timeimmortal

Deborah Gyapong has an excellent report published in the latest edition of the Western Catholic Reporter concerning, of course, Canada’s human rights commissions, this time in light of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech to the UN.

Pope Benedict’s speech to the United Nations last month serves as a reminder to Canada that human rights discourse stems from a world view based on universal truths and an objective notion of right and wrong.

“Either we recover some of these assumptions and make a serious course correction,” McGill University professor Douglas Farrow said, “or we begin to encounter quite rapidly the consequences.”

Farrow sees Canada’s human rights commissions as a sign the country is in a transitional phase, because increasingly the Canadians are seeing human rights as what we say they are.

“Thus laws can be written concerning human rights that have nothing to do with universal standards.”

…

Increasingly, various individuals and groups are using human rights commissions to “generate traction” for that group’s particular construct of rights, he said. This method has often been used to suppress religious freedom, especially that of Christians.

Farrow said the real basis for human rights springs from a world view like that the pope outlined in his speech - a theistic world view that sees a benevolent Creator and human beings made in God’s image, with a capacity to distinguish between good and evil.

The pope exhorted the world body to return to its founding principles as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

The declaration is based on “the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations,” Benedict told the UN.

Human rights should mean the fundamental freedoms to which all human beings are entitled, exercised within a framework of obligations and responsibilities, the burden of which all human beings must bear. The notion of human rights, however, has been abgorated and, I would say, abducted by those whose view of rights is that they are a series of entitlements which are accompanied by no reciprocal responsibility whatsoever. Whereas there should be a natural “give and take,” the view of the HRCs and their “clients” increasingly is that rights is all “take” with no “give” reciprocal to it.

To call that immoral, to call it unethical, and to call it a violation of natural law would at once be accurate and an understatement.

I’m no fan of the UN, as the regular Reader will know, but at least the UDHR recognizes that the right to freedom of expression is one of the bedrock principles of human freedom. Yes, there are responsibilities that go along with that right, and yes we do have some legal protections in place in Canada to make sure that freedom of expression does not cross the line to incitement to violence.

But in regard to freedom of expression, it is worth noting two things:

1. it is nowhere written that, included among the responsibilities that accompany the right to freely express one’s opinion, we have a responsibility to avoid hurting people’s feelings or offending people’s sensibilities. Social convention encourages us to be polite even when expressing disagreement, but some ideas cannot easily be expressed in a manner that pays good observance to social convention.
2. it is nowhere written that any of us has the right to not be offended, nor is it anywhere written that any of us has the right to not have our beliefs and views challenged

Perhaps the word “yet” should affixed to the end of both of those points; I don’t know.

The plain fact of the matter is that, through the existence and operation of human rights commissions, specifically in regard to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, Canada is going far beyond where it needs to go in order to ensure that so-called “reasonable limits” on freedom of expression exist. There is only one real “reasonable” limit on freedom of expression anyhow, and that is making incitement illegal. Limiting freedom of expression because some things are e.g. hurtful or offensive to others is not a “reasonable” limitation at all — such limitation is, in fact, the antithesis of freedom of expression: it is Censorship.

And as such, it has no business in Canada.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

From the text of a speech Pope Benedict XVI delivered at Nationals Park Stadium:

In today’s Gospel, the Risen Lord bestows the gift of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and grants them the authority to forgive sins. Through the surpassing power of Christ’s grace, entrusted to frail human ministers, the Church is constantly reborn and each of us is given the hope of a new beginning.

Let us trust in the Spirit’s power to inspire conversion, to heal every wound, to overcome every division, and to inspire new life and freedom.

How much we need these gifts! And how close at hand they are, particularly in the Sacrament of Penance!

The liberating power of this Sacrament, in which our honest Confession of sin is met by God’s merciful word of pardon and peace, needs to be rediscovered and reappropriated by every Catholic. To a great extent, the renewal of the Church in America and throughout the world depends on the renewal of the practice of Penance and the growth in holiness which that Sacrament both inspires and accomplishes.

