Anti-Christian Atheism and Unethical Behaviour

Following my article Effects of Atheist Propaganda Come Home to Roost, - although on Free Republic the comments were favourable to my position - readers of my blog have posted comments that need a more analytical and detailed answer than allowed in the comments section.

Complex subjects require complex treatment. Furthermore, there seems to be much confusion about the theme of Christianity and ethics.

For example, an anonymous reader calling himself "roger in florida" wrote: "I believe you are very misguided if you equate Christianity with morality or cannot understand that atheists, such as myself, are incapable [he then explained that he meant "capable"] of morality".

Indeed I never made (and it would have been absurd to make) such a sweeping generalization as that atheists are incapable of morality.

I was myself an atheist (and now am an agnostic) capable of morality, as I am sure many others are.

Besides, if we want to be specific - and this philosophical topic requires it - everybody is capable of morality, in varying degrees, with possible pathological exceptions.

The devil is in the detail, it is those different degrees that make all the difference.

The late-18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between "autonomy" and "heteronomy": the former is the capability of giving oneself moral guidance and rules, the latter applies to individuals when their morality is determined from outside themselves, through fears of losing social approval and of punishments like those associated with the penal system.

The vast majority of individuals will have a combination of the two, in proportions that will diverge greatly. Children and adults who are generally considered immoral, like criminals, will need more external guidance and deterrents.

Anyway, my article was about a specific connection between atheism and immoral behaviour, not a generic one.

Another reader, aLeRGya, addressed this thus: "I don' think implying what Dr. Dawkins is promoting directly leads to the dilemma relating to the video is that simple. Correlation does not imply causation".

Of course, as exposed by the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, we cannot logically derive causation from correlation or temporal coincidence.

But here we do not need to.

When a company invests large sums of money to advertise a product and then it sees the product's sales soar, it is a highly plausible hypothesis that the advertising campaign caused the increase in sales.

In fact, this pattern follows that of a scientific experiment: you change one variable (the experimental variable) and, coeteris paribus (all the rest being equal), the change in the responding variable (the result) will likely be due to your intervention, proportionally to how much the rest has been maintained equal.

The very fact that companies and other organizations and agencies keep spending lots of money in advertising is in itself a sign that this method achieves the desired objectives.

What is true for advertising of products is also true of advertising of ideas, propaganda, which was literally what I explored in my article, i.e. an atheist advertising campaign in Britain.

The population of a country like Britain had been exposed, until the 1950s, to an education following the values of Christian ethics, which centre around self-discipline and self-constraint in all areas of life, not just sexuality as it is vulgarly assumed but also eating, drinking, shopping and spending, drug taking, personal relationships, and so on in every sphere.

In the last 5-6 decades the British population has been subjected to a politically Leftist, anti-clerical, militant atheist propaganda and bombarded with messages similar to and pointing in the same direction as those described in my article.

God does not exist, therefore enjoy your life and live for today: commenters who criticize my piece for making the connection between atheism and absence of ethical thinking (ethics requires exactly that, going beyond the "now" and instant self-gratification) overlook the fact that Leftist, militant atheists are the first to make that connection, as evidenced in this particular bus and train advertising campaign.

Some, more ascetic people, in seeing those slogans, may have thought of a different kind of enjoyment, but the vast majority will have understood right in thinking that it was an invitation and encouragement to a relaxation in sexual behaviour, which Christianity rightly sees as covered by ethics but atheist moral philosophers, like Peter Singer who has influenced Richard Dawkins, do not.

Here is what Peter Singer, one of the main contemporary proponents of atheist ethics, writes on pages 1 and 2 of his book Practical Ethics (Amazon US), (Amazon UK) , when giving the basic foundations of his ethical system:

Some people think that morality is now out of date. They regard morality as a system of nasty puritanical prohibitions, mainly designed to stop people having fun...

So the first thing to say about ethics is that it is not a set of prohibitions particularly concerned with sex. Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by sex.) Accordingly, this book contains no discussion of sexual morality. There are more important ethical issues to be considered. [Emphasis added]

For a utilitarian like Singer, a consequentialist moral philosopher, to so easily neglect the specific consequences of sex, the human activity that leads to the conception of children, is an incredible mistake.

