Time Immortal

…”This is a crisis as big as war and you couldn’t trade your ration book in the wartime. You were allowed three ounces of butter a week, or whatever, and that was it. And this is what it should be like with carbon. None of this carbon trading. We should have a fixed limit and if you use it all up in October, then tough, you shiver for the rest of the year.”

…”If the polar bears leapt from the pages of my fiction into reality and saw what was happening,” reckons Pullman, “they’d eat us. Eat as many of us as quickly as they possibly could. And good luck to them.“

Ah, climate change alarmisim — religion for the easily influenced and the weak of heart.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: The Curt Jester)

“Somehow, one can never manage to be an atheist.”

All I can say is ‘heh’:

The writer-director of “The Golden Compass,” Chris Weitz, is peeved. The movie tanked so badly that the second and third installments are not going to be made (it did fairly well overseas, but unfortunately for New Line Cinema, that didn’t help because it pre-sold those rights).

Such a pity!

…one also detects the whiff of soured Puritanism in our wide-spread faith in the doctrine of Strength Through Evil that is part and parcel of the Culture of Fear.

Strength Through Evil? When put like that, we don’t like to think we believe in such things. But looking not at our protestations but at our art, the notion that Bad is Powerful is everywhere. The myth created by that great son of Scotch Calvinist culture, Robert Louis Stevenson, is as potent today as ever: Jekyll is a weenie. Hyde is strong. Captain Kirk “needs” his evil side in order to avoid the same fate of terminal weeniness. From The Cowboys (where a wimpy stuttering kid finds inner strength through profanity, and boys become men through the brutal killing of a bad guy) to Million Dollar Baby (where the hero finds inner strength through murder) to Titanic (where a girl trapped in a colorless life finds inner strength through fornication), our culture loves and deeply believes the story of finding Strength Through Evil.

That’s no accident; it’s part of a Calvinist and post-Calvinist anthropology. That’s why one constant refrain in anti-Catholic apologetics is that the Immaculate Conception just can’t be true because, if it were, it would mean that Mary is not “fully human.” Why? Because you need sin and evil in order to be fully human, we are told. That, in the end, is what is implied by the wholly unbiblical and philosophically preposterous phrase “sinful nature.” What Calvinism and its postmodern descendants all tend to affirm is that sin is not what corrupts human nature, but what constitutes it. That’s because we have failed, as a culture, to make the distinction between what is normal and what is natural. Sin is normal. It is never natural. Indeed, it is what destroys nature.

…

The problem with this Faustian arrangement is simply this: Evil is not constitutive of the human person; evil is not healthy and natural and realistic and, most of all, evil is not strong. Evil saps strength, darkens reason, and corrupts our very ability to grasp reality. Evil does not, in fact, keep us safe, make us happy, or help us win the war on Radical Islam. It makes us weaker, confuses us, and leaves us more vulnerable than ever to our enemies. Indeed, mortal sin is radically contrary to the good of the human person and always results in disaster when we embrace it.

It’s funny that so much of Calvinist thinking — that is, a Christian religious philosophy that emerged in opposition to medieval Catholicism — now underpins secularist/atheist/materialist reasoning in so many ways. It’s everywhere in the atheist mind. Whether it’s Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (of which The Golden Compass, more properly called Northern Lights, is the first book) and its doctrine of the salvation of the universe through the sexual intimacy of its (unwed) teenaged protagonists, Amanda Marcotte’s weird obsession with proving that virginity is just a “myth” or artificial social construct, or Richard Dawkins‘ assertions that human beings overcome their base animal nature by giving in to the temptation to commit adultery (from which he draws the subsequent conclusion that society should no more stigmatize people who take multiple sexual partners, even after they are married, than it should stigmatize those who like two or three different kinds of wine), the idea that sin can in some way “save” us (from what we are saved is never clearly established) permeates secular thinking everywhere one finds it.

It’s sad that Protestantism has become such an enabler for modern atheism, and sadder still that so much of Protestant thinking — which was erroneous even at its promulgation centuries ago — has become so prevalent in our modern world. The most telling example for me, I think, was an argument I once had with a Southern Baptist kid who was attempting to explain how engaging in a little anonymous cyber-sex did not constitute cheating on his then-girlfriend.

But as Chesterton noted, fallacies do not suddenly become truths simply because they become fads. The only question, I suppose, is how messy the societal collapse triggered our willing embrace of every sinful tendency will be. Because that is the ultimate destination of decadence and of a society which abandons notions of self-restraint in pursuit of an uninterrupted experience of “what feels good at the time.”