but in the long term they would probably save quite a lot of dollars if they were, in fact, succecssful to any meaningful degree.

A person really “cannot change a lifetime of habit in a 3 hour surgery,” and our health care systems need to be able to address this reality. At present, as I understand it, patients in for bypass surgery do receive counselling, and (correct me if I’m wrong, O Reader) have to have demonstrated the ability to lose a certain quantity of weight on their own prior to undergoing the surgery itself. That said, somewhere along the line that person did begin down a path that led them to become obese, and one gets the sense that more could have been done for them earlier on to perhaps prevent them ever becoming so morbidly overweight as to require drastic surgery in the first place.

The elephant in the room is a pair of questions: what could be done, and how do we get people to take it seriously. And this brings us back to our culture of entitlement, because while such a thing persists it may well be nigh-impossible to put in place programmes that work to prevent morbid obesity by way of counselling, teaching, and exercise.

In a way, the prevalence of gastric bypass surgery, and obesity as well, is just one more testament to the way in which our rights-obsessed, responsibility-free, post-Christian society is ultimately destroying itself.

It might be entirely predictable of me to point out that modern atheism bears a goodly deal of the blame for this self-destructive trend in society, as surely as it bears the blame for other such trends (e.g. demographics). But I observe that I’m not the only one who thinks so…and the sane Hitchens brother has quite the thing to say about another trend with the same root causes.

I did mention Atheism at the beginning. For that is at the root of all this. Once people don’t acknowledge any moral authority outside themselves, they can choose which rules to take seriously and which not to entirely according to their own feelings at any time. They will generally do this on the basis of what suits them. It begins with little things, and moves on to the great. We are now at the stage where it is moving on quite fast.

One of the key features of atheism is that atheists themselves are unable to grasp this point. We’re just as good as religious people, they respond, if not better. Maybe so. Religious people who understand their creeds know perfectly well that they’re no better than anyone else. That’s not the issue. What is?.

It is this. What do you really mean by ‘good’? Why (for example) is fidelity better than adultery, patience better than impatience? Watch people who are nice to you in the office, as they drive, in a hurry, in frantic traffic, and you may see another side of them. ‘Road rage’, where we are unrestrained by fears about how we will look to those we live and work with, is an interesting measure of what we are really like. Cars are a powerful moral lie-detector.

The connection might not seem immediately intuitive, but it is there, and it has a great deal to do with both individual liberty and the distinctions drawn between what are considered private matters, and what are considered public matters.

What we eat, most people would agree, is a private matter. What, where, and how fast we drive can be similarly classified, but in the case of a car it is easier to observe that what can at first be viewed as a private matter can very rapidly become a public matter, if in fact we drive too fast or too recklessly. What we eat can similarly become a public matter, if we are reckless about it as well. This is perhaps not as true in places like America, given that one pays for one’s health care there, but it certainly is true in places like Canada and England, where the government generally foots the bill. Obesity — which, psychological considerations aside, arises out of too much consumption — and the expensive surgical treatments for it are an example of how the private issue of what we eat becomes a public issue; basically: we have eaten too much, and are now a burden on the public purse.

Drugs? Take them. Sex? Have it now and to hell with the consequences. Abortion’s easy now. Manners? Who cares. Patience? What’s that? Parents? Ignore them as soon as you can, and especially once you’ve got to university thanks to their money and effort. Teachers? What do they know? Rules? They’re for other people. Religion? It’s a wicked fraud designed to keep us down. This belief is itself a moral code, but one which is entirely based on the desires of the person involved — and which is destined to cause growing problems as more and more unfettered egos bump into each other.

The same attitude could probably be observed, I suspect, in response to the above suggestion that medicine become more preventative in nature — this is the illustration of the elephant, so to speak. For as surely as our society believes that rosaries should be kept far away from ovaries, we believe every bit as much that nobody is allowed to tell us to put the cheeseburger down in favour of a green vegetable…even if that is exactly what we need to do.