“In hope we were saved!” (Rom 8: 24). As the Church in the United States gives thanks for the blessings of the past 200 years, I invite you, your families, and every parish and religious community, to trust in the power of grace to create a future of promise for God’s people in this Country.

I ask you, in the Lord Jesus, to set aside all division and to work with joy to prepare a way for him, in fidelity to his word and in constant conversion to his will.

Above all, I urge you to continue to be a leaven of evangelical hope in American society, striving to bring the light and truth of the Gospel to the task of building an ever more just and free world for generations yet to come.

Those who have hope must live different lives! (cf. Spe Salvi, n. 2). By your prayers, by the witness of your faith, by the fruitfulness of your charity, may you point the way towards that vast horizon of hope which God is even now opening up to his Church, and indeed, to all humanity: the vision of a world reconciled and renewed in Christ Jesus, our Savior. To him be all honor and glory, now and forever. Amen!

Just so. One consistent theme in Benedict’s papacy has been the ideal of hope — not the vacuous, vain “hope” that Barrack Hussein Obama seems to be promising in his campaigning in the presidential primary, but real hope that not only desires an end which is good, but also looks to an end that will be fulfilled and realized.

How consistently impressive this Pope is, and how often he says exactly what needs to be said at exactly the right time! What a magnificent blessing upon the Church.

Interesting compare and contrast — while Pope Benedict XVI made a point of visiting a Jewish synagogue to bring a message of “Shalom,” former U.S. president Jimmy Carter met with the leader of Hamas, as well as several other Islamic terror group leaders.

Who, one wonders, really cares for the welfare — physical and spiritual — of the Jews?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

You know, I am constantly amused by the way that atheists just seem to land on my doorstep. I realize that I tend to be pretty vocal in my criticisms of that particular philosophical conjecture/quasi-religion, but nevertheless I am still amused and the intermittent train of individuals who feel the need to stop in and say something.

I mean, really: if I am just a deluded theist, why not leave me to my delusions? Of what profit is it to debate with me, when the subject of debate is something that any atheist will state doesn’t even exist (i.e. a deity)? Why do atheists waste so much breath on the denial of this God in whom they most certainly do not believe, and whose existence they very readily deny. Why deny it at all? If, as Joel asserts, religious folks are akin to schizophrenics claiming that the dogs are talking to them, why bother to tell us that the dog’s voice isn’t real? Arguably, we can’t help it (being deluded) and probably won’t listen anyhow (being mentally ill).

For whatever reason, though, the poor dears feel the need to comment. Providing illustration to this observation, Nicholas had something else he wanted to add regarding my last response to him.

Let’s keep it simple: the old technology of signposts. We come to a fork in the road. One way leads to Edmonton, the other to Calgary. The signpost says right for Calgary. (And let’s also suppose that no local yobs are in the habit of turning signposts round.) Is it right for Calgary because the signpost says so? Or does the signpost point right because that’s the way to Calgary?

That, of course, is what Plato was getting at in your least favourite of the dialogues, Euthyphro. Is (for example) feeding the hungry good only because one or more gods are alleged to have said so, or are there reasons why feeding the hungry is good? If there are reasons, then we don’t need any gods as a basis for our moral choices. Note that this argument says nothing about the existence of one or many gods. It just says that the alleged guidance of one or more gods cannot be a moral basis for moral choices.

Moreover, the god YHWH was, in my opinion, according to the alleged records of its moral guidance, frequently grossly immoral. And many of the recorded sayings of Jesus are, in my opinion, also misleading moral guidance. Joseph Hoffman, for example, puts all that much better than I can. See http://www.spinozaslens.com/libet/articles/hoffmann_lettinggoofjesus.htm.

