The pointless Israeli-Palestinian talks proceed. Or maybe not.

Tuesday the Palestinian Authority’s Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, stormed out of a meeting with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon. The cause of his fury? He proposed that there should be a Palestinian state in which only Arabs and no Jews would be allowed to live, and a second Palestinian state  – where the State of Israel with its mixed population of Jews and Arabs now exists – in which Jews would be allowed to go on living. At least some Jews. For a time. Perhaps.

Ayalon rejected the proposal.

So if the talks that were started without any remote chance of bringing any result whatsoever break down despite all Obama’s pressure to keep them up, it will be Israel’s fault.

It’s always Israel’s fault when the dear old talks break down.

Bill Clinton now blames Natan Sharansky for the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian talks held under his auspices at Camp David in 2000, when Prime Minister Barak made an extremely generous offer to Arafat, which Arafat turned down.

[Foreign Policy magazine] claimed that Clinton talked about a conversation that he had with Natan Sharansky, who, according to Clinton, was the only Israeli minister to reject the comprehensive peace agreement Clinton proposed at the Camp David Summit in 2000.

“I said, ‘Natan, what is the deal [about not supporting the peace deal],'” Clinton was quoted as saying. “He said, ‘I can’t vote for this, I’m Russian… I come from one of the biggest countries in the world to one of the smallest. You want me to cut it in half. No, thank you.'”

Sharansky … denied Wednesday that the alleged conversation ever took place. “A report of President Clinton’s comments has been brought to my attention which I hope is inaccurate.”

“However, as to the basic facts, I was never at Camp David and never had the opportunity to discuss the negotiations there with President Clinton,” said Sharansky.

I suppose it depends on what “said” means. If Sharansky “said” no in Clinton’s imagination, does that mean Clinton is lying?

Good grief! Would Bill Clinton lie?

A group founded by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who plans to build the mosque at Ground Zero, applied for and was granted tax-exempt status as a religious foundation in 1998, claiming to run a prayer center attended by 450 to 500 worshipers every day in the apartment building where the Imam’s wife Daisy Khan was registered as a tenant.

Her place was a one-bedroom apartment of about 800 square feet. Nowhere in the entire apartment block was there a hall or room or any kind of space big enough to accomodate 450 to 500 people, especially if they were all to get down on their knees and prostrate themselves in unison in the direction of Mecca. However did they do it?

Here’s part of a report on the mystery, to be found at Creeping Sharia:

The application for tax exempt status from the American Sufi Muslim Association (ASMA) in 1998 claimed the group had an established place of worship at 201 W. 85th St. in New York. That is a 17-floor apartment building.

The 1998 tax filing, called a 1023 form, is required for any institution that wants to be considered a religious house of worship and therefore exempt from taxation. In the filing, Rauf is identified as ASMA’s founder. The application said the group was already operating as a prayer center for between 450 and 500 daily worshipers.

However, a review of the building and real estate records indicates there is nowhere in the building to house that many congregants. ASMA lists its office address as 201 W. 85th St., Apt. 10E on the tax form, while it cites only the building address as its location for prayer services.

The building has apartments only and no public spaces, such as a conference or a board room, to accommodate 450 people. Apartment 10E, building records show, is a one-bedroom apartment with about 800 square feet of living space. In the 1997 incorporation records filed with the state of New York, Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan, was named as an ASMA director living at that address.

The Imam and his wife got away with a scam.

Surely now that they’re known to be cheats, liars, frauds, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg and other powerful defenders of their Ground Zero mosque scheme will withdraw their support?

How can we doubt it?

We need a new word for belief in a deity (or a plurality of deities). “Theism”  is not really the right word because it has a specific meaning in the jargon of religion: it means belief in a god who not only made the world but continues forever to concern himself with it, act in it, play a part in human affairs, and generally preside in his inscrutable way over all goings-on, from the most trivial preoccupations of every single individual to the hugest events of history and nature, retaining full control whenever he feels like exercising it over whether (eg) this person will pass his exam, that volcano will erupt, this African tribe will slaughter that African tribe, this baby will be born deformed, that virus will eat the flesh of a few thousand people, and so on. A whimsical power, the theist’s god, who will never, never be shaken off.

“Theism” is opposed to “deism”. The deist believes that a god made the world and set it going, then brushed off his hands and went away forever. He’s had nothing more to do with it nor ever will. “Okay, there’s your world, now tata!”

