Careful examination of the background, and also of the foreground of the Scriptures, has led me to the conclusion that they are authoritative, if often misunderstood. I note that Our Lord was personally guilty of founding one of these “organized religions,” and of appointing the deeply flawed Saint Peter as its first CEO. And that, whatever can be said against it, the organization is still around, with the same sales message never yet updated, and in as much of a mess as ever before.
Verily, the more I read of history, the better persuaded I am that Catholic Church, TM, has been on the brink of collapse, continuously, these last two thousand years. As Hilaire Belloc put it, and I do love to quote this:
“The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”
By comparison, I suppose, the Prophet of Submission could be accounted wiser, to have taken arms against his sea of troubles. His outfit would descend from the unattended dunes upon complacent strangers, in hours when they were unaware. (The whole process arguably in anticipation of the Welsh art of Llap-goch.)
For our “Christian” part, even in the colonies, it was the piratical State that arrived this way — with a disorganized gaggle of proselytizing priests, seldom in their baggage, under the impression they must save men’s souls, wherever the ships sailed — unarmed, and frequently alone, in circumstances perfectly unpredictable, except for the reasonable expectation of a grisly end. They were, in the Americas as elsewhere, more likely to be pleading on behalf of the beleaguered natives against the State, than exacting tributes to the State’s command.
There is a real contrast here in marketing strategies.
David Warren, “Organized religion”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-08-08.
April 7, 2018
QotD: Organized religion
March 28, 2018
Samuel HaNagid – A Prince of Jews – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 11 Jun 2016Forced to flee from his home in Cordoba, Samuel HaNagid made a new name for himself in the kingdom of Granada. He picked his allies carefully and rose to the position of vizier, an unheard of honor for a Jew in a Muslim kingdom. His fame as a poet, a leader, and a patron of Judaic studies spread across the Mediterranean.
March 23, 2018
The use of the euphemism “grooming”
Mark Steyn from a recent Clubland Q&A session:
If you missed our livestream Clubland Q&A on Tuesday, here’s the action replay. Simply click above for an hour of my answers to questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the planet on various aspects of identity politics, from micro-aggressions at the University of California to macro-aggressions in Telford and Rotherham – with a semantic detour into nano-aggressions and quantum-aggressions. Speaking of semantics, I saw this question after the show ended, from Steyn Club Founding Member Toby Pilling:
If with regard to language, clarity is the remedy (as Orwell would say), shouldn’t the ‘Asian Grooming Gangs’ be re-named ‘Moslem Rape Gangs’? I’ve been trying to make the case that they should at the local council I work for, but over here in the UK one can be hauled in for hate speech at the drop of a hat.
I agree with Messrs Orwell and Pilling on clarity in language, and have never liked the word “grooming”, a bit of social-worker jargonese designed to obscure that what’s going on all over England is mass serial-gang-rape sex-slavery. “Grooming” is, in that sense, a euphemism. An hour or two after yesterday’s show I chanced to stop at the Upper Valley Grill and General Store on an empty strip of road in the middle of the woods in Groton, Vermont, a small town of a thousand souls that feels, if anything, rather smaller than that. And paying at the counter I noticed that they had a can next to the cash register for donations to what the hand-written card called the “Groton Grooming Fund”.
Having just been on the air yakking about Telford, I was momentarily startled. It is, in fact, not a whip-round to enable the gang-rapists to buy more petrol to douse the girls in, but a contribution toward the volunteer group that maintains the local ski and snowmobile trails – ie, they “groom” the snow. Happy the town in which grooming is left to the snowmobile club rather than the Muslim rape gangs. The slogan that greets you on the edge of the village is “Welcome to Groton – Where a Small Town Feels Like a Large Family”, which I always find faintly dispiriting. But it’s better than Telford, where a large town feels like a small prison.
March 18, 2018
Genghis Khan – Beginnings of the Great Mongol Nation – Extra History – #5
Extra Credits
Published on 17 Mar 2018The man now known as Genghis Khan, leader of all Mongols, was ready to show the world what he was made of. He acted in fairness towards his own people and happily began integrating Chinese citizens and their culture, but showed no mercy to those who opposed him.