Nicholas demonstrates a very careless inattention, given his invocation of the tired Euthyphro argument. It was a good argument back in its day, when the dominant religion of the day was polytheistic and the notion of the love of the gods for what is “moral” was substantially more subjective given that different gods in the Greek Pantheon loved different things, often in ways which were contradictory. Euthyphro is more or less irrelevant in a monotheistic framework in which the internal contradictions of the Pantheon, on which the dilemma is so focused and dependent, simply do not exist.

Moreover, Nicholas is careless, O Reader, because he evidently didn’t bother to check and see if I’d had anything to say about Euthyphro buried in the archives. As it turns out, I’ve had a fair bit to say about the subject (see here and here, especially — moreover, see this and this by author Theodore Beale), and can confidently say that I’m not particularly worried at its implications to both my faith and my worldview.

The central question of the Euthyphro dilemma is, of course, Morality: is X moral because the gods love/command it, or to the gods love/command X because it is moral? Socrates had a field day with this. And to be fair, it kind of works within the context of the Pantheon (although, as Theodore Beale demonstrates at the above links, it can also be assailed and discredited purely from within that context), given that someone like Hera would be apt to love — and view as moral — different things than someone like Hades would. That’s fine.

Within the Christian context, however, the solution to the dilemma is a bit simpler: “yes.” Is something moral because God loves/commands it? Certainly. Does God love/command something because it is moral? Definitely. This works, principally, because God is the creator of all things (unlike, if memory serves, the various members of the Pantheon) — as the sole author of the whole of the Universe, God has created morality itself, and separated what is moral from what is not. This is both built into the fabric of creation and recorded as instructions, because humanity — empowered with free will — has need of both formal and natural revelation in coming to terms with, and in fostering its understanding of, God’s plan. That is why when we are taught, in the Bible, that marriage is the moral context for the use of the gift of sexuality, natural law and evidence from the world bear that conclusion out. There is a unity between what is taught and what is seen. God has both called us to moral living and made all the Universe in such a way that the living which He calls us to is moral.

To answer Nicholas more directly, however:

• Calgary is to the right.
• It is good to feed the hungry.

I trust the Reader notes what is going on? Nicholas is trying to sidetrack the discussion with dodges and pseudo-justifications, and in fact these are irrelevant. It is good to feed the hungry, plain and simple. Yes, Jesus commanded it, and obviously He did so because it was good. But equally, God (one in being with Christ in the Trinity) made humanity to be a social animal that values community and the well-being of members of the community; it is within our nature to care about the well-being of others. And so, both from within and without, what is moral is to feed the hungry.

As to the morality of God, I am not going to engage Nicholas in any substantive fashion, because we will end up talking past each other. I will agree that in the Old Testament there are a lot of times where we — merely human — might look askance at the recorded acts and commands of God and wonder at their correctness. Equally, however, we must remember that God does not see things as we do, and that if there is any truth to the “alleged records of its moral guidance” then there is also no chance at all that we mere humans will have any hope of comprehending the ways and means of the Almighty. Personally, I’m thankful for that, O Reader. For if God saw humanity as we humans tend to see it, I submit that He’d send us all into the pit of Hell with nary a second thought.

God is love, as Pope Benedict XVI recently reminded us in his encyclical Deus caritas est. And that is the first category we must employ when looking at the actions of God in Scripture. We may not be able to understand a particular action as one of love, of course, but whose shortcoming is that? God’s? Or ours?

Nicholas is, of course, welcome to dismiss as questionable the moral teachings of Jesus. Curiously, though, he simply states this as a matter of fact, providing no examples. I suspect that is because it is hard to argue that there exists any superior moral standpoint to “love your enemies.”

Finally, while the Hoffman article was interesting, it was also uncompelling (as, I have found, are most things that argue from the perspective of Jesus not being a historical figure). The fact that people doubt that Jesus was real doesn’t come as any surprise to me, given that a quarter of Britons think Churchill was a myth. I’d be willing to bet that over on this side of the Pond, more than a few people share that same thinking. And that should be instructive to us: large swathes of our society have relegated to the category of mythical a man whose accomplishments and shortcomings are well-documented, and who walked this Earth a mere sixty or so years ago. That people are weak-minded enough to similarly doubt the factual existence of historical figures that lived a thousand years ago, or two thousand, comes as no surprise, and is in fact to be expected.