Throughout this period from the '50s to now Britain has experienced a vast rise in the incidence of teenage pregnancy, illegitimacy, sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS/HIV, divorce, abortion, broken families, multiple marriages, fatherless children, eating disorders, overeating, obesity, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, over spending, obsessive shopping, indebtedness, sexual child abuse, neglect of the elderly, loss of sense of community, individual isolation, and more.

To argue that there is no causal connection between these two sets of events stretches credibility way too far.

Try to bombard people for decades with the message: "People have been telling you that in the morning you should get up from the right side of the bed. Well, they were wrong. People who say that are superstitious, pervert ignoramuses. We are on the right side of history, on the side of progress, have science in our support and we tell you that you should get up from the left side of the bed".

The human mind is very plastic, malleable, flexible and adaptable.

If, after half a century of people's hearing this message continuously repeated in overt or subtle ways in their living rooms from the TV, in cinema screens, classrooms and college halls, in newspapers, political, academic, entertainment and indeed any public discourse, even on billboards on buses and trains, would you be surprised if people who had always got up from the right side of the bed eventually get up from the left, and would you not see that the first set of phenomena caused the other?

There could be other concomitant causes too, there always are in sociological events of a certain complexity, but atheist, anti-Christian, anti-ethical propaganda is undoubtedly a major one.

The reader aLeRGya also makes a reference to the Catholic Church's so-called "paedophile" scandal, which is nothing of the sort and will be treated in a future article.

Do Entitlements Come before Safety?

Boston Bombing Could Reset National Political Debate:

Although it's unclear who was responsible [UPDATE: This was written before there were suspects], the Boston bombings are likely to again place terrorism at the top of the national agenda and put President Obama to the test as a leader in a time of crisis.

He has already been put to the test numerous times, and he failed them all. How many tests do you want?

The reality is that Obama's response is likely to define his administration and, more important, help determine whether Americans feel safe in their own country for the foreseeable future.

At the presidential election most voters preferred freebies to safety. Now we see the results. Obama is perfectly capable of spending lots of money his government does not have to give people the full benefit of a big welfare state but is totally incapable of fighting Islamic terrorism.

If the incident turns out to be terrorism, Obama will never be able to repeat the mantra that predecessor George W. Bush's supporters used in describing his administration's efforts to protect the homeland after 9/11: He kept us safe.

The way to keep the West safe is not to stage wars in Afghanistan, Iraq or anywhere else in the Muslim world, but to expel Muslims from Western countries and prevent them from entering our borders again. There is terrorism only in countries with a Muslim population. Muslim-free countries have no terrorism.

Monday's incident was the first big bombing in the United States since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. U.S. officials acknowledge that some potentially serious incidents were foiled, and there was a mass killing which many defined as an act of terrorism in November 2009. That's when Army Major Nidal M. Hassan fatally shot 13 people and wounded 30 more at Fort Hood, Texas.

In the UK, as well as in the USA, there would have been many more Islamic terrorist attacks if the security services and police had not constantly kept an eye on the Muslim "communities".

Will this new atrocity on American soil serve as a wake-up for people?

About an hour before the Boston bombings, I happened to be interviewing Republican pollster Bill McInturff about the political climate, and he made a prescient comment. "A president's agenda often gets hijacked by big events" that demand his attention and change his priorities, McInturff told me. This could be what happens in the wake of the Boston tragedy.

Will American people now realize that Barack Hussein Obama is not the right man for the job?

We Need More Leaders like Thatcher

Among the people who complained about the cost of Margaret Thatcher's funeral (and on this I happen to agree with them, especially in these financially hard times) are also some of the protesters, the "hate mob" at the funeral, who in fact increased those costs by indirectly forcing more security measures.

This tells you a lot about the Leftists, in particular it exposes the difference between what they say and what they do.

This funeral cost duplicity is in perfect parallel with the hypocrisy of claiming to be compassionate and wanting to help the working class people while implementing all the policies that harm them, whereas Maggie Thatcher actually benefitted them.

As former Tory minister Kenneth Clarke recalled during the TV debate Question Time, it would not have been possible to make those necessary changes introduced by Thatcher in a different, softer, more compromising way. It had already been attempted by as many as three previous prime ministers - Callaghan, Wilson, Heath - without success.

The opponents' position was too entrenched, rigid and unwilling to compromise to be able to allow that. Changes could occur only in the manner that Lady Thatcher enforced them, due to the opposition's inflexible stance.

