Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller Are still Fighting Back against Their Ban: Help Them



The 25 June 2013 is a significant date not only in the history of the counterjihad movement but also in the history of freedom of speech in one of the countries that most contributed to its establishment: Britain.

That is the date on the letter to Robert Spencer announcing the UK Home Secretary Theresa May's decision that he should

be excluded from the United Kingdom on the grounds that your presence here is not conducive to the public good...

The Home Secretary notes that you are the founder of the blog Jihad Watch (a site widely criticized for being Islamophobic). You co-founded the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, both of which have been described as anti-Muslim hate groups.

So those were the reasons given for Spencer's and fellow founder of American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and SIOA Pamela Geller's ban.

As Robert Spencer put it at the time:

Muhammad al-Arifi, who has advocated Jew-hatred, wife-beating, and jihad violence, entered the U.K. recently with no difficulty. In not allowing us into the country solely because of our true and accurate statements about Islam, the British government is behaving like a de facto Islamic state. The nation that gave the world the Magna Carta is dead.

Al-Arifi is just one of the many Islamists admitted to Britain, in this case just a few days before Spencer's ban. The interesting thing about him is that he's the author of these words:

Devotion to jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer. Allah said that if a man fights the infidels, the infidels will be unable to prepare to fight.

Robert Spencer, according to the Home Office, instead wrote this:

...it [Islam] is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society because media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.

The grammatically and logically confused quotation is unlikely to be literal, as anyone who's read Robert's prose will easily realize. Nevertheless, what distinguishes the latter extract from the one immediately above? They both equate Islam with war against infidels, but one - Al-Arifi's - approvingly, and the other - Spencer's - disapprovingly:

[I]t is perfectly acceptable to speak about jihad violence in the UK, as long as you’re for it. If you oppose it, watch out...

This is even more true in view of the fact that the purpose of the two anti-jihad campaigners' visit to Britain was to lay a wreath at a memorial for British soldier Lee Rigby - murdered by two jihadists on a London street on 22 May - on Armed Forces Day, 29 June.

Immediately after the ban, The British Society For Freedom of Speech published the online petition Allow Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer to Speak in UK, which has so far collected almost 10,000 signatures, including mine.

On 2nd July, Spencer and Geller fought back with an appeal against their ban and instructed lawyers in the UK.

A couple of weeks ago, two judges decided to uphold the Government’s exclusion on Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller from the UK.

But that's not the end of it. A fund has been established to help the lawsuit against the entry ban.

They know that it’s not going to be easy:

The entire British government and media elite is determined to appease Islamic supremacists and discredit and silence the defenders of freedom. We will have to hire a top British legal team that can navigate through all the roadblocks and obstacles that the Home Office puts up.

It’s going to cost us upwards of $25,000.

So, please help them fight the ban: donate via Paypal to americanfreedomdefense@aol.com .

Nazis Ordered: Remove All Christian Crosses and Spread Paganism

I've shown in the first and second articles of this series - concluding with the present article - that Hitler was neopagan and anti-Christian and that the new pagan religions that developed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s gave Nazism part of its ideological foundations.

It is only to be expected, then, that the Hitler regime tried to tear German society away from Christianity and return it to pagan beliefs. While Hitler made public proclamations that he would protect Christianity in order to be acceptable to the German people who were in their majority Christian, his recorded private statements and his actions tell a very different story.

Many absurd, unbelievable claims about Hitler's presumed Christianity have been made and, in this day and age when anything about Christianity, even the most preposterous assertion, as long as it's bad of course, is accepted as undisputable fact, Michael Coren has produced an excellent book, relatively short and easy to read, which I recommend to everybody who is interested in the truth. It is Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) . In it he says:

In January 1942, the New York Times, certainly not now and not really even then a particular friend of Christianity, published a thirty-point program listing the central dogmas of the National Reich Church, a body established by the Nazis to replace Christianity and to eliminate Christian ideas from the next generation of young Germans. It's significant that the Times published this, because if such an internationally important newspaper was aware of Nazism's hatred of Christianity, we can be sure it was a known and accepted fact elsewhere.

This is the final statement of the program of dogmas:

On the day of the foundation of the National Reich Church the Christian cross shall be removed from all churches, cathedrals, and chapels inside the frontiers of the Reich and its colonies and will be replaced by the symbol of invincible Germany - the swastika.

