There may now be more Muslims in Europe than Christians. Not that most Europeans have converted to Islam – they’ve  just given up religion.

The Protestant countries of the north shrugged it off some time ago; the Catholic countries, mostly in the south, more recently.

Now Ireland is angrily repudiating the Catholic Church.

From the Telegraph:

The airwaves are full of bitter remarks supporting Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Enda Kenny’s attack on the “disgraceful” Vatican, and recommending every anti-church measure from the dissolution of the monasteries to the expulsion of the Papal Nuncio and the severing of all links with the Holy See. (The recall of the Papal Nuncio this week marks the lowest point of relations between Ireland and Rome.) …

The Taoiseach, meanwhile, has been met with standing ovations for his salvo against the Vatican for failing to respond with sufficient concern to the clerical sex abuse scandals as described in the Cloyne report.

His justice minister, Alan Shatter, is introducing a highly controversial Bill which will compel Irish priests to disclose the secrets of the confessional where paedophilia is mentioned: failure to do so could result in a five-year prison sentence. …

The breach with the Church has been a long time coming, and for the majority of Irish citizens it is welcome. …

There are now calls to remove the Catholic Church from every element of Irish public life, and this is supported by a growing secularist movement.

Contrary to supposition, though, state and Church in Ireland are already separate: the constitution, although it mentions God, makes no mention of the Catholic Church, specifically affirms that there may be no religious discrimination, and rules that no religion may be endowed by the state. However, there is a difference between state and culture: the state construes laws, but the culture draws on history, memory, family, folklore. Despite constitutional separation of Church and state, there remain religious traditions, such as the broadcast of the Angelus on national radio, the prayers that open Dail [Parliament] sittings, and the existence – even dominance – of faith-based schools, which secularists seek to abolish. …

Catholic Ireland … could become as secularist as France, with all allusion to the Almighty officially excised.

We would consider this a good thing if Muslims would follow the Christians’ example and become secularist. But Islam is spreading and its power is growing all over the continent and in Britain.

From the Mail Online:

Islamic extremists have launched a poster campaign across the UK proclaiming areas where Sharia law enforcement zones have been set up.

Communities have been bombarded with the posters, which read: ‘You are entering a Sharia-controlled zone – Islamic rules enforced.’

The bright yellow messages daubed on bus stops and street lamps have already been seen across certain boroughs in London and order that in the ‘zone’ there should be ‘no gambling’, ‘no music or concerts’, ‘no porn or prostitution’, ‘no drugs or smoking’ and ‘no alcohol’.

Hate preacher Anjem Choudary has claimed responsibility for the scheme, saying he plans to flood specific Muslim and non-Muslim communities around the UK and ‘put the seeds down for an Islamic Emirate in the long term’.

In the past week, dozens of streets in the London boroughs of Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets and Newham have been targeted, raising fears that local residents may be intimidated or threatened for flouting ‘Islamic rules’. Choudary, who runs the banned militant group Islam4UK, warned: “We now have hundreds if not thousands of people up and down the country willing to go out and patrol the streets for us and a print run of between 10,000 and 50,000 stickers ready for distribution. There are 25 areas around the country which the Government has earmarked as areas where violent extremism is a problem. We are going to go to all these same areas and implement our own Sharia-controlled zones. This is the best way for dealing with drunkenness and loutishness, prostitution and the sort of thug life attitude you get in British cities. … The Muslim community will not tolerate drugs, alcohol, pornography, gambling, usury, free mixing between the sexes – the fruits if you like of Western civilisation.” …

 

Seizing control: Activist Jamaal Uddin puts up one of the Sharia stickers in Leyton, in the East London borough of Waltham Forest

 

Drink outlawed: Uddin places his poster on a lamppost outside the now defunct Oliver Twist pub in a part of Leyton in London

The campaign comes just months after stickers proclaiming a ‘gay-free zone’ … appeared in Tower Hamlets.

Women in parts of East London including Tower Hamlets have been threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists if they did not wear headscarves.

