Milton Friedman, Bad Laws and Tax Evasion

In this video, entitled "Incentives for Immoral Behavior", the American economist Professor Milton Friedman explains how there are fundamentally two types of law: those that are regarded as moral and just by the vast majority of people, and those which are not.

The former group of laws are generally obeyed because they speak to the inner moral sense of the population, the latter have a high rate of violations.

Obviously, the greater the number of laws and regulations, the higher the number of them that will be considered as superfluous and will not carry moral value among the citizens, and in turn the more numerous the laws that will be broken.

This generates a psychological and social climate of lawlessness, which is clearly bad for society.

For a long time now I've thought that laws are like medicines: they both almost invariably have side effects, unwanted consequences. Therefore, they should be used extremely sparingly, only as the last resort.

Unfortunately, left unchecked, governments have a tendency to create an enormous amount of unnecessary laws and regulations, that just complicate life, make it more expensive, and often contradict each other so new laws have to be passed to solve those contradictions or to solve the problems produced by the previous laws.

Very interesting, for the current political environment of Britain and in fact all the West, is Friedman's reference in the video to how people who wouldn't steal a penny from another person have no moral qualms about finding ways to evade tax, which is illegal.

It's relevant to the current climate because in the UK tax evasion has recently increased, and Prime Minister David Cameron, for one, has been chastising this practice, while the press has brought to public attention cases involving corporations and entertainment famous figures ("celebs") alike.

The rise in tax evasion is undoubtedly due to the profligate, dissipated and frankly cretin way in which successive British governments, particularly during the interminably long 13 years of the previous Labour tenure, have squandered taxpayers' money to create the third highest national debt in the world.

The vast disillusion with the welfare state - by far the main culprit of this waste - in which taxpayers, namely its donors and funders, have lost any trust, is clearly largely responsible for the tax evasion hike. Knowing how the welfare system of benefits is easily exploited and is replete with fraud cases must provide a huge inspiration and incentive for fiddling with tax returns.

Basically, the law-makers should not pass laws and impose taxes that appeal to themselves for ideological - like redistribution of wealth - or other reasons, but have no or little resonance with the people they are supposed to represent.

To give citizens, as Milton put it, "incentives for immoral behavior", specifically for law-breaking, should be avoided because, once people start thinking of themselves in those terms, psychologically it has a domino effect and contributes to the spreading of an attitude of mistrust and eventually corruption.

As the US economist says, the endemic corruption in the British civil service was eliminated by getting rid of the laws that were giving rise to bribes.


Hat tip to Erwin

Support for Christianity Should Not Alienate People

This article is the first part of a reply to the comments on my speech What is Uniquely Good about Western Civilisation Derives from Christianity. Most of them have been positive, in agreement with what I said.

This is something we should take more notice of. Militant atheists and anti-Christian people are very vocal, but they only represent a minority of ordinary people's views.

Very few persons have disagreed with my speech. One commenter, though, has sent me observations that, as well as highly critical of the position I take there - even to the point of suggesting that my party Liberty GB, which upholds Christian values and principles, would lose supporters because of this stance -, are detailed enough to warrant a complex answer in more than one part. Here is the first. I’ll call the commenter by his Christian name, Tony.

Some of Tony’s comments remind me of a trial in which, reversing the traditional legal procedure, the defendant is a priori considered guilty until proven innocent, and what is applied to him is a strange, contradictory criterion according to which everything that stands in his favour is discounted as pure chance while whatever stands against him is taken as undisputed evidence of his evil nature.

This is an example of the former:

I agree with you that many wonderful things have come from people professing to be Christians. Public schools and hospitals in Britain are one example. However there is no reason to believe these would not have come about without religion.

In other words, that people professing to be Christian and acting according to the teachings of Jesus and to Christian beliefs and morals created something good is not due to Christianity.

And, immediately after the above, comes an instance of the latter:

The societal benefits that you describe as coming from Christianity came after the Reformation, when the power and influence of Christianity was greatly reduced, and the Church was put in its place. Prior to the Reformation, society was undermined by superstition, religious persecution and backwardness, there was very little in the way of social or scientific development for hundreds of years, which is why it's called The Dark Ages.

Putting aside for a moment the question of the historical accuracy of this description, the double-standard message is very clear: everything good that was done by Christians is not due to Christianity, but everything bad that that was done by Christians is.