It might seem strange for a “freespeecher” to be thinking in this manner, but let us come back to what was said above, O Reader. Let us look again at the issue of where the private exercise of rights becomes a public issue. With freedom of speech, that line ostensibly exists at the exact point where the articulation of an idea or viewpoint becomes incitement to violence. We have laws against that sort of thing (and rightly so).

Where does that line exist regarding the issue of what we eat? Does it exist at all? Should it exist, if it currently does not? How might we effect such a thing in real life? One possible answer is that receiving treatment is contingent upon meeting a set of criteria both pre- and post-surgery, although what the penalty would be for breaking such an agreement post-surgery would be, I do now know (a gastric bypass can’t really be undone, after all). The idea of a user-pay system for obesity treatments is a tempting thought, but given that even in the U.S. obesity is on the rise, the effectiveness of that idea is called into question. Denial of treatment to those who did not seek counselling earlier on in their obesity is a possibility, although that raises other issues.

Social upheaval would probably achieve the best results, but it would be rather unrealistic to expect such a thing to occur.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

…but creating one in real life, especially a half-human, half-animal hybrid, is not morally sound, nor does it seem all that defensible on scientific grounds. Yes, I will grant that it is possible that some great new advance in medicine might come about because of experimentation on hybrid embryos, but so what? Imperial Japan made some great leaps in the field of medical research back in the 1940s, but their methods included grotesque experimentation on Chinese prisoners. The desired ends do not justify the means by which they are achieved.

David Warren, in fine form as always, puts the proper perspective on the issue:

The current British prime minister, Gordon Brown — the one who did not win the last election, and with any luck, will not win the next one — is naturally among the advocates of the legislation his government tabled. In campaigning for it, he has made shameless emotional use of his own small child, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. He would not himself recognize it as shameless, of course, for he is wallowing in confusion over ends and means. But using his own son, Fraser, as his exhibit, he has very emotionally declared that the creation of hybrid animal/human embryos for research purposes is “an inherently moral endeavour, that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions.”

…Gordon Brown was uttering an untruth. As even the leading “expert” advocate of the government’s measures — Lord Robert Winston, the English fertility specialist, politician, and television personality — has admitted, there is no pressing need for animal/human hybrid embryos. He had already said that the loss of the hybrid clause “won’t fundamentally alter the science of stem cell biology.” The research could perfectly well go on with adult stem cells, to the use of which there is no moral objection. Even the Catholic Church has contributed directly and materially to that research.

An emotional argument has thus been made, and accepted as perfectly legitimate, where “the end justifies the means.” But where an opponent of the evil means speaks “emotively” in defence of a moral absolute, he is dismissed as lowering the tone of the debate.

We are most certainly dealing with a moral absolute in this case. Our entire civilization (including e.g. all legal codes throughout the Western world) depends upon the sharp and unambiguous distinction between what is human, and what is not. We do not abandon this “front line” without inevitably lapsing into the kind of barbarism of which fascist-era Germany and Japan served as terrible warnings.

Alas, we already crossed this line, in 1967 in Britain, in 1969 in Canada, when abortion was legalized. The definition of what is human, that is extremely sharp in nature, was made legally vague. The sharp line in nature can only correspond to human conception. From that moment of conception, a woman is carrying a baby, not some inhuman “thing” that becomes “relatively more human” with the progression of time. Ignore that sharp line, and no other line can be drawn and held. By comparison, childbirth itself provides no precision whatever, for a child may be born many weeks prematurely, and still survive and flourish.

Evil ultimately only begets evil; that is why the Church constantly cautions against using evil means that good ends may come from it. Though the campaigners for abortion “rights” were doubtless driven by what was, in at least some of their minds, a desire to do “good” — in providing something that was, in their view, of benefit to women, and a tool of emancipation moreover — the ends they have achieved have far surpassed any gains that might have emerged.