Both theism and deism literally mean god-ism, the first derived from Greek, the second from Latin.

We prefer to use English and coin the term godism. It lugs no semantic baggage about with it. Its meaning is clear.

But for its opposite we’ll stick to “atheism'” rather than “godlessism” which would be too clumsy.

It’s good to know that godists are becoming seriously concerned about the spread of atheism. As more and more atheists are daring to declare themselves, and more and more books in defense of atheism and attacking godism are appearing, the godists are getting desperate. They still can’t prove the existence of a god, of course, so they resort to abuse and mockery.

For an example of intense irritation disguising itself as scorn and hilarity, see an article by Bill Murchison here at Townhall.

He claims to find Stephen Hawking’s theory of spontaneous creation side-splittingly funny. In the same way churchmen split their sides when Copernicus said that the planets go round the sun, and again when Giordano Bruno said he was right, and again when Galileo said the same thing. They stopped laughing to burn Giordano Bruno to death, did those godly protectors of The Truth. And Galileo was threatened with torture until he “recanted”, and then was kept confined in his house so the world would not hear what he had to say. Fortunately, his words got out.

Murchison’s get around more easily through the Internet. Here are some of his thoughts:

Assuming, no doubt, our anxious world could use a good laugh, Stephen Hawking undertakes to provide one. He says the universe created itself.

The theory itself isn’t the joke. The joke is the dogged persistence of atheists trying in the face of common sense to persuade the world as to the wisdom they see in their every utterance. Another way of putting it would be, atheism is the joke. …

Hawking’s new book, “The Grand Design,” (written with one Leonard Mlodinow) argues that “the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”…

A series of questions follow which are supposed to baffle the atheist:

I suppose the intent of such stuff is to render non-atheists, Christians especially, mute and fearful. Which is more than a little bit odd. Who is likely to grow mute in the face of a bald claim that the universe more or less invented itself? Was Hawking there with his camera? That would be the first question. Soon other questions would follow. The vast variety of life — that was spontaneous, too? The human organism — the brain, the eye, the ear, the digestive tract — just sort of, you know, happened? The sky, the seas, the seasons, not to mention human reproduction — those things, too?

He seems to be urging a Proof of God by Awe and Ignorance.

He goes on:

And the greatest minds of history failed to catch on, century after God-fearing century? That or they practiced denial? Uhhhh … yeah….

Yes, Bill, they did practice denial of anything that threatened their belief. But their Greatness of Mind is proved to Murchison by their believing. Hawking doesn’t believe, so his mind is not great –

There is a poignancy to the atheist fixation on showing up God. What’s wrong with these people? Many of them are technically intelligent (Hawking is routinely labeled “brilliant”), but they swallow with satisfied smiles the intellectual bilge called atheism. …

Apparently having not the least idea of what atheism is, he invents a church for atheists:

It’s really all too funny, as things tend to get when certain people — over and over without pause — do the same stupid things. Such as instruct the whole of human history to get off this God thing and start believing in spontaneous creation. I can see it all now, can’t you? — The Church of Spontaneous Creation; services whenever you’re feeling spontaneous; come feel the creative power surge through your veins; learn to laugh at fools and frauds and idiots stupid enough to disagree with the doctrine of “It All Just Happened.” …

Seems he fears to be laughed at. He needn’t worry, he’s not funny.

We guess he won’t even try to read Hawking’s book. And if he read it, he wouldn’t understand it. And even if he understood it, he still wouldn’t believe it. He knows The Truth.

Islam must be defeated by exposure and argument, and so – eventually, with luck – by the sort of generalized revulsion that irredeemably condemns Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism. (Individuals who believe in it, or have simply had the misfortune to be born into it, should not of course be harmed – unless they have committed a crime in Islam’s name, and then by the law, not by their neighbors.)

In connection with the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, and generally whether the enemy is Islam or only a “tiny radical element within Islam”, there are two arguments that liberals and Christians of the left constantly bring up  to show what nice tolerant people they are. One is the myth of a wonderfully tolerant, diversely populated, creative,  advanced civilization the Moors established in Spain; the other is the claim by Christians that “Christians have killed far more people in America than Muslims have”.