Most of the media coverage of the Pope’s visit to the U.S. seems to focus on his addressing the sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Church. And I for one am not going to complain that Pope Benedict XVI has chosen to address this issue as thoroughly as he has — it needed to be done, and Benedict himself is a great person to have in charge of handling the situation.

The folks at GetReligion, however, point out that the Pope also took time to speak out against the dangers of secularism and relativism — this, it seems, has been woefully underreported.

Pope Benedict XVI visited the White House on Wednesday, his 81st birthday, and praised America as a nation where strong religious belief can coexist with secular society.

But he later warned, in a speech to American bishops, of the “subtle influence of secularism” that can co-opt religious people and lead even Catholics to accept abortion, divorce and co-habitation outside of marriage.

“Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs?” he asked in a lengthy address to the bishops. “Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?”

“Any tendency to treat Religion as a private matter must be resisted,” he said.

What’s interesting is that the Pope approaches the issue from two directions; he confronts secularism directly and opposes it directly, but he also confronts and opposes the creeping influence of secularism — including the spread of moral relativism — that afflicts members of the body of the Church. He reminds us all that if one yokes oneself to the Catholic Church, one necessarily accepts Catholic teaching in matters pertaining to, among many other things, sex, marriage and abortion. And he then follows that up with an admonishment to the non-religious: religion cannot kept out of view.

I’ve always been offended by those who insist that religion is merely a private matter, because…well…because it isn’t. After all, if there is any truth to the religion I am a member of (Catholicism, natch), then what is at stake is not merely some temporary thing, but an immortal soul that resides within my being. If in fact we Catholics have it right, then it can only follow that the most important thing in our lives, above all other considerations (including family and friends, jobs and leisure activities) is our faith.

Simply put, we can no more be expected to set that aside than we can be expected to set aside our skin colour, because our religion is even more important than the biological realities at work in our bodies. Especially for Catholics — who experience Christ both directly, in the Eucharist, and in the context of community — religion cannot be relegated to the realm of “the private.”

And to suggest that it should be thusly relegated is laughable.

http://usccb.wordpress.com/

That one’s going in the “morning reads” bookmark list!

Pope Benedict XVI will pray, at Ground Zero in New York, for the redemption of the Islamic terrorists who felled the Twin Towers, and will call on all who follow the ways of Islamist terror to convert to Christianity, abandoning their god of hatred and rage for the one true God of love and understanding.

Calls for his head on a platter will likely follow in lockstep with his praying thusly. But he’s saying what needs to be said, and I for one think it is long past time that Catholicism, globally, stopped taking a conciliatory tone where radical Islam is concerned.

It’s rather funny, you know? Historically, it was up to soldiers of the Church to fight and die on the battlefield in order to clean up the messes made by Islam’s conquests. In the modern era, it seems to be falling to Catholics to fight on the rhetorical battlefield against new advances, in that arena, by the same old foe.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Kathy finds a gooder — a Muslim (presumably Canadian?) blog complaining thusly:

In order to understand why Canada’s HRC has no ears for Canada’s largest minority, Muslims, because HRC was brain-child of a Jewish lawyer, Abe Borovoy - and has a history of Zionist-Jewish domination.

Okay, let’s look past the atricious spelling and poor grammar. After all, the guy describes himself as an industrial/power-generation engineer. And as we all know, engineers aren’t usually gifted with eloquent use of the English language, especially in print.