Liberal Democrat politician Menzies Campbell reminisced that, during the era before Thatcher, bodies were left unburied, people went to sleep at night without knowing whether the next morning they would have water, electricity, gas: all this because of the continuous, interminable strikes.

Kenneth Clarke, in the UK network Channel 4's documentary Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary, has a colourful way to express how super powerful trade unions were: they grabbed the country by its cojones and, when they wanted something, they squeezed more and more until they got it.

The UK had become a socialist country. Pre-Thatcher, when it was called "the sick man of Europe", Britain was the country with the highest level of nationalization of its economy, and consequently one of the poorest, outside the communist block. It was on the brink of social and economic ruin.

Almost everything had been nationalized: telecommunications, steel, energy, water, electricity, gas, mines, car, bus and lorry industries, aircraft manufacturing, airports, transport, travel companies like Thomas Cook. A man could spend his whole day without ever being in contact with private industry, but only using state-owned or state-manufactured products and services.

The state-based economy was bringing the country to collapse. Founded on monopoly, in the absence of competition, there was no incentive to win the customers over and nobody was held accountable for making (or not) the system efficient, productive and profitable. Managers did not worry if there were problems. If companies lost money instead of making it, no sweat: that's what taxpayers' money was for, to compensate for the losses.

Maggie changed all that, privatized industries, closed down those that were over subsidized, unprofitable and damaging to the economy. As a result:

According to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the state companies went from costing the Treasury an average of £300m each a year in subsidies to contributing between £3.3bn and £5.8bn a year in corporation tax from 1987 onwards.

Political consensus had been tried and failed. As we know, Baroness Thatcher stood up to the quasi-omnipotent unions and won. The British society, including the working class, in the long term was better off because of her interventions.

Thatcherism worked. Take one (of course imperfect) measure: ONS figures suggest the economy grew by 3.03 per cent a year in the 1950s, 3.18 per cent a year in the 1960s, 2.07 per cent in the 1970s, accelerating back to 3.09 per cent in the 1980s under Thatcher, before expanding by 2.77 per cent in the 1990s (when her legacy largely remained) and by 1.77 per cent in the 2000s.
The report of the LSE growth commission is emphatic: by the late 1970s, the UK had been left behind, with US GDP per capita 40 per cent higher than Britain’s and the top European economies 10-15 per cent ahead. By 2007, however, UK GDP per capita had overtaken France’s and Germany’s and reduced significantly the gap with the US, a position which hasn’t really changed since, despite the US and Germany’s better performance over the past couple of years.

In the days before Maggie Thatcher there was no social mobility, society was not meritocratic and did not let individuals express their full potential.

If the father was a plumber, the son would be too, and the grandsons, and so on for all generations.

If a working class person had ambitions, s/he could do nothing, there was no way for him/her to climb the social ladder out of the housing estate where this person was born. In fact, the Left objected to aspirational working class people, considering them arrogant for wanting to break the uniformity of egalitarianism.

But after the advent of the Iron Lady people from low background with entrepreneurial skills could and did become rich, including in the City, whose doors she opened to everyone, beyond dynasties and old school ties.

There is no doubt that not just Britain, but every country needs many, many more politicians like Thatcher, now - it would seem - more than ever, but the question that is foremost in my mind is: if Maggie were Prime Minister now, would she deal with the immigration, and particularly the Muslim, issue the way she dealt with union leaders, strikes and Left opposition?

Nobody can know the answer to that, given the different times, circumstances and prevailing ideologies: no-one, for instance, called her "racist", which these days is a cardinal sin, an anathema, a fate worse than death, at most she was a "milk snatcher" which does not sound half as bad.

But what we do know is that we need a political leader who will address Islam, the seemingly intractable "unions" issue of today, the way she addressed them.

John Lydon against Thatcher Hate Mobs

Surprisingly, who came to the defence of Margaret Thatcher but John Lydon?

He used to be Johnny Rotten, the singer of the '70s punk group Sex Pistols, that released the single "Anarchy in the UK" and mocked the British national anthem in their song "God Save The Queen".

He said: "I'm not happy about the boo boo parties":

'When someone dies, give them respect. Enemy or not. I can't be listening to folk who do that.

'What kind of politics are they offering me? You dance on another person's grave? That's loathsome.'

But as to whether he would be watching an TV coverage of Baroness Thatcher's funeral, he said: 'I might have something better to do.'

He added: 'Her politics were really dreadful and derisive [sic] and caused a great many issues for me when I was young, for all of us trying to go through that.