Such a position of total enmity and hatred (for once this overused term is justified) for Christianity, which only a few decades ago would have been considered not only offensive but, even more importantly, as absurd as coming from another planet – maybe the planet of Islam -, is perfectly understandable today.

We have to realise that the Left, with its typically 20th century’s creation of Cultural Marxism, has been in power in all Western countries since the end of the Second World War, both when it has been and when it hasn’t been in government.

The power of the Left is ideological, is its grip on every means of spreading ideas and indoctrinating people, in short is cultural. Every other political force now has to confront the theories of the Left which, in the views of the majority, stand on the moral and political high ground – although this can easily be shown as a myth. That communists killed around a hundred million people should act as a simple inspiration for doubting that myth, but apparently communism has remained largely unscathed in Western minds, weirdly disconnected from its effects.

I wonder why. Possibly for the same reason as Christianity is so wildly vilified? Because of socio-communist propaganda dominating schools, universities, media, entertainment?

Hate for Christianity has been mirroring and running parallel to hate for the West, and has led to the historical revisionism, misinformation, ignorance, distortions and propaganda that neo-Marxism has successfully spread in the last 50-60 years. This will be treated in the second part of my article, which will deal with slavery, a classic case of falsification of history and doctrine that has created the myths of the evils of both Christianity and the West.

I know about it beacuse I was a victim of this indoctrination too, and years ago I may have agreed with what Tony writes.

That loathing of Christianity is real can be seen from this comment to my post "From Atheist to Agnostic":

My family is quite devout (or as devout as the CoE permits), and I was bullied a bit for it in school.

Tony says:

To associate Liberty GB with Christianity will alienate a lot of people (myself included). You might also be linked in peoples' minds (and then dismissed) to the Christian fundamentalist movement / religion Right in the USA. This would bring a lot of negative baggage.

That every time someone defends Christianity he (in this case, she) risks being classified as a fundamentalist is very similar to the risk that an individual opposed to uncontrolled immigration to the West or aware of the dangers of Islam will be called racist or Islamophobic.

Both these types of accusations derive from a similar kind of profound misunderstanding.

And also, as American scholar of Islamic culture Raymond Ibrahim wrote in a personal note to me:

[W]hatever the shortcomings of the Christian right in America, vis-a-vis Europe, they certainly have a better approach to Islam, whereas secular-centered Europe is exactly where it is, and going to get worse, because they reject the idea of any connection to Christianity.

Ibrahim expressed my speech's main point as follows:

Christianity, as with all religions, has two aspects, the spiritual (personal) and the cultural (societal): in our context, one need not discuss or even promote the former, but rather it is the latter that needs to make a comeback - the legacy, heritage, etc., that the West can rally behind, give it a core, a sense of collective identity, and of course a moral grounding.

You can find this position represented in a comment to my speech from another person:

I am an Atheist but I believe that a free , strong , democratic society can only exist in the West by following Christian ethics or as in Israel , Jewish ethics ( after all Israel is the only democratic country in the middle east .)

And this is the point: how is it that people who extoll so much the importance of science, as atheists generally do, take so little notice of empirical evidence, which is a foundational element of the scientific method?

If all religions were the same, and in particular if they were equally bad, how is it that they have produced cultures so far apart from each other, with profoundly, extremely different outcomes for the well-being of the corresponding populations? Correlation is not causation, granted, but what broadly divides the West from the Islamic world, and both from the rest, is indeed religion, with all the ideas that it generates.

Only the West, which has always been Christian, has reached peak achievements in all human fields, bringing with it countries that understood its success and imitated it. Those who deny the importance of Christianity should provide an explanation for this phenomenon.

What is Uniquely Good about Western Civilisation Derives from Christianity

Transcript

My name is Enza Ferreri. I'm a blogger, journalist and the Press Officer of the Liberty GB party.

This video is for everybody, but it's mostly for the people in the counter-jihad movement, and among them, the atheists and agnostics. We know much more – and I include myself – about Islam than we know about Christianity.

Now, I've been an atheist almost all my life. I've become an agnostic less than a year ago, when I realised that the reason why many people, many atheists, are opposed to the belief in God – the reason they'll give is that there is not enough evidence for the belief in God – could also be an argument against atheism. Because when you say there's no Creator, ... when you don't explain the origin of the universe by means of a Creator, you are automatically subscribing to the alternative view which is that everything happened by chance, that the universe came about by accident, and that has got less evidence ... than the belief in God.