And this is from another source that, like the NYT, can be accused of anything but conservative, pro-Christian bias, Wikipedia:

In power, the Hitler regime conducted a protracted Struggle with the Churches. Hitler moved to eliminate political Catholicism, while agreeing a Reich concordat with the Holy See which promised autonomy for the Catholic Church in Germany. Hitler then routinely violated the treaty, moved to close all Catholic organisations that weren't strictly religious, and permitted a persecution of the Catholic Church... He angered the churches by appointing the neo-pagan Alfred Rosenberg as official Nazi ideologist, and generally permitted or encouraged anti-church radicals such as Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann to conduct their persecutions of the churches.

Hitler was a Social Darwinist, and as such he believed that the universe is governed by the struggle between weak and strong, ideas that ran counter to Christianity, then prevailing in Germany.

The Nazis promoted paganism before and especially after coming to power in 1933.

Soon after coming to power they replaced Christian holidays and festivals with pagan ones such as "The Day of the Summer Solstice" and "The Day of the Winter Solstice". Wedding ceremonies were celebrated according to neo-pagan rites:

"After the bridal couple's exchange of rings, the votive warden pronounces the blessing: Mother Earth, which lovingly bears us all, and Father Sky, who blesses us with his light and his weather, and all the beneficent powers of the air, may they rule over you until your destiny is fulfilled." [Once again, we see the evidence of the pagan: the Co-Rulership of the god and goddess are recognized, and once again, the creature is worshipped rather than the Creator.]

Crucifixes were gradually removed from hospitals and schools. Just as it's happening in our days.

Schools were massively targeted as part of a strategy to deChristianize the young. In 1935, Christian prayers in schools were stopped, and from 1941 onwards all lessons concerning Christianity were banned for all students over 14. Schoolchildren were taught what the Nazis called the "glorious pre-Christian German history".

The Nazi Teachers Association actively discouraged its members from taking religious education, and many teachers of religious studies (who were all required to be licensed by the state) inculcated neo-paganism into their pupils. Later on, teachers were explicitly and totally forbidden to attend voluntary religion classes organized by the Catholic Church.

The Nazis even used former Christian religious facilities, seized by the government, as schools where students were trained in male supremacist ideology, through the works of homosexual theorists like Otto Weininger.

Rites and ceremonies from Germany's pagan past were held all over the country. All Nazi meetings and rallies, under the shadow of flaming torches and where slogans full of hate and violence were shouted, were following pagan ceremonies undistinguishable from those held thousands of years before at pagan temples and altars.

The Nazis also used art to re-awaken paganism, using ancient Greek concepts and symbols and imitating Greek statues, showing strong men and women of the Aryan race. Hitler admired the Spartan model and dreamed of a superior race created by eugenics.

Laurence Rees, the contemporary British historian who wrote, directed and produced many BBC series and documentaries on the Second World War and in particular on Nazism, in his book (also on DVD) The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) described the thrust of Hitler's semi-autobiographical work Mein Kampf (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) as "bleak nihilism" revealing a cold universe with no moral structure other than the fight between different people for supremacy:

What's missing from Mein Kampf, and this is a fact that has not received the acknowledgement it should—is any emphasis on Christianity.

And this despite the fact that Germany, Rees noted, had been Christian for a thousand years. So, he concluded:

The most coherent reading of Mein Kampf is that whilst Hitler was prepared to believe in an initial creator God, he did not accept the conventional Christian vision of heaven and hell, nor the survival of an individual "soul"... we are animals and just like animals we face the choice of destroying or being destroyed.

Hitler believed much more in, and was much more influenced by, Charles Darwin than Jesus Christ.

It's not entirely surprising that today, like in Hitler's day, we witness a return to paganism in conjunction to a return to strong nationalist sentiments. We should be wary of nationalism, which is not bad per se at all, in fact can be a positive force, but taken to extremes can become very irrational and dangerous, as indeed Hitler's example illustrates.

