timeimmortal

A sobering reflection that one almost has to excerpt in its entirety so as to avoid missing any good point thereof:

It’s [about] real, ordinary Canada as opposed to those who want to reshape this nation in their own image. It’s about people who can say the word “patriotism” without blushing as opposed to those who blush when their grants are cut.

It’s about those who read books because they enjoy them as opposed to those who read books because they think other people don’t read them.

It’s about you who would fight to keep this great nation together as opposed to those such as novelist Margaret Atwood who told electors to vote for Quebec separatists just to stop Stephen Harper from cutting a fraction of the arts funding budget.

It’s about people who bemoan the lack of public childcare as opposed to those who know we already had the best childcare and it’s called parenting.

It’s about those who feel Canada as a home and a heart as opposed to those who think of Canada as a concept and a social experiment. About those who view taxation as a necessary evil to be used to help the most unfortunate as opposed to those who want to use taxes to change the very nature of Canadian society.

It’s about those who see Americans as friendly cousins as opposed to those who see our neighbours as ugly sisters. About those who believe that Canada is public broadcasting, state education and the Charter of Human Rights as opposed to those who see it as pioneers, personal initiative, sacrifice and courage.

About those who want a clean environment for the sake of their children as opposed to those who want a clean environment because they prefer the planet to its inhabitants. About people who were raised in loving families and in turn raise their own well-adjusted kids as opposed to those who think family a place of evil and oppression and would rather watch a subtitled documentary than take their son to a hockey game.

About people who believe in their God and are proud of the fact as opposed to people who buy books about atheism, pretend to read them and are proud of the fact. About people who are religious and have fun-filled lives as opposed to people who detest Religion and have fun abusing those who are religious.

About moms and dads rather than caregivers and nannies, about real communities as opposed to artificial communes, about having a thick skin and a sense of humour as opposed to being constantly oversensitive and complaining about and demanding an apology for any remark that offends your politically correct sensibilities.

About common sense and common decency as opposed to senseless extremism and indecent behaviour. About shedding a quiet tear when a brave fallen soldier returns home as opposed to attending ugly demonstrations and noisily demanding that all Canadian soldiers come home.

About a Canada based firmly on our traditions and values as opposed to a Canada destroyed and then rebuilt on notions that are entirely foreign to our way of life.

A 21 month conditional sentence with primarily house arrest — or dorm arrest, where he can still drink, party and such (unless refraining from any manner of drugs is one of the ‘onerous, numerous conditions’) — is a joke. Especially since they were adults at the time; it was not only rape-without-consent but rape-of-a-child and being-party-to-a-crime the last of which, in the case of murder, automatically increases the severity of the charge, or at least it used to do so.

I just do not get how sparing the victim from testifying — by pleading guilty (there may be some honour there, unless of course it was part of a plea bargain to this ridiculous sentence, then it is simply selfish) — makes the criminals worthy of a lesser sentence. I would say the only time a rapist should get some sort of leniency is if they, shortly after the crime and without broadcasting it and likely getting lawyered up after charges, voluntarily confess of their own accord. For any crime, voluntary confession to police should be the only reason for reduced sentences, other than other cooperation with police to catch a bigger net of criminals — although the benefits should be markedly greater for voluntarism than for cooperation once caught. Not that voluntarily confessing should land one a joke sentence like this one, but if, say, a rapist turns himself in after Church on Sunday for a rape committed early Saturday morning in which the victim can not identify the rapist, perhaps a shorter sentence of 7-10 years in jail as opposed to a 15-20 year jail term would be appropriate.

But bodily mutilation? State-sponsored/mandated bodily alteration permanently changes the criminal so that they can not have a normal life even after a conversion experience to an upstanding, moral life, say by conversion to the one true Religion of Catholicism while in jail. And that is a heavy price to pay for what might be a one time mistake, and then a mistake largely facilitated by current culture where parents know or control or care little about their semi-adult children. More on this later.

As for the true sickos who actually have a deranged psyche, removal of penis and testicles will not necesarily remove the urges and they will do with hands or stubby arms the same violations, and the Church has said that modern societies should not have to use capital punishment, and after a certain point, removing hands an such makes them permanent wards of the state who can not even, say, do prison labour to help pay for their incarceration.