Now this introduction is just to make you understand who I am, where I'm coming from, but has nothing to do with what I'm going to say next.

Let's put the belief in God aside. Okay, we all know that we have a problem with Islam. But we should understand, for instance, that the EDL [English Defence League] has failed – has got many problems – exactly because it starts from only that viewpoint. It's just a spontaneous reaction against Islam, but without a grasp of the problem and a better ground to understand it and to face it. Islam is not the problem, Islam is a symptom of a disease, and the disease is cultural Marxism.

Now the West wouldn't have any problem with Islam if the West were strong within. It's a bit like the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire, yes, was destroyed by the barbarians from outside, but more than anything was destroyed by its own weakness inside, the divisions, the political divisions within it. And the same, something similar, applies to the West and Islam, in the same way as Rome versus the barbarians.

Our superiority, the West's superiority and greater strength is such that Islam wouldn't trouble us at all if we didn't have these divisions within the West, Western civilisation, which are caused by Cultural Marxism, which is the reincarnation of Marxism in the twentieth century.

Antonio Gramsci, who founded the Italian Communist Party in 1921, formulated the theory of cultural hegemony, which says that before being able to change, to make a change politically, to have a political revolution, we need to change the culture. And that is done by changing the consciousness of the people, a total change in and control of the culture, so that new, emerging, dominant ideas would lead to the political revolution and give rise to new generations with different ideas.

That has been done by the Left successfully. After Gramsci there was the Frankfurt School later on, and since then the Left has applied this idea of cultural hegemony and has with it control of the media, and the education system, has done exactly that and has won the war so far.

Now we must do the same, we must use the same means. How? The great Oriana Fallaci, who was one of the first, one of the pioneers to open the eyes of the West to the dangers of Islam, was herself an atheist. But she called herself a Christian atheist.

This is an important distinction because we want to distinguish between Christian theology and the belief in God – to which we may or may not subscribe – [and] Christianity as civilisational foundation for the West and for our countries. And that is non-negotiable. We need Christianity, we can't do without it because this is what the West was built on.

We are ourselves the victims of decades of leftist propaganda, so it's understandable that many of us have actually embraced them, believed in them. But there are many [myths in what they say]: first of all, that all religions are the same. This is absurd. If you want to think scientifically and look at empirical evidence, where are Christian terrorists? Let's look around ourselves, there aren't any.

But there are so many Muslim terrorists, and not only that, all over the world violence is initiated mostly by Islam. No other religion really, but certainly not Christianity.

And another thing: we have to explain to ourselves why only the Christian part of the world has made such enormous progress, to which the other parts of the world don't even come close. There must be some explanation, why is it? The only thing that distinguishes the West from the rest is Christianity.

Christianity is not what some atheists – I'm not talking about all atheists of course, there are atheists like Oriana Fallaci, like me, or agnostics, who don't believe in that – but some atheists propagate the wrong ideas about Christianity, and they have led us to believe some things that Christianity is not.

Christianity is a very complex, rational doctrine developed through centuries of Patristic and Scholastic philosophy incorporating Aristotle and his logic. If all religions were the same, how is it that Aristotle could never be reconciled with Islam?

Now let's think about the Crusades as well. Most people in the counter-jihad movement, will know by now, hopefully, that there's been a huge historical distortion of what the Crusades were about – by the Left, by Cultural Marxism.

They were not, as they have been portrayed, a war of aggression, but they were actually the opposite, they were belated wars of defence against the encroachments of Islam, which was about to conquer Europe. We have to thank the Crusades if we are now not all Muslims or minorities in Islamic countries – which is a fate worse than death, you just have to look at what happens all around the world.

So in same way as the Crusades have been, the history of the crusades has been distorted and manipulated by the Left, in education and in the media – if you look at the Hollywood films that have been made about the Crusades, they are all totally distorted –, the same can happen about other parts of Christian history.

Now, I'm not going through all the history of Christianity because we haven't got enough time for this short video, but we've got to look at the things that Christianity has contributed to the West, which are important throughout Western history, including now.

Christianity is deeply ingrained in many of the things that we believe in today. Many of our institutions, values, principles and practices. And here they are, for instance:

All men are equal. This is a distinctive Christian belief, not to be found in any other religion or doctrine, especially at the time of Jesus Christ, it was a very, very revolutionary belief; and without bias of race or class.

