Amazon

NOTICE

Republishing of the articles is welcome with a link to the original post on this blog or to

Italy Travel Ideas

Showing posts with label Christianity Erosion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity Erosion. Show all posts

Friday 22 August 2014

The Fate of the West

Muslims burning the Danish flag during a Muhammad-cartoons protest


Published on FrontPage Magazine

By Enza Ferreri



Either the West Will Become Christian Again or It Will Become Muslim


It's all very simple. We can't fight Islam in the West without fighting the enablers of Islam in the West, namely the Leftists.

And, since the Left has many different and separate aspects, we have to fight against each one of them. Secularism, environmentalism, global warming alarmism, homosexualism, militant feminism, sexual relativism, multiculturalism, anti-Christianity, Islamophilia, post-nationalism, internationalism are just as important targets to attack as Marxist economics, the expropriation of the capitalist class (or, in its modern reincarnation, high taxation and welfare state, aka redistribution of wealth), and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Neglecting any of these fronts is like fighting a war leaving a battleground to the enemy, like fighting on the Western front and leaving totally undefended the Eastern one.

Secularism and atheism are certainly the first lines of important wars.

A secularist West will always lose to Islam, because it will have enough compassion, tolerance and self-restraint from violence that are the remnants of its Christian heritage, but it will have lost the ideals, the passion and certainty of fighting for a just cause that were once part of Christianity and have disappeared with its erosion.

Two quotes here serve as epigrams. Robert Spencer wrote in his great work Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't: “People who are ashamed of their own culture will not defend it.” And Dennis Prager said during one of his radio broadcasts: “Only good religion can counter bad religion.”

Some people claim that there won't be a religious revival in Europe because we are past believing in God. That this is not true can be seen by the high - and increasing – number of Westerners who convert to Islam. Many of them give as a reason for their conversion the need for absolutes, boundaries and well-defined status.

A journalist writing for The Spectator on this subject explained why she is Catholic:
But above all, I like the moral certainties. I don’t mind the dogma one bit. I would rather dogma and impossible ideals than confusion and compromise. In that sense, I do identify with those who choose Islam over the way of no faith, or a seemingly uncertain faith, like the woolly old C of E.
William Kilpatrick, in Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West – a book I thoroughly recommend reading -, writes:
Brian Young's friends said he was troubled by the decadence of Western society. David Courtrailler's lawyer said, “For David, Islam ordered his life.” These are the sorts of reasons ordinary converts to Islam give. A common refrain from converts is that Islam provides a complete plan for life in contrast to the ruleless and clueless life offered by secular society. As Mary Fallot, a young French convert, explains, “Islam demands a closeness to God. Islam is simpler, more rigorous, and it's easier because it is explicit. I was looking for a framework; man needs rules and behavior to follow. Christianity did not give me the same reference points.” If you look at the convert testimonials on Muslim websites, they echo this refrain: Islam brings “peace”, “order”, “discipline”, and a way of life that Christianity and other religions fail to offer.
Human beings will never be past the need for believing in something bigger than themselves, because that need is part of the human mind.

Today the Christian religion is being replaced by the worship of the Goddess earth, New Age beliefs, the cult of celebrities (not coincidentally sometimes called "idols"), a blind faith in science, in chance as the creator and motor of the universe and in the absence of God.

And, last but not least, by Islam, which is increasingly filling the vacuum left by Christianity.

It is not surprising that Western people who feel a spiritual need may embrace Islam more easily than Christianity, when the latter has been the butt of constant attacks, denigrations and ridicule for a very long time, increasing since the 1960s, while the former is continually - albeit seriously mistakenly - praised as a religion of peace, tolerance and great wisdom.

Christian clergy is often criticized, sometimes rightly and sometimes not. But we tend to forget that clergymen are human beings, with all their imperfections. They too have been subjected to many decades of Leftist indoctrination and brainwashing. Even they, by the mere fact of living in this society, have been influenced by its insanity.

This applies to admitting homosexuals to priesthood and letting them work with young boys in the misguided hope of helping them overcome their pathology, as well as to displaying an extreme naivety towards Islam and its supremacist, violent nature.

We can expect guidance from our leaders, yes, but rather than castigating them we should make the first steps.

A clear direction was given by Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop of Bologna, Italy.

As early as 30 September 2000, before 9/11, when very few in the West even thought of worrying about Islam, he delivered a very forward-looking speech, which included this premonition:
In an interview ten years ago, I was asked with great candor and with enviable optimism: “Are You among those who believe that Europe will either be Christian or cease to exist?”. I think my answer then may well serve to conclude my speech today.

I think – I said – that either Europe will become Christian again or it will become Muslim. What I see without future is the “culture of nothing”, of freedom without limits and without content, of skepticism boasted as intellectual achievement, which seems to be the attitude largely dominant among European peoples, all more or less rich of means and poor of truths. This “culture of nothingness” (sustained by hedonism and libertarian insatiability) will not be able to withstand the ideological onslaught of Islam, which will not be missing: only the rediscovery of the Christian event as the only salvation for man – and therefore only a strong resurrection of the ancient soul of Europe – will offer a different outcome to this inevitable confrontation.

Unfortunately, neither “secularists” nor “Catholics” seem to have so far realized the tragedy that is looming. “Secularists”, opposing the Church in every way, do not realize that they are fighting against the strongest inspiration and the most effective defense of Western civilization and its values of rationality and freedom: they might realize it too late.
An effect of the decline of Christian faith in Europe has been the strong decrease in birth rates, that are now below the population replacement level (for the indigenous, as the replacing – and then some - is done by Muslims). Why have babies when you feel that you don’t have anything valuable to pass on to them?