As to parents — I have recently learned that children in a Catholic parish youth group are using hard drugs including meth and some of the students in that high school are prostituting themselves out between end of school and when parents return home. These are underage children who are most likely prostituting themselves out to males over 18 — I will not call them “adults” or “men” as they deserve neither title. Some teachers and the parents must be either oblivious or purposefully not wanting to recognize the emotional, physical and spiritual harm befalling their children and hiding behind ‘mood swings of adolescence’ to sleep at night. Add the scourge of pornography, which has ensnared even many Catholics who desire to be good, and we are in a heap of trouble. I have heard of a co-worker who, while still in high school and/or just graduated (but still under 18), has been stoned to the point of waking up being gang-raped. The depth of this problem is truly terrifying and the piss-poor sentences handed out only serve not to deter further criminal activity.

I have heard there is an old adage that society can only be controlled by cops and/or conscience. But that really boils down to conscience because if the cops have no conscience, they can not make up for the lack of personal conscience whereas strong personal consciences can make up for a dearth of cops. But how are we to instil conscience when certain practices are not to be discussed as they may interfere with particular..cough…Muslim and other primitive tribal practices…cough…cultral practices, all of which are ‘equally valuable’ or some other politically correct bull-skubula. Or when other PC B.S. says we are haters of women when we respect the entire woman, including her fertility? Or when we respect the transcendent tendency of humanity to aspire to something beyond the “four F’s” of feeding, fighting, fleeing and…fertility promotion…and that such aspiration is the human ideal, not the four F’s which makes us little different from animals, neglecting what the Greeks called our rational souls. It is a plague of gnosticism and manichaeism which either deifies or nullifies the body as something to be gloried in or abused (and which the Church is, wrongly, accused of doing with its pronouncements on sex) and as such sacrifices our embodied existence for a disembodied — “as long as we agree to it, it is okay” mentality where the true repercussions of actions are not fully realized or appreciated, to the detriment of our society.

Boy, that was a somewhat disjointed rant.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

A new manual is being released to help security officials in Europe identify signs that Islamic extremism is breeding in a prison, and to help outline what measures can be taken to prevent it.

Look for inmates growing beards, reading religious books and not wanting to share showers with non-Muslims.

That is the advice given by security officials from several European countries in a manual to help prison authorities spot potential terrorists.

The manual, developed by France, Germany and Austria, was released to help prevent prisons from becoming breeding grounds for Muslim extremists.

But it has been slammed by a prison group fearing the manual could stigmatise Muslim inmates.

…

Prisons ‘can be a facilitator and an accelerator’ of radicalisation and inmates are often ’strongly destabilised’ and therefore malleable, said Christophe Chaboud, head of France’s Anti-Terrorist Co-ordination Unit.

‘It is not a question of Religion but of confrontation with the West,’ Chaboud said in a telephone interview.

Islam is the second-largest religion in France and, while there are no official figures available, Muslims make up a large part of the inmate population — the majority in some prisons.

You don’t say! But how can this be? Islam is supposed to be a religion of peace! It’s only liars and Zionist propagandists who describe Islam as a violent, tribal, misogynistic religion bent on stamping out “the infidel.”

Or have I been reading Rehmat too much?

Personally, I think the solution is pretty easy: make it mandatory for prisoners to be clean-shaven. There’s no such thing as a human right to a beard.

The problem with a book like Denis O. Lamoureux’s Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution is that it is proposing something which is at once radical and entirely normal. It proposes that evolution and science can be fully reconciled with Religion, and especially with the Bible. Not only that, it further proposes that science and religion actually work together, in a kind of harmony or companionship, to bring God’s revelation to humanity, though each in different ways. This is not a proposal which many Christians and non-Christians are willing to accept, in part because they are caught up in a false dichotomy that unnecessarily assumes that science — and in particular the theory of evolution — and religion are mortal enemies which must, by definition, contradict each other.