Equality and suffrage for women good ends that have emerged from feminism, but these ends could have been achieved without abortion, and might even have been sweeter victories had history played out in that way. As it is, though, what gains feminism has made in terms of expanding the rights and role of women in society have been more or less counteracted — if not erased entirely — by the fact that our society, more than any other, objectifies women in ways that would have been unimaginable to our “patriarchal” forebears. It’s a common charge that the women of old were valued only for their ability to make babies. Even assuming that’s an accurate statement, it seems that in the modern day women are valued for even less than that — indeed, the ability of women to become pregnant is seen by many as something which needs to be corrected for. Our modern society regards women, essentially, as a means of consequence-free gratification.

And it should come as no surprise, then, that our modern, enlightened, post-Christian society thus regards human life in general as something expendable, and as something which can be tampered with willy-nilly at its earliest stages in pursuit of murky, uncertain, and rather unlikely scientific ends. Experimenting on embryos is, to be sure, different than experimenting on Chinese prisoners, but only in the sense that the embryos are at an earlier stage of development. The same disregard for certain categories of human life is still present. And creating human-animal hybrids does not remove that particular moral dilemma; it adds to it.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

The former may exist. The latter, as Mark Steyn points out, does not:

What the west calls “moderate Muslims”, Islam regards as apostates. Sometimes, as with Dr [Wafa Sultan], they’re atheist apostates; sometimes, as with Miss [Irshad Manji], they’re lesbian apostates; and sometimes, as with Magdi Allam, they’re Christian apostates. To Islam, it doesn’t matter which branch of apostasy you opt for: As the Prophet [Muhammad] puts it, “Whoever changes his Religion, kill him.” All four principal schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree. So do the 36 per cent of young Muslims in Britain who believe apostasy should be punished by death. But, to the west, which branch of apostasy has most appeal to Muslims is an interesting question.

There are two main reasons why I feel myself compelled to take such a hard-line stance against Islam, its false prophet, and the various violent excesses of many who hold to that religion. The first, of course, is that Islam is, itself, a false religion, and is worthy of opposition on those grounds alone.

Equally, though, I cannot comprehend how one could view Islam as being in any way compatible with Western, Christian-founded ideals like human rights, equality before the law, equality before God, and other fundamental tenets of what we call “freedom.” In Islam, none of these things exists. There is no free will; there is only the will of Allah. There is no equality; there is Sharia. There is no freedom; there is only submission.

And ultimately, there is no love either; there is only hatred. Whether that hatred is directed at the Jews or at those who are not sufficiently “Islamic” in their character shifts week to week, but the hatred itself is ever-present.

On the one hand, Magdi Allam’s conversion is bad news…on the other hand, it’s good news in that it suggests the most effective strategy against a resurgent, radicalized Islam may be the oldest of all — an evangelizing Christianity.

The response of Europe to its progressive Islamicization has been a predominantly secular one that has sought to push Christianity even further toward the sidelines. In Canada, Muslim lobby groups (like the Canadian Islamic Congress, headed by terror-supporter Mohamed Elmasry) use human rights commissions to silence and censor those who dare to articulate any views that holds Islam suspect. In America, CAIR attempts to do the same through the civil courts.

And for the most part, when the West has roused itself to push back, it has done so through secular avenues. And while it is good to meet the enemy on the battlefield, whatever form that battlefield might take, it is not enough to merely win at the secular side of the game, because that is the distraction, the feint. And indeed, becoming too entrenched in a secular response to Islam will be our undoing, because Islam’s advantage is its ability to proselytize into the void that secularism leaves in its wake.

A strong, expanding religion like Islam can only be met, and subsequently thrown down, by a strong, vibrant religion that exists in opposition to it. Traditionally, this has been Christianity.

And so it must be, again.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Canada’s age of sexual consent is going to be bumped from 14 to 16. I realize that’s not much of a jump, but it does bring Canada in line with the laws of other nations around the world, which is good. If I understand it correctly, Canada had a bit of a reputation as a place where one could go if one’s…uhm…preferences tended toward the younger crowd.

The legislation was brought in by the Conservative government in part to deal with older internet predators who troll the web looking for younger victims.

Canada’s age of consent will now be in line with other countries, such as Britain and Australia, and most American states.