I remember a time when my friends and contemporaries of child-bearing age - but childless - were saying to me things to the effect that there was no point – indeed it was a crime to engage - in bringing people into this terrible world. This is the talk of faithless despair, no hope in this or another world, lack of belief.

Militant atheists à la Richard Dawkins have not really given enough thought to the long-term consequences of their ideas, which we are beginning to see.

And of which we are reminded whenever, for example, we read in the news of doctors and missionaries who die of Ebola while assisting affected patients for Christian charities. Not many atheist charities are involved in that work.

Wednesday 30 July 2014

Empty Pews, Bursting Mosques


Not many words are needed.

Just compare the two pictures from the Mail Online, both taken at the end of last month, few hundred yards of each other in the East End of London.

The top photo shows a Sunday morning service in the churche of St George-in-the-East on Cannon Street Road. Only 12 people attended the service.

The photo at the bottom shows worshippers gathered for Friday midday prayers outside the mosque on the Brune Street Estate in Spitalfields. Since the mosque holds "only" 100 people - an enviable number for many churches -, the Muslim believers overflowed in the nearby streets.

As a terrible coincidence, adding insult to injury, Canon Michael Ainsworth of St George’s, that the Mail describes as "putting on a brave face", was beaten up in 2008 in his churchyard by three "Asian" (read "Muslim") youths, in an incident which police treated as a "faith-hate" attack.

The chairman of my party Liberty GB, Paul Weston, wrote about it at the time, and so did I a few years later.

Is this the country we want to live in? A country where decent, altruistic, peaceful and loving people are replaced by their exact opposites?



Tuesday 26 November 2013

Paternal Uncertainty in a Godless Society

Paternal uncertainty's classic case: white couple with black baby


When I work until late at night, just about the only TV programme left to watch afterwards is often The Jeremy Kyle Show. At first I watched it for its comic value, as dysfunctional couples and families shout at each other over non-existing problems before turning to the namesake presenter of the show for guidance and, more importantly, to solve their real problems with DNA paternity and lie detector tests.

But then I realised that this broadcast is much more useful than an average comedy show. It has exposed at least two things.

The first is how in the lives of the people appearing in Kyles' studio - who are British reprentatives of what American sociologist Charles Murray and others call the "underclass" - Christianity has totally disappeared.

The underclass is a new social class, it is no longer the working class. It is not characterised by its economic status so much as by its behaviour, mores and ethos.

It has a disproportionately high illegitimacy rate, school drop-out rate, unemployment rate and crime rate. It is anti-social in its outlook, attitudes, rules and codes.

In the US the underclass is disproportionately black - which is why the American version of the JK Show has mostly black guests - but in Britain it is mainly formed by indigenous Britons.

The complete abandonment of Christian values and principles, particularly those of self-discipline in every area of life - ranging from what psychologists today call "anger management", and was once the fight against the sin of wrath, to sexual self-restraint -, seems more than a mere coincidence in the type of problems that Kyle guests face.

The second thing that this TV show evidences is how in today's society the pendulum has gone too far in favouring women over men, in many different fields but specifically here in the case of paternity issues.

Gerd Gigerenzer's book on risk and its statistical aspects, Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK), explains how human males are exceptional in the animal kingdom in being expected to contribute to the rearing of a child without certainty of fatherhood. Paternity uncertainty coupled with parental responsibility is a very heavy burden that society forces men to bear:
Why is there wife battering all around the world? And why do many more men than women kill their partners? Although there are many contributing variables, such as alcoholism, the classic explanation is paternal uncertainty. Unlike in the majority of mammalian species, in which males contribute nothing to the upbringing of their offspring, in the human species males and females cooperate in providing parental care. Fathers face a problem that mothers do not, and which according to evolutionary theory is so serious that most mammalian fathers opt out of paternal investment entirely. This problem is cuckoldry. That is, a man has to accept some degree of uncertainty about whether he actually is the father of his children. A woman, in contrast, can be certain that she is the mother of her children (barring an accidental exchange of babies in the hospital). Paternal uncertainty can be reduced by many means, one of which is for a man to control his partner physically to ensure that she is not consorting with other men. According to this argument, the cost of male parental investment brings with it male sexual jealousy, which leads men to use methods ranging from vigilance to violence to controlling sexual access to their mates.

How certain should human fathers be about their paternity? Probably not as certain as is conceivably possible since the mid-1980s, when DNA fingerprinting became available as a highly reliable method for paternity testing. Using DNA fingerprinting, researchers found that 5 to 10 percent of children in Western countries who had been studied have a different biological father from the one they thought they had. [Emphases added]
Or, as the Romans put it in their lapidary, succinct way: Mater semper certa est, pater numquam (the mother is always certain, the father never).

At least since the advent of feminism, it's always been considered sexist (in the direction of misogyny) to stigmatise female adulterous and promiscuous behaviours in a way that male corresponding behaviours are not.

In fact, in light of the serious repercussions on paternal uncertainty, what is sexist (in the direction of misandry) is not to stigmatise women more than men for sexually promiscuous habits.

It has to be noted that Gerd Gigerenzer is not a political writer. He is a psychology academic, former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and currently director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

The book from which I quoted deals with statistics, calculation and assessment of risk in human and medical sciences. It is a scientific work, with hardly any political implication.

His political views on this matter are unlikely to be similar to mine, i.e. right-wing or anti-feminist, firstly because he would by now have been sacked from his academic position, secondly because his work is highly recommended by openly Leftist, Guardian columnist and author of Bad Science (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK), Ben Goldacre, and thirdly because the application of DNA paternity tests that he mostly advocates is for catching fathers trying to avoid their responsibilities.

He writes, for instance:
Before DNA testing, court proceedings were often colored by the public humiliation of unmarried mothers...

