Individual Christians in the name of what they take to be Christianity do good, and have done good throughout the history of Christianity, but critical examination of the religion itself does not support its claim to benevolence or truth.

Its theology is absurd. While it can plausibly be argued that all theologies are absurd, Christianity’s is particularly abstruse and internally inconsistent as well. The doctrine of the Trinity, in what claims to be a monotheistic religion, defies logic and challenges even the fuzzy sort of rationalizing which passes for reason in religious thought.

Its mythology is lethal. Its founding myth anathematized the people of another religion with a potential, and ultimately actual, genocidal result.

Its morality is unjust. By advocating love for all human beings including those who commit evil, it abnegates justice.

Its history is bloody. While it is true that the mission of the Church to gain adherents was often peaceful, there were ages in which it tried to impose its orthodoxy by force. With totalitarian ambition, Roman Catholicism in the Middle Ages unleashed one of the cruelest instruments of force in all recorded history in the form of the Papal Inquisition. The Crusades, often defended by Christians as a just war of defense and reclamation of the ‘Holy Land’ from Islam, also massacred Jews against whom there was no question of necessary defense. Furthermore, internecine wars continued to rage within Christendom well into the twentieth century.

By its treatment of the Jews, Christianity as a movement can only be judged, in the light of its own declared moral values, a failure, a deception, and an hypocrisy. That terrible history alone and in itself makes nonsense of Christianity’s claims to be a religion of love and gentle forbearance, and reveals such injunctions and ideals, by which it characterizes itself, to be merely sentimental .

Christianity extinguished the intellectual light of classical Greece and Rome, and brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. In the last two hundred years or so it has become a gentler religion – even Roman Catholicism has become more tolerant – but has been in slow decline as scientific enquiry raised doubts about religious belief in general, and as humanism and science together make Christian reverence for suffering look both sick and obsolete as a source of comfort, substituting cure and palliation for resignation and endurance, and the happiness of survival for the morbid virtue of martyrdom.

Jillian Becker   May 20, 2009

Daniel Greenfield writes in Canada Free Press (read it all, it’s strong stuff):

The only reason for creating Palestine 2.0 [Palestine 1 being Jordan – JB] is the destruction of Israel. It will not bring regional stability. It will not even bring local stability. It cannot even function unless its entire workforce is funded from abroad. It cannot even stop engaging in terrorism.

Palestine 2.0 is a Frankenstein’s monster, with body parts from Shiite, Sunni and Marxist terrorists. It only knows how to do one thing and one thing alone, kill. It is not a natural creature, because no Palestinian state ever existed throughout history. It is an artificial state whose existence has only one purpose. The destruction of Israel.

And that answers our question at last. Who needs a Palestinian state? Someone who is either ignorant, foolish or needs to destroy Israel.

The Two State Solution is not a formula for any kind of stability or end to the violence. It’s meant to take the violence to a whole new level. It is a formula for the destruction of Israel. 17 years of peacemaking by Israelis has produced 17 years of terrorism by the Palestinian Arabs. Everything sowed on the Palestinian Authority, from money to guns, from autonomy to infrastructure, have come up as dragon’s teeth.

Palestine is not a state. It was never a state. It will never be a state. It is currently ruled by two factions who have both disowned a negotiated Palestinian state in favor of the destruction of Israel. It is not a country, it is a weapon.

Palestine is a gun aimed at the head of Israel with one goal, its destruction. Palestine is a gun aimed at the head of every Jew in the world, legitimizing the worst and ugliest kinds of bigotry. Palestine is an imaginary place given form as a vicious myth brainwashing generation after generation of Jordanian and Egyptian Arabs to call themselves Palestinians and kill and die in the name of perpetuating a second Holocaust, all for the glory of Allah, Mohammed, Marx, not to mention Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, the House of Saud, and every cause and ruler with an interest in toppling Israel into the dust.

Palestine is death. It exists only as a form of living death by a population taught to see themselves as willing martyrs to the bomb belt from birth. It breathes death, it celebrates death, it teaches death and preaches death. It is the final ugly end of the hatred and cruelty bottled up in the Arab and Islamic dictatorships of the region. It is the true face of Islam and its shining reflection in the mirror of the Western press and diplomats is the true measure of their Dhimmism.

The Cult of Death in Palestine and the war against Israel is only a preview for the West of things to come. Palestine is not a place, it is hate and homicide boiled down into myth. Palestine is not only in Israel. It is in Paris and London. It is in Madrid and Detroit. It is in Sydney and Moscow. It is everywhere that the toxic brew of Muslim fanaticism and Arab nationalism flows. Its flag is the flag of death. Its constitution is a death warrant for every free nation. Its legislature is a smug coven of obese terrorist chieftains sending their followers off to death with the promise of virgin demons fornicating with them in Paradise.

