Time Immortal

Predictably, Shaukat Khawja is not pleased about this, and blames it all on “Zionist” media spin.

Like the US — the Zionist-contrlled mass-media in Britain also tells the public that Muslims are becoming a threat to the so-called “Western values”, refuse to integrate with local non-Muslim societies and don’t accept national practices of “liberalism” and “freedom of speech”.

That sounds about right. Shall we review?

First, there’s the issue of no-go areas, communities of predominantly Islamic immigrants into which non-Muslims venture at their own peril (Denmark has them too!). Then there’s the widespread support of things like Sharia law and legal disparity between men and women among younger Muslims in Britain (whose voices will be a part of what shapes what is to come for that country). The incitement to violent murder that is often preached in mosques in the United Kingdom is also concerning, as is the rampant and well-documented misogyny that accompanies Islam — and, in particular, Sharia law — wherever it spreads.

As to freedom of speech? Don’t. Get. Me. Started.

Not to be deterred by anything so inconvenient as the truth, however, Shaukat (a.k.a. Rehmat) continues:

Now, how idiotic these blames are, can be found from a speech given by professor Martin Amis of Manchester University — “Muslims are gaining on us demographically at huge rate. A quarter of humanity now, and by 2025, they will be third. ….Muslim community will has to suffer until it gets its house in order….I don’t hear from moderate Muslims, do you?….Strip searching Muslim people. Discreminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Muslim community and they start getting tough with their children.”

Now, just imagine someone make the same statement with replacing the world Muslim with “Jews” — and find out how much “freedom of speech” exist in UK or the US or in UE countries. Mind you, it was in Europe that Jewish communities were expelled from almost every country — England being on the top of the list — for 350 years!

This is called shooting yourself in the foot, methinks; to at once demand proof that one can’t say unkind things about Jews and then follow it up with the observation that Europe has a massive, lengthy history of anti-Jewish bigotry is a textbook case of a self-defeating statement.

Not that I would expect any less from my good friend in Pickering, Ontario.

Of course, what’s even more amusing is how the quote from Amis and follow-on “thought experiment” actually do nothing to prove “how idiotic these blames” that Shaukat highlights are. The dispute over whether the media in Britain is or is not reluctant to print unkind things about Jews is irrelevant to whether or not the fears of the British populace are warranted or “idiotic.” It may well be that every media outlet in Britain is controlled by the Zionists…but if Muslims in Britain are something worth fearing, then the rest of the British people are still right to fear them, aren’t they?

British folk see Muslims as a growing threat in their midst. Is this really the fault of the distorted lies propagated by the Zionist-controlled media? Could there possibly be a more tangible reason? Could people possibly have a very real, true-to-life reason to be uncomfortable with their new Muslim neighbours?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Especially since they don’t seem to notice the soft, subtle “censorship” (by their definition) of artist-run peer-review grant funding groups:

Independent filmmaker Garth Pritchard is having some fun dreaming up gag titles for his next documentary on Canada’s troops in Afghanistan. So far he’s had to find his own funding, but other Canadian filmmakers making soft porn seem to be getting government grants.

“Maybe if I called my next film Red Light Districts of Kabul or Young Soldiers F-ing, I could get a government grant,” jokes Pritchard, referring to films that received taxpayer funding entitled Red Light Districts of the World, where viewers are treated to the spectacle of prostitutes shooting bananas from between their legs, and Young People Fucking. And while Pritchard chuckles at his own joke, the reality of what he’s saying is not funny.

Arts funding has become a huge federal election issue, particularly in Quebec. Artists and opposition politicians have been attacking Prime Minister for cutting arts and culture funding, despite increases for the major arts agencies.

The artists and the politicians say the Harper government is “censoring artists” by cutting $45 million from some programs. Obviously, not funding something is not censorship. The artist is free to find another donor and create art.

But if cutting off or not providing public funding is their definition of censorship, let’s use it. What none of these artists ever mention is that perhaps the biggest censors of all are the “artists” who dole out taxpayers’ money.