DNA testing has helped to dispense with the humiliating [for the mother] character that court hearings had in the past. Now that DNA evidence for paternity exists, courts rarely subject mothers to cross-examinations about their sex lives...

My point is that the mere possibility of DNA fingerprinting can be sufficient to end denial, to spare the mother an inquisition into her sex life, and to oblige the father to pay child support.
I don't see anything wrong with public humiliation and stigma for unmarried mothers. It's because Western societies have abandoned this stigma that illegitimacy rates have been steadily rising in all EU countries, North America and Australia.

In 2009, 41% of children born in the US were illegitimate, from 5% a half century ago. As for the European Union:
In 2011, 39.5% of all births in the 27 EU countries were extramarital. In that year, births outside marriage represented a majority in Iceland (65.0%), Estonia (59.7%), Slovenia (56.8%), Bulgaria (56.1%), France (55.8%), Norway (55.0%), Sweden (54.3%), and Belgium (50%). The proportion of extramarital births is also approaching half in Denmark (49%), the United Kingdom (47.3%) and the Netherlands (45.3%)...

In the EU, the average percentage of extramarital births has risen steadily in recent years, from 27.4% in 2000 to 39.5% in 2011.
In the UK most children will be born out of wedlock by 2016.

While people were too concerned about sexual liberation and women's rights, children and society at large were paying the price. I cannot cover in this post all the consequences of fatherlessness - and they are all negative -, although I will in future articles.

But I'll say that the price is astronomical in terms of children's psychological wellbeing, children's poverty, crime levels, antisocial behavior, unemployment, and finally the welfare state bills for taxpayers.

Also, observe the double standard. Whereas hormonal and other biological factors are often utilised in women's favour, as excuses even for murders allegedly due to Pre-Menstrual Tension (PMT) or postpartum psychosis, similar factors are never employed to excuse men in cases of rape, for example, or, as in this case, paternity uncertainty is never recognised as an intense stressor for a man and used to justify his jealous, controlling or violent behaviour.

Men are expected to provide for and in other ways contribute to a child's upbringing, no questions asked.

Not many consider this immense factor of stress for men, in the same way as in public discourse it's very rare for someone to examine things from a man's perspective. It is politically incorrect. It's only from a woman's viewpoint that we are supposed to look at everything.

Whereas oceans of ink and light years of film have been devoted to all the various problems associated with the woman's role in reproduction, hardly anybody has paid even the scantest attention to those related to the man's role.


Photo by toledo clubber (Creative Commons CC BY-ND 2.0).

Monday 25 March 2013

We Are so Used to Assaults on Christianity that We No Longer Even Recognize Them

Muslim Prince Charles



After posting my article Islamic Republic of Great Britain under President Charles Windsor?, I've received comments here and especially on my Facebook Save the West page that show two related phenomena:

1) most people still do not understand that Christianity is the only way the West can remain itself, civilized, Islam-free and ethical

2) the reason the Western general public opinion has not been capable of recognizing or adequately countering the Islamic threat is that it has been so accustomed to the Left's propaganda, an important part of which is its anti-clericalism, anti-Christianity and assault on Christian moral values, that it has lost the ability to see even the biggest elephant in the room; in other words, erosion of and attacks on Christianity have become so normal and commonplace that they are not even noticed and recognized as such, which has led to the spread of the misconception that a religion equals another, and this in turn has made it more difficult to recognize Islam for what it is, even in the face of the most obvious and widespread direct experience through our eyes and ears.

After all, if so many people (including me until not long ago) can believe that Oscar Wilde was an innocent victim of homophobia whereas in fact he was a dirty homosexual paedophile of the worst sort, a wealthy man abusing and exploiting young working class rent-boys for sex, and that, far from being a victim of Victorian prejudice, even today he would be found guilty and be rotting in a prison cell, the high incidence of this belief in itself shows how big the collective disconnect with reality has become in the Western mind.

People have been subjected to such a brainwashing of Orwellian proportions and diabolicalness that of course, when Islam was ready and coming here to invade and submit, it found the gates of the West wide open. Nobody, or very few, were capable of seeing the obvious any more.

Now, going back to the comments to my post. I do not blame anybody, as I said it is extremely easy to be deceived by 40-50 years of uninterrupted, continuous, profound leftist indoctrination.

The comments are mainly of two types: a) they minimize the impact that even a Muslim or Islam-sympathizer Prince Charles could have, either because his reign will be short-lived or he will not have any say in how the country is run or because at least he is honest, and b) they defend the atheists' presumed entitlement to "get a say in who is to sit on the throne".

The very fact that Britain could have an Islamophile monarch is per se a sign of the enormous influence that this pseudo-religion has already attained, let alone if that dreadful scenario becomes reality.

This case also makes it even more evident than it has already been how Islam is incompatible with and a direct threat to Christianity, when you have a monarch who is supposed to have the official titles of both the "Supreme Governor" of the Church of England and the "Defensor Fidei", defensor of "the" faith - as there is only one faith that can be recognized as the foundation of any Western society, and that is Christianity - who has Islamic propensions and does not really want to defend the special role of the Christian faith.

The question about "atheist rights", which we hear more and more of, increasingly reminds me of the often-trumpeted "Muslim rights".

In advanced, Western democracies, both individuals and minorities should be protected, hence the classical theory of human rights, not to be confused with the current, leftist theory of human rights, which is something completely different, indeed opposite, and only underpins the spread and power of the state and of the welfare system, bringing Western countries to economic ruin.

The classical theory of human rights derives from the Christian doctrine of natural rights. And incidentally, this is only one of the many things that Christianity has "done for us". The problem is the widespread lack of historical knowledge of how almost everything that distinguishes the West, with its incredible civilization, from the rest is indissolubly and inherently linked to Christianity.