The intent of the new law is not to criminalize teenage sex, but to crackdown on adults who prey on youth, former justice minister Vic Toews said when the bill making the change was introduced.

I keep accumulating reasons to be a) happy with the government, and to b) be happy to be Canadian again. I count this as another entry in both categories.

This one is for any British readers! This is the day to be proud of your country, people — wave the flag, and to hell with anyone who worries that the sight of the red cross will be offensive to some people and unduly remind them of the Crusades! So wave it proud, and wave it high.

Of course: no national holiday is complete without a bunch of progressives attempting to slander the country observing the holiday. I cannot help but thinking that this proposal — a re-drawing of the map of areas of Europe that more or less deletes England entirely, breaking it up into three smaller zones — is a calculated insult.

More absurdity from the wacky world of Islam. Let’s review.

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.

Call by Muslims for the rest of us to do something nonsensical? Check!

Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers.

Useless reiteration, by the reporting media outlet, of a fact that we already know and have heard ad nauseum? Check!

The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.

One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

Bogus facts and outright lies? Check!

He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.

Victim card played? Check!

The underlying belief is that scientific truths were also revealed in the Muslim holy book, and it is the work of scholars to unearth and publicise the textual evidence.

Reporting media outlet treats as credible a stance toward Muslim Scripture that would be derided in same media outlet were the subject some attempt at concordance between Christian Scripture and science? Check!

But the movement is not without its critics, who say that the notion that modern science was revealed in the Koran confuses spiritual truth, which is constant, and empirical truth, which depends on the state of science at any given point in time.

Unusual reasonableness on the part of the reporting media outlet in an effort to allow for the possibility that faith and science can be reconciled? Check!

I am going to have to remember that last sentence, though — despite my facetiousness, there is a goodly deal of truth to the statement. In conceding that, I am not saying that there is necessarily a conflict between spiritual and empirical truths — a truth and another truth cannot contradict each other, after all — but certainly the above is not a stance I am used to seeing in the media, which tends (at least where Christianity is concerned) to stoke the flames of the fallacious notion that a dichotomy exists between science and Religion.

joel writes in with a comment about this article (or, at least, that is the article I presume he is responding to).

As an atheist, I’ve noticed that, yes, Christianity does come under more attack than other Religions (at least in the U.S.)

There’s a couple reasons for that, though:

1. In the U.S., Christianity is the biggest kid on the block. The biggest kid is always the biggest target.
2. Christianity also likes to throw its weight around in Politics. Intentional or not, its the christian worldview that has the strongest influence on our policies. Its actions in that realm make it a target, because its actions affect us all. Hinduism simply doesn’t have that kind of power.
3. Christianity is, as best I can tell, the only proselytizing religion in the US (that we don’t consider a cult). So, even walking down the street, or at our homes, it can intrude. Again making it a target.

You might argue that #1 and #3 are not fair (I think a case can be made on either side), but #2 is a real issue.

-j

In truth, O Reader, I would not argue as joel indicates. None of his points are particularly unfair, but all of them miss the point…so spectacularly, in some cases, that they seem almost specious.

The Biggest Kid?

To be sure, argument #1 is spurious, and meaningless in light of the other two points that joel makes above. Were we discussing, say, why most computer viruses seem to be targeted at Microsoft Windows, it would be a valid argument — Windows has most of the market share, and so is a natural target for people looking to cause a little chaos; were most viruses targeted at Ubuntu, the amount of chaos caused would be minimal indeed. And virus-makers are looking to cause chaos. Were we discussing the dynamics of the schoolyard (a slightly more apt example, although still not accurate enough to suit our needs in this analysis), however, we would observe that very often it is not the biggest kid who is the “biggest” target (biggest, in this latter sense, taken to mean “most often targeted,” essentially).

One tries, honestly, to limit one’s quantity of jokes about American myopia, but in this case a remark along those lines cannot be avoided. It is true that in the U.S., Christianity is the biggest kid on the block — that is safely beyond dispute. But of course, the world is much bigger than just America, and globally the “biggest kid” is probably Islam (in fact, I seem to recall some trumpeting in the media, recently, about an admission by a Vatican official along these very lines).

