timeimmortal

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!

My thoughts and prayers go out this day to the victims of the terrorist attacks in London — I pray that God’s merciful salvation will see the many dead received into His arms, and that the Holy Spirit will guide and aid the healing of the wounded.

In the aftermath of these terrorist attacks, there will probably be a lot of commentary (again and again, flogging the dead horse again…) about the “root causes” of Terrorism, and I think that most of this commentary will eventually devolve into scathing condemnations of three things:

a) George Bush
b) The “Zionist” entity and Israel
c) the “quagmire” in Iraq

And none of it will even come close to the truth.

The root cause of terror, this terror, isn’t a desire to promote a political cause, nor is it a method of protest against oppression. Not in the case of al-Qaeda. Their “root cause” is much simpler than economic disenfranchisement or neo-Marxist “liberation”. They seek to kill the infidel…which would be us. Mark Steyn weighs in with a timely quote from a couple years back, when some French ships were the target of terror attacks. It appears the terrorists were hoping to take out an American ship, but the French boats worked too…they were all infidels. Here’s the relevant excerpt, for people too lazy to click on the link:

…

On which subject, the Independent’s Robert Fisk thinks the Aussies were targeted for a more specific reason—blowback for being too cosy with the Great Satan: “The French have already paid a price for their initial support for Mr Bush. The killing of 11 French submarine technicians in Karachi has been followed by the suicide attack on the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen. Now, it seems, it is the turn of Australia….” And don’t worry, there are plenty of others who’ll be getting theirs any day now. Just in case al-Qa’eda had missed one or two, Fisk helpfully provides a useful list of legitimate targets: “Belgium, which hosts Nato HQ; Canada, whose special forces have also been operating in Afghanistan; Ireland, which allows US military aircraft to refuel at Shannon…”. Blessings be upon you, Mister Robert, we had entirely forgot to add “Kill the Irish” to our “To Do” list.

I wonder if it was a cautious editor who added “initial” to that French “support for Mr Bush”. The French were supportive for about ten minutes after 11 September, but for most of the last year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: throughout the spring, their foreign minister, M. Vedrine, was deploring American “simplisme” on a daily basis. The French veto is still Saddam’s best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would be it.

But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, “We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.”

No problem. They are all infidels.

…

(c) Copyright Mark Steyn, 2005, all rights reserved.

And even as I see that there are some people already weighing in with “root cause” commentary that pretty much follows the above predictions (see here, here, here, here, and here for starters…and then here for some laughable CIA paranoia), I’d just like to say that I hope the British government will show itself to be above such hypocrisy and address the real causes — the terrorists themselves, and the war they have declared against the infidel.

Because really, this “root cause” bleeding-heart talk is all pretty hypocritical, if you get right down to it.

Think about it…if al-Qaida or Hamas is justified in blowing up a bus in England or a restaurant in Tel Aviv because they perceive that the western Zionist oppressors are killing innocent Iraqis or Palestinians without cause and are driving the Islamic faith to ruin, then why isn’t some anti-abortion activist justified in blowing up an abortion clinic because s/he perceives that the pro-abortion oppressors are killing innocent unborn children without cause and are driving the moral fabric of society to ruin? Whether it’s a bus or an abortion clinic, it’s terrorism and it’s murder to blow it to pieces and kill people in doing so, so if you’re going to legitimize one and not the other then you’re committing a hypocrisy.

And if now you’re thinking “hah, now at least you’re admitting that Christians commit acts of terror too when they blow up clinics”, then I think you should read one of the recent articles at relapsedcatholic, and then the article that the author, Kathy Shaidle, links to from there. That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t blood on the hands of some of those who claim to be Christian…but it IS to say that in many cases, the amount of blood is probably far less than many of my more liberal-minded acquaintances would prefer to see on the hands of members of a faith system they hate with almost irrational passion.

It’s both funny and tragic to me, and Mark Steyn has again commented on this (although sadly it appears that the relevant article is no longer linked from his page), that many of the same people who speak out against violence against women, oppression of women, violence against homosexuals, and discrimination against minority religions (i.e. “non-Christian” religions in the West), and who speak out in support of corruption-free elections and a vague concept of “freedom”, do so only in the West, in their own nations. On the global stage, many of these self-same people would be willing to plant themselves in the camp of fanatical theocrats and dictators who force women to wear burqas, who believe that the removal of the clitoris is the rite of passage into womanhood, who behead homosexuals — or toss them off rooftops, as the Taliban were fond of doing — and whose electoral process makes a mockery of concepts like democracy and “freedom”, all in the name of opposition to the even greater world threat: America. Saddam Hussein can execute and gas his own people, the Sudanese government can slaughter and rape Christians willy-nilly for the crime of not converting to Islam, and the “socially liberal” champions of individual rights here in the West are often the first to criticize America, Austrailia, and even Britain when they decide to go toe-to-toe against a dictator like that…or, come to think of it, when a Christian tries to peacefully convert them by handing them a pamphlet. If the Sudanese government stopped at pamphlets, there’d be a few thousand more Christian human beings alive today, and a few less trees. As sad as it is, for some people, the trees are the more important item.

And us conservatives are the scary ones, eh?

Well, so be it…consider yourself officially chilled to the bone.