Ethics and Christianity Syllogism

Premise 1
Ethics consists in subordinating the short term to the long term. The longest-possible term is eternity. A doctrine that makes you think in terms of eternity provides the greatest-possible frame for ethical thought and behaviour.

Premise 2
An ethical doctrine that includes eternity will maximise ethical effects, provided that it teaches to do good. If it teaches to do bad, like Islam, it does the greatest opposite: it maximises evil thinking and doing. Christianity is an ethical doctrine that includes eternity and teaches to do good.

Conclusion
Ergo, Christianity maximises ethical thinking and doing, compared with both Islam and atheism or agnosticism.

Anti-Semitism Claims Are Made Too Often

No-one doubts that there will be people who hate Jews.

The most obvious example is devout and observant Muslims, who are commanded by their religion to do so. They are also ordered to hate Christians, but for some reason the latter injunction doesn't evoke even a fraction of the emotion inspired by the former, despite the fact that an infinitely higher number of Christians than Jews suffer the consequences of this today.

Incidentally - this is not relevant to the rest of the article -, I've found what I consider a better way to distinguish between Muslims of various degrees of radicalism. Rather than the self-contradictory expression "moderate Muslims", invented by the West for tactical (read "cowardly") reasons and not used by the Islamic world, I prefer to call "devout and observant Muslims" the Mohammedans who are usually referred to as "militant and extremist", with the implication that those of them who are not covered by this description are not Muslim in the truest sense.

Going back to the main topic, the reason why Islamic Jew-hatred provokes much more indignation than Islamic Christian-hatred is not difficult to understand. It's because anti-Semitism is - or rather has become - another buzzword of the politically-correct language of today's ideological orthodoxy. According to this prevailing dogma, being against Christians does not even remotely approach the same level of sinfulness as attacking Jews.

Accusations of anti-Semitism, without reaching the absurdity and scope of charges of Islamophobia, have nevertheless something in common with them. They say: there is a protected group here, designated as victim, that shouldn't be messed with, or else.

This is not healthy, as it doesn't effectively distinguish real Jew-haters from people who simply have criticisms to make which, as in the case of Islam or Muslims, may be directed at Judaism or Jews.

This is something I have observed over time, but a particular direct experience of it brought it home to me more forcefully.

It all started with the short post "Wrong to Have Animals Killed in War" I wrote on this blog a couple of months ago, prompted by the news of an Israeli military dog killed in a Gaza blast who saved her handler's life.

This elicited two responses which - although one is anonymous - I think came from the same people, as they are worded almost identically.

The first you can see on the post page as a comment:

time I took my Jewish support away from LIbertyGB
there were dogs used in WW2
the Isola da [sic] Elba is over-run with homeless cats
they eat live animal sushi in Japan
but look...can we talk about all this instead of being enemies?

The next day an email was received by my party Liberty GB from two Jewish ladies who were supporters, asking: "Can you please remove this blog?"

The rest of the email is a repetition of the above comment, and ends with: "Why pick on us Jews, clearly singled out?"

Now, one can disagree with my opinion. I have been involved all my life in the movement for animal equality, and I know we are a minority. But no-one can say that my post was anti-Semitic.

Predicting that in these days of heightened sensitivities about anything somebody could - wrongly - read it that way, I wrote (and this is the whole of my comment, the rest of the post being two lines of news):

I have to say that I consider immoral to have dogs or other animals take part in military operations - be it Israeli or any other - as they cannot give their consent.

The "non-anti-Israel" disclaimer is one fifth of the entire text.

I didn't scour the annals of war history to find an apt anti-Semitic episode I could exploit in order to express my hatred of Jews, as these ladies seem to believe. The reason why the post was about an IDF (Israel Defence Forces) canine is simply because it's seeing that news item that inspired it. If I had spotted a similar event in the context of any other army I would have written the same, mutatis mutandis.

What is sinister about these responses is their demand of the removal of my blog, whatever that meant. I'm not sure if these ladies actually know how these things work, but it's immaterial. The spirit of strict censorship - anything we don't like must be removed - is there in full view.

Also unpleasant is the remark "the Isola da [sic] Elba is over-run with homeless cats". Since I am Italian, it looks like a clear tit-for-tat and ad hominem attack. They can be excused for not knowing that I am a lifelong animal activist, but not for neglecting to try to find out something about the context before launching themselves into indictments for anti-Semitism.

Just browsing my blog would have shown them that I've written in support of Israel several times, and would have displayed my animal-rights credentials.