The danger of a return to values and ideas espoused by the Nazis is real, but doesn’t come so much from the direction of the usual suspects, “Islamophobic”, neo-Nazi groups, as from a much more mainstream, Leftist direction. The threat has two sources: one is the rise of Islam in the West – aided and abetted by the Left - with its well-known ideological and historical links to Nazism and anti-Semitism. The second source is less well-known. Recent historical, in-depth and ground-breaking research, thanks to the opening of national archives - previously closed to the public - after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, has thrown an entirely new light on what nurtured Nazi ideology. We already knew that Hitler and Nazism were neo-pagan and anti-Christian (despite what the Left says), but books like Karla Poewe's New Religions and the Nazis (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK), Gene Edward Veith's Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judaeo-Christian Worldview (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) and others go much further than that.

Regarding Poewe's work, which took 10 years of painstaking historical research, I can only agree with this review:

Inevitably claims that deny that Nazism was rooted in Christianity draw fire. As a scholar in modern and early modern Europe at the University of Victoria, I affirm this book as extremely well researched. The onus is on those who would disprove its assertions to do more thorough research--a daunting challenge indeed. The Nazis were as hostile to Christianity as to Judaism. The preparation for the ascendency of National Socialism provided by the advocates of new religions like Jacob Wilhelm Hauer is a sobering reality that needs to be understood more widely today.

It's an eerie feeling to recognise that Nazis, as I showed in the previous two article of this series, shared our days’ most cherished and growing ideas, from the normalisation of homosexuality to the decadence of the family, from the rise and destigmatisation of illegitimacy to the pantheism and anti-human feelings of environmentalism.


Photo by Marion Doss (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).

The New Pagan Religions that Built Nazism

This is the second article of a series of three.

There are many variations within neopaganism, deriving from the fact that it collects a large number of geographically diverse faiths with some common threads, but all neopagans agree on one crucial point: Christianity must be, if it is not already, defeated.

As showed in the first article of this series, Hitler's Neopaganism and Anti-Christianity, and in anthropologist and historian Karla Poewe's book New Religions and the Nazis (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , being neopagan in the 1920s and 1930s was deeply linked to opposition to the Jewish-Christian tradition.

The book reveals a major, so far neglected, element of Nazi history: the contribution of the so-called new religions, defined as non-established religions, to the emergence of Nazi ideology in the twenties and thirties in Germany.

This book is not to be overlooked or underestimated because it's the result of a 10-year ground-breaking research in the German Federal Archives in Berlin and Koblenz. It was researched from original documents, letters and unpublished papers, including the SS personnel files held in the German Federal Archives.

The fall of the Berlin Wall gave Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis' author, access to the archives of the Berlin Mission Society. In 1995, while working in these archives, she discovered a great amount of material regarding conflicts between members of the Berlin Mission, a Christian missionary society, and the Nazis.

Karla Poewe is Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Calgary, in Canada, and Adjunct Research Professor at Liverpool Hope University, in England. She was interviewed by the Calgary Herald after her book came out:

"The new religions that developed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s ushered in National Socialism and nurtured it," Poewe said.

"There were constant battles in the 1920s between Christians and the members of these new religions, because they identified Christianity as a kind of Jewish imperialism. They wanted nothing to do with it, so they came up with their own version. They tried to build a genuine German religion."

Because the Nazis were "on the far right," as a nationalist movement, they tend to be misinterpreted as a more extreme version of Christian conservatism. But "they weren't trying to conserve anything," Poewe said. They were rather extreme radicals, trying to overthrow completely the 1,000-year tradition of German Christianity -- replacing the cross with the swastika.

"There's a big mistake in identifying National Socialism as a Christian movement," Poewe said.

"There was a Deutsche Christen movement, but they weren't Christian at all. They rejected the Old Testament, Jesus had to be an Aryan, they were hostile to St. Paul, and they emphasized (the Gospel of) St. Mark. They remained in the church, but rejected everything Christian like the Trinity. Christ was at best a good philosopher." [Emphases added]

Poewe researched the former German missionary Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who in the 1920s founded the German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung or DGB), mixing Nordic and Hindu religions with Germanic idealistic philosophy. This new religion was intended to express the essence of National Socialism and the New German Man, as found in the the SS.

We have to consider the state of major turmoil into which the First World War threw Germany. The loss of the war and and the punitive, draconian conditions of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany produced general discontent and resentment. Therefore Germans, and in particular intellectuals, took political, ideological and religious matters into their hands with the purpose of achieving national regeneration.