(Note: that statement is sardonic; my writing is just fine, thank you very much, and I’m an engineer as well)

Let’s look at the content of his statement, shall we? Muslims, he asserts, are unable to have their complaints heard by the human rights commissions in Canada, because the HRCs — found by a Jewish lawyer — “has no ears for…Muslims.” This explains why the Jew Mark Steyn and the Jewish newsmagazine Maclean’s is currently taking noted Muslim scholar Mohamed Elmasry and four Muslim Osgoode Hall law students to the Canadian Human Rights Commission (and the , and the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal) for their refusal to allow Steyn & Maclean’s to publish a rebuttal to a written piece by Elmasry that the plaintiffs are calling “anti-Jewish.”

Oh, wait, sorry, I turned on the sardonic filter again. Let’s reiterate!

Muslim scholar and terrorist supporter Mohamed Elmasry is the one taking (the non-Jewish) Mark Steyn and (the not particularly Jewish at all, really) Maclean’s magazine to the CHRC for their refusal to allow Elmasry and others to publish a rebuttal to a Mark Steyn piece that appeared in Maclean’s discussing the prospect of looming global Islamification, which Elmasry and the four Muslim Osgoode Hall law students that he uses as sock puppets assert was “anti-Muslim.”

Yes, Canada’s HRC has no ears for Canada’s Muslims — that’s why the most high profile case in front of the CHRC has a Muslim plaintiff!

Also, what is it with Muslims and the tendency to jump, almost instantly, to the belief that everything is a conspiracy by the Jews?

Finally, the Borovoy behind the formation of the HRCs was Alan Borovoy, whose first name is Alfred. I don’t know where our blogging industrial/power-generation engineer gets the name Abe from…maybe he just needed a Jewish-sounding name and went for the first one he could think of?

Update: Welcome, Steynians and 5FoF readers! To answer Kathy’s question more directly, I don’t know if it’s something about engineering as a discipline, or if it has more to do with the sort of person who is attracted to the discipline as a whole. To describe most of my male classmates as social misfits (or, in some cases, nearly autistic) would be a very charitable understatement. Most of the women, for some strange reason, were normal enough.

Update II - The Quickening: Mark Steyn points out that the crazy only gets better from the already auspicious start above — was the good Reader aware that Pope Benedict XVI is a Zionist plant in the Catholic hierarchy?

Jonah comments on a phenomenon that is getting a bit on the old side by now — the “Darwin Fish“. You know, that “clever” little modification of the classic “Jesus Fish” that you see tacked onto the bumpers of some cars, that has taken the classic fish shape and added legs to it, with either “Darwin” or “Evolve” replacing the traditional texts one finds printed in the “Jesus Fish”?

It’s one of those things that I think was meant, by whoever came up with it, to be a witty little statement against religious faith. Of course, instead of being witty, it typically comes off as petty, especially when paired (as Jonah notes that it so often is) with some sort of bumper sticker preaching “tolerance.”

Not that one ever expects truly rational thinking from secular folk. It’s nice to find, when it happens, though. But the “Darwin Fish” isn’t an example thereof.

Update: as a bonus, Michael Coren discusses that other great secular bigotry, tolerance, frameworking the discussion in the story of Magdi Allam, the Italian journalist welcomed this Easter into the Church by none other than Pope Benedict XVI himself. Allam’s conversion from Islam has been treated as controversial in the media, and has been condemned as a move calculated to inflame Christian/Muslim tensions.

Aref Ali Nayed, one of a group of 200 Muslim scholars who claim to be intent on establishing a new, open relationship with Christianity, condemned the Pope’s behaviour as “a triumphalist tool for scoring points.” The group in question tends to say very little about, for example, suicide bombings, forced conversion of Christians to Islam in Sudan or Turkey’s closing of a Catholic seminary. But is extremely upset that the Pope has behaved as, well, the Pope.

It’s a spurious, disingenuous critique. Theological dialogue may have been a Muslim tendency 800 years ago but nobody seriously believes that religious pluralism is a regarded concept in contemporary Islam. The denial and double-talk is sickening. Allam had been under police protection long before his conversion because of his staunch critique of violent Islamic fundamentalism. Death threats have increased since his embrace of Christianity and all that allegedly moderate Muslims are saying is that if there is going to be a conversion, for goodness sake keep it quiet.