March 17, 2018
“Schedule 7 of [Britain’s] Terrorism Act … effectively treats speech as terror, ideas as violence”
Brendan O’Neill on the British government’s decision to refuse admission to Canadian videographer Lauren Southern:
In Britain in the 21st century you can be punished for mocking gods. You can be expelled from the kingdom, frozen out, if you dare to diss Allah. Perversely adopting medieval Islamic blasphemy laws, modern Britain has made it clear that it will tolerate no individual who says scurrilous or reviling things about the Islamic god or prophet. Witness the authorities’ refusal to grant entrance to the nation to the alt-right Christian YouTuber Lauren Southern. Her crime? She once distributed a leaflet in Luton with the words ‘Allah is gay, Allah is trans, Allah is lesbian…’, and according to the letter she received from the Home Office informing her of her ban from Britain, such behaviour poses a ‘threat to the fundamental interests of [British] society’.
This is a very serious matter and the lack of outrage about it in the mainstream press, not least among those who call themselves liberal, is deeply disturbing. For what we have here is the ringfencing of Britain from anti-Islam blasphemy. The purification of the kingdom against those who would take the mick out of the Muslim faith. In refusing leave to enter to Ms Southern because she handed out those leaflets, the UK authorities are making it clear that this is a nation in which certain things cannot be said about Allah. They are sending a message not only to Ms Southern but to Britons, too: trolling of Islam is a ‘threat’ to society and counter to ‘the public policy of the United Kingdom’. They haven’t only banned one woman; they have sought to chill an entire sphere of ‘blasphemy’.
Ms Southern was stopped at the border in Calais. She was reportedly questioned under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. This is an extraordinarily broad and illiberal part of the law. It can be used to stop anyone at Britain’s borders, even if there is no suspicion that they are involved in terrorism. The individual can be detained and questioned for up to nine hours. There is no right to silence. There is no right to a publicly funded lawyer if the person is at a border. That such a repressive measure was allegedly deployed in the questioning of someone for distributing leaflets, for speech, should horrify anyone who cares about liberty. This effectively treats speech as terror, ideas as violence, mere words as things to be kept out of the nation, setting a terrible precedent for free speech in this country.
H/T to Perry de Havilland for the link.
February 18, 2018
“The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all”
Matt Ridley on the rising tide of neo-Victorian prudery in western society:
Is it so different here or are we slipping down the same slope? Pre-Raphaelite paintings that show the top halves of female nudes are temporarily removed from an art gallery’s walls; young girls are forced to wear headscarves in school; darts players and racing drivers may not be accompanied by women in short skirts; women are treated differently from men at universities, as if they were the weaker sex, and saved from seeing upsetting paragraphs in novels; sex is negotiated in advance with the help of chaperones. We have been here before.
In Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s novel of 1928, she portrayed the transition from the 18th century to the Victorian period thus: “Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides.”
How we laughed at such absurdity in my youth. But even for making the point that some of the new feminism seems “retrograde” in promoting the view that women are fragile, the American academic Katie Roiphe suffered a vicious campaign to have her article in Harper’s magazine banned before publication. “I find the Stalinist tenor of this conversation shocking,” she told The Sunday Times. “The basic assumption of freedom of speech is imperilled in our culture right now.”
The sin of blasphemy is back. There are things you simply cannot say about Islam and increasingly about Christianity, about climate change, about gender, to mention a few from a very long and growing list, without being accused of, and possibly prosecuted for, “hate speech”. Is it hate speech to say that Muhammad “delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse”? That was Voltaire, one of my heroes. You may disagree with him but you should, in accordance with his principle, defend his right to say it. In demanding tolerance of minorities, many younger people seem to be remarkably intolerant.
There is an odd contradiction between the declared wish to live and let live — “diversity!”, “don’t judge!” — and the actual behaviour, which is ruthlessly and priggishly judgmental. They never stop drafting acts of uniformity, always in the name of the collective against the individual. The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all.
February 4, 2018
Sword Bayonets – German Casualties – Jerusalem Occupation I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 3 Feb 2018Check our Podcast: http://bit.ly/MedievalismWW1Podcast
Chair of Wisdom Time! This week we talk about possibly fabricated German casualty numbers, the unwieldy WW1 bayonets and the reaction to the occupation of Jerusalem.
February 3, 2018
Saladin – the Sword of Islam – IT’S HISTORY
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 2 Feb 2018Saladin was the famous Muslim leader during the time of the Crusades.