In the West I also include Christian populations the world over.

But the decision in a democracy is clearly taken by the majority, and most people in Britain want a Christian monarch with a Christian role: "73% said she should continue as supreme governor of the Church of England and keep the Defender of the Faith title ".

The problem is that, if we lose or dilute our Christian roots, we become nothing, the West cannot even be defined without them.

Europe geographically is just an appendix of the Eurasian continent. What distinguishes Europe is its culture, and its culture has two roots: the classical world of ancient Rome and Greece and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Without them Europe, and by extension the West, would have just remained as civilized as the Third World is now.

The West would not have existed without Christianity and will not survive without it.

One of the reasons why Islam has made so many inroads into Western society so easily is because the people in the West do not believe in anything any more, and therefore think that there is nothing to defend, nothing worth protecting.

People who attack Christian values, which are what the West is built on and without which the West does not exist (think of the current difficulties in trying to define “Britishness” in the UK and “Europe” in the EU, difficulties that derive from the attempt to exclude Christianity from these definitions), open the door to Islamization, whether they realize it or not.

As for atheists, it is possible to be atheist and Christian, as Oriana Fallaci declared herself to be and I was until I realized that atheism is impossible to support rationally and scientifically (the alternative to the existence of God, that everything happened by chance, having such a low probability as to be mathematically impossible); so now I am agnostic and Christian. You can believe in Christian ethics and values and recognize that we owe all our civilization, including science, to Christianity, while having doubts about or without believing in God.

Thursday 21 March 2013

Islamic Republic of Great Britain under President Charles Windsor?

Queen Elizabeth II


The UK's Queen Elizabeth II has unfortunately been ill with gastroenteritis recently.

Understandably this has started speculations, I hope premature, about what could happen in case of her death.

I like her, and I wish her a very long life.

Who will succeed the Queen is a very worrisome question. I dread to think of her son and heir to the throne Prince Charles as the King, not only because of his, shall we say, lack of grasp of reality (Oriana Fallaci, the Italian best-selling author who, with her book The Rage and the Pride (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) , was post 9/11 among the first to alert the West to the dangers of Islam, called him "babbeo", a Tuscan term which could be reserved for the village idiot), but even more importantly because he has repeatedly made it obvious that he is not a Christian faithful, and that he keeps an "open mind" on different religious faiths.

How can that be reconciled to his future status, if he becomes king, as the "Supreme Governor" of the Church of England?

If he is consistent he should refuse to be the next monarch.

To obviate this problem he famously said, as found on his official website: "I personally would rather see it [his future role] as Defender of Faith, not the Faith", meaning all faiths and not just Christianity.

But the vast majority of British people fortunately do not want that:
Almost 80% of people in England agree the Queen still has an important faith role, a BBC poll suggests.

In a poll by Comres to coincide with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, 79% of respondents said the monarch's religious role remained relevant.

Meanwhile, 73% said she should continue as supreme governor of the Church of England and keep the Defender of the Faith title first given to Henry VIII.
Charles' own website shows that his connections to Islam are very strong:
The Prince has given many speeches on the need for greater understanding between different religions. In March 2006, His Royal Highness addressed over 800 Islamic scholars at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, and called for greater dialogue between the three Abrahamic faiths: Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The Prince was awarded an honorary doctorate from the university for his work to encourage inter-faith dialogue and was the first Western man to receive this honour.

During the same overseas tour with The Duchess of Cornwall, His Royal Highness repeated his call at Saudi Arabia’s most senior Islamic University, the Imam Muhammad bin Saud University in Riyadh, the first Christian to speak there.

His Royal Highness also set up The Prince’s School for Traditional Arts in Shoreditch, London, to bring a wider appreciation of the arts and craft skills which have deep roots in all the major faith traditions.

The school teaches Islamic architecture, icon painting, Islimi and Arabesque craft, and stained glass skills to pupils of all religions and backgrounds. The school has developed outreach and education programmes for young people and is also working with a number of governments in Arab and Asian countries to build links with institutions.
And it doesn't end there. The Boston Globe wrote in November 2005 (via Jihad Watch):
The Prince of Wales was at the White House last week, hoping, the Daily Telegraph reported, ''to convince President Bush of the merits of Islam . . . because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since Sept. 11, 2001." This is a drum Prince Charles has been beating for years. In 1993, for example, he scolded those in the West who peddled ''unthinking prejudices" about Muslim culture -- for example, ''that sharia law of the Islamic world is cruel, barbaric, and unjust." Two months after 9/11, he was lambasting the American attitude toward Islam as ''too confrontational."
Islam scholar and political activist Robert Spencer also has this in Jihad Watch:
Bonnie Prince Charlie: East has what the West lacks.

The East, that is, Islam, or at least Sufi mysticism. Attending a whirling dervish ceremony in Turkey, Charles waxed enthusiastic:
When they had finished the Prince gave a speech on Rumi’s appeal in the 21st century. “Whatever it is, it seems to me that Western life has become deconstructed and partial.” The East, on the other hand, had given us “parables of the soul”.
Islam scholar Daniel Pipes offers a long catalogue of reasons that make him wonder whether Prince Charles is a convert to Islam.

I can't imagine many things worse for a future (or present, for that matter) British monarch to utter than what Prince Charles said to an audience of scholars for the 25th anniversary of the University of Oxford's Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, "which attempts to encourage a better understanding of the culture and civilisation [sic] of the religion", organization of which he is patron: "Follow the Islamic way to save the world".

If you look at the photos of students accompanying the article and, even more, if you read the comments to it, you'll notice that that speech didn't go down very well.