The freedom and rights of the individual. For Christianity man has free will and he is in the image of God. This is in stark contrast to the autocratic societies of the non-Christian world, past and present. Without freedom, without this kind of freedom, there are no other freedoms, political, economic or religious.

Human rights derive from the Christian concept of natural rights.

The dignity of manual labour, that Christianity has introduced; it didn't exist in other cultures. Remember that Jesus's father was a carpenter, and most of the people he recruited were either fishermen or other labourers.

Christianity has been the inspiration of great art, music and literature.

Then, the abolition of slavery. Only Christianity has abolished slavery. It still exists in Islam, it's never been abolished by Islam, whereas Christianity abolished it twice: at the time of the Roman Empire first, when Christianity became the [future] religion of the Roman Empire; and in nineteenth century America – it was Christians who abolished slavery in nineteenth century America.

Then, Jesus banned animal sacrifices.

Then, the banning of gladiator fights, which derived from pagan Rome.

Christianity in ethics. Christian ethics is the best ethics, even today. There is nothing that has been able to replace it. Utilitarianism, which is a non-Christian – actually non-religious – ethics founded by Jeremy Bentham in the nineteenth century, is not a good system of ethics. It basically accepts the principle that the end justifies the means.

Christian ethics is still the best ethics, founded on love and charity. In fact, you can see that the people who help now and have helped the Third World – who have gone there and helped it – the vast majority of them are Christians.

Before Christianity and in other parts of the world ... there's never been an interest for the poor, the sick and the dying. Christianity introduced historically the institutionalisation of healthcare.

Then, the birth of science. Science in the modern sense of the word was born with the beginning of the modern era in Europe, after the Renaissance. ... Science is a system, a systematic application of a method of enquiry to nature, and a different outlook on the natural world.

It's been possible because Christian scientists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – and philosophers of science as well – because they were Christian they believed that because the Christian God is a person like us, He has ordered the universe in a way that we can understand. For science it is essential that there is an orderly universe, that you can discover the laws of nature.

We think this is obvious now, we take it for granted, but it's not an obvious concept at all, that the universe must be ordered and not chaotic. In fact the Chinese, for instance, at the time couldn't believe in that. That's why science [didn't] develop in China for instance.

If you read a book, why do you think you can understand it? Because you know that you speak the same language as the author, or think, have a mind that is similar to that of the author. Galileo spoke of the book of nature being written by God in mathematical language and he said we – scientists – can understand it because we have a mind similar to that of God, we are built in his own image. So this was all essential for the birth of science, and Christianity was crucial in it.

No other religion, philosophy, teaching, nation or movement has changed the world for the better as Christianity has done. Are we going to throw all this away? How do we know that all these great things that Christianity has given us will survive without it?

As individuals we can be atheist or agnostic, but can we as a society be?

Is it a coincidence that Islam is representing a mortal threat to the West for the first time in centuries just when our society doesn't seem to believe in anything any more?

All the enemies of the West have always been enemies of Christianity. Is that a coincidence?

To resist the ideological onslaught of Islam, we must know who we are. This culture of nothing, of nothingness, prevailing in the West has helped Islam, and will continue to be an obstacle to our resistance to it.

Not all atheists but those of them who oppose Christianity and the Church don't realise that they are fighting against the strongest inspiration and the most effective defence of Western civilisation and its values of rationality and freedom. And they might realise that when it's too late.

When Tommy Met Mo It Ended in Tears

I’ve watched the BBC documentary When Tommy Met Mo: Leaving the EDL (video above), which was clearly intended to portray Islam as a peaceful, nice and tolerant “religion”, hijacked by some, in short the usual spin, but this time with the prestigious and authoritative backing of a former English Defence League leader.

That Tommy Robinson lent himself to this circus shows what a confused man he is. He has a split personality, at least vis–à–vis Islam. There are times when he appears to understand, at least partly, what Islam is; and then there are times when he has strong doubts about what he has previously thought, and starts talking nonsense.

The fact that he may believe all the things said by Mohammed Ansar and Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation is another indication of how unclear his ideas about Islam are. He wasn’t even able to quote from the Quran in an intelligible way, which would have been the easiest thing in the world and the first thing to do, when the others disputed his words. Of course we don’t know if the BBC cut out the parts when Robinson might have appeared not so gullible: we have to go by what the documentary shows, but I suspect that it must have had Tommy’s final approval.