So really, if the preferential targeting of Christianity by atheist apologetics has anything to do with the biggest kid on the block, then atheist apologists need to give their heads a shake and realize that Islam is the biggest kid (in terms of raw numbers). Yes, this may not be true in any individual Western country, most of which are derived from a Christian heritage. And perhaps that should be telling — in countries which are predominantly Muslim, one is substantially more at risk of losing one’s life for one’s atheism, after all. Perhaps joel can be forgiven for his myopia

Which is all to say nothing at all about the fact the West, by and large, ticks along on reserves of Catholic/Christian moral capital, and that it is this moral capital in Western culture that enabled an atmosphere of open inquiry — which in turn allowed atheism to flourish — to emerge at all.

And finally, as mentioned before, joel’s first argument is invalidated by his other two arguments. That is not to say that the other two arguments do not capture aspects of what Christians in America (and elsewhere in the world) do; it is to say, however, that Christians are hardly the only ones, and it is to say that Christians do not present a sufficient danger in their attempts to justify the level of opposition that atheists bring against them. Islam is every bit as active, and in many cases more insidious, in attempting to work its way into the political fabric of Western nations — even the US — and the implications of its successes in this regard are much more dire than the imagined evils of an imaginary Christian theocracy.

Religiosity exists outside American borders, and yet pretty much everywhere one goes in the world, one can find atheists who are primarily opposed to Christianity. This is even the case in England, in spite of the fact that English Christianity is rather subdued and not particularly involved in the day-to-day politics of the land (despite the fact that Anglicanism is the state religion of Britain; America has no official state religion). By contrast, Islam is surging in Britain, with no-go areas for non-Muslims, cousin marriage, and arranged/forced marriage of schoolgirls becoming more and more commonplace each year.

Throwing its weight around

Argument #2, joel asserts, is a “real issue.” On the face of it, I don’t see what he’s getting at in regard to Christianity. Having just pointed out that Christianity is the “biggest kid” in the American philosophical playground (and, indeed, the “biggest kid” in terms of population — most Americans are Christians of one variety or another) am I right to assume that he is then complaining that Christianity is too involved in the American political scene?

What a strange concept, O Reader: that a nation where a majority of people are Christian would have a political scene in which Christianity is a concept that appears from time to time. How very unheard of! Then again, perhaps I am being sardonic.

One wonders exactly what joel is suggesting here. Is he implying that only persons of a secular bent should be allowed into the American government? Is he implying, perhaps, that persons elected to government office in America should leave their religious convictions at the door (even though, for many religious people, their religion is the first and foremost consideration in their lives)? Is he say that he personally finds it odd/unacceptable that a religious philosophy held by approximately 80% (maybe a little less) of the American population occasionally appears, in mild ways, in the political discource of an elected, supposedly representative government?

Curious.

Additionally, joel gets a bit intellectually dishonest when he attempts to note that other religions don’t have the kind of power that Christians do. He cites, by way of example, Hinduism. And he’s right in a sense: Hindus don’t really have that much power in the American government. But joel is being myopic again — were we to travel to, say, India, we would observe that Hindus have quite a lot of power in government.

Moreover, Islam is making numerous inroads into the political scene in America, including openly violating the concept of separation of church and state that many Americans, secular and religious alike, uphold and value*.

And while the involvement of Islam in American politics has not yet reached an equivalent level to that of Christianity’s involvement, numerical quantity is not the sole consideration (although I realize that for many atheists, quantity — i.e. empirical measure — is all there is to go on). The quality of the interference has to be examined.

Setting aside obvious straw men (i.e. Pat Buchanan, the legacy of Jerry Falwell, and the Westboro nutters), the average Christian in America is, typically, fairly devoted to his/her family and country; most American Christians love America and what it stands for. They might have their reservations about some things (evolution, the military, capitalism) but they will tend, by and large, to abide by American ideals. If they run for election, almost all of them do so not because they desire to impose their Christian values on the rest of the nation (although in most cases, such an imposition wouldn’t hurt America at all), but because they want to serve their country, the same as most secular politicians would.