'But that don't mean I am gonna dance on her grave, as they say. I'm not that kind of person.

'I was her enemy in her life but I will not be her enemy in her death. I am not a coward.'

Either Europe Will Become Christian Again or It Will Become Muslim

Only a few days ago one of the best known figures of the Italian counter-jihad, Egyptian-born journalist Magdi Cristiano Allam, a former Muslim who converted to Catholicism, announced that, although he remains Christian, he has left the Catholic Church.

In his column in the daily paper Il Giornale he gave several reasons, prominent among which is "Because this Church is weak vis-à-vis Islam":

What more than anything else drove me away from the Church is its religious relativism, in particular the legitimization of Islam as true religion, of Allah as true God, of Muhammad as true prophet, of the Koran as sacred text, of mosques as places of worship. It is genuine suicidal madness that John Paul II went so far as to kiss the Koran on May 14, 1999, Benedict XVI put his hand on the Koran praying toward Mecca in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul on November 30, 2006, while Francis I began by extolling the Muslims "who worship one, living and merciful God." On the contrary I am convinced that, while respecting Muslims who, like all people, possess the inalienable rights to life, dignity and freedom, Islam is an inherently violent ideology, as it has historically been conflictual inside and belligerent outside. Even more I am increasingly convinced that Europe will eventually be submitted to Islam, as has already happened from the seventh century to the other two sides of the Mediterranean, if it does not have the vision and the courage to denounce the incompatibility of Islam with our civilization and the fundamental rights of the person, if it does not ban the Koran for apology of hatred, violence and death against non-Muslims, if it does not condemn Sharia law as a crime against humanity in that it preaches and practices the violation of the sanctity of everyone's life, the equal dignity of men and women, and religious freedom, and finally if it does not block the spread of mosques.

This news has attracted national and worldwide media attention, just as the announcement of his conversion from Islam to Catholicism on 22 March, Easter Eve night, 2008 did, when he "received Baptism, Confirmation and Communion in St Peter's Basilica from Pope Benedict XVI".

Allam's position has several Italian (and international) counter-jihad blogs sympathetic to it, carrying articles with titles like Islamic Fundamentalism and the Impossible Dialogue.

But his new decision to leave the Church has also attracted many criticisms in Italy. Journalist Filippo Savarese: "I do not know what could be worse than repudiating one's conversion for (alleged) issues which are in fact mostly 'political'." Politician Maurizio Lupi who was Allam's godfather: "I am sorry, but Christianity taught me to love the freedom of every man and to respect it even when I do not agree with his choices. In this case not even with the reasons (we are Christian for love of truth not for aversion to Islam), but I notice that, unfortunately, this is the attitude of many who say they accept Christ but not the Church".

Gabriele Satolli, candidate to the 2013 Italian general election for the party founded by Allam, Io Amo l'Italia, left the party, calling Magdi's motivations "raving, and therefore impossible to agree with".

Still, although we may dispute whether they are a good enough reason to leave the Catholic Church, Allam's arguments are grounded in reality.

"Having a dialogue" is by definition a reciprocal verb, as "being a sibling". They mean something only if what is true of the subject of the verb is also true of the object, be it a quality, relationship or activity. When a call for dialogue is not met with a response, it is a monologue.

As Raymond Ibrahim points out, the Muslim countries with some of the worst records on their treatment of Christians are also the most interested in interfaith initiatives in the West:

Few things offer surreal experiences as when Islam and the West interact—when 7th century primordialism encounters 21st century relativism. Consider the issue of “interfaith dialogue.” In principle, it is a decent thing: Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others trying to reach a common ground and professing mutual respect. But what does one make of the gross contradictions that emerge when a human-rights violating nation calls for “dialogue,” even as it enforces religious intolerance on its own turf?

Enter Saudi Arabia. Birthplace of Islam, the Arabian kingdom is also the one Muslim nation that regularly sponsors interfaith initiatives in the West—even as its official policy back home is to demonize and persecute the very faiths it claims to want to have an interfaith dialogue with.

There are different positions within the Catholic Church with regard to Islam, with a minority of voices, some of which powerful, dissenting from the official stance.

The two positions at the extreme opposites are exemplified by the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who was Archbishop of Milan, and Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop of Bologna.