About paedophilia, all he had to say is that Muhammad, the ideal man, the model of behaviour for all Muslims – none excluded – to follow, was a paedophile himself, which automatically legitimises paedophilia in Islam.

And about reforming Islam and throwing away parts – the nasty, “violent” he called them, parts - of the Quran: you cannot reform or pick and choose between the words of God, and for Muslims the Quran IS the direct word of God, verbatim dictated to Muhammad, unlike the Bible, that was written by men. So, unlike Christianity, Islam is by its very nature fundamentalist and cannot be reformed in principle.

The often-repeated leitmotif of the documentary was “British Islam”, a contradiction in terms no less than “squared circle”.

I’m writing all this not because Tommy or what he does have a supreme importance for me, although he's been a brave bloke and although his actions still have major effects. For example, a friend of mine, who is highly representative of public opinion and who watched the documentary too, now likes Tommy Robinson very much, thinks he’s a nice person, and more than ever hopes that Islam will be reformed and everything in the UK will be hunky-dory with Muslims. Which is the impression the BBC wanted to create: Islam is good and, even in case you doubt it - namely, even if you have eyes and ears –, it can always be reformed. What more do you want?

No, I’m writing this because there is a lesson for us on all this.

The lesson is that we cannot act without having thought first, which is what Tommy omitted to do. He has made such a mess of things: being against Islam – or maybe not -, then being an apologist for Islam, like the historian Tom Holland appearing on the programme, whom I never quite found convincing – and what he said on this broadcast confirms me in my opinion.

And Tommy made such a mess of things because he did not start with the right foot, which would have been having a good, solid and deep understanding of what he was fighting against, beginning with a clarification of the spurious distinction between Islam and Islamism, that he never quite realised to be fabricated. But, in a war, comprehending who your enemy is is necessary but not sufficient. You also have to understand who you are and more importantly what you fight for.

The existence of an LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual) division in the EDL shows very clearly that he did not grasp what he was fighting for. The Left, even before Islam, is our enemy. The Left is the enabler of Islam in the West. And you don’t fight the Left by joining it. The normalisation of homosexuality - and even more transexuality - is one of the many manifestations of the cultural war victories that Marxism has achieved over the Western, typically Christian, values and principles we stand for.

That’s why I keep stressing the importance of having clear ideas and ideology before anything else.

It doesn’t have to end in a civil war, as somebody gloomily forecasts, just because Tommy Robinson – and probably the EDL – have failed. We can learn from their mistakes and solve this problem politically, as we in the Liberty GB party are trying to do.

Londoners Sign Petition for Female Genital Mutilation

Shocking but revealing.

Leyla Hussein, a Somali woman living in London who was subjected to female genital mutilation when she was seven in Somalia, has tried a macabre experiment to test how far the political correctness of the public in the British capital would go.

She asked shoppers to sign a petition supporting FGM, telling them she wanted to protect her “culture, traditions and rights”.

Ms Hussein astonishingly found that only one person out of 20 refused to sign her petition.

She said to the London Evening Standard:

“I kept using the word ‘it’s just mutilation’. They were like ‘yes, you are right’. How can anyone think that’s okay?”

...[P]ublic health minister Jane Ellison warned that vulnerable girls were being failed because people do not want to be seen as “culturally insensitive”.

This reminds me a bit of that notorious psychology experiment in which subjects were asked to administer electric shocks to other persons by someone whom they believed to be a scientist. Under test was the willingness of ordinary people, not particularly sadistic or cruel, to go along with the infliction of even severe pain on innocent human beings if the command was imparted by a figure in authority in a white coat if they thought that this could benefit science.

The pain was imaginary, no electric shocks were really given, but the subjects did not know that. Mostly, they obeyed the order to administer progressively stronger electric shocks, and continued even when the presumed victims, whom they could not directly see, were screaming.

Two are the great gods of our world, to whom everything must be sacrificed, as in the ancient pagan rites of human and animal sacrifices: science and political correctness.


Photo by Jonathon Narvey (Creative Commons CC BY 2.0).

Immigration: UK public was never consulted

It’s so odd that many British politicians, especially those of the Euro-skeptic variety, always go on saying that the UK public has not been consulted regarding Britain’s position in the European Union now that the process of European integration is political and not just economical as it was when the UK held a referendum on the subject in 1975.