Dr. Lamoureux’s view is not simply a syncretic one, nor is he attempting to simply establish a synthesis between disparate concepts. His conjecture, rather, is that in looking at Scripture and then at science, we are looking at different forms of revelation of the same one God — science and religion, then, are not simply bridged by the idea of Evolutionary Creationism, but treated as a kind of unit whole, each effecting the revelation of the Lord by a different means.

Because this concept is above the grasp and reasoning of so many who are caught up in the unnecessary conflict that infests the origins “debate,” Evolutionary Creation can’t simply start by jumping in head-first into an explanation of its core philosophies and the justifications for them. Instead, Dr. Lamoureux must begin at the very beginning of reasoning itself, by discussing and establishing categories.

In a nutshell, categories are the foundations upon which we base how we look at the world, and how we think about the world. Evolutionary Creation uses the example of how our eyes are programmed to perceive the spectrum of colours in visible light to illustrate this point, noting that our brains are wired to perceive the issues which we face in a similar, ranging manner that is rarely ever “black and white.” Yet at the same time, Dr. Lamoureux notes that many view the origins “debate” in a very “black and white” way. Even referring to it as a “debate” suggests a conflict model that pits a secular and godless science against a Christian, Biblical view of creation. This very limited category set thus forces people to make a choice between science and religion, “faith” and “reason,”
God or the various things which humanity has discovered about the nature of the world and the processes which formed it.

This dichotomy, incidentally, is seen on both sides of the debate, and it’s almost impossible to ferret out who fired the first shots in the war. Atheists who promote the dichotomy present atheism as the bastion of reason and wisdom, and portray Christians as mental dullards and uninformed fundamentalists. Christians who promote the dichotomy denounce evolutionary theory as misguided or, worse, Satanic, and discard the substantial body of evidence in support of an old Earth as “circumstantial” whilst simultaneously clinging to threadbare evidence which purportedly justifies their own positions.

Even worse, both sides turn on like-minded folk who dare to step outside the conflict model. Atheists or skeptics who step outside the model and propose that empiricism and research are not a sufficient basis upon which to base a rejection of the existence of God, or who themselves admit to even weak agnosticism, are derided as being senile or simply in error. Christians who afford even a handful of scientific discoveries are denounced as liberals, heretics, cafeteria Christians, or proto-secularists.

At the same time, however, these two warring sides actually agree on at least one thing: whatever the exact nature of the origins of the world, human Morality and ethics are intimately connected with the view of origins one is informed by. This gives the origins “debate” special relevance, because our beliefs about who we are and where we come from directly influence and inform our believes about how we should relate to one another, and how we should order the societies in which we live. Christianity and secular humanism alike concede this point…and for as wrong as both sides may be about the topic of origins, both sides are at least correct in noting this important connection.

The key contributors to the false dichotomy (Greek: dicha - “in two”, temno - “to cut”) are, in Dr. Lamoureux’s opinion, two related factor. The first is what is that both sides tend to adopt “popular” understandings of terms like “evolution,” “creation,” and “theory.” This logical error is compounded by the second contributing factor: conflation. When a Christian hears the word “evolution,” she immediately associates the term with atheism, with a worldview that postulates a godless, chance-driven reality. When a secularist hears the word “creation,” he immediately associates the term with the (false) notion that the world was formed in six 24-hour days. And whether both sides realize it or not, this immediately prohibits any progress in the dialogue between them; both sides are trapped in their thinking.

So the question must be asked: is their thinking accurate?

Dr. Lamoureux begins his analysis by looking at the popular categories and conflations involved in how both sides view “evolution.” He begins by unpacking the term a bit, and by moving past the conflation: he proposes that the idea of evolution must be re-categorized thusly:

• Teleological: has a plan and a purpose (reflects an intelligent designer)

       ↑
Evolution
       ↓

• Dysteleological: has no plan or purpose (reflects random chance, not design)

The Greek term telos indicates the presence of an end or a goal; dysteleology is a term coined first in German which was intended to refer to the absence of said same. The two terms refer as much to the actual nature of the evolutionary process as they do to the views each of us has concerning it: we either view evolution as a process which was set in motion — and which may be reflective of some influence of — a designer or creator, or we view it as a the result of purposeless, random chance.