“We’re living through a revolutionary moment, all over the world. The world we knew and believed we understood is gone, and we don’t know where we’re headed.”

So writes Michael Ledeen at PajamasMedia. His column gives rise to question after question in our minds:

The more I look at the Oslo massacre, the more I am struck by how archaic it all is. The killer fancies himself a noble defender of a Western world that no longer exists, and has not existed, really, since the First World War destroyed it. He is the sort of fascist who believes in the myth of a Golden Age that must be restored, and vaingloriously sees himself a member of the elite chosen by history to defend the mythical West.

So what is the nature of the West that exists now? Whatever it is, is it not under attack? And if it’s under attack, how should it be defended?

He [Breivik] fancies himself a warrior fighting against two mortal enemies: “Marxism” and “Islam.” He needn’t have bothered; they both died a long time ago.

Is there not a Marxist in the White House right now, and has not his ideology brought America to economic crisis and contributed to chaos in the world?

The first was effectively demolished in the Cold War with the defeat of the Soviet Empire. Yes, there are certainly Marxists around, and even communists, but there is no longer a worldwide mass movement challenging the West in the name of dialectical materialism. Their contemporary warriors are intellectuals, not workers, and they are more often masked as liberals or moderates than openly leftist revolutionaries. That’s because there is no market for revolutionary Marxism, as Van Jones can explain to you.

No link is given to any statement by Van Jones, the Maoist who was exposed as such and (therefore?) left his White House job as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. Perhaps Ledeen means that his discharge demonstrates that Marxism “has no market”.

It’s true that most Reds are Green these days, but is it not still the same old egalitarian collectivist ideology that moves their emotional bowels?

The second, “Islam,” has been moribund for centuries. Virtually all the countries calling themselves “Islamic” are failed states whose citizens are starving, whose industries are generations behind those of the contemporary West, and whose most talented young people are mostly eager, even desperate, to live and work in infidel countries. Yes, there are certainly plenty of murderous jihadis around, but although they work very hard at killing us (typically often blowing themselves up instead, or setting their own underwear on fire), they are most effective against other Muslims. Even outside the “Muslim world” — as President Obama called it during his unfortunate address in Cairo in 2009 — the hard-core pro-jihad, let’s-create-a-new-caliphate crowd visits misery on correligionaries packed into ghettos and force fed a particularly nasty version of shariah.

What of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt whose declared and practiced policy is to spread Islam world-wide, and the legitimization of that jihadist organization by Obama’s State Department now pursuing diplomatic relations with it?

And what of the growing power of Islam in Europe, with sharia recognized as a parallel legal system and the unchallenged acceptance of virtual Islamic states within the states?

Anders Breivik’s demons did not drive him to attack Muslims, although there may have been some among his victims; his targets were his own people, those he called “traitors” for betraying the mythical West to the mythical global forces of Islam and Marxism. Quite a bizarre tapestry: A fight to the death among and within three spent forces which had already died.

So there is no Islamic threat to the West? There is no Red-Green movement trying to establish world government? And no West to be threatened?

He goes on to acknowledge that all three “spent forces” still exist, still think of themselves as they once were, and fail to see the new realities in which they are struggling with ghosts.

This archaic mythology is not only Breivik’s; the Marxists and the radical Islamists embrace it just as avidly. The Marxists embrace the myth of class struggle in a Western world that is no longer capitalist and where there is no working class. The jihadis embrace the cause of holy war (no accident, the Marxists might say, that jihadis raced to take “credit” for the mayhem in the first hours) against a Western world described as Christian and Islamophobic. That, too, is an archaic remnant from a past long dead and buried, especially in Europe. The Old World is secular, and, certainly among its elites, more anti-Semitic and anti-Christian than anti-Muslim. Just look at the thoroughly disgusting remarks by the Norwegian ambassador to Israel AFTER the massacre, in which he showed greater “understanding” of Palestinians killing Jews than of a Norwegian massacring fellow countrymen.