It’s odd because no politician ever, at least in the mainstream political parties, has ever uttered a word about another dramatically important issue affecting British people’s lives much more profoundly than the country’s European membership.

I refer to the mass immigration, legal and illegal, of so-called economic migrants as well as political refugees and asylum seekers, genuine and bogus alike, that has inundated the country with a number of people from all over the world so large and so unmanageable that nobody knows exactly what it is.

I said it’s odd but in fact it isn’t. There’s a crucial reason why the decisions about mass immigration have been taken by the various successive governments from the post-war period to now without bothering to find out what the people actually wanted.

Because politicians know extremely well that the vast majority of the British population do not want this large-scale demographic experiment performed on their own skin, as all opinion polls clearly show.

Some Religions Are More Equal Than Others: the Existence of Double Standards

It never ceases to amaze me how on one hand cultural products considered offensive to Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism are treated as “hate crimes”. If, God forbid, a book or a film offends Islam (and that is easy enough, because Muslims do get easily offended), on top of being labelled a hate crime it also puts author, director or producers’ lives at risk with a fatwa (in fact, a film about Islam would be even too dangerous to make).

But on the other hand to offend Christianity is “art”, as in the case of Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung and surrounded by cut-outs from pornographic magazines.

The existence of the much over-used words "anti-semitic" and "islamophobic" obviously shows that certain groups are protected by political correctness, but one group is not.

There have been many excuses put forward for Ofili's work, the most common of which have been:

1)You can attack your own religion.

No, because it is not only your religion, it is not exclusive to yourself. Many other coreligionists may be offended by something that you don't find offensive, and you have to think of its effect on them.

2) Dung is God's creation.

What about pornographic cuts? Last time I checked it was not God that created Playboy or hard core movies.
The question is one of context. It is not the human body or its products at issue here, but the association of a Christian symbol with something which has a repulsive connotation.

3) It makes people think.

Wow! So, without a product of defecation or urination slapped in front of them, people wouldn't be able to think. Whatever the persons who put forward this excuse have faith in they can't have a lot of faith in people's reflective powers.
It's possible to make people think without the "shock, horror!" techniques that someone seems to believe necessary. Incidentally, aren't they the same techniques used by popular tabloids and mags ('gutter press' they are called in England)?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

People who defend Ofili's work overlook the all-important question of communication.

We use certain words (and discard others) because we know that they convey a certain meaning to other people, that is the recipients of our communication, not to ourselves.

Communication is all about thinking of who is going to receive it and what they will make of it.

Now, art is one of the most important forms of communication.

Whether a painting is a real work of art or is art only in its producer's wishes (and wildest dreams), it doesn't alter the fact that it is a means of communication.

Whatever Ofili thinks, it should have been obvious even to a not exactly gigantic intellect like him that the majority of people who would see the painting considered elephant dung as a symbol of something totally different from Ofili's supposed and alleged original intentions.

By associating it with a symbol of Christianity, Ofili conveyed a clear message.

The message is: profanity.

Let me explain what it means, from the original Greek: it is to pollute and displace one icon with another. Now, trying to interject offensive symbology into a religion's iconography certainly is profanity. Is it profane for the culture involved, Christianity, or not? Since so many Christians protested vehemently about it, one could with certainty infer that they found it profane.

The most interesting things I read on that work by Ofili are this:

"There is contempt of the past, a senseless denial of any possibility of enduring meaning, in desecration art. Desecration art functions like the parasite; it destroys the heritage from which it draws its meaning. Ofili's piece illustrates this. The icon gives the piece meaning, yet the icon is what the piece seeks to destroy. Destroy the meaning of the icon and the meaning of the piece is destroyed with it like the parasite that dies with its host. The artist is vandal and the museum the gate to this cultural barbarism."

And this:

"Or perhaps the artist, not unlike a dirtyminded little adolescent, sought the most offensive image his little brain could contrive in order to aquire a name and hopefully wealth. Because that is what art today is really about, money. It is no different from pop culture, which is what Warhol went to all the trouble to point out."

And the central issue at stake here is that no works of "art" have done the same thorough job at desecrating fundamental symbols of religions other than Christianity.

Conversely, every time a Christian symbol is depicted in "art" now is surrounded by or associated with excreta, urine, vaginas, condoms, breasts, panties, coat hangers for abortion, phallic pipes, simulated sex acts and the like.