The former is credited with having anticipated many bishops of Italy and Europe in stretching out an acquiescent hand towards Islam. As early as 1990 he dedicated his Saint Ambrose homely to "We and Islam". In 2001, after 9/11, his Saint Ambrose homely had a title that substituted a clear stance with a list of concepts: “Terrorism, retaliation, self-defence, war and peace”.

On Islam, the most difficult issue of the decade, as well as on many other questions, Martini's position has always been the search for a grey area, a balancing act: “We have to prevent the dramatic scenario of a clash of civilizations”, qualified by “We must not delegitimize the right to self-defence from terrorism and the need to extinguish its hotbeds”.

It is interesting how, replicating the ideological and political alliance between Islam and the Left in the Western lay world, Cardinal Martini, considered a progressive and constantly praised by the mainstream liberal media, was after his death eulogized by the leftist newspaper La Repubblica for having approved of policies ranging “from dialogue with Islam to yes to condoms” and because “he had never condemned euthanasia”.

Writer and blogger Antonio Socci thus sums him up rather unfavorably:

"Everything imposed by ideological fashions found Martini open to dialogue and to all possibilities: 'there is nothing wrong in two people, even homosexuals, having a stable relationship and in the State favouring them', he had said."

At the other end of the spectrum is Cardinal Giacomo Biffi. As early as 30 September 2000, before 9/11, when not many people in the West worried about Islam at all, he delivered a speech at the Fondazione Migrantes seminar, "On Immigration". The following is what he said on Muslim immigration to Italy and Islam:

The case of Muslims

If we do not want to evade or censor realistic attention, it is apparent that the case of Muslims should be treated separately. And it is hoped that political leaders will not be afraid to face it with open eyes and without illusions.

Muslims - in their vast majority and with few exceptions - come here determined to remain alien to our "humanity", individual and social, in its most essential, valuable, "secularly" non-renounceable aspects: more or less openly, they come here determined to remain substantially "different", waiting for us all to become substantially like them.

They have different eating habits (not in itself a big problem), a different holiday in the week, a family law incompatible with our own, a concept of women very far removed from ours (going as far as practicing polygamy). Above all, they have a strictly fundamentalist view of public life, so much so that the perfect identification between religion and politics is part of their unquestionable and inalienable faith, although they prudently wait to become predominant before imposing it. It is therefore not the Church, but modern Western states that must think carefully about this.

I shall say more than that: if our state seriously believes in the importance of civil liberties (including religious) and democratic principles, it should work to make them more widespread, accepted and practiced at all latitudes. A small tool to achieve this goal is the request of being given a not purely verbal "reciprocity" by the immigrants' countries of origin.

In this respect the Italian Bishops Conference wrote in 1993: "In many Islamic countries it is almost impossible to adhere to and freely practice Christianity. There are no places of worship, non-Islamic religious events are not allowed, not even minimal ecclesiastical organizations exist. That raises the difficult problem of reciprocity. And this is a problem that affects not only the Church, but also civil society and politics, the world of culture and even international relations. For his part, the Pope is tireless in asking everyone to respect the fundamental right to religious freedom" (n. 34). But - we say - asking does not help very much, even if the pope cannot do any more.

Although it may seem alien to our mentality and even paradoxical, the only effective and not unrealistic way to promote the "principle of reciprocity" by a really "secular" state, truly interested in propagating human freedoms, would be to allow for Muslims in Italy only the authorization of institutions which Muslim countries actually allow for others.
…

Conclusion

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 defence of Western civilization and its values of rationality and freedom: they might realize it too late. "Catholics", letting the knowledge of the truth they possessed fade in themselves and replacing apostolic anxiety with pure and simple dialogue at all costs, unconsciously pave the way (humanly speaking) to their own extinction. The only hope is that the seriousness of the situation may at some point lead to an effective awakening both of reason and of the ancient faith.

It is our hope, our commitment, our prayer.

Written in 2000. All predictions confirmed. Truer, if possible, now than it was even then.

Effects of Atheist Propaganda Come Home to Roost

The seeds of nihilism are sown...

I have a suggestion for militant atheist cum zoologist Richard Dawkins about a British (although it has now got to America as well) TV program to watch, that is bound to lift his spirit: The Jeremy Kyle Show.

There he can see exactly the kind of society he is trying to promote and propagate.