December 31, 2017
A contrarian view of hijabs, niqabs, and burqas
Western views of full-coverage clothing, including hijabs, niqabs, and burqas, may be concealing a hidden benefit to those who choose to wear such clothes voluntarily:
Hijabs, niqabs, and burqas — different sorts of coverings worn by Islamic women — are divisive apparel in the West, associated with patriarchal oppression, cultural outsiders, and even suicide bombers. Yet few accounts actually discuss the experiences of the women wearing the veils, and the freedom and anonymity coverings can afford if worn voluntarily.
Born in Pakistan and educated in America, Rafia Zakaria is the author of Veil, a new book which explores the history and shifting meanings of female coverings in Islamic countries and Western secular society. In a wide-ranging conversation, she talks with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie about the theological underpinnings of veils, their use as a means of controlling female sexuality, and how they have become markers of socio-economic status and virtue signaling.
Veils present a particular conflict for Western feminists. On the one hand, veils — especially burqas — are emblematic of regimes that are particularly oppressive to women. Feminists and others have moved to ban the wearing of veils in public in the name of female empowerment. But if a Muslim women wants to wear one, is she endorsing patriarchy and setting back the women’s rights movement or simply owning her own choices, especially in a culture that might itself be anti-Islamic?
December 24, 2017
December 14, 2017
QotD: Terrorism and mental illness
In the West, the conviction that you must kill people in order to receive 72 virgins in paradise would be considered a mental illness. In Islam, it’s a mainstream belief. 89% of Pakistanis believe in genies. But then again genies are present in Islamic scripture. 89% of Tunisians believe in witchcraft. 72% of Iraqis believe in the “evil eye”. 1 in 5 Afghanis have witnessed an exorcism. Half of Pakistanis believe in fairies.
Saudi religious police have a special Anti-Witchcraft Unit and there are actual witch trials. Majorities of Muslims don’t believe that Muslims carried out the 9/11 attacks. 40% of Pakistanis believe that fathers have a right to kill their daughters if they engage in premarital sex. Half of British Muslims think that the Jews are in league with the Freemasons. A third believes that Princess Diana was murdered to stop her from marrying a Muslim.
Ideas and behaviors associated with mental illness in the West are mainstream in parts of the Muslim world which exist in a pre-rational medieval universe brimming with conspiracy theories, paranoid delusions, lack of personal responsibility, erratic emotions and an inability to apply reason to reality.
Western psychiatric benchmarks don’t mean much in the Muslim world where witchcraft is a major problem, Jewish conspiracy theories abound and genies are responsible for psychiatric problems. Killing your daughter or just non-Muslims in general is socially approved behavior. The Muslim world has fundamentally different social norms than we do. And that means very different concepts of sanity.
Misattributing Muslim terrorism to madness is convenient, but meaningless. It’s a way for us to avoid dealing with the difficult questions posed by Islam. And that avoidance is also a form of insanity.
Daniel Greenfield, “Insane Muslim Terrorists”, Sultan Knish, 2016-05-13.
November 3, 2017
Egyptian lawyer discovers a “duty to rape” women who wear revealing clothes
It may be just a vivid fantasy on western university campuses, but rape culture is real … in Egypt:
An Egyptian lawyer has sparked a controversy by saying that it is a “national duty” to rape women who wear revealing clothes. During a heated television debate on prostitution aired on a local television channel, the lawyer said it would be a “patriotic duty” of citizens to sexually harass such women.
Nabih al-Wahsh, a locally popular lawyer with strong conservative views, was among several guests who were debating a new draft law on prostitution broadcast on the Egyptian television channel, al-Assema. When the panel’s debates became more heated, Wahsh, at one point insisted that females wearing revealing clothes deserve to be punished.
“Would you accept a girl walking around with half of her thigh showing?” he shouted at a fellow panellist before quickly adding: “I say when a girl is walking around like that, harassing her is a patriotic duty, and raping her is a national duty.”
October 24, 2017
More on Quebec’s niqab ban
Ted Campbell is emphatically against Quebec’s attempt to ban facial coverings for Islamic women:
These laws are stupid … but they are worse than stupid, they are an assault on individual liberty by a bunch of political nincompoops.
Now, there are a number of variants of head and face coverings, they are especially common among some Muslim women …
… and some restrictions on some of them in some situations are, pretty clearly, justified on common sense or security-identification grounds. We, most of us, can probably agree that a lady should not wear a burqa or chador or even a niqab when she’s driving a car (it might restrict her vision) or when she is applying for a driving licence, which is a pretty common form of recognized identification … and it seems pretty clear that airport security should insist that a burqa or chador must be removed for security screening (to permit positive facial recognition).