And yes, the fact that Christians get elected to political office in America does mean that American politics take on a Christian character of sorts. But that is something not only to be expected — that is something to be praised, in a certain sense, because it confirms that the government is at least somewhat “representative” of the people it governs. There shouldn’t be a dichotomy between the ideals of government representatives and the people they represent. And at any rate, the occasional debate about evolution/intelligent design in schools nonwithstanding, the “quality” of Chrisitian involvement in government is benign; they’re not there to see about imposing a theocracy or rounding up and shooting all the homosexuals.

joel’s intellectual dishonesty, then, is his refusal to consider Islam, or even mention it by way of example, and his attempt to sidestep the issue by instead mentioning Hinduism.

The fact of the matter is, Islam is becoming more and more involved in the political scene in many Western nations, including America, and the tone of the political discourse is beyone merely worrisome. When the Archbishop of Canterbury states, bald-facedly, that sharia is unavoidable in England, when a Canadian government agency apparently has ties to Islamist elements in Canadian society, when sharia banking begins to emerge at even mainstream banks, when incidences of violent rape attacks in communities rise in lockstep with an increase in Islamic immigrants living in the same community, and when honour killings happen in places like Lewisville, and atheists are still wasting their breath decrying the subversive Christian element in American politics, I call shennanigans.

(Indeed, the only active theocracies I can think of in the world today are Islamic, and Muslim nations are about the only places in the world I can think of where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death.)

Were atheists even remotely serious about standing up in opposition to the threat that religion poses in their view, they would be all over Islam like a dirt on a mud wrestler. That they are not, with the occasional exception of Christopher Hitchens (not exactly the best or most authorative voice out there) suggests that they are afflicted with either monumental ignorance or willful blindness (or else that they are cowards hiding in fear of a fatwa).

Who proselytizes?

In argument #3, the full magnitude of joel’s intellectual dishonesty is made its most apparent. That is not to deny that Christians do not engage in evangelism. But then, so do atheists. So do Mormons. So do Jehovah’s Witnesseses. joel makes exemption for religions that could be considered “cults,” which is an interesting bit of sleight-of-hand, given that I think the most active proselytizers are said “cults” (i.e. Mormons, Jehovahs, and the like) as opposed to mainstream Christian denominations. joel hasn’t quite said “Excluding Republicans, Democrats are the most hawkish of Americans,” but he has come close to doing so, and his statement is similarly misleading because of it.

And in fact, his statement is false (tautology is a wonderful thing). joel observes that, as far as he can tell, Christianity is “the only proselytizing religion in the US” that isn’t considered a cult. That would probably come as more than a bit of a surprise to the Muslims of America, many of whom engage in far more aggressive proselytism than their Christian counterparts. One cannot fail to note, for example, that Islam is the fastest growing religion among American prisoners; it would be the height of reckless ignorance to assume that similar conversion trends did not exist in the non-incarcerated portion of the American population. Islam is also the fastest-growing religion in Europe.

Within my own lifetime, assuming trends do not shift dramatically, France will become a nation in which Islam is the religion of a majority of the population. joel objects to Christianity being a philosophy present in American politics, because within that governmental realm “its actions affect us all.” Myopic as ever, joel seems to spare no thought at all for how we all may be affected by the prospect of nuclear power France slowly and inexorably becoming the Islamic Republic of France.

Now, perhaps the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have it exactly right — maybe Christianity is the threat after all. If so, I don’t see it. Maybe I’m just blinded by my own stake in the Christian faith. Somehow, though, I very much doubt it. Taking even one example, were I an avant-garde artist presenting my “Piss Kaaba Key” in a public forum, I’d be scared witless for fear of getting the Theo van Gogh treatment. Were I instead the artist presenting “Piss Christ,” I would have no analogous fear, except perhaps the fear that people would exercise in droves their right to not attend my art show.