Some little pearls representative of the many more disparaging comments: "Must be the medication he's on for his chest Infection.", "And this guy will be your future king,be afraid very afraid.", "'Follow the Islamic way to save the world,' Does that include honour killings and stonings and public executions for gays Charlie?", "When Charles is crowned King, he will have to swear to be the Defender of the Faith - and that is the Christian faith, not Islam.", "to come out with this is utter insanity", "Just shows you how out to lunch he is!!!", "Go back and talk to the trees!", "It really amazes me that the citizens of this country put up with the thought of this man being the next King of England.", "Now tell me he's not crazy!", "Who are the fools who think he is worth a penny of the taxpayer's money?", "I also find it disturbing that you, as Head of the Church in a Christian country, would single out another religion in the way that you have. Really Sir - your comments are 'unhelpful' at best.", "'we cannot exist on our own without the intricately balanced web of life around us. Islam has always taught this and to ignore that lesson is to default on our contract with creation.' Yes Charles but then can you explain why it is then that some followers of Islam spend most of their time trying to obliterate some of this finely balanced web? Get a grip Sir, you are paid for out of British Taxpayers Money and you represent people such as those killed and maimed in the July bombings. If you feel such a fan of Islam then why not go visit the relatives of those people and try explaining to them the fine balance that you talk about.", "I cannot believe that a future king and defender of the faith, christainity , church of england , could come out with such garbage. I sincerly hope he does NOT become our king.", "Prince Charles a 'practising Christian' ???!!! Says who?", "I pray that this man will NEVER sit on the throne of the United Kingdom!", "And this from the man who may become the head of the Church of England? God help us all.", "If he wasn't so stupid he'd be a joke.", "Who would not be a Republican after reading this?", "He shames our country.", "Could the potential head of a country possibly be more out of touch with his people?", "Where does he get the idea that Islamic spiritual principles protect the environment? We have just returned from a holiday in Egypt (Cairo and Alexandria) the atmospheric pollution and discarded refuse was unbelievable.", "I think that Islam needs to follow the world actually..With people like this bloke at the helm I grieve for this Christian Nation.", "Thank God there's a chance the succession to the throne will skip a generation.", "How differently things might have turned out if this practising Christian had remembered the commandment - Thou shalt not commit adultery. Christian values made Britain great. It is very sad how those values have been eroded over the years.", "We are the plebs who keep him and his mistress in the luxury they're acustomed to!! Time to say NO - think of the damage he's going to do, IF he ever becomes King.", "The prince apparently lives in some kind of parallel universe. As King, he will be "Supreme Governor" of the Church of England, and here is on spouting on and on about Islamic values! Championing an Islamist cause is a strange role indeed for this man, but perhaps not surprising considering how weird and unsuccessful his life has been to date. He needs a reality check imho.", "He is an outright embarrassment. Why doesn't he just go ahead and convert to Islam already instead of being the royal Dhimmi that he is".

And this comment from an Aussie nicely sums up my own feelings: "I do hope the Queen sticks around for another 30 or so years", or more.

I wonder, if there was a public vote, say a referendum on his accession to the throne, whether Prince Charles would be the choice of the people. I very much doubt it.

Wednesday 20 February 2013

O'Neill Got It Wrong: Gay Activists Want More than Liberation, not Less

LGBT Rainbow flag flying from a building in Brighton



Brendan O'Neill totally missed the point.

He compares the gay radicals of the past who did not want marriage because they saw it as a form of oppression to the LGBT movement of today who demand same-sex wedlock, and concludes that the latter have become bourgeois and integrated, renouncing the radical ideology of the beginning, when Stonewall was young and fighting for liberation from matrimony, not enslavement by it.

The point he misses is that the homosexual activists have become more radical, not less.

What they demand from society now is a total redefinition of marriage, something that goes to the core of this institution and pierces it through the heart. They want to shape society in their own image, not just more or less politely ask society to leave them alone.

What was a negative request, "Do not interfere with our personal lives", has become a much stronger, positive demand, "Change the meaning of marriage to fit our bill".

This can be seen especially clearly when you consider the LGBT movement's request for same-sex marriage in church, when it is obvious that the people who intend to take advantage of this "right" do not believe in the precepts of the Churches whom they would require to celebrate their wedding.

It is transparent that church gay marriage is a travesty of Christian marriage, as I have written elsewhere:
We must not forget that, for believers, marriage is a sacrament; and for non-believers, what's the point of wanting to marry in church other than mocking the Church?

There was a male gay couple interviewed on the [British] TV. One of the two, in late middle age, with all the seriousness in the world said: "I want to marry in a church because this is the way I was brought up". One should ask: were you also brought up to have a homosexual relationship? And, if you can accept to depart from your background and education in one aspect, what's wrong with doing the same for the other aspect as well?

If as a gay couple you got married in church, it would not mean anything, because the creed and doctrine behind the sacrament of marriage does not include unions of this kind. It would be an empty ritual, a gesture without significance behind it.

It would confuse form with substance, appearance with reality. It would be a travesty.

It would be like thinking that a man wearing a wig and fake breasts is a woman. He may look like a woman, but he is not; similarly, a church gay marriage may look like a Christian marriage, but it is not.

Homosexual wedding in church is an insult to the people who believe, it's like an enormous joke at the expenses of Christian clergy and faithful alike. Why does a homosexual really want to marry in church knowing that, given the Christian teachings on homosexuality, that "marriage" is meaningless, if not to give Christianity the finger?

Why should gay activists want to make a mockery of other people's genuine Christian beliefs? And why should the British government want to give in to this offensive request, as it has already done to all other gay requests without exception [bar abolishing the minimum age of consent]?