It's a small thing, you may say, and I would agree, if it were not indicative of a much wider and greater phenomenon, of which I was reminded when I read the following in Takimag:

He [American Congressman Jim Traficant] also gained infamy (along with Patrick Buchanan) for opposing the deportation to Israel of John Demjanjuk, whom Traficant insisted had been misidentified as notorious concentration-camp guard “Ivan the Terrible.”

Since Patrick Buchanan is the author of a book I'm reading with great interest, Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, that made me curious to find out more.

It turned out that the case of Ukrainian John Demjanjuk, first sentenced to death by an Israeli court for being the infamous "Ivan the Terrible" guard in Treblinka, the German concentration camp, and years later acquitted by the Supreme Court of Israel because Ivan Marchenko had been established as the real "Ivan the Terrible", is very interesting.

In the clearly not anti-Semitic Kyiv Post, Ukraine’s English-language newspaper, lawyer Andriy J. Semotiuk writes:

While I was not immersed in the case, over the years I became increasingly alarmed by the legal deficiencies that were evident in the prosecution of his case in the United States, then in Israel and finally in Munich.

I don't want to reproduce here all the story of Demjanjuk and his case, which you can follow by reading the links.

Gitta Sereny, an Austrian author of Jewish descent who investigated and wrote extensively about the Third Reich's extermination camps and is another unlikely anti-Semite, had this to say:

From the start of the trial I was concerned that a man was being tried whose identity was in question. My friend Albert Spiess, the German prosecutor of the Treblinka trial and the trial of Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, considered the identification procedure that had been applied in Israel and which produced the identification of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible to be unacceptable. He had told the Israelis, who had invited him to testify at the trial, that he would have to say so in court, at which point the invitation, not surprisingly, was withdrawn.

So, Buchanan and Traficant, who as the Takimag article says gained "infamy", were right all along: Demjanjuk had been misidentified as "Ivan the Terrible", and the latter was finally found to be another man, Marchenko.

That didn't save Buchanan and Traficant from being accused of anti-Semitism over this episode.

I repeat what I said earlier: anti-Semitism, like anti-Christianity, exists. But it is bandied about too often and too often wrongly.

The kind of defensiveness that leads to imputations of Jew-hate whenever there is a disagreement is too similar to "Islamophobia" for comfort, and doesn't help to isolate and address the real anti-Semitism as it confuses the latter with so many "cry wolf" false alarms.

Marseille Is No Longer a European City

The city in the pictures is Marseille, France's second largest city, for many years considered as one of the cleanest, most beautiful cities in the world. See what it looks like now.

In her best-selling book The Force of Reason, the great, pioneer counterjihad writer Oriana Fallaci talked about Marseille as a symbol par excellence of the devastation, ugliness and filth brought by the Muslim invasion of Europe.

Europe, she wrote, is becoming unrecognisable. Marseille is "no longer a French city, it is a Maghrebin city".

Arabic ​is the first language spoken in Marseille, and French only the second.

95% of the students in the city's Collège Edgar Quinet are now Muslims.

No wonder Gaddafi once said in a speech that there was no need to invade Europe because in 20 years Europe would be Muslim.

Europe, with its political fear, spiritual decadence and weakness, and obsequiousness towards Islam, is the first battleground for Muslims in their quest to conquer and subjugate the world.

The Apprentice Gets the Sharia Treatment

You know that Islamisation has become a normal part of British life, acceptable and widely accepted, when one of The Apprentice BBC series' would-be tycoons, competing for the quarter-of-a-million pounds that Alan Sugar - now Lord - will invest in a new business idea, is a woman in hijab.

This is a high-profile TV program, and with the X-Factor one of the most popular. The new series has just started Tuesday 14 October.

Seeing this Muslima acting in a typically Western way - namely trying to make tons of money with little concern for anything else, as money is now our God -, discussing fashion issues with the other girls in her team - despite the fact that her market stall only sells "Asian" fashion, of which I suppose her headscarf is an example -, and simply - if you can take your mind off her Islamic headdress - appearing normal, will do wonders to make the British people view the presence of Muslims in their midst as an everyday occurrence, especially for those who don't yet have the pleasure to experience this phenomenon first hand in their streets or countryside. The soap opera East Enders has already done that, but then everybody knows that London is a different country.

Since sooner or later Muslims will be a majority in Britain and sharia will become the law of the country, the BBC, by trying to make us get used to it, is probably thinking that it's doing us all a big favour.