By fusing politics, religion, theology, Indo-Aryan metaphysics and Darwinian theory they intended to create a new, genuinely German, pagan-faith-based political movement: that was National Socialism.

Hauer, founder of the DGB,

is particularly interesting, Poewe said, because he sought the pagan roots of German religion in Hinduism. In pre-history, the Aryans who invaded northern India were the same race as those who later became Germans. And Hauer found the warrior universe of the Bhagavad Gita particularly inspiring -- "it fed him the kind of moral relativism he sought," Poewe said.

"The rejection of Christianity was due to the fact that it is universal, and they wanted something local" -- the Volkisch (folk) phenomenon. "They rejected the universalist. They wanted something with a historical-genetic-racial link to them," Poewe said.

"They also rejected Christian morality. They couldn't stand the Ten Commandments. They were totally against any categorical or timeless morality. They wanted something opportunistic, something that changed with the human circumstances." [Emphasis added]

Sounds familiar. Where have I heard this before? There are no moral absolutes, anything goes, we just want to be happy, we indeed have a right to be happy: that's all there is to ethics. It sounds very, very modern. It's today's prevailing ethos, complete with the jettisoning of Christianity.

Add to that our own revival of eugenics, wide use of science in reproduction and epidemic of abortions, and Nazism looks more and more like a pioneering movement.

And Christian universalism, mentioned in the quotation, is indeed a profound antidote to racism, now as in Hitler's time.

Unsurprisingly, Poewe observed that former Nazis were prominent in the German New Age movement of the 1970s.

The Nazi movement "took elements from the Christian religion, but it didn't mean they were Christian. They also took things from Hinduism, from Buddhism -- Tibetan Buddhism was particularly popular among the SS. From this they concocted a mythology that gave them a picture of the world that appealed to them. They wrote about it, novels, plays, poetry. It was very political, in some ways pantheistic."

And here's another element of great modernity in Nazism:

Hauer's DGB bunde shared with National Socialism a tendency toward homoerotism. Hauer himself was permissibly heterosexual, but "homosexuality was very tolerated in these youth movements, and a high percentage of the SA and SS were homosexual or bisexual. People like to think that because Adolf Hitler murdered (SA leader) Ernst Rohm, who was homosexual, he was repressive of homosexuality. But that wasn't the case. It's a myth to think the Nazi movement was against homosexuality. Far from it; it wasn't sexually repressive at all," Poewe said. [Emphasis added]

It all fits nicely.

Third part tomorrow.


About the photo: it is a visual demonstration of the links between paganism and Nazism, as described in Nicholas Clarke's book Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

Homosexuals Are a Law Unto Themselves

In Redbridge, a London suburb, police have been visiting designated 'Public Sex Environments' (or 'PSEs', including public parks) advising male homosexuals of the risks of indulging in public sex, lest some "homophobic" crime is committed.

Another politically correct nicety in the headline of the newspaper article linked to above, beside "homophobic crime", is "outdoor sex spots", similar to picnic spots or panoramic places.

The same article says that public sex is illegal, but there's no suggestion of police arresting the exhibitionists or telling them to do their dirty business at home - which would also be safer for them, without the taxpayers' having to pay the police for this extra, unnecessary work.

And apparently this is happening all over the country, from Scotland to leafy Surrey, the worst affected county. There are now hundreds of public spaces unofficially legitimised by the police as 'Public Sex Environments'.

George Whale of Liberty GB has written a very good article on this, "Dirty Exhibitionists and the Police Who Give Them Tea and Biscuits".

When I saw the title, I thought the tea and biscuits were metaphorical but, lo and behold, they are as literal and concrete as you and me:

This from the Surrey Comet:

"Illicit thrill-seekers on the look-out for sex at cruising and dogging spots in Surrey have been provided with £120 worth of tea and biscuits by Surrey Police. Surrey Police admitted providing hot beverages and snacks between May and July at the Hog's Back Cafe, a well known cruising spot between Guildford and Farnham.

"It is believed neighbourhood officers and the lesbian and gay liaison officer (LAGLO) have also gone down to the woods to have a chat with people using a 'dogging' site at Wisley Gardens just off the A3 near Cobham."