Saturday 2 February 2013

Italian Priest Offers Reward for Weddings

In the small village of Volania, in Northern Italy, home to about 300 families and 1,000 people, the local priest Father Giancarlo Pirini has decided to offer a "bounty" of 500 euros, in cash, of his own money to every couple who will get married.

The Father is worried about the crisis of marriage.

"Some time ago, leafing through the marriage register of the parish - says Fr Pirini - I noticed that it was still at the first volume, which began in 1955." Scanning it, the parish priest ended in despair: in 1960 only 17 weddings were celebrated, in 2006 and 2012 none.

Europeans, if the current rates of marriage and reproduction continue, are going to die out.

Friday 14 December 2012

Peter Hitchens, Will Self and Gay Marriage on Question Time

On the BBC's political debate program Question Time last night, panellist Will Self lived up to his auto-referring surname (the only thing that it's not his fault) by doing his best to shut up everyone who dissented with his views by calling them "homophobic" or "racist", according to the subject under discussion, whether it was same-sex marriage or mass immigration. When the argument was about drug policy, his tactic was slightly different: since the words "addictophobic" or "substancist" (discriminating against those who take illegal substances) have not (yet) been invented, he accused those with different ideas of simple, old-fashioned ignorance of the data.

Will Self is a writer and a Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, which is a very sad illustration of the standard of what these days passes for college brainwashing, sorry, education.

Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens was the only one of the five panellists with something intelligent and sensible to say, beyond the ideological irrationality (Will Self), political interests (MPs Justine Greening and Stella Creasy) or simplistic platitudes (Lord Bilimoria).

Hitchens' first intervention, about PM David Cameron's ill-conceived backing of "gay" marriage in church, was not very forceful, though. He just dismissed the subject as unimportant and preferred to concentrate on attacking Cameron more generally. But after two people from the audience spoke out clearly against it, he must have found the courage he lacked at first in the culturally Marxist environment of Question Time, very hostile and aggressive to his positions, and regained the dignity of expressing deeply politically incorrect views.

But the real highlight of the program was the two members of the audience, a white man and a black woman, who had the courage to declare their opposition to homosexual marriage and even more, in the woman's case, to openly state that love of God is the basis of her opposition, facing derision, laughter among the crowd, and isolation.

I haven't seen this kind of thing for some time, and only recently I've noticed people who stand up for Christianity in a public way, like for example X-Factor star Jahmene Douglas, who professed his Christianity on the show, and said he wants to raise the moral standards in pop music.

What is interesting are also two observations.

One is that many of these Christians without fear, like Jahmene and the woman in the Question Time audience, are black or have a black parent. In our politically correct times, this gives them an advantage over whites (although it's obviously unfair, and whites should be treated with the same consideration too): it's much more difficult for "ethnic Europeans" to argue aggressively with blacks. In the case of the lady opposed to same-sex marriage, for example, to call her "homophobic", the usual reply PC people resort to, would make them feel uncomfortable because that could clash with their feeling that they are probably racist in calling a black, particularly a woman, names.

The second thing to note is that the two members of the Question Time audience who stood up for Christian values were not treated with the same intolerant derision. The black woman got a better reception than the white man, and for that I have already given a reason in the paragraph above: PC.

There is, however, another reason. The guy was apologetical. When asked about his views, he started by saying: "With the greatest respect to homosexual couples", then he rested his position on the argument that same-sex marriage is "ontologically impossible", a philosophical argument which does not hold much water but - this is my hypothesis - he thought would give him a defence against charges of homophobia, based, as it seemed to be, on higher grounds than prejudice.

The woman, instead, did not refrain from using the name of God and the Bible to support her views, and did not try to diminish or compromise her positions.

I believe that, as the recent disaster of Romney's defeat in the American presidential election shows, we should stop apologizing for our opinions and stop feeling that we have to defend ourselves.

People who have politically incorrect views that run counter to the current dominant orthodoxy, which generally speaking is cultural Marxism, should not make any attempt to dilute them: that is a losing strategy.

If you think something, say it loud (metaphorically) and clear. Others are more likely to take what you say seriously if you do not sit on the fence and, who knows, there may be some-one among them who was just waiting to take the plunge him/herself or somebody who wants a real alternative to the current climate of thought oppression and free speech censorship.

Monday 10 December 2012

X-Factor Star, Committed Christian Jahmene, Wants to Raise Standards in Music

Jahmene Douglas, X Factor 2012 runner-up


The very talented and exceptionally moving singer Jahmene Douglas, who was the runner-up in The X Factor pop music contest last night and whom producer Simon Cowell said he is planning to give a recording contract, is a really good role model and some-one to watch for.

In an interview with The Daily Mail 3 days ago, Jahmene said that he used to pray to give himself strength through the torment of living with his abusive dad Eustace.

The 22-year-old from Swindon recalled about his father: "He didn’t want us to go to church. He stopped us from going to Sunday school".
‘But when you do go to the bottom of the bottom, you realise everything that is important. I’m not here for money and fame and all that stuff. I have my own priorities and try to keep myself grounded in what my mission is.’

Which is? ‘A lot of singers have forgotten they have a responsibility through influencing people - mainly the younger generation. So all these foul songs - they don’t realise how badly they’re poisoning children’s minds. I’m trying to bring back the class of the olden days and hopefully set some standards.

In Ella’s last week, Jahmene, who doesn’t drink, refused to join the other contestants in performing Katy Perry’s Last Friday Night. He says: ‘The lyrics weren’t just about alcohol, they mentioned threesomes.

‘The first line was: “There’s a stranger in my bed.” I was thinking about Ella, who’s only 16, and how it would be for her to sing lyrics that open this whole world of ménage à trois, getting naked and drinking.