Ebola Could Mutate into an Airborne Virus; "Bar Entry from Affected Countries" Says Liberty GB

Tuesday during a House of Lords debate Labour's Lord Robert Winston, a medical doctor who has presented scientific TV programs, said that Ebola could mutate into an airborne virus that is caught like a common cold.

He was reacting to Health Minister Earl Howe's remark at the House of Commons that the Ebola risk to British people "remains low".

At the moment the disease is passed through bodily contact or fluids such as blood and sweat, but the contagion risk would increase if the virus became airborne.

Lord Winston asserted: "I am slightly concerned about the possible risk of seeming a little complacent about saying that this is low-risk. We know that viruses mutate, for example, and we know that the Ebola virus can mutate."

He was echoing a similar concern expressed on US television by an expert on the Ebola virus, Purdue University virologist Dr. David Sanders, who has been studying this virus since 2003.

Sanders made his concern known after – in the first person-to-person transmission of Ebola on US soil - Texas Presbyterian Hospital nurse Nina Pham contracted the virus from Thomas Duncan, a Liberian patient who, if proper controls had been in place, should not even have been in America . The associate professor of biological sciences explained: “So we actually have the data that show that Ebola enters into lung tissue from the airway side. This was done with human lung tissue. And it enters by the exactly same side of the cell as influenza enters cells. So it clearly has that inherent capacity to get into the lungs from the airway”.

In another interview he had warned: “So this argues that Ebola is primed to be able to have respiratory transmission... We need to be taking this into consideration – what if. This is not a crazy what if. This is not a loud what if.”

The US Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), a global leader in addressing public health preparedness and emerging infectious disease response, about a month ago had already reported: ”We believe there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks.”

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, harshly criticised in the States for their mishandling of the crisis, seem to start accepting this possibility.

The heightened risk of contracting Ebola due to respiratory transmission, if confirmed, will and should put more pressure on British authorities to stop potential carriers from entering the UK.

President Obama has been accused of putting American lives at risk for the sake of political correctness, by refusing to suspend travel visas from Ebola-affected countries.

Here in the UK, Public Health England and Border Force officials admitted that there is no fixed plan on how to deal with people who have visited affected countries but refuse to give details or to have their temperature taken.

Screening for Ebola has started at British airports but it emerged that the process is voluntary.

Keeping in mind that “After Ghana and Gambia, the UK has the third highest risk globally because of the large number of people and flights from the epidemic region to London”, the Liberty GB party believes that the first step to protect the British public is to bar from entry to the UK people from the Ebola-stricken countries.

NUS Rejects Anti-ISIS Motion as "Islamophobic"

You have to see it to believe it.

A student of Kurdish descent has submitted a resolution to the UK's National Union of Students (NUS) to condemn the Islamic State, but the motion has been rejected because it offended the sensibilities of the Union’s Black Students Officer (BSO) who led a voting bloc to defeat it.

The NUS considers the ongoing conflict with ISIS to be “Islamophobic”.

You couldn't make this up. At least they recognise that ISIS represents Islam, and is not some totally extraneous group that for some hard-to-fathom reason has decided to associate itself to the "religion of peace" while beheading people like there's no tomorrow.

From Breitbart London:

One member of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) group took to his blog to bemoan the fact the Union’s Black Student Officer could railroad the motion apparently by virtue of race alone. Complaining of the excessive power the Liberation campaigns enjoy he said: “the idea is widespread that if a Liberation Officer opposes something, it must be bad… people see or claim to see debate on the Middle East as something that the BSO should somehow have veto power over, regardless of the issues and the arguments made”.

Apart from the purported Islamophobia that supporting a minority group being raped and murdered by the Islamic State implies, the involvement of the United States in the conflict appears to have caused the greatest division among the various elements of the NUS, as the traditional bête noire of right-on student politics is flying air-missions in support of the Kurdish army.

The NCAFC blogger was realistic about the utility of American intervention, remarking: “the Kurds and Yazidis thus far would not have been able to survive if it had not been for aid from the Americans. Calling simply for an end to this intervention is the same as calling for the defeat of the Peshmerga forces by ISIS”.

As the motion was defeated by a combination of abstainees and the BSO power of opinion setting, in the words of the angered bloggers this time the NUS thought it preferable to “sit back and watch the slaughter” than to ally themselves with a “pro USA intervention” vote.

Biggest Scientific Study Suggests Life after Death

"First hint of 'life after death' in biggest ever scientific study", headlines The Telegraph, going on to say: "Southampton University scientists have found evidence that awareness can continue for at least several minutes after clinical death which was previously thought impossible".

Does this prove that there is life after death and that God exists?