Why the police do nothing is explained by the kind of politically protected people who are most likely to indulge in these activities:

Meanwhile in Scotland:

"A horrified East Kilbride mum is warning parents to be aware after her children witnessed an unsavoury incident at a local beauty spot.

"The Westwood woman, who did not wish to be named, told the News her 15-year-old son spotted two male pensioners involved in a sex act in the bird hide at Cathkin Marsh.

"Shockingly, the recent incident at the 'dogging' hotspot reportedly took place in the middle of the afternoon."

This is from the article about Redbridge linked to above:

Pc Anton Brown, an LGBT liaison officer for Redbridge, said: “Thefts, robberies, rape and other violent assaults take place at these locations and victims are scared to report them as they do not want to be ‘outed’. They are often men who have sex with men but don’t necessarily identify as being gay.”

That a double standard is applied - there is a law for homosexuals and a law for everybody else - is obvious from this:

Every morning before opening his cafe on Ockham Common in Surrey, Stephen Bungay collects a bin-bag full of debris from outside his kiosk including sex toys and latex gloves. He says that the rangers from Surrey Wildlife pursue dog-walkers who fail to pick up dog-mess, but he has never seen them ask a cruiser to pick up their condoms.

In an email George says: "When did public spaces where people might stroll with their dogs or kids become officially designated 'Public Sex Environments'? And how do we get these politically correct plods to do their sodding job?"

The first is a rhetorical question. In fact there is no legal designation of 'Public Sex Environments'. They are just well known, established areas where individuals meet for sex. There are even police detailed guidelines on how to manage and police PSEs.

This is the umpteenth example of how the law is twisted to accommodate homosexuals, Muslims and all other groups that are by definition "victims".

Hitler's Neopaganism and Anti-Christianity

The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things...

The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity... And that's why someday its structure will collapse... The only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little...

Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery...

I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors - but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.

Who said this? It sounds very much like Richard Dawkins, with its reference to evolution and science ("When understanding of the universe has become widespread") as antithetical forces to Christianity, not to mention its prediction of the latter's death.

The literary style isn't quite his, though. Sounds more baroque and archaic.

In fact it was said between 1941 and 1944, by a certain Adolf Hitler, and is found in Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

One of the myriad unfounded accusations levelled at Christianity these days is the claim that Hitler was a Christian. The reality is that he was not a Christian at all, but very close to paganism.

Paganism is a generic umbrella term that encompasses various and different beliefs of pre-Christian European peoples, from classical Roman and Greek to Norse and Germanic.

Although Europe's paganism was replaced by Christianity, it did not die. In the 16th and 17th centuries some European thinkers began to rediscover paganism.

To its rebirth contributed in particular the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the movement of thought whose political result was the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries inspired by the Jakobin ideology made use of signs of pagan mythology.

The Jacobins, leaders of "The Terror", the bloodiest period of the French Revolution, were influenced by neopaganism and hated Christianity. Before Nazism, they first embodied the connections between neopagan ideas and violence.

They propagated a widespread rejection of Christianity, and establiahed a new "religion of reason", based on pagan symbols rather than Christianity.

Neopaganism also played a big role in 20th-century violent ideologies like Nazism and fascism. The American historian Gene Edward Veith, in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judaeo-Christian Worldview (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , defined fascism thus:

Fascism is the modern world's nostalgia for paganism. It is a sophisticated culture's revolt against God.

From an early age Adolf Hitler had a lifelong passion for pagan legends, which explains his obsession with Richard Wagner's music, with its "only grandiose themes" of "gods and heroes". Wagner's operas are said to have had a profound, almost religious effect on the Fuhrer.

Not only Hitler, but also many of his associates were fascinated by the history and mythology of the German Volk, which helped shape the political activities of these men.

The legends of German mythology, substantially the same as the Norse ones, are completely pagan and pessimistic in nature. The Earth and Heaven were destined to be utterly destroyed by the Frost Giants, in a final great battle between Good and Evil, in which Evil was predestined to win and the whole of creation to be destroyed. The only ray of light in all this darkness was the idea that dying a heroic death would make everything else pale into insignificance. This notion of heroism and fighting to the death against all odds was very congruous with the fanatic loyalty wanted by Hitler and Himmler.