People who appear on the show have been living the sort of life which was advertised for £140,000 on billboards all over buses and underground trains across England, Scotland and Wales, in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, Leeds, Newcastle, Dundee, Sheffield, Coventry, Devon, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Swansea, Newport, Rhondda, Bristol, Southampton, and Aberdeen a few years ago for weeks, with the message: "There's probably no God... now stop worrying and enjoy your life": campaign and message that Dawkins totally endorsed.

She [little known comedy writer Ariane Sherine, that the article calls the "brains" behind the campaign] said she wanted to promote her own message that people can believe whatever they wanted. [It certainly takes a great brain to come up with such a formidable idea.]

Speaking at the launch of the campaign in central London, Ms Sherine said the sheer number of donations received had demonstrated the strength of feeling in the UK.

Obviously a vast number of people are never so happy as when they are encouraged to do just exactly whatever they like and indulge in any fancy they may have, reassured in the belief that this is the right course of action by "luminaries" and intellectual authorities à la Richard Dawkins, with the full backing of science, no less, behind this highly satisfactory claim.

The consequences of choices and actions, though, pace Dawkins and that superb "brain" of Ms Sherine, are not just in the afterlife but in this one as well.

...and the fruits are harvested

And the consequences of the "stop worrying and enjoy your life now" lifestyle, when embraced by large swathes of society, can be calculated at the time of the Budget and seen as a form of public entertainment in TV broadcasts like The Jeremy Kyle Show (undoubtedly there are many similar others).

The show's guests have "enjoyed" their lives all right, if by "enjoyment" we intend overeating (this they do not need to declare, you just have to look at them, especially the women), booze, drugs, not working, and above all - by far the most frequent reason that brings them to this TV production which promises them solutions, therefore indicating that this is what has the most serious consequences in their lives - sexual promiscuity.

The expressions, usually uttered by Kyle, "unprotected sex" and "unsafe sex" are sprinkled all over the chats, which are in fact rows and shouting matches. Hearing those phrases makes me shudder. The very fact that we have come to see sexuality as an activity that has to be treated with surgical gloves, that we need to put the mechanistic, physical, even medical, aspects ahead of everything else - because there is little else left - shows our society's general confusion and failure in its sexual ethics.

The show is a carousel of different people who are in fact all the same, exactly like a rotating carousel always represents the same figures.

They need the program to pay for two, recurrent types of test: DNA paternity and lie detector.

Uncertainty about who fathered whom reigns supreme, as about who cheated with whom, how many times and to what level of sexual intimacy: the DNA test is hoped to help with the former, the lie detector with the latter.

Here we have the dream of Richard Dawkins made reality in the flesh of the underclass: no God, no rules, no certainty, no faith, in particular no faith in other people.

Who needs faith when we have science? And who needs trust in a relationship when we have the products of science in the form of DNA paternity test and lie detector test?

Immigration Is Killing Sweden's Welfare State

Swedish Professor Karl-Olov Arnstberg and sociologist/journalist Gunnar Sandelin are about to publish a new book about the alarming situation and consequences of immigration in Sweden. They submitted an op-ed about it to every major Swedish mainstream media outlet, and all without exception refused to publish it. Exactly as the article says, “this is an issue that is not to be discussed.”

That immigration, whose main merit, apart of course from the cultural "enrichment", was always trumpeted by the multicultists and the Leftists as the economic benefit it would bring to the host countries, has in reality been bleeding European economies and exacerbating the unemployment of the indigenous populations, is becoming increasingly evident.

So much so that someone has proposed that European countries have enough justification to expel Third World immigrants, particularly Muslims, on financial grounds alone.

Prominent German journalist Udo Ulfkotte has made it clear: "Muslim immigrants in Germany up until 2007, Dr Ulfkotte explains, "have taken 1 billion euros more out of our social welfare system than they have paid into our system". To give a better idea of the magnitude of this figure and put it into perspective, he adds that the total debt of the German government is 1.7 billion euros. Expelling Muslims, therefore, will help Europe fight its financial crisis."

The article about the new Swedish book described above has been translated by Gates of Vienna, and is really worth reading. Here are the most interesting excerpts:

Sweden is set to burst — the question is when

The welfare state will fall apart within a few years if this situation is allowed to continue. But this is an issue that is not to be discussed.
...
Sweden cannot cope with this much immigration

A professor of ethnology and a sociologist/journalist: Swedish politicians have lost control of immigration. The costs are escalating, the housing situation is desperate, unemployment is on the rise and segregation may be described as dramatic.