But why? This is not about changing a shirt but transforming a life. According to Christian belief, Magdi Allam has begun a journey that will lead to eternal life. He has found not interesting opinion but absolute truth. Jesus didn’t say “I may be” but “I am” The Way. The only way. The Catholic Church is far more accepting than many Protestants in the way it views the salvational possibilities of non-Catholic goodness; but it still teaches that the only guaranteed way of meeting God is through the Sacramental structure of a church founded by Christ.

This notion of exclusive truth, however, is not just a problem for Muslims but for secularists as well, what with their fetish for ostensible tolerance. Modern liberalism has not merely abandoned certain commandments but replaced those it has expunged with a set of its own. The most important of which is toleration. I tolerate therefore I am. It’s nonsense of course, in that it is self-contradictory by nature — the tolerant cannot tolerate intolerance and are thus no longer tolerant — but it’s also a grand, great lie. Human rights commissions, student unions and leftist activists remind us every day of the authentic meaning of genuine intolerance.

Yet it still plays to the core of secular thinking. The standard argument, taught in universities and passively accepted in popular dialogue, is that because religion believes that it has the truth it is not broad-minded and broad-mindedness is an indication of sophistication and urbanity.

Magdi Allam said yes this Easter. Yes to a truth and no to its rivals. No to Islam, no to atheism. Which has made many Muslims and just as many of their relativist, secular allies extremely angry. An Easter present slightly more important than a chocolate egg or even a teaching course on why nothing really matters.

Chesterton defined bigotry as the inability to form a rational conception of an alternative to a proposition. To be fair, that definition allows the label of “bigot” to be applied to many a believer…but it can also be applied to many, many more on the secular/atheist side of the equation; only genuine agnostics could be considered exempt.

As a person of faith and a committed Catholic, I can nevertheless admit that I may be incorrect in my faith. I nevertheless choose to practice it, in the expectation that I am not wrong…but, certainly, I might just be. I can, to wit, conceive the alternative to the proposition I make by saying that I am a believer, a person of faith.

I’ve yet to met a self-declared atheist who can admit an ability to understand that s/he might likewise be incorrect. At best, one can expect to be told that is irrelevant and also a poor evangelical tool. Of course, the initial question — that is, the ability to rationally conveive the alternative to the atheistic proposition — did not concern Pascal’s musings at all, and the rejection itself (seen, for example, in the Rational Response Squad’s FAQ section) is evidence of the bigotry of the atheist in question.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers! If you enjoyed this article, you may also be interested in some more recent discussions I am having with a pair of atheists named Joel and Sam!

It’s the last country on Earth that bans churches within its borders.

The Vatican is in negotiations with Saudi Arabia to open the first Catholic church in the kingdom.

Archbishop Mounged El-Hachem, the papal envoy to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates said talks had started a few weeks ago, in the wake of King Abdullah’s visit to [Pope Benedict XVI] last November.

Currently, all Saudi citizens are required by law to be Muslim, and the Mutaween, or religious police, strictly prohibits the public practice of non-Muslim religions.

The last Christian priest was expelled from the kingdom in 1985.

However, the Vatican?s relationship with the Muslim world is improving rapidly, and Qatar opened its first Catholic church on Sunday.

Mgr El-Hachem said a church in Saudi Arabia would be an important sign of ‘reciprocity’ between the faiths.

I find I cannot help but be a bit pessmistic about the prospects of these talks amounting to anything — the Saudi (Wahabbist) strain of Islam is perhaps the most bigoted and narrow-minded of all the various iterations of the religion of the false prophet that can be found in the world. Still, it would be an incredible thing to be able to return the light of the Lord to the darkness of the country that contains within it both Mecca and Medina. Pray for this event to transpire, O Reader, and call upon the intercession of every saint.