‘The contestants were 100 per cent behind me. So the production team changed the song. A song has to be something I feel deeply about. I’ve turned down a lot of songs because of the message.’

Jahmene is truly made of steel, despite appearing painfully nervous most of the time.

...‘Winning can mean a lot of things. There’s winning the competition, then there’s making an album and being successful - that’s the winning for me. If I’d left two weeks ago but made an album that was successful and made a difference, I would have won.

...‘When all hope was gone, I used to get on my knees and pray for the strength to change things. I think the fact I’m here now proves my prayers have been answered. The X Factor is a massive platform to help change things for someone else.’
Jahmene is a committed Christian and had no problem, in these days when being Christian is seen as politically incorrect and not "cool", in professing his views on The X Factor program. For example, when he was asked what album he would like to make he replied a Gospel music album. When he was asked what kind of music he would have liked as one of the one-week themes for the show, he answered "‘Team Jesus’ Gospel".

He then introduced The X Factor to his local church's Gospel choir, with which he regularly sings, and to his pastor.

This is the first time in a very long time that I see Christianity and the most popular music associated in such a public, high-profile way.

"For every action there is a reaction" is not just Newton's third law of motion in classical physics, but on many occasions in history it has seemed to govern human behaviour too.

The 18th-century Enlightenment with its focus on reason was followed by 19-century Romanticism with its attention to emotions; the rise of communism in early 20th-century Italy was followed by the fascist regime trying to put a stop to socialists and communists taking power, and the defeat of fascism was followed by a resurrection in communist influence.

Early, pre-Socratic Greek philosophy saw a series of philosophers radically contradicting the principal ideas of the philosophers preceding them.

Maybe in the coming years, after many decades of erosion of Christianity and attacks on Christian values from numerous fronts in the West, we will be witnessing a reaction in the form of young people like brave, strong Jahmene, who will show rejection of this trend and will express that they do not want Christianity to be put aside in a corner to die in our societies and say that they want to bring Christian principles back into the public sphere.


Friday 7 December 2012

"Gays" are More Equal than Christians

British Prime Minister David Cameron in Parliament


UK Prime Minister, "Conservative" David Cameron, has today backed an enormous policy change introducing same-sex marriages in churches in Britain.

Tory MP Peter Bone said the PM’s party was split 50-50 and predicted that several government ministers would vote against homosexual marriage.

He added: “Despite the PM’s assurance, the redefinition of marriage — because of the European Convention on Human Rights — will force churches to marry same-sex couples. This will outrage millions of people and hugely damage the Government in electoral terms.”

Not surprisingly, both Labour and the other party in the government coalition, the clueless Liberal Democrats, support "gay" marriage, and the LibDems have tried hard to push Cameron to back it.

Christian Today newspaper writes in the article PM's assurances on gay marriage 'meaningless':
Mr Cameron said today that he was a "massive supporter" of marriage and did not want gay people "to be excluded from a great institution".
What hypocrisy and what arrogance! Showing that you are a "massive supporter" of something by depriving it of its meaning, opening the way to its destruction.

I think that the most likely reason for Cameron's decision to back homosexual marriage in church was a quid pro quo, a compromise with his LibDem coalition partners who wanted a reform of the House of Lords. He could not agree to that, but in an exchange of favours he accepted to go ahead with "gay" marriage, which the Liberals had been calling for.

Some commentators have also acutely pointed out that, in the polls, popular support for Cameron is well above that for the Tory Party, and so it is in his interest to keep a distance from the rest of his party by showing a liberal, modernizing face, which does not cost him anything to do. After all, Christians in today's Britain don't matter.
He also insisted that churches would not be forced to conduct gay marriages if they did not want to.

"But let me be absolutely 100% clear, if there is any church or any synagogue or any mosque that doesn't want to have a gay marriage it will not, absolutely must not, be forced to hold it," he said.

Mr Cameron added that MPs would have a free vote on the issue.

His assurances of church protection, however, have failed to convince the CLC [Christian Legal Centre], which provides legal support to Christians experiencing discrimination.

CLC director Andrea Minichiello Williams said: "If this moves ahead the courts’ interpretation of equality legislation will not provide any effective protection from litigation for churches who do not wish to perform such ceremonies, whatever the Prime Minister says now. Any such assurances are meaningless.

“At the Christian Legal Centre we have seen countless cases where Christians have been forced out of their jobs for their refusal to condone and promote homosexual practice. Their views have not been respected or accommodated and Mr Cameron has ignored their plight.

“This does not bode well for British Christians if further legislation is passed. Assurances to churches who do not wish to perform same-sex ‘marriages’ fly in the face of all the evidence."

The CLC has itself faced difficulty because of its defence of traditional marriage.

A marriage conference organised by the organisation earlier this year almost had to be cancelled when two venues - the Law Society and the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre - pulled out of hosting it at the last minute.

Both centres said the bookings had been cancelled because the CLC's views on marriage contravened their equality policies.
The organization Coalition for Marriage (they have a petition going that you can sign at their website, as I have done) has declared:
Introducing same-sex weddings in churches and other religious premises is a radical departure from the consultation proposals. Ministers promised that religious believers could not be forced to hold weddings of homosexual couples because it would not even be possible to register them in churches or other religious premises.

But now that promise has been broken. Christians, Jews, Muslims and others will be exposed to the legal nightmare of equality and human rights laws, as well as the intrusion of the European courts. We have no confidence in so-called ‘safeguards’ Ministers will offer.

Legal advice from leading human rights lawyer Aidan O’Neill QC has made clear that the only completely safe course for churches will be to stop hosting weddings altogether, a massive change to Britain’s social landscape. He has also shown that, quite apart from the issue of buildings, individual people from any background who believe in traditional marriage face damage to their careers or even dismissal from their jobs, especially teachers, chaplains, foster carers and others in the public sector.