In 2012 the Migration Board (Migrationsverket) issued approximately 111,000 residence permits.
...
Many illiterates

Immigration has gradually changed. An earlier wide spectrum of immigrants has been replaced by asylum seekers from mainly Muslim countries such as Syria, Somalia and Afghanistan. These asylum seekers are ill-equipped for life in the high-tech Swedish society. Employment statistics show that over 60 percent of the new arrivals and their relatives have a very “rudimentary education”, which means that many of them are actual or practical illiterates. This makes it particularly difficult for them to find employment. According to Eurostat, only 2.5 percent of the jobs are available for them [based on their qualifications — translator] compared with other EU countries where jobs for workers without any formal qualifications amount to 17 percent. This means that there are extremely few jobs on offer for asylum seekers and their dependents who are allowed to stay in Sweden. As a result, the already large employment gap of 27 percent between domestic-and foreign-born persons aged 25-64 is increasing (SCB, 2012). The prestigious English magazine The Economist noted in February that a large proportion of the non-European immigrants that are allowed to settle in Sweden end up living on the dole.

21 percent are refugees

Every asylum seeker is described as a “refugee” by the media. This is not true, because the definition of “refugee” is tied to the Geneva Convention and the Immigration Act. Of all the asylum seekers that were allowed to stay in Sweden under Fredrik Reinfeldt’s prime ministership, up until 2013, only 21 per cent were refugees. If we go as far back as 1980 the corresponding figure is considerably lower, only 10 percent.
...
In recent years the number of individuals that have managed to obtain family reunification visas is three times higher than those that have been granted political asylum. The majority of the family reunification applications involves newly established relationships. In other words, it’s not family reunification per se, but rather partners who are being brought over from the applicants’ former homelands. It should also be noted that Sweden, as far as we’ve been able to determine, is the only country that allows welfare recipients to bring over relatives to Sweden who are also very likely to end up living on welfare. The general rule in the rest of Europe is that anyone who brings over family members or partners is financially responsible for them. According to Minister of Immigration Tobias Billström, fewer than one percent of those that are issued with family reunification visas manage to provide for themselves.
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Rikskriminalen (National bureau of Investigation) estimated in 2010 that approximately 90 to 95 percent of all the asylum seekers that arrive in Sweden were aided by human traffickers. The asylum seekers come mainly from Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan. The traffickers provide believable refugee stories that the asylum seekers can present to the immigration authorities. Asylum seekers are also advised not to show passports or other appropriate ID documents. Subsequently almost nine out of ten applicants have at the time of application not produced a valid passport to Swedish authorities. The refugee policy cannot be referred to as a humane policy as long as Sweden keeps eroding the right of political asylum for the truly needy by granting political asylum to people who are unable to reveal their true identity and their true intentions.
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In September 2012 fifteen local Social-democratic politicians in the Stockholm region raised the alarm about the housing situation... The reason, of course, was a severe lack of housing... But it’s not just the lack of housing that is problematic. If we leave the Stockholm area and take a look at Katrineholm, the Social Services statistical database shows that of the foreign-born citizens in the city, which in 2011 accounted for 14 percent, 67 percent were on municipal income support. This is a representative figure. In 2011 the foreign-born living on income support (including establishment allowance) were over-represented on the statistics by a factor of 8.6 (or 860 percent), compared to native Swedes.

What is the cost of the immigration?
...Associate Professor of Economics Jan Tullberg, who teaches at the Stockholm School has, in our upcoming book Invandring och mörkläggning (Debattförlaget) [“Immigration and blackout”, Debate Publisher], upgraded the costs to just over three per cent of GDP, which is around SEK 110 billion per year. This is almost half of the overall cost of Swedish health care, or an additional annual net income of SEK 23,000 per employed person.

Tullberg believes that Sweden should curb immigration and do more to get the unemployed back into the workforce. The labour migration from outside the EU / EFTA states largely confirms this: In the last four years, according to the Swedish Migration Board, 43 percent of all the job migrants come to perform unskilled work, while at the same time half a million people are unemployed in Sweden.
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When Tobias Billström, the only politician in the government [willing to speak out], suggested that “we need to discuss volume”, i.e. the amount of immigration, he was met by massive media criticism and was not even supported by his own party leader. There is only one possible conclusion. Unless the trend described above is altered, Sweden’s status as a welfare state will soon be history.