What most Canadians don’t recognize is that many government grant decisions are made by artists who sit on various boards. For instance, in the case of the Canada Council for the Arts, grant decisions are peer-reviewed, which means incestuous relationships often develop between grant clients. One peer doesn’t want to turn down John’s wonky idea because John might be sitting in judgment the next year. So there is a tendency for outsiders like Pritchard who don’t fit the artsy template to get excluded.

This is especially true if Pritchard wants to portray Canadian troops in a positive, or even just in an honest, light. “Art” is a broadly-defined category at the best of times, but the majority of Canadian ‘artists’ seem to accept and promote the funding of only a very narrow range of views. That which doesn’t fit the narrative is not funded.

Now, the denial of funding, as Licia Corbella (the columnist) points out, is not the same thing as censoring. But then, Canadian artists really haven’t the first clue what censorship looks, feels, or tastes like. Few if any of them have had to put up with the same sort of persecution that artists in other countries — Denmark, and various states in the Middle East and Africa — have faced. Few if any of them have lost their lives for producing something “controversial”…mostly because they only attack “safe” targets in the first place (or as others have said: “Rome doesn’t issue fatwas”).

But if Canadian artists — or, at least, the vocal, politically active ones — want to equate “not funding” with “Censorship,” they might do well to look in the mirror.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Apparently, Pope Benedict XVI began a televised reading of all 73 books of the Bible yesterday. Yes, I said “73 books of the Bible” — Protestants who cling to the incomplete canon might do well to tune in to the broadcasts and learn just what they’re missing.

As The Anchoress notes, the Pope is, by taking the Word of God to the airwaves, engaging the Devil on his own turf. This is the sort of battle that needs to take place; may the Holy Spirit guide the wisdom and witness of our most holy Pontiff.

A new documentary is evidently being produced about the human cost of global warming hysteria. The documentary evidently aims to present the issue in the larger historical context of the banning of DDT, and the contribution of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring to that ban, which has cost the lives of millions in Third World nations.

The documentary is evidently called Not Evil, Just Wrong.

Interesting tidbit of Church history: apparently, premillenial theology (very common today in Evangelical Protestantism, and in works of fiction like the Left Behind novels), in addition to being almost universally without merit in the Theology of the early Church, was often closely linked with other, more general perversions of mind, body, and spirit — in this specific case, the lusts and gluttonies of heretics such as Cerinthus and Nepos.

Hells Angels vs. Islamic jihadists in Denmark? That’s the sort of showdown that appears to be shaping up. The Soviet hat tips BCF for the lead on this one. Strange days ahead.

As someone — Rockefeller? — once said: “Can’t they both lose?”

Shaukat Khawja is complaining that the Jooooooooos only allow freedom of the press for themselves. It’s a perennial theme for the perpetually aggrieved blogger who calls himself ‘Rehmat’; the Joooooos are at fault for everything, and are responsible for everybody else’s shortcomings.

Oh, and the Joooooos are also out to denigrate everyone else’s Religion.

And look at this allegation: the Israeli Mossad was actually responsible for the Muhammed cartoons published in Denmark.

Shaukat is also up in arms over the insults directed at Jesus in the recent movie the Da Vinci Code, produced by (the Jew!) Brian Grazer. And while I appreciate Shaukat’s defence of Christ, I might point out that the Koran — which I can only assume Rehmat holds in high regard — does little better than the poor prose of Dan Brown when it comes to giving due glory to Jesus.

After all, the Koran denies Jesus’ divinity and asserts that He did not die upon the Cross. That’s about as insulting to Christian beliefs as anything portrayed in some crappy movie starring Tom Hanks‘ bad haircut.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Apparently, the Alberta Human Rights Commission has no less than fifteen people working on Ezra Levant’s case.

And yet, surprisingly, not one of them realized that Shirlene McGovern — in her questions for Syed Soharwardy (the Calgary imam who filed the human rights complaint against Levant for the latter’s publication of the Muhammed cartoons) — doesn’t even know which cartoons Levant’s magazine, the Western Standard, re-printed, nor does she apparently know what the twelve original cartoons of Muhammad actually are.