Wagner held anti-Semitic views, and took great pride in being a member of the "German race" and in his German ancestry. He wrote that he considered himself "the most German of the Germans".

Head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, who studied books on Germanic lore, mysticism, and secret societies, came to regard Hitler as a god, another sign of non-Christian, pagan religiosity.

The secret initiation ceremonies of the SS were dominated by references to the ancient Germanic sagas. The Nazi Party was called by Hermann Esser "an association of visionaries, worshippers of Wotan", a Germanic god.

Presenting a similarity to today's environmentalism with its pantheistic streak were Himmler's proclamations of the sacred status of the German lands and peoples as a faith. He used ancient German and Nordic mythology as a source of the SS symbols, oaths and rituals. The rooms of their secret meetings were decorated with runes, prehistoric signs supposed to give the power of prophecy to anyone who could read them. The very symbol of the Schutzstaffel, twin twisted lightning bolts to indicate SS, is a runic symbol.

Initially Himmler wanted German women to adopt the same moral code of the heroines of ancient German legends, although he later changed his view to encourage them to have as many children as possible, whether they were married or not. He and Hitler had considered abolishing the "criminal institution of the Christian Church known as marriage", but realised that Germans were not yet ready for such a radical idea. How happy these supreme Nazi leaders would be if they could see what is happening now in our society.

As a ceremony for illegitimate children Himmler created a "secular christening", called an "SS name-giving", in which the child was wrapped in a blanket covered with embroidered swastikas and runes and set before an altar, with the parents laying their hands on him and solemnly speaking his name. For their birthdays these children received by the SS a gift of candles, manufactured at no charge by the prisoners at Dachau.

Himmler's mystical zeal exasperated even Hitler sometimes, although only temporarily and he never tried to rein it in. Hitler wrote:

What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start that all over again. We might as well have stayed with the church. At least it had tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave ...

And about Himmler's archeological excavations:

Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts ... All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past. Instead Himmler is making a great fuss about it all. The present-day Romans must be having a laugh at these revelations.

This is the first article of a series of 3. To be continued tomorrow.


Photo by surfstyle (Creative Commons CC BY 2.0).

Has Science Eliminated God?

Certainty is a feeling, an emotion. Reason, on the other hand, gives rise to doubts and uncertainties.

Science is rational, and exactly for that reason it is uncertain, which is what many people fail to appreciate. A widespread myth is that reason brings about - and knowledge means - certainty.

This is what causes all the confusions of the kind that surrounded vaccines and autism in Britain a few years ago, for example, and the general confusions about probability and risk: what causes them is the fact that people expect certainties from science. Instead, in reality science is made up of theories and hypotheses, which may be refuted now, or temporarily confirmed until they are refuted and replaced by a better theory later. That's how science progresses.

Reason can be used to arrive at certainties, but not at pieces of knowledge. This is the case when reason is used in logic, but only because in logical deductions we never arrive at new knowledge.

It is certain that, in a logical deduction, if the premise is true the conclusion is always true, but only because the conclusion does not say anything which was not already contained in the premise. A very simple example is: "If A and B are both true, then A is true".

The logical conclusion makes what was already contained in the premise explicit, that's why, if the latter is true (or better, well founded), so is the former. But this process does not originate new knowledge. It is a process of transformation of one statement into another, not of discovery.

This is why non-philosopher atheists like Richard Dawkins generate confusion among their followers: because they themselves are confused in the first place.

To identify science with rationality, although correct - even if we must add that science is only one among the various rational activities of the human intellect, not the only one as Dawkins et al seem to believe, and a religion like Christianity, for example, is another -, condemns science to perpetual uncertainty.

Furthermore, science does not establish the limits of rationality, but only those of possibility. In other words, what science does is to say: "This is not possible because it goes against the laws of nature". But it doesn't tell you, within the multiple, mutually-contradicting possibilities, which is the true one.

It must remain understood, however, that the best scientific theory we have could be wrong and one day refuted.

But even presuming that it won't be, science - both as a whole and as single scientific theories - rules out, as I was saying, physical (or empirical) impossibilities, namely the phenomena that go counter to the laws of nature (i.e. the laws of science), but among the various remaining possibilities cannot tell you which is the true one.