But, why the hell does the state ~ the BIG, collective, state ~ care what any individual wears when (s)he boards a bus. It ought to care that she deposits the correct fare, of course, or taps her card to pay, but why does the state care if her face is covered? It’s arrant nonsense, and it is an infringement on a fundamental right.
Reminder: you (and I, and Muslim women, too) have lots of rights but four of them are quite fundamental: life, liberty and property as defined by John Locke in 17th century England and privacy, as defined by Brandies and Warren in 19th century America. These rights all accrue to all individuals, only, and they, those individuals, need to have their fundamental rights protected against constant threats from collectives including religions, societies and states, themselves. These new laws, passed by big, collectivist states, are threats to individual liberties and must be challenged and overturned. Liberals, like Justin Trudeau, will not do it because they are progressives, not liberals, and because people like Justin Trudeau cannot think about fundamental rights … only about partisan, short term, political advantage.
Let me be clear about my own position:
- Women may wear whatever they want for their own (good or not so good) reasons; but
- It is wrong for anyone (including any father or husband or rabbi or provincial premier) to force women to dress in some certain way for social (including political) or religious reasons.
Your religion is a wholly private matter between you and your gods … you may never try to impose your beliefs on others, including your wife and children.
October 20, 2017
Quebec’s niqab ban
Chris Selley on the Quebec provincial government’s latest anti-Muslim legislation:
It’s mostly about the Quiet Revolution. That’s what we’ve been assured by wise owl pundits about all this intolerant-looking rigmarole in Quebec. When polls show far more Quebecers than other Canadians hesitant to vote for a turban-wearing Sikh like NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, the owls exhort us to contextualize: Quebecers’ rejection of the Catholic Church’s outsized role in their society left them suspicious of all public displays of religiosity (except Catholic ones, weirdly). This explains higher levels of antipathy toward other religious symbols as well, we are told: kippas, kirpans and hijabs. Hijabs specifically are antithetical to a uniquely French brand of feminism, the owls explain. We must understand that French Canadians, like the French, simply do not believe in multiculturalism; other cultures must adapt to and exist within the dominant one. Without understanding all this, we cannot comprehend what’s really happening.
Well, here’s what really happened Wednesday: after years of dithering, the Liberal government in Quebec City made it illegal to provide or receive government services with one’s face covered — which is to say no niqabs on university campuses, no niqabs at the police station, no niqabs on the bus or on the Métro. Not even the Parti Québécois’ much-loathed values charter proposed the latter. So what are we to make of this, owls? Was the Quiet Revolution, this proud rejection of church influence over the state, really about bestowing upon the state the power to tell religious people what they can and cannot wear on buses and trains? Shall we sing Gens du Pays?
How stupid do the Liberals think people are? How stupid do they think Canadian judges are? Stupid enough, apparently, to believe that this isn’t really about niqabs, but about a general outbreak of people riding public transit without their faces showing. Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée said the rule applied equally to niqabs, balaclavas, dark sunglasses and anything else that might obscure all or part of the face. It’s a simple matter of “security, communication and identification.”
October 6, 2017
QotD: The likely transnational progressive endgame
… if transnational progressivism actually succeeds in smothering liberal individualism, its reward will be to be put to the sword by some flavor of jihadi. Whether the eventual winners are Muslims or Mormons, the future is not going to look like the fuzzy multicultural ecotopia of modern left fantasy. The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars.
In the banlieus and elsewhere, Islamist pressure makes it certain that sooner or later the West is going to vomit Stalin’s memes out of its body politic. The worst way would be through a reflex development of Western absolutism — Christian chauvinism, nativism and militarism melding into something like Francoite fascism. The self-panicking leftists who think they see that in today’s Republicans are comically wrong (as witnessed by the fact that they aren’t being systematically jailed and executed), but it is quite a plausible future for the demographically-collapsing nations of Europe.
The U.S., fortunately, is still on a demographic expansion wave and will be till at least 2050. But if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking “crusader” cities, they’ll make crusaders out of the U.S., too. And this time, a West with a chauvinized America at its head would smite the Saracen with weapons that would destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass. The horror of our victory would echo for a thousand years.
I remain more optimistic than this. I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.
The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do, either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our children, we’d better get to work.
Eric S. Raymond, “Gramscian damage”, Armed and Dangerous, 2006-02-11.