No, really.

Here are McGovern’s questions for Soharwardy. There’s a lot of crap in there, and I’ll try to comment on it all later. But focus on question 10:

…[image]…

She talks about the “most offensive” Danish cartoon — the one with “mohammed as animal/pig; sex with animal”.

But no such cartoons were ever published by a Danish newspaper, nor by our magazine. Here are the original 12 cartoons exactly as published in Denmark: we chose eight of those.

What McGovern is referring to are three cartoons fabricated by Danish imams, designed to be as offensive as possible, in order to whip up ignorant Muslim mobs that might not get sufficiently excited about the actual Danish cartoons.

In other words, McGovern was duped by jihadist propaganda. Soharwardy must have smiled like a cat when he heard her regurgitate those lies as if they were truths.

Does anyone else find it alarming that one of the people charged with deciding what is perhaps the most important case of the right to freedom of expression that has ever come up in Alberta is so terrifyingly unfamiliar with even the most basic facts of the case itself?

Samuel Skinner writes in again to follow up on my previous reply to him. It seems that my prediction has come true; between Joel and Sam, it would appear that another atheist season is upon Time Immortal.

Perhaps it’s just my fuzzy memory, but I seem to recall another such season beginning at about this time last year. Weird.

I think I’m going to handle this one in an “interlinear” fashion as well, simply because it wanders between a bunch of topics and concepts; it will be easier to framework a response (and seem more coherent) to handle it paragraph by paragraph.

By “looking up on google”, I was refering to atheists basing Morality on some something other than theistic premises. I didn’t mean to show it was the only way with that comment, just that it occurs.

That’s true to a point, although most such premises are…wanting? Yes, wanting, O Reader. Or, alternatively, they are somewhat hypocritical, as they are little more than an attempt to invoke a very (or very nearly) Christian moral sensibility without invoking the Christian deity. Of course, some sense of telos is still used in secular moral reasoning; absent an appeal to some manner of higher ideal, it is more or less impossible to suggest that there is any sort of concrete moral ideal.

Again, that’s not to say that believers are inherently more moral than atheists, nor is it to say that atheists are inherently immoral; it is simply to remark that we really cannot begin to discuss the idea that morality exists and/or that it has concrete tenets of any sort without first invoking something that atheists, on the surface at least, deny exists: something that transcends the human condition and this empirical realm in which we live.

Most people can agree that it is wrong to rape someone, or that it is wrong to kill someone. Most people can agree that men and women are human persons possessed of equal rights and dignity on the basis of their humanity alone. Behind each such concept is a moral imperative that cannot be justified from within a purely empirical or falsifiable framework, especially the notion that there is an innate dignity and equality that exists between all human beings (since all the evidence suggests that steep inequalities exist in terms of things like physical strength, level of intelligence, pain and temperature tolerance, and so on).

Scratch an atheist’s moral reasoning, I have discovered, and one very quickly finds a very subtle attempt to sneak a transcendental concept into what is ostensibly an argument from cold, concrete empiricism or falsifiability in the best scientific tradition. Because one cannot compose a moral imperative without doing so at some level.

Um… it isn’t straw man or adhominum. You are saying that because of Christians we have all this wondeful things. Implied in that statement is that noone else would have been capable of doing such deeds.

Firstly, it was a straw-man argument that was previously made, O Reader; Sam responded to my suggestion of society’s reliance on Christian moral capital by dismantling the assertion that theists are more moral than atheists. Since I made no such claim in my original article, Sam’s invocation of that claim is an almost textbook example of a straw man argument — he regards my point as having been refuted when in fact all he has done is refuted a point I did not make in the first place.

Intellectual dishonesty? Perhaps. The charitable assumption would be carelessness, of course.

At any rate, Sam attempts to justify himself above, though not to great effect; my statement comes with no attached implication that “noone else would have been capable” of establishing Western society with the moral foundation and legal principles that it has. I’m fully willing to grant the possibility that another philosophical system, apart from Christianity, could have furnished a moral society. And indeed, there are other philosophies in the world.