That's why saying that science has eliminated God (a creator of everything) is absurd. For as long as a creator of everything remains compatible with the laws of nature, as it has always been and it is even more now that the Big Bang theory presumes a period preceding the birth of the universe in which laws of nature did not exist, the hypothesis of God as creator is a possibility. Science can ony tell you that it is possible, and not if it's true or not.

Atheists, and not only the people that Dawkins managed to mesmerise but the British zoologist himself, don't seem to properly grasp what they are saying. And I'm not referring to God or religion, but to science: they misunderstand science itself.

I am willing to admit that Dawkins is aware of many of the things I said, that's why he always uses qualifiers like "almost certainly" or "probably" when he says that God doesn't exist or that science leads to that denial. However, he doesn't act or write as if he had any doubts at all. And, as I said at the beginning, certainty is an emotional state, not the product of rational thought.

Who knows, maybe science, born out of Christianity, with the first scientists wishing to understand God's work - the creation - through it, after a period in which it's been dominated by naturalism (only nature exists) aka materialism (only matter exists), will turn out to be just the way in which in the end humanity arrives at God, which was science founders' original intention.

Photo "Sunset" courtesy of the website Human Health and Animal Ethics

Nothing Is Wrong with Satanism, You Bigot

We've gone full circle now.

First, Christianity was the main spiritual force of the West, so much so that the latter was known as Christendom.

Then, atheism prevailed, followed by paganism, and now it looks like Satanism is being recognised as a legitimate... what? Religion? Faith? Spiritual orientation, which anyone is entitled to practice as much as a sexual one?

And why not? After all, why should we discriminate? Discrimination is the last, or one of the last, remaining sins. And this applies to every sense of the word, good as well as bad, as in "taste discrimination" to indicate refinement, or in "discrimination between right and wrong". The only exception is reverse discrimination, which is always a virtue because it is meant to fight discrimination - if it sounds absurd it's because it is.

Satan worshipers want 7-foot-tall statue of devil put at Oklahoma state Capitol, headlines the UK's Daily Mail:

• The New York-based Satanic Temple formally submitted its application to a panel that oversees the Capitol grounds
• The application includes an artist's rendering of Satan as Baphomet, a goat-headed figure with horns, wings and a long beard
• They want it to sit where a Ten Commandments monument sat in 2012
• In the rendering, Satan is sitting in a pentagram-adorned throne with smiling children next to him.

This satanic group claimed that, if the Ten Commandments could have a monument, so should their idol figure. Thinking otherwise would be discrimination. Now, tell me: how can anybody these days object to such an argument?

It's the same line of reasoning that led to the passing of homomarriage laws in various countries: if people of different sex can get married, why discriminate against same-sex couples?

And, if the West is now post-Christian, why should we give Christianity a special place, especially after the influx of so many cultural enrichers who adhere to different religions, sometimes having a moral code directly opposite to our own - Islam springs to mind -, which is derived from Christianity but people have forgotten where it comes from and think it arose from nothing, the same as the universe, life and cosnciousness? We are used, by now, to the idea that something comes from nothing: that this is so counter-evidential, that nobody has ever experienced, witnessed this type of occurrence doesn't trouble our "scientific-minded" atheists half as much as the idea of a creator of all that exists.

'The statue will also have a functional purpose as a chair where people of all ages may sit on the lap of Satan for inspiration and contemplation.'

The Satanic Temple maintains that the Oklahoma Legislature's decision to authorize a privately funded Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol opened the door for its statue.

The Ten Commandments monument was placed on the north steps of the building in 2012, and the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has sued to have it removed.

Perhaps we should have Nelson removed from his column in Trafalgar Square, and demand in his place a statue of Hitler, Stalin or Britain's own serial killer John Christie.

Why the Satanist statue should be allowed, or even considered as it seems to be, but not Hitler's, I doubt that anyone can provide good reasons for, that can be accepted outside of psychiatric hospitals of course.

On its website, the Satanic Temple explains that it 'seeks to separate Religion from Superstition by acknowledging religious belief as a metaphorical framework with which we construct a narrative context for our goals and works.

'Satan stands as the ultimate icon for the selfless revolt against tyranny, free & rational inquiry, and the responsible pursuit of happiness,' the website says.

Exactly. Call a nurse, please.


Photo by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).