The West no longer capitalist? In every Western country capitalism is grossly interfered with by socialist governments, but capitalism is still the only bread machine.

True the European West is no longer Christian, but it is increasingly Islamophobic, as it must be if Islamic terrorism and the jihad are working as intended. One should not judge the degree of Islamophobia by how many attacks are made on Muslims. Even mockery and criticism of Islam are restrained, because Islam’s campaign of intimidation has worked. Europe has been largely dhimmified, and that in itself is proof that Islam is feared.

Sure the Marxists long since abandoned the proletariat as their sentimental pretext for revolution, but they substituted the Third World, those more distant “victims” of capitalism, and of “colonialism” and “imperialism”. They still aim to impose their egalitarian and collectivist tyranny on the rest of us, and with the trumped-up panic of the environmental movement have come far too close to achieving their goal. The threat still hangs over us.

The new Norwegian ambassador to Israel did indeed imply that terrorism is not bad when used by Hamas against Israelis, only when it is used by Breivik against Norwegian leftists. He must be a rather stupid man.

It is thoroughly understandable, then, that some have responded to the Norwegian mass murder with myths of their own, beginning with the fable that Breivik is the tip of a very large iceberg, that includes not only deranged would-be killers but also writers and politicians. Thus they conjure up yet another phantasmagorical mass movement — a vast conspiracy with countless followers, some hidden, others public. There is no such movement. Yes, there are crazy people who think they are fighters in the great cataclysmic struggle of the days of the Last Judgment … But I doubt there are enough of them to feed more than a handful of Knights Templar, let alone a full-fledged political movement.

No argument there.

He concludes:

We’re living through a revolutionary moment, all over the world. The world we knew and believed we understood is gone, and we don’t know where we’re headed. No wonder chaos disrupts orderly thought, and mythology replaces common sense.

Are our thoughts so chaotic that we deceive ourselves when we think of Marxism (in its new green clothes) and Islam as real enemies?

Is it a myth that capitalism works, or that the individual freedom on which it depends is worth fighting for?

Are we so bewildered that we cannot apply common-sense lessons from the past to our present predicaments?

Even if Michael Ledeen is right and we are shadow-boxing in the dimness of a new inchoate world, what choice do we have but to battle the enemies we perceive, and cling to the certainties we imagine we possess?

Islam to the West: “You are willing to tolerate the intolerant and the intolerable. That will be your epitaph. We are intolerant of the tolerant. That will be the message of our victory.”

We quote from an article by Edward Cline at Family Security Matters.

He writes as a secularist, and praises individual freedom. A thinker after our own heart.

Twenty years before 9/11, when Saudi nationals hijacked American passenger planes and used them as suicide bombs, the West was warned by one of our main enemies of things to come. The warning was announced in an unsigned Reuters article which appeared in April, 1981, in The New York Times: “Saudis Shield Islam From ‘Alien Values.’”

The headline sums up one half of the truth. A subheading may as well have read: “Values Alien to Islam to be Liquidated.”

A page-two heading could also have paraphrased Vladimir Lenin: “Westerners will sell us the rope with which we will subjugate them.”

The physical rope is the oil-production capacity which the barbarians nationalized (pioneered by Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, which then helped to form OPEC in 1960), which the West refrained from reclaiming. The ideological rope is multiculturalism and cultural relativism. Their ultimatum was and remains: If you Westerners insist there is no difference between our cultural and politics and yours, then it can make no difference to you if we take over and set the terms of your existence.You are willing to tolerate the intolerant and the intolerable. That will be your epitaph. We are intolerant of the tolerant. That will be the message of our victory.

The Times article is a fawning puff piece about our less than benevolent extortionist, the royal kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and about its pseudo-angst over how Western values are no match for a medieval, totalitarian ideology that is insulated from any and all threats from Western civilization.

Saudi Arabia’s economic planners believe they can successfully link the West’s technology and the Islamic faith without rending society, but acknowledge they face a challenge.