Of course, in looking at different societies that have emerged around the world, I also tend to look on my above statement in the same light as Churchill looked upon democracy: Christianity may not have been the only system that could have given the West its moral and legal foundation, and it may not have been the best system upon which to base that moral and legal foundation; it is better than all the others that have been tried.

We can look at the Islamic world and observe that in Islam there is not a great lot of evidence that the Muslim religion would have furnished the West with the same concepts of equality and human dignity. Much the same can be said for Hinduism (the most salient example of which is India, which still struggles with the concept of a caste system). The failures of various flavours of animism are made evident in looking at Africa, and even atheism has not had a good go of things when it has been made the official state “religious” stance — the most morally depraved regimes in human history (i.e. Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China) were very ardently atheistic.

An argument could be made in favour of Buddhism, except that Buddhism doesn’t really proseltyize and so never reached the West during its founding. And even then, those nations which comprise Buddhist majorities have either not done well, or have done well in part thanks to Western intervention.

In other words, when one takes as an example the rest of the world and the societies that have sprung up around every other flavour of philosophical conjecture, one is left with the distinct impression that while it is certainly possible that Christianity is not the only religion which might have furnished the West with its moral foundation, it is rather improbable that another religion, or any kind of secularism, would have done the job.

And like as not, the way history unfolded was that it was Christianity which formed the moral and philosophical foundation of the West, and it is Christianity’s influence which can be detected still in bills of rights and codes of law in most Western nations. That is not to say these nations are inherently “Christian,” nor is it in any way an attempt to imply, again, that Christians are the more moral — it is simply an observation of an historical reality. Christian principles built up most Western nations, and Christian soldiers fought and died to preserve them against outside aggressors (such as the Moors) during those key, formative centuries.

People aren’t inherently moral- psychopaths are a good example of those without “morality written upon their heart. In addition people have “written upon their heart” deeply immoral instinctions like tribalism.

I make two observations about Sam’s argument here.

Firstly, if one wants to refute the idea that not all people are inherently moral, one could do better than basing one’s objection on persons with some manner of disorder. I could, for example, assert that people are inherently possessed of a working pair of lungs; arguing that some people have asthma does not actually disprove the statement, because asthma is a disorder, a deviation from the norm. And I am commenting on the norm. That psychopaths act immorally is regrettable and unfortunate, yes, but it does not mean that the in the normative sense, human beings do not have an innate moral sensibility etched into the fabric of their being. It just means that they are either a) ignoring it, or b) not perceiving it.

Secondly, I observe that if what Sam says is true, then Sam has just undermined the notion that any sort of humanistic morality can be composed; that is, he has argued that the best moral code that secularism could hope to promulgate is a sort of neutral amorality. This would seem to argue against his assertions, and mine, that theists are not the only ones who can be moral.

Now, the remark about tribalism is interesting, O Reader, and Sam posits that the instinct towards it is a) immoral and b) also written on the human heart. Tribalism certainly has its bad points, although to be fair it is like any other human instinct: the morality or immorality of it is dependent on what we do with it, as much as is the case with…say…the human sexual instinct.

Tribalism can lead to xenophobia and racism, it is true, just as the human sexual instinct can, if improperly exercised, result in things like rape. However, human beings are social creatures; we tend to fare poorly when we “go it alone.” The tribal instinct bonds us to other members of a “group” (whether of ethnic or other derivation) even when our relationships with other group members are strained.

Perhaps Sam does not believe in free will, and so does not make the connection between instinct and intentionality; I do not know. If, however, he does believe in free will, I am surprised that he has missed this key point. And if he does not believe in free will, then I am surprised that he feels the need to continue to argue the point with me, since the both of us are deterministically locked in to our respective philosophies, and it is thus a waste of oxygen to even engage in a debate about them.

Although I suppose it could be argued, in that case, that he can’t help himself.

You seem to forget that we didn’t have much of a moral progress until after the 17th century. Change was little- serfdom, monarchy and a persons value based on blood were the rule for the day.