Of course not, but it shows without a shadow of a doubt that there are many phenomena and events that science doesn't explain about the nature of consciousness and of the mind in general.

Someone's answer to that migtht be that science will one day explain everything: but that belief requires a deep faith in itself. Even though the object of that faith is science and not God, faith it is.

What is paradoxical about the way in which atheists - "unbelievers" is a misnomer, as they do believe without empirical or rational foundation in many things -, since 19th-century positivism to today's Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, have associated decline of religion with progress of science is that the advances in the latter, if anything, have demonstrated to us how many things in the universe, life and mind science doesn't understand, most notably their origin. And there are very good reasons to predict that it never will, as they probably require other constructs, other ways of thinking and other kinds of explanantion.

The connection between the brain, a material object, and the mind, or rather how the physicality of the former can produce the non-physicality of the latter, has not become clearer the more it has been studied and researched by science, but in fact the opposite has occurred: the questions have multiplied, while the answers have diminished in proportion.

It's perfectly true that it's in the nature of scientific investigation that every new problem solved, every new question answered gives rise to new problems and questions, which inspired one of the greatest philosophers of science, Sir Karl Popper, to title his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest.

But there is a difference between the type of investigation in which science excels, where satisfactory theories that can survive rigorous tests are reached, and the type of investigation which displays an exponentially increasing discrepancy between problems and their solutions.

What the neo-positivists of the early 20th century, like the Vienna Circle - thinking that they were following Ludwig Wittgenstein but in fact misinterpreting him -, were saying was that questions which cannot be answered by mere logic and empiricism (hence one of their names, "logic empiricists") should not be asked and pursued. Metaphysics and theology were nonsense. This was a way of limiting all intellectual search of knowledge to science.

This position has serious limitations. First a logical one: it is a self-contradictory position. If anything beyond the realm of science is nonsensical, what these philosophers (and their heirs today) are saying is nonsensical too, as it does not limit itself to logic and empirical evidence: they are engaging in metaphysics as well, albeit to oppose another metaphysical view.

And this takes us to its second serious limitation: if even people who have postulated boundaries for intellectual investigation cannot confine themselves to them and remain within them, that by itself is an indication that those boundaries are too narrow and unsatisfactory. And that science cannot provide all the answers that are necessary for a curious mind to be satisfied.

Even more, what if science itself, as it seems to be the case the more it expands and deepens, points to something outside itself?

From The Telegraph article:

The largest ever medical study into near-death and out-of-body experiences has discovered that some awareness may continue even after the brain has shut down completely.

It is a controversial subject which has, until recently, been treated with widespread scepticism.

But scientists at the University of Southampton have spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria.

And they found that nearly 40 per cent of people who survived described some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted.

One man even recalled leaving his body entirely and watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room.

Despite being unconscious and ‘dead’ for three minutes, the 57-year-old social worker from Southampton, recounted the actions of the nursing staff in detail and described the sound of the machines.

“We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating,” said Dr Sam Parnia, a former research fellow at Southampton University, now at the State University of New York, who led the study.

“But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.

“The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.

“He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”

Of 2060 cardiac arrest patients studied, 330 survived and of 140 surveyed, 39 per cent said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated.

Although many could not recall specific details, some themes emerged. One in five said they had felt an unusual sense of peacefulness while nearly one third said time had slowed down or speeded up.

Some recalled seeing a bright light; a golden flash or the Sun shining. Others recounted feelings of fear or drowning or being dragged through deep water. 13 per cent said they had felt separated from their bodies and the same number said their sensed had been heightened.

Dr Parnia believes many more people may have experiences when they are close to death but drugs or sedatives used in the process of rescuitation may stop them remembering.

“Estimates have suggested that millions of people have had vivid experiences in relation to death but the scientific evidence has been ambiguous at best.

“Many people have assumed that these were hallucinations or illusions but they do seem to corresponded to actual events.

“And a higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits.

“These experiences warrant further investigation.“

Dr David Wilde, a research psychologist and Nottingham Trent University, is currently compiling data on out-of-body experiences in an attempt to discover a pattern which links each episode.

He hopes the latest research will encourage new studies into the controversial topic.

“Most studies look retrospectively, 10 or 20 years ago, but the researchers went out looking for examples and used a really large sample size, so this gives the work a lot of validity.

“There is some very good evidence here that these experiences are actually happening after people have medically died.

“We just don’t know what is going on. We are still very much in the dark about what happens when you die and hopefully this study will help shine a scientific lens onto that.” [All emphases added]