Palestine 2.0 is a monster with only one purpose, to create Holocaust 2.0. That is who needs a Palestinian state. That is why the far left and the far right are both so hellbent on bringing one into being. Accepting the Two State Solution means accepting death. Rejecting it means embracing life.

Today Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, whose business it is to defend Israel from its genocidal Arab and Iranian enemies,  and President Obama, whose sympathies are with the Arabs and who is reluctant to take any efficient measures to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons and using them to destroy Israel, are clashing with each other in a polite fashion and will try to find some points of agreement and compromise to bamboozle the American public into believing that Obama has a workable plan to pacify the Middle East, and that Israel may still depend on the US for support in a world that mostly wants it wiped off the map.

While we await the statement that will confirm this prediction of ours, we offer this extract from a Melanie Phillips article in the Spectator  to show how little chance there is of any real agreement between Netanyahu and Obama. She demonstrates that the Middle East policy of Britain is concocted from the same delusions as Obama’s. 

‘Palestinian statelessness is the biggest recruiting sergeant for Islamic extremism around the world,’ said (British Foreign Secretary) Mr Miliband.

Ah yes – Palestinian statelessness was obviously uppermost in the minds of the Islamists who blew up Mumbai; it was obviously the reason they bombed Spain to help along the restoration of the caliphate and tried to do the same to France, that legendary ally of Israel; it’s obviously the driving passion of the Chechen Islamist separatists; it’s obviously the rallying cry of the Islamists in Indonesia who intend to Islamise southern Asia; it’s obviously the reason Islamists are persecuting, murdering and driving out Christians across the Third World from Sudan and Nigeria to Bethlehem and Gaza.

For various reasons, however, this idiotic but deeply ideological analysis is now accepted by many non-ideological folk as axiomatic. They are all fixated by the delusion that a Palestine state is the key to peace between Israel and the Arabs. It is not. The briefest knowledge of history tells us that it is not – for the simple reason that it has been on offer repeatedly for seven (some would say nine) decades, with the Jews in agreement – indeed, with the Israelis in recent years offering the Palestinians more than 90 per cent of the disputed territories — and yet the only response from the Arabs has been war.

The requirement by the Arab side is not for a Palestine state. It is for the end of the Jewish state. It is not just Hamas that declares this over and over again. It is also the supposedly ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah, who say repeatedly that they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state. Yet these facts are simply ignored as if they don’t exist…

What is even more remarkable is that these twin icons of progressive politics, Obama and Miliband, are actually pushing the cause of racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing. For the proposed Palestine state is to have not one Jew living inside its borders. So Obama and Miliband say the cause of peace and justice in the Middle East can only be served by the creation of a racist, exclusionary state — while beating up on Israel, which actually gives full civil rights to its Arab and Muslim citizens.

The key to the ending of the war between the Arabs and Israel is that the Arabs and the wider Muslim world have to grasp that it is in their interests to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, legitimised as such under international law, and to abandon for ever their attempt to remove it from the map… 

But instead, the message the Arab and Muslim world is currently getting from America and Britain – with their overtures to Iran and creeping recognition of Hamas — is that its violence and aggression have paid off and that the great prizes, not merely of Israel’s destruction but also the defeat of the free world, are now within reach. Having accepted the Arab and Muslim narrative on Israel/Palestine, and having decided that appeasement is the only way forward, Obama and Miliband are making the strongest effort since Carter to pressurise Israel to become the propitiatory sacrifice to the enemies of civilisation. And … Israel is to be blamed if it refuses to play the role.

In a speech on May 16, 2009, Michelle Obama announced that the President has ordered the establishment of ‘an Office of Social Innovation’.

Bearing in mind that in a political context the word ‘social’ negates any word that it precedes – as in ‘social justice’, ‘social democracy’, ‘social conscience’ – this is not good news for innovation.

True innovation springs from originality of thought, and it occurs only when gifted and inspired individuals have time and money to spare, and where they can reasonably expect achievement to bring reward.   

When individual freedom is suppressed and conformity imposed, innovation is brought to an end. And when that happens in a nation, it stagnates.

By ‘social innovation’ the Obamas can only mean community organizing.  The Office of Social Innovation will recruit a multitude of young volunteers to pressure their fellow citizens into consensus and obedience, in preparation for concerted ‘grass-roots’ political action – as was done by young Maoists in China’s ‘Cultural Revolution’; as the Hitler Youth did in the Third Reich.