It should be noted that the teleological category actually can be broken down into a few different sub-categories, which roughly correspond to the range of religious opinions evident in the world today (theism, deism, paganism, etc.). This is an important point to keep in mind in light of what follows its articulation in the book.

The most powerful argument that Dr. Lamoureux makes in this section is based on a survey done about a decade ago that, taken to its logical conclusion, deals a death blow to the idea many Christians have that scientific researchers are predominantly atheistic and trying to impose a godless worldview upon millions of hapless schoolchildren.

In 1997, Karry Witham and Edward Larson issued a report called “Scientists Are Still Keeping the Faith,” in Nature (a prominent scientific journal). To a large sample group of scientists and other researchers, the following question was posed:

I believe in a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind, i.e. a God to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer. By ‘answer’ I mean more than the subjective, psychological effect of prayer.

40% of those polled expressed belief in God as defined above, 45% expressed that they did not believe in God so defined, and 15% expressed no definite belief.

Let us come back to the teleological sub-categories mentioned above, because something important must be noted about the respondents who answered in the negative to the given question. Deists, pantheists, and other pagans — despite not being atheists — would have been caught up in the negative-responding group, despite the fact that all accept teleology to one degree or another. Deists are, as I understand it, given to believing that God is not intimately involved in the day-to-day function and structure of creation…but still generally accept that He had something to do with it, and that He may have had an eye toward its design. Pagans believe in various divine forces, or pantheons of gods, who exert varying degrees of control over the course and shape of creation. Pantheists believe that creation is itself divine, and thus reflective of a will and a design.

And of course, 15% of the respondends expressed an agnostic view. Here again, categorization is important: agnosticism and dysteleology are not synonymous. As such, an interesting conclusion emerges from the results of this admittedly limited survey: a majority of scientists are probably teleologists, or at least are not dysteleologists.

Which is more than a bit of a shot in the arm to the notion that scientsts are part of some atheistic cabal or conspiracy seeking to undermine the good faith of the world’s youth.

This brings us to the end of the first part of my review of Chapter 1. It should be noted that the above all comes out within the first 7 pages of the book, which, overall, starts slowly and yet covers much ground as it goes. Thus far, Dr. Lamoureux’s presentation is written in an engaging and accessible manner, but readers will nevertheless likely be surprised at the steady stream of information coming at them as they progress up to, and past, even this early point in the book.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which looks at — and debunks — popular notions concerning creation.

…so the question must have been: how can we really ruin the world, for good this time, no takebacks?

Certainly, the general backwardness of Muslim nations, and the fact that almost all of them are Third World tinpot dictatorships or totalitarian theocracies has nothing at all to do with the fact that Islam itself is a violent, tribal, misogynistic Religion which never managed to pull itself out of the Bronze Age, and which has subsisted on the stolen innovations of the the various other Arabic and Near Eastern cultures which it has absorbed, converted, and/or wiped out throughout history.

Nothing. At. All.

And I’m Lutheran^[1].

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

1) it never gets old…

Dear Islam,

If you want to be taken seriously as a world religion, there’s something you have to accept: people will attack you, people will mock you, and people will attempt to undermine you. And if you approach each incident thereof with violence and threats of violence, it will just confirm the suspicion of many in the West that yes, Islam is a violent and disgusting Religion. You’re going to have to learn to accept books like The Jewel of Medina, just as you’re going to have to learn to accept that people will take a long, hard look at your (false!) prophet and his marital relationship with a nine-year old girl, Aisha.

Christians have had to endure this stuff for centuries, and now it’s your turn.

In all seriousness: stuff it.

Imams, stop playing the “nice country you have here…shame if something were to happen to it,” game and tell the violent idiots in your congregations to put the gas and matches away, and to stop chanting about death and beheading at each and every instance of an insult being levelled against Islam, Muhammad, or some other aspect of your strange little cult. Either get your people in line, or expect that sooner or later, the government of the nations that have so graciously agreed to host you and let you build mosques will have to do it for you.

Grow up, in other words, and stop poking. You might find you won’t like what you accidentally awaken.

Regards,
Time Immortal

Update: Welcome, Steynians!