As to the first: our reader and commenter, Bornagainpagan, has drawn our attention to an article by Professor Bruce Thornton in which he accurately writes:

Andalusian Spain has particularly been evoked as an example of an interfaith tolerance unknown to Christians, as President Obama claimed in his June 2009 speech delivered in Cairo, when he extolled Islam’s “proud tradition of tolerance”.

As many historians have shown, the historical facts of Islamic rule in Spain and elsewhere belie these claims. The “proud tradition” would have surprised the several thousand Jews massacred in Grenada in 1066, or the 300 Christians crucified, per Koranic injunction, in 818 during a three-day rampage of killing and pillaging in Cordoba, or the 700 Christians slaughtered in Toledo in 806. These are just a few examples of numerous Muslim massacres of Christians and Jews in Spain, whose lives were circumscribed by prohibitions on everything from the sorts of animals they rode to the height of their houses.

As to the second, the massacres carried out by Christians, they cite the killing of Indians during the early wars of conquest. True many Indians were killed. True, the people who killed them were mostly Christians and some saw themselves as having a mission to spread Christianity. (Of course the Indians did their share of killing too, but they were “only defending themselves and their land”, comes the retort.)

What puzzles us is this: how can the fact that Christians killed Indians in wars fought hundreds of years ago mean that Americans today, of many faiths and none, have thereby lost the moral right to protest the insult of a triumphalist monument at a place of a mass slaughter committed in the name of Islam?

Verily, these liberals and lefty Christians are as muddle-headed as they’re self-righteous!

Europeans may indulge themselves in mea-culpa multiculturalism in penance  for a colonialist past, and though it’s hard to see what benefit the policy brings to anyone, one can understand their argument. But for Americans, imitatively, to put their necks on a block and ask for their heads to be cut off because their ancestors fought wars of conquest is irrational to the point of being ridiculous – and seriously dangerous for the health of the nation.

Afterthought: Strange that conservatives should find themselves having to defend America in argument with fellow Americans; stranger still atheists defending Christians in argument with Christians!

Good news. Mark Steyn is back. His latest column is full of wit and wisdom – of course. Don’t miss it. Among related matters, he discusses the international scandal of the Korans that were not burnt. We expressed our view that the best thing to do with a Koran is read it, because it’s a self-incriminating text. [See our post To fight Islam don’t’ burn the Koran – read it, September 6, 2010.]

Here’s part of what Mark Steyn says about the affair:

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? … Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights? …

President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. …

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama … General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. … The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

Yes. They are counseling us, instructing us, to be afraid of Islam.

Many of us would rather oppose it, fight it, defeat it, and ideally destroy it.

There is nothing in it that is good for the human race. Nothing.

While appalling criminal acts are being excused by radical judges (see our post immediately below, A thirst for injustice), law-abiding citizens are being punished for regulatory offenses they had no intention of committing.

The criminalization of the innocent is the subject of an article by Edwin Meese (US Attorney General 1985-1988) in the Washington Times. It needs to be read in full, but here are some extracts:

Another sign that we have lost our sense of the Constitution lies in the phenomenon of “overcriminalization.” Put simply, government is making too many criminal laws, creating traps for people who are doing their best to be law-abiding citizens. Consider: The Constitution itself identifies only three federal crimes – piracy, counterfeiting, and treason.

When the First Congress enacted the original Crimes Act in 1790, it stipulated only 17 federal crimes. Today, Congress own research service can’t even count all the federal crimes on the books. Our best estimate is that the federal code now delineates more than 4,500 federal crimes. And federal regulations create tens of thousands more. Our Founding Fathers would recognize relatively few of these offenses as crimes.

At the time of the founding, almost all criminal law punished conduct that everyone would recognize as wrongful – offenses like murder, theft, and burglary. And virtually all crimes required proof that the accused had acted with a “guilty mind” – that is, with the intent to do a wrongful act. …

Today, the vast majority of the crimes are regulatory offenses. They involve conduct that is not inherently wrong but has been made criminal only because an elite legislature – or unelected bureaucracy – has decreed it to be so.