The Bill to redefine marriage will be published in the New Year. We understand there were behind-the-scenes attempts to publish a wafer-thin Bill next week to avoid proper scrutiny of the details by Parliament. Thankfully that seems to have been prevented by internal arguments.

Thursday 15 November 2012

Why Paedophilia Concerns Have Come to Override Basic Rules of Law




Whether or not the BBC, as the Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson argues, should prove that the programme Newsnight was not acting with malice towards senior Tory politician Lord McAlpine wrongly accused of paedophilia by an abuse victim, one thing is clear.

The current obsession with paedophilia seems to have erased or greatly diluted the basic legal principles that a person is innocent until proven guilty and, even more importantly, that the burden of the proof is on the accuser.

Paedophilia and, to a lesser extent, rape have become such politically incorrect crimes that they are treated as if they were worse than even murder or mutilation.

Yet losing life or a limb is certainly worse than being a victim of sex crimes.

When another child abuse scandal connected to the BBC, that of Jimmy Savile, emerged, we heard a never-ending number of celebrities and commentators repeating ad nauseam that children must absolutely be believed without a doubt in the world when they make this kind of accusations, almost implying that disbelief is a crime in itself and echoing similar assertions made about rape and women who claim to have been raped.

Nobody should be believed absolutely and undoubtedly: children, adults, women and men. People who say they have been victims of a crime are witnesses; and it is a well known fact that crime witnesses are highly unreliable, as this latest case concerning Lord McAlpine confirms for the umpteenth time.

This applies to all crimes: the least unpopular as much as the most hated ones. It has nothing to do with the severity of the crime, or how much it is disliked, or how strong emotions it arises.

It is a simple rule of law. To punish an innocent is worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

In the case of paedophilia, even accusing an innocent may be worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

"To call someone a paedophile is to consign them to the lowest circle of hell – and while they are still alive" correctly writes Boris Johnson.

But why have we got to this point of insanity, where paediatricians have been lynch mobbed for having the same prefix as paedophiles (from the Greek for "child") in their name and accusations can fly around and be believed so liberally?

The reason is very simple. Starting from the 1960s "sexual revolution", strongly if not entirely consciously influenced by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich theories that repressing sexual impulses is not good for you, sexual activity has been removed from the moral sphere.

Contemporary, influential moral philosopher Peter Singer writes in his Practical Ethics that ethics should not concern itself with sexuality, and that driving a car, due to what he believes to be its environmental impact, raises more moral issues than having sex.

This new dogma has been readily and happily accepted by a majority opinion, leading to such nice results as multiplication of marriage breakdowns, adultery, divorces, broken families, abortions, illegitimate births, multiple partners and fathers, AIDS, increase in sexually transmitted diseases, homosexualist agenda being imposed on everybody, incest and Muslim polygamy made quasi-legal or accepted.

But public opinion, seeing where all this was going, namely that sex with children woud be next on the list of morally permissible activities, strongly drew a line at that. Something similar happened with rape.

Given the very confused ideas about sexuality and morality that prevail in our societies (and I grant that the subject is complex), all the furore about paedophilia (and to a lesser degree rape) derives from and is directly proportional to the eagerness and almost desperation with which all other forms of sexuality have been embraced without a thought in the world.

It turns out that sexual activity is not beyond the realm of ethics after all.


Monday 1 October 2012

Germany: Whole New Neighbourhoods without Churches

In Germany, architecture is being "de-Christianized". Entire new neighbourhoods and urban areas are being built without a church in them: churches are just not planned in the projects, as if nobody even thought of them.

The German Catholic news site Kreuz reports on this phenomenon with examples from an article by architecture critic Dankwart Guratzsch in the daily Die Welt.

In Stuttgart, a large new district was built for 12,000 residents without a church.

In Hamburg, another new neighbourhood for 12,000 residents was created without a church. Not only that: to realize this project, 19 churches were closed down, probably because they were in the way. Made disappear in the blink of an eye. Under the pretext that nobody had requested them.

Some people, however, did protest, and to make them happy they were provided with a small chapel with just thirty chairs, hidden on the ground floor of a battered-facade office building.

This does not look like an accident, but a plan to make the signs of Christian faith disappear in a cold, calculated, cruel way.

Writing in Die Welt, Guratzsch quotes the son of the great philosopher Hegel, Immanuel Hegel, who advised: "Build churches!". Because, adds Guratzsch: "To build churches means to build communities. When the faithful are deprived of the visible testimony of public recognition of their values, the latter are also weakened for the believers themselves".

Guratzsch recalls how the same was happening during the time of the German Democratic Republic, communist Germany: churches were being demolished to humiliate, offend, isolate religion and inculcate atheism.

A Europe without churches and without strong Christian roots and values will be much more vulnerable to a threat similar to communism: Islamization.

Wednesday 12 September 2012

Christian Values Erosion Opens the Way to Muslim Polygamy

A typical example of how the erosion of our Christian values has left us without defence against the encroachment of Islam is that of polygamy.

Multiple divorces and remarriages in the West have created a situation which is similar to polygamy with a man or a woman having more than one family. The only difference with Muslim polygamy is that men and women in the Western variant of polygamy are on an equal footing or rather, if there is a discrimination, it is against men.

In these circumstances, Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

As it is, it's not clear what the ethical basis for the rejection of Muslim polygamy should be, since we have allowed things that have similar consequences for the children, for instance, left in many cases without a clear father figure or even without a father at all, as in the case of single-mother 'families'.

In many ways, there are a lot of similarities between Muhammed and Henry VIII: they both formed religious principles around their physical needs and personal desires.