Sam is clinging here to a rather antiquated view of history. And no, O Reader, your good Author is not denying that things like kings and peasants did not exist. But Sam’s covert invocation of the concept of the Dark Ages is rather suspect, since for the last 70 years or so most historians have disputed that such an era even existed.

And in plain point of fact, the statement is false: a very concrete moral progress can be observed as one follows the historical evolution of the doctrine of the Church, which is documented back to the very early days of the Christian community in Europe and the Mediterranean area — that same doctrine would not be without an application in daily life. Codes of law and other derivations of moral systems have existed throughout history, and have undergone gradual changes as the moral awareness of human beings has expanded and been tempered.

The “moral capital” that you term didn’t occur due to the Greeks or 2000 years of Christian history. The increase in caring about human rights and civil liberties- not to mention the inherent worth of human beings- had to wait until the 19th century. That is where Western Civilizations moral capital comes from. You can point to philosophers from centuries past, but they had NO EFFECT!

Sam’s assertion, while interesting, would probably come as news to the people who drafted the Magna Carta (Christians, for the most part), as well as to William Wilberforce, the British Christian who led the charge to disband slavery back in the 18th century.

Right and wrong aren’t entirely inherent in people. Feral children don’t have it for starters. You are forming observations of reality based on your philosophy, not the other way around.

Much as with Sam’s example of psychopaths, O Reader, feral children can be considered an exception apart from the rule; after all, humanity evolved in conditions not unlike those that feral children subsist in (indeed, early humans may even have had a rougher go of it, at least initially), and yet morality was able to flourish within each tribe (tribes often went to war with each other, of course). And at some point, that morality was able to expand to include other tribes as well (we know this because of the emergence of trade between groups).

in a couple of paragraphs, Sam will give examples of other early civilizations, some of them being “primitive” tribes, who likewise established moral imperatives. That he does not see this as further evidence of the intrinsic, nature of said imperatives is — to your good Author, at least — both tragic and amusing. But then, one is used to atheists abandoning logic and reason when the discussion turns to religion.

The reason people don’t practice “love everyone” is the reason the SHakers don’t exist. You are asking why people don’t attempt to live up to an impossible standard and them blaming them for failing. By impossible, I don’t mean people can’t achieve it- I mean it won’t work in the real world. Loving everyone leaves you open to those callus enough to us it against you.

Sam demonstrates his ignorance of history; the Shakers died out because they were one of the few Christian groups that did not believe in proselytism, and also practiced strict celibacy. When, as a group, you’re not out winning new converts and not giving birth to new members, you really can’t be expected to last forever, even if the initial response to your emergence is positive.

I find it hard to believe that Sam was unaware of Shaker doctrine regarding celibacy and conversion, however; it seems more likely that his statement above is a deliberate distortion of the truth in order to make a a point that is, unfortunately, only too easily disposed of.

Chesterton once observed that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried.” I do believe that Sam has given us a most poignant example of this phenomenon.

Sam very correctly bemoans the fact that the world we live in is, for the most part, an uncharitable place, and harsh. What is unfortunate is that Sam’s proposed method of dealing with this (that is, refusing to love everyone — i.e. actively hating enemies) only serves to perpetuate the lack of charity and incredible harshness at work in the world today. In essence, Sam is saying, in one breath, that the world has no love in it, and in the next breath he is arguing that we should go on not loving, for this is the best response to our loveless world.

Do try not to get whiplash, O Reader.

What is truly unfortunate is that the standard being proposed — “love your enemies” — while difficult, is not impossible. Its primary form is forgiveness, and to understand that even those who persecute and hurt us are, nonetheless, human beings with a dignity equal to our own. And we must respect that, even if they do not; to do otherwise is simply to sink to the depths they have let themselves sink to, and to perpetuate hatred.

“Our faith binds us to extend forgiveness to them. And the fact they are impenitent does not give us license to hold on to bitterness toward them. The command is absolute: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those (everybody, not just the people who have satisfied us emotionally by a serious act of contrition) who trespass against us.