One of our readers, A.G.S., sent us an idea he had for an article comparing America now to the early days of Mussolini’s Italy. The thought came to him, he wrote, when he read Mario and the Magician by Thomas Mann. He outlined the article he had in mind and asked me [JB] if I would complete it. At first I was a little skeptical; I felt he was exaggerating. But the more I thought about it, the more I found myself in agreement with him. The following is the result of our collaboration.

*** 

In his famous story Mario and the Magician, Thomas Mann demonstrates how fascism under Mussolini corrupted the Italian populace. At the start of his regime a general feeling spread among the Italians that it was right to impose conformity, and society was gripped by a mood of collective censoriousness. In the story, set in an Italian holiday resort, a child takes off her bathing suit to wash the sand out of it in the sea, and her momentary nudity arouses the wrath of the crowd on the beach, the police are informed and the child’s family is fined. The story as a whole is about the destruction of individual will during an evening’s entertainment by an evil hypnotist. The allegorical implications are unmistakeable.

As in Italy then, an atmosphere of authoritarian regulation is spreading in the US now. There is a powerful demand, emanating from the president and his circle, for mental and physical conformity.

Proofs of this intent abound. Group action and community involvement are encouraged, with the aim of inducing non-conformists to fall in line. The Department of Homeland Security issues a memo warning that persons who have a political point of view different from the present federal government majority are a threat to society. Anyone challenging the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which the Democrats in power have embraced as an orthodoxy, is denounced as a heretic. In the cause of mitigating the projected undesirable effects of climate change, the government proposes to dictate what sources of energy you may use and to what extent.  It will regulate the temperature of your house, the clothes you may wear, the food you may eat, and the car you may drive. In sickness and infirmity your body will be treated as the government decides when its nationalized health policy is imposed. Government will decree what opinions you may express on talk radio, in the universities and schools, and soon in any public forum. By ‘spreading the wealth around’ it will set a limit to how high any individual may rise by his own efforts.  Government will rule on how much business managers may be paid and under what union-dictated terms an employee may work.

When conformity is legislated and imposed by force, dissent criminalized and punished, authoritarianism has become tyranny. 

Obama is the Mussolini of America.

Claudia Rosett writes in Canada Free Press:

From World War II to the winning of the Cold War, to the push during the Bush first term to stop the old axis of evil in its tracks, American influence and might has long served the world well. “Change” on this front is perilous, and it is happening.

What began as a shift to “soft power” during the Bush second term has been further evolving under Obama into a surrealpolitik of reset buttons, apologies for America and avowals of “respect” for governments such as Syria and Iran–whose rulers respect neither America nor the basic rights of their own citizens and neighbors.

Iran’s rulers brag up their nuclear program on Iranian television–as they did, again, just last week. In response, Washington huffs and puffs, and reverts to the much-tried-and-failed formula in which the solution to such menaces as terrorist-sponsoring Iran is supposed to be the speedy incarnation of terrorist-spawning Palestinian authorities into rulers of a sovereign state. North Korea conducts illicit missile tests, threatens a second nuclear test, and announces that after years of talks and American concessions Pyongyang will pursue whatever nuclear programs it wants…

On the nuclear front, the threat is not just the prospect of proliferation of bombs among rogue and despotic states–problematic enough though that would be for anyone inside the blast radius, should one of those bombs go off. The further problem is the message such proliferation sends: that arsenals of this kind may be acquired with malign intent and relative impunity; that the least scrupulous of nations are rewarded with out-sized power and influence.

Since the toppling of Taliban rule in Afghanistan in 2001, and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in 2003, America has shown growing reluctance to engage in anything smacking of real confrontation abroad. Saddam’s overthrow is by now an issue now so macerated by Washington infighting that the majority of American policymakers treat it as a terrible mistake to have rid the Middle East of a mass-murdering, war-mongering tyrant. And while America has been sticking it out in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been no clear signal sent that when fresh threats arise, America will as a matter of course stand up definitively to anything more than four Somali pirates in a small boat.

In this opportunistic world, what, then, are the new rules of the game? Are they the rules of the morally perverted United Nations Human Rights Council? That’s where America, in its new eagerness to “engage” with all comers has just won a seat alongside such world-class human rights abusers as China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. Are they the rules of the Indian Ocean? That’s where America now seems willing to try to rescue its own citizens if they are actually held hostage, but there is still no will to actually clean out the pirate dens. Are the new rules those of Iran’s hostage politics? That’s where victories consist of obtaining the release of prisoners who should never have been held in the first place…

America is coasting right now on the strength of genuine past victories and of the seemingly inexhaustible resources produced by a longtime mix of democracy and free markets. Lamentations and financial woes notwithstanding, most Americans still live cocooned in enough comforts so that it’s easy to forget just how rough the world can get. If America won’t lead the way, lay down the rules and proudly defend them, big change is indeed on its way. It won’t be the change we seek.