The text of the country’s economic plan recognizes that there is concern in the Government and among the populace that ”alien values and the spirit of materialism” may threaten religion, adding that this is a difficult problem. …

But as Cline points out,  “Islam is safe. It faces no peril from the West.” It is the West that is threatened by Islam. And if the West is overcome by Islam, scientific and technological development will cease.

Islam is by nature a parasitical ideology which cannot allow its adherents to create, innovate, or think outside the suffocating box of blind faith. Islam cannot allow its elect or anyone else freedom of thought without sabotaging itself. It will not abide criticism ranging from cartoons of its prophet to examination of its central tenets. So, it must feed off the West, which does allow freedom of thought, and freedom of action.

It is not … Islamic society that is being rent by the conflict between Islam and the West. It is the West’s societies, in virtually every Western nation, that are being torn asunder thanks to their pragmatic, tolerant, non-judgmental, and politically correct perception of Islam as just another religion. Europe is experiencing this dissolution first hand.

What are the “alien values” that the Saudis wish to keep – and have successfully kept for decades at box-cutter’s length? The supreme value of the individual. The idea that it is the individual who is the prime mover of his own life, responsible for his own values and actions. The value of that individual to be free to act in his own self-interest. The value of the idea that his rights to exist and to act do not emanate from society, or the state, or any monarchy, but from his nature as a being of volitional consciousness beholden to no dogma or faith.

We interrupt him to applaud.

And we nod in agreement as he goes on:

The “spirit of materialism”? What is meant by that? Ostensively, an overriding concern for one’s material comfort and happiness at the expense of intangible “spiritual” or moral values …

We like those quotation marks round “spiritual” – whatever does the word mean?

… which, in the case of Islam, is unquestioned submission to the theology and pseudo-ethics of Islam. However, blind, unquestioning acceptance of any morality is not a moral action. And one does not witness the sacrifice of “material values” in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Dubai, or any other oil-windfall Arab regime. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Saudis have embarked on an “economic plan” which consists of building monumental skyscrapers, housing developments, and other neo-pyramids, all of which, funded by petrodollars, are white elephants that can never earn back their enormous investment. They represent the siphoning off of genuine, productive wealth from the West into unimaginable money pits. …

Willful blindness keeps most Western politicians from seeing and acknowledging the truth that Islam is waging a war of conquest. President Obama, we observe, acts consistently to ease Islam’s path to victory (see our post Too dreadful to contemplate, July 9, 2011).

The West is on the defensive, Islam on the offensive. As communists in the past have done in pursuit of global socialist state, Islamists [we just call them Muslims – JB] are plotting the overthrow of the West and its replacement with a global caliphate …  They are quite frank about their ends and means. …

While one totalitarian system has collapsed of its own ineptness, another has sprung up to take its place. …

Journalistic and politically correct diffidence continues to this day …  [towards] death fatwas on critics and cartoonists, rising sexual assaults on non-Muslim women in Western countries, honor killings of disobedient girls and women, riots and mass car burnings in “no-go” ghettoes in major cities, a resurgence of anti-Semitism spread by Muslim clerics, brazen calls for sedition and the overthrow of Western governments in mosques, the de facto establishment of Sharia courts in contravention of civil law, the meek accommodation of Muslim “needs” such as foot baths, prayer rooms, and halal food, often paid for by non-Muslim taxpayers (yes, it is jizya, or the Islamic tax on conquered infidels), the Ground Zero mosque … and so much more, all abetted, condoned, or ignored by a liberal news media, our leftist/liberal intelligentsia, and often by our judiciary.

And by most teachers in our schools and academies, and most of our military and political leaders.

Even our technology won’t save us if we lack the will to win this war.

Some American atheists want to prove that they are patriotic by having planes fly banners on the Fourth of July advertising their atheism and patriotism.

We have to wonder why. What will they gain from the “$23,ooo” exercise? They say they “hope to draw attention and spur public discussion”. Yet it is public attention and discussion of their atheism that has offended and scared