Any reasonable, rational person should be able to discern where the real problem is to be found. That so many supposed rationalists choose instead to focus on a non-problem is curious, and also telling.

* even I value the concept for its original intent, which was to forbid the state from explicitly establishing any one church as “the official” church of the state (i.e. Anglicanism in Britain). I don’t value the concept for the ways it has been used to muzzle religious expression, however.

What bothers me just as much is the sense of being transported, when I wasn’t looking, into a very bad dream from which there is no waking up.

When exactly did it happen? When did my town hall change from being a friendly, efficient place into a headquarters of fussy political correctness where I feel like an unwanted interloper?

When did the BBC news become a shameless propaganda show, instead of a discreet one?

When did my GP surgery start asking me for my ethnic origin? Worse, when did they start treating parents as guilty suspects if they bring a child into hospital after a fall?

When did it become impossible ever to speak to anyone who will take responsibility for anything?

When did I start getting the feeling, as one of these episodes begins, that there is absolutely no point in complaining or resisting, because if I don’t accept this, sooner or later, ’security’ is going to be called and I will be worse off than I was before.

It was not always like this. I know it wasn’t. I can remember when it wasn’t. What I cannot remember is, at any stage, asking for the changes that have happened, or being asked if I wanted them.

They just happened, and now they’re here.

Canada is not all that far behind Britain in becoming a police state in all ways except for the actual establishment of a secret police. Our human rights commissions already censor opinions held to be “disagreeable” while at the same time serving as a vehicle of agenda and propaganda for subversive interests. Bureaucratic record-keeping is certainly monolithic enough in this country as to make the issue of a person’s ethnic origin a suitable topic for a medical form (when in reality, all that should matter is a) whether one is injured or ill and b) if so, in what way). And the dichotomy that has emerged between parental rights on one hand, and the whims of educators and health facilitators on the other, is well known here. But then, we opened that Pandora’s Box when we started giving fourteen-year old girls the option of getting an abortion, or a supply of condoms, without having to first seek parental consent, didn’t we?

Chesterton observed that if anarchists sought to throw down the small laws, they would be left with big laws instead, a none-too-subtle reminder that when one dismantles the pillars of a functional and free Western government, the result is not a governance-free anarchist paradise, but a dictatorship.

Analogous to Chesterton’s observation is the fact that if human rights commissions would seek to protect, at any cost, the human rights of every petty interest group that dares speak out, they will not be left with a paradise in which every person walks about in an optimal, self-actualized and enlightened appreciation of his or her own rights; they will be left with a place in which no person enjoys any basic rights at all. The police state loometh, in Canada as surely as in Britain.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

One person was arrested in a search of the home of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Later-Day Saints, a group of “breakaway” former Mormons — led by one Warren Jeffs — who practice polygamy. Apparently, there was an investigation underway “related to the marriage of an underage girl.”

Somewhat less reported in the news, of course, are those missing British schoolchildren, a phenomenon that this blogger is almost certain can be found, albeit to a lesser extent, both in Canada and the U.S.

Just to be clear: in parts of the world, thousands of young girls are being effectively sold into arranged marriages at a very young age. No arrests seem to be emerging from what sparse investigation into such practices is being done. And the people behind the disappearing schoolgirls are members of what may now be the most populous religion in the world.

But a rogue group of ex-Mormons numbering only a few hundred are worth a full-on investigation complete with arrests, and all because one underage girl may have been married off?

I’m not trying to excuse what Jeffs et. al. were doing — polygamy disgusts me, as does the idea of underage marriage. And yes, O Reader, I realize that I’m discussing phenomena that have been reported in different nations, and so in a sense am comparing apples to kumquats. That acknowledged, can any of us say that we labour under the delusion that, were a rampant phenomenon of underage arranged marriages being reported in the American Muslim community, similar arrests would be made at the outcome of comprehensive police investigations? Or would police forces and federal agencies back down in the face of another lawsuit and media campaign by CAIR…not unlike how British police have similarly been cowed into looking the other way for fear of being branded as “racist” over across the Pond?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!