To make enforcement of these new social norms easier, legislatures have often jettisoned the “guilty mind” requirement. As a result, people may be punished with jail time for doing things they had no idea were illegal, much less criminal. …

Hence, a 12-year old girl is arrested for eating a French fry in the Washington, D.C., Metro system. A 63-year old grandmother in Palo Alto, Calif., is arrested for failing to trim her hedges in the “officially approved manner.” Four FBI agents, in SWAT gear and armed with automatic rifles, arrest an Alaskan inventor for shipping scientific material without a federally mandated sticker on the package. A retired orchid grower spends 17 months in jail for importing orchids without the proper paperwork.

As the list of criminal acts expands, it becomes harder for the average American to get through the day without unknowingly committing a crime. This situation creates an even more insidious danger. If everyone is potentially a criminal, then the government and its employees have vast powers to decide which people to charge. With so wide a scope of possible criminal charges, we now face a situation where little but the discretion of the government determines who goes to jail and who goes free. …

The comprehensiveness of criminal law now means that it may be deployed as a weapon against the disfavored or the politically unpopular without regard to the actual blameworthiness of their conduct.

Without limits protecting citizens from haphazard application of criminal punishment, law becomes a tool of oppression rather than protection.

Five judicial nominations have been submitted for confirmation by Obama. The names are:

• Robert N. Chatigny, a federal district judge from Connecticut,
• Federal magistrate Edward M. Chen of San Francisco
• University of California at Berkeley law professor Goodwin W. Liu
• Former state Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler of Wisconsin
• U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell, Jr., of Rhode Island

According to the Washington Times –

All five nominations were held up for months because not even many Democrats want to go on the record voting for their confirmation. The nominations officially lapsed when the Senate recessed for more than 30 days in August. Rather than letting them die quietly and without embarrassment, the president renominated them – as if to emphasize his utter disdain for the usual American norms of justice.

Of Robert N. Chatigny, the editorial reports that he showed “bizarre sympathy for a serial rapist-murderer, saying his ‘sexual sadism’ was a ‘mitigating factor’ rather than reason to punish him to the extent of the law.” It quotes him further as saying:

He [the rapist and murderer] is at Cornell, he had this classmate, this petite Asian girl who is sweet, and he likes her, and he winds up killing her because he has this affliction, this terrible disease. [It was] this awful, uncontrollable impulse to sexually brutalize this person he liked and then kill her. … Michael Ross may be the least culpable, the least, of the people on death row.

So Ross was the victim of his own impulse! There is no question in the judge’s mind of holding him to moral responsibility. But isn’t that precisely what a judge’s business is – to hold people accountable for their actions?

A man who thinks as Chatigny does is either insane or deeply evil. Either way, he should be locked up, not promoted to a higher position in the judiciary where he can do more harm.

Next, Edward M. Chen is against neutral justice:

He once explained that a judge should “draw upon the breadth and depth of their own life experience. … Inevitably, one’s ethnic and racial background contributes to those life experiences.”

In other words, your judgment should be guided by your own predilections and prejudices.

Of Professor Goodwin W. Liu the paper tells us:

He has argued that the judiciary should be “a culturally situated interpreter of social meaning”…

Whatever that means. It sounds sinister, and has never before been part of a judge’s job description.

Liu also believes in “a constitutional right to welfare“. That is to say, redistribution, though such a notion is nowhere to be found or even hinted at in the actual Constitution.

Finally, there is this on Justice Louis Butler and U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell, Jr.:

They each argued in separate cases that paint manufacturers should be held liable for lead poisoning in children today for paint made decades ago even if there’s no evidence the poisoning came from paint actually made by the manufacturer in question. This is such a departure from evidence-based law – and beyond guilt by association, into an even worse guilt by insinuation – that it makes a mockery of the judicial system.

Collectively they are against personal accountability, objective justice, the constitutional role of the judicial branch, and evidence-based law.

Obama must have had scouts scouring the length and breadth of America to find these radicals for him. Such specimens must be rare. At least we hope they are.

All five are revolutionaries. They invert the values and principles on which America was founded. They are barefaced enemies of the Constitution. Even worse, they negate  justice itself.

Ever since the Second World War, the Catholic Church has desperately tried to separate itself from the history of the Third Reich, and repudiate Adolf Hitler as one of its sons.

Before the war, in the early years of Hitler’s chancellorship, the Church in Germany did oppose him. But from 1939 onward, it collaborated with him; a fact which it has gone to great pains to try and disprove, without success.

We suspect it is embarrassed rather than appalled by what Hitler wrought without its interference,  condemnation, or even the mildest official objection when the Final Solution, the genocide of the Jews, was implemented. We say this in consideration of the Catholic Church’s own totalitarian, anti-Semitic, and blood-soaked history.

Hitler was born into a Catholic family and was brought up as a Catholic by a pious mother. He was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church as an infant in April 1889. He was confirmed in 1904. He was a communicant and an altar boy. For a time in his adolescence he thought of becoming a priest.

In adulthood, his ardour for the Church cooled. He did not go to confession or attend mass. But he continued throughout his life to think of himself as a Christian, and as Dictator of the Third Reich he maintained the most cordial and co-operative relationship with the Vatican and the German primates.

The Church will not confess to this. Its revisionism, how it now presents its attitude to Hitler, is illustrated by this quotation from a letter dated November 21, 2002, written by David E. Utsler, the Information Specialist of an organization called Catholics United for the Faith, in Steubenville, Ohio:

It is true Hitler was born to Catholic parents. His father was reported to be lukewarm in his faith, but his mother was very devout. Adolf Hitler was confirmed in 1904, but did not often attend Mass. The question is not whether Hitler was a Catholic, but whether he practiced the Catholic faith and if his lifestyle accurately represented Catholicism. Clearly, the answer to that question is “no.”

Hitler was not a faithful son of the Church, docile to her teaching, but rather looked at the Church in a way that served his own ends. For example, in his Mein Kampf, he makes reference to the Catholic Church, because he perceived the Church to be a blueprint for the totalitarian state he wished to create. It is absurd to construe Hitler’s political delusions as an indictment against the Church. …

The real question is whether Hitler persevered in the faith of his baptism or turned from it. The historical record clearly shows that Hitler, in both word and deed, repudiated the faith of his baptism, so Hitler’s “Catholicism” is a non-issue.

How they would like it to be a “non-issue”! But while Hitler could certainly be described as a “lapsed Catholic”, and although the Church likes to claim now that his deeds demonstrate a repudiation of Catholicism, there is no record of his ever making a statement of renunciation.

What were Hitler’s religious beliefs?

The following information and quotations come from an essay by Chris Thiefe, an American atheist of German descent:

As Hitler approached boyhood he attended a monastery school. (On his way to school young Adolf daily observed a stone arch which was carved with the monastery’s coat of arms bearing a swastika.) …

In MeinKampf he wrote about his love for the church and the clergy. “I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.”…

He was never excommunicated nor condemned by his church. …

In a document dated 22 July 1933, he wrote: “The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany [concerning German tax revenues sent to the Vatican] means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism is hostile to religion is a lie.” …

The Church preached Nazi ideals in their sermons and “in turn Hitler placed Catholic teachings in public education”.

This photo depicts Hitler with Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, the papal nuncio in Berlin. It was taken On April 20, 1939, when Orsenigo celebrated Hitler’s birthday. The celebrations were initiated by Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) and became a tradition.

In the 1920s, Hitler’s German Workers’ Party adopted a 25 point program. Point 24 stated:

“We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession…”

The Church alleges that Hitler was an atheist, or a pagan, or  was interested in mystical cults and occultism.

But he was positively intolerant of atheism:

“’We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out’.” -Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933.

And, Thiefe writes, “the following words from Hitler show his disdain for atheism, and pagan cults, and reveal the strength of his Christian feelings”:

“’National Socialism is not a cult-movement– a movement for worship; it is exclusively a ‘volkic’ political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship… We will not allow mystically- minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else– in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will— not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord… Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men.” -Adolf Hitler, in Nuremberg on 6 Sept.1938.

Of course Nazism itself was a mystic cult – as that statement convincingly confirms. And the cult was not Christian. But the Christian God was never dethroned in Hitler’s mind.

Testimony to this comes from his architect friend, Albert Speer, who wrote in his book Inside the Third Reich:

“Around 1937, when Hitler heard that at the instigation of the party and the SS vast numbers of his followers had left the church because it was obstinately opposing his plans, he nevertheless ordered his chief associates, above all Goering and Goebbels, to remain members of the church. He too would remain a member of the Catholic Church, he said, although he had no real attachment to it. And in fact he remained in the church until his suicide.“

The Catholic Church continues to do its utmost to exonerate Pope Pius XII, pleading that he saved some Jewish lives. But the hard truth remains that the Church stood by as Hitler did his worst.

Jillian Becker    September 17, 2010

The Pope is in Britain making speeches, telling whoppers.

Here are comments on some of the things he’s been saying by an atheist, Tom Chivers, writing in the Telegraph:

He’s barely been here two hours and already he has said this:

“Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a ‘reductive vision of the person and his destiny’ (Caritas in Veritate, 29).”

The facts: The Catholic Church colluded with Hitler. It could have issued, but would not, an edict to German Catholics forbidding them to assist in the mass murder of the Jews. Almost all the Protestant churches (the exceptions being one or two small sects) actively supported the Nazis, not reluctantly but enthusiastically. A very few individual Christian clerics made personal protests and paid a personal price for doing so, but the churches stood with the regime.

Yet here is the scholarly Pope Benedict XVI blaming atheists and their “extremism”. He either believes or pretends to believe the persistent rumor that Hitler was an atheist, and that the National Socialist movement in Germany was generally atheist. In fact, Hitler was a Catholic.

So you heard it here first, people; the Nazis wished to eradicate God from society, and were “atheist extremists”. Those presumably would be the Nazis run by one A. Hitler, who in his book Mein Kampf said: “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

Hitler also said in a speech in Munich: “My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognizsed these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders.” There are dozens more quotes along these lines here.

There are indeed. But then Chivers goes on:

Let me stress: I am not saying the horrors of Nazism were the fault of Christianity. That would be idiotic. They were the fault of Hitler and his coterie … and, yes, of too many ordinary Germans. But to blame atheism for them is not only idiotic …  but demonstrably wrong: Hitler, and most Europeans of the time, were Christian, and doubtless many thought (wrongly; we can all agree that) that they were doing God’s work.

Not the fault of Christianity? There  Chivers is wrong. The Holocaust was long prepared for by Christianity. Two thousand years of anathematizing the Jews and persecuting them with impunity throughout Christendom culminated in the Final Solution.

We must also point out that far from it being “exclusion of God and religion”, it was Christianity itself that kept Europe in darkness for a thousand years.

The Pope dares to speak of  a “truncated vision of man and of society”? Throughout the Middle Ages, the would-be totalitarian Catholic Church punished free thought, blindfolded dissenting visionaries, and “truncated” uncountable numbers of men, women and children literally with sword, rack, and fire. Its victims were Christians and Jews. But atheism is the dangerous idea, the destructive force?

Pope Benedict XVI is neither ignorant nor stupid. But he has given his life to a fantastic dogma, and gained his eminence through it, and he cannot let that stern corrector and spreader of light Reality burst into the Gothick darkness in which he lives and reigns.

One of his cardinals, Walter Kasper, aroused indignation – to our surprise – with some remarks he made, and was dropped from the tour retinue, or “couldn’t come because he has gout”.  What he’d said was that when you arrive in Britain “you think at times that you’ve landed in a Third World country.” (A view that’s not hard to justify, actually.)

He also said that an “aggressive new atheism” was rife in British society.

It’s true that although Britain has an established church of which the monarch is the head, it has long been an irreligious country on the whole. But by no means can it be described as aggressively atheist, unless a few intellectuals like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens speak for the nation, which we don’t think they do.

What everyone – the Pope, the too-candid cardinal, and the newspaper columnists – seem to be forgetting is that Islam is spreading in Britain. The number of Muslims is increasing rapidly by immigration, birth and proselytizing. Successive governments have facilitated Muslim immigration. The heir to the throne is positively partial to Islam. The Archbishop of Canterbury urged that sharia courts be allowed to operate as a parallel legal system, which it now is, to the extreme disadvantage of subjugated Muslim women who might have hoped for some relief under British law.

But don’t expect the Pope, the Queen, the Archbishop, or opinionated cardinals to say anything critical of Islam.

It’s safer to fulminate against atheism.

Jillian Becker    September 16, 2010

Victor Davis Hanson has a good article at PajamaMedia on how socialism – or “statism” – is failing all over the world (as it must: what cannot work will not work), just as America is being led on to the socialist ramp down to poverty and serfdom.

We agree with much that he says – as we often do with this insightful and well-informed writer – but there is one point on which we take issue.

Here’s part of what he writes:

Survey the world’s statist systems of every stripe, from soft to hard. One sees either failure and misery or stasis and lethargy. At the most extreme, a North Korea is turning into a Neanderthal society where subjects eat grass. Castro’s Cuba is imploding, and the Great Leader in his dotage is now renouncing his communist catastrophe. Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela proves that an even an oil-rich exporter can destroy itself with self-imposed socialism.

India progressed only when it adopted free markets. People do not outsource 1-800 numbers to socialist paradises. No need to review the Soviet collapse or the change in China from a peasant to a wealth-building capitalist society. Europe for a while longer works despite (rather than because of) democratic socialism. From Germany to Greece, Europe is moving away from the encroaching public sector that has nearly destroyed the European Union.

So the trend of the world — even after the meltdown of September 2008 — is away from statism, except in the United States. I don’t say that lightly or as a slur, but empirically. The Obama administration has absorbed large sectors of the auto industry and some segments of banking and insurance. The student loan program is federalized. …

The percentage of GDP that is government-run will markedly increase; the trillion-plus annual deficits, in gorge the beast fashion, will force higher taxation to pay for redistributive payouts and entitlements — or inflate the currency to erode saved capital. The UN is worshiped and reported to. Allies are now neutrals, and enemies are courted. We seek to prove that we are not “exceptional,” but simply one among many — a sort of socialist approach to foreign policy where all nations are the same.

Symbolically the president, before and during his tenure, has called for “redistributive change,” “to spread the wealth,” and openly suggested that, at some arbitrary point (known to him alone, but apparently sufficiently high enough to allow Costa del Sol and Martha Vineyard vacations) one need not make (as in, keep one’s earnings) additional income. I could go on, but you get the picture: Obama would like to take us down a path that leads inevitably to a Greece, even as the world is racing away from it.

He goes on to list five dangers of socialism.

One of them is under the heading of Demography. It suggests how socialism may explain shrinking populations.

When one demands cradle to grave care, a classical (now scoffed at) reason for childbearing (to change diapers for those who might one day change your own in gratitude) is destroyed. And if there is no struggle to create income and savings (the state provides all needs; the state ensures against all risks; the state takes away most income; the state gobbles most inheritance), why worry about transcendence or passing anything along to children — or why children at all?

So far, so good. If people are supplied with everything they need to survive, what should they strive for, what do they live for? Some might set themselves their own purposes, but many may be content to lie in the lap of the state and purr. And growl and grumble too, of course.

But Hanson goes on:

Agnosticism leads to a shrinking population and vice versa. If the state is the god, and defines happiness as social justice in the material sense, then the here and now is all that matters. The state defines morality as the greatest good for the greatest number — as it sees it.

Lost is a sense of individual tragedy, self-sacrifice, personal accountability for sin and transgression, and appreciation for a larger world beyond and after this one. A society that does not believe in a hereafter will be sorely disappointed that the state never quite satisfies its appetites. We see that hedonism well enough from Greece to California. “Never enough” (Numquam satis) is the new de facto motto.

No sane person loses a sense of individual tragedy. Everyone is doomed to die. Everyone, from the moment of his birth, suffers. And everyone in the course of his life does harm to other people, strive though he might not to. We are all hurt, and we all inflict hurt. An apt title for a biography of Everyman would be Poor Bastard!

Everyone endures disappointment. No appetite can ever be completely satisfied. Everyone has longings that are not material.

Almost everyone suffers remorse – which is an acceptance of personal accountability for wrong-doing. (Maybe not the Christian torturers and burners of heretics, and other such tyrants defending The Truth, religious or political.)

There is no world beyond or after this one. Death is the end of life. Death defines life. That is the meaning of “mortality”. A being can only be said to be alive if it can die.

The universe is a thing. No mind exists in it except the human mind, which is to say successive multitudes of mortal human minds. Only in each of us, embodied by the same dumb stuff as everything else, is there a self-conscious, reasoning, inventing “mind”. Strictly speaking, mind is a verb; it is an activity of the human brain that emerged at this end of an immensely long process of evolution.

The realm of the mind is infinite. Forever discontented, the uniquely human imagination roams wide. It discovers galaxies and electrons. It tries socialism and regrets it. It invents gods and heavens and hells – but they remain imaginary.

Unless someone can prove otherwise.

Jillian Becker September 15, 2010