We want answers to these questions:

1.  What would constitute victory in Afghanistan?

2.  Should the US intervene in foreign countries for humanitarian reasons if intervention serves no US interests? 

3.  Should the US use military force to prevent countries that have declared themselves its enemies acquiring nuclear weapons?

Our reader ‘roger in florida’ has told us that  DebkaFile , the source of the following information, is generally unreliable, but as this is peculiarly interesting we offer it for what it’s worth:

Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency Leon Panetta visited Israel two weeks ago to explore Israel’s intentions with regard to a raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities and its alignment with Egypt and Saudi Arabia for this shared objective.

On the one hand, Panetta showed Israeli leaders a new US report which estimates first, that Iran lacks adequate military resources to shield its nuclear sites from attack and, second, would pull its punches in responding to an Israeli strike. On the other, it is feared in Washington that by linking up with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Israel would be free to send its warplanes against Iran through the skies of its two Arab partners, without deferring to the United States.

This report was also presented by defense secretary Robert Gates on May 5-6 to Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo and Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh.

None of the three Middle East leaders took the report seriously because –

1. They could not make out if it was meant to encourage or deter an Israeli attack? Surely, the best time to strike would be before Iran acquires adequate defenses for its nuclear sites. Is that what the Obama administration is after?

2. Israel does not believe that Iran would emulate Iraq’s Saddam Hussein who refrained from hitting back after Israel demolished his nuclear reactor in 1981. Iran’s rulers are committed to massive retaliation or else face a degree of popular contempt that would test the regime’s survival.

Panetta and Gates alike returned home convinced that Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf emirates are far more fearful of a nuclear-armed Iran than of clashing with the Obama administration over its policy of engaging Iran.

This understanding prompted a policy review in Washington, which is still going on.

One outward symptom of a possible reversal was the sudden announcement on May 8 that President Obama had decided to again address the Muslim world from Egypt on June 4, ten days after Mubarak visits Washington. On the same day, he also renewed sanctions against Syria, which, after weeks of diplomatic pursuit, he accused of sponsoring terror and seeking weapons of mass destruction.

Washington’s dawning appreciation that the rise of a nuclear-armed, terror-sponsoring Iran is the burning preoccupation of Middle East rulers, leaving the Palestinian issue for another day, will certainly make Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s talks in the White House next Monday, May 18, a lot smoother. The clash which otherwise would have been unavoidable may now be averted.

Christians in Islamic states are being continually and ruthlessly persecuted and slaughtered.  Heads of the various Christian churches, Western Governments, the big political parties, and the mainstream media are pretending it’s not happening.

Click on the video (from David Horowitz’s Freedom Center) to learn how bad it is.

Meanwhile, because European governments and political parties are refusing to acknowledge that there is any threat to the survival of their indigenous cultures as Muslim numbers grow by birth and conversion, neo-Nazi parties are gaining support among the electorates. Angry voices are calling for the forceful expulsion of Muslims. There is reason to fear outbreaks of Muslim and anti-Muslim violence this summer in many parts of Europe. The stench of genocidal hatred is in the air.

What should be attacked are not Muslims but the ideology of Islam. Not people, but ideas. The fight should not be with clubs, fists, boots and guns, but with words. Islam should be argued against, rationally, strongly, persistently in every public forum, actual and electronic, that our civilization has at its disposal.

Yet the UN is trying to stop all criticism of that cruel, intolerant, oppressive, murderous creed.

Furthermore, it’s hard to argue against the nonsense Muhammad taught without also pointing out that all other religious belief  is equally absurd. True, Judaism and Christianity do not preach moral evil as Islam does.  But Christianity has practiced it (both the Catholic and Protestant branches have burnt their heretics), and besides, any insistence on irrational belief is corrupting.

But as the Taliban take over Pakistan and its nuclear arms; as Ahmadinejad prepares his nuclear bombs to destroy the Jewish state; as the Sunni fanatics of Hamas gain support from the Shias of Iran (as well as from Obama’s administration); as Hizbollah takes control of Lebanon; as Turkey turns Islamist; as Somalia ferments jihad on the high seas; as terrorists train under Somali and Pakistani jihadis in camps scattered through the US; as Christians are slaughtered in Indonesia, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan; it would seem clearer than ever that the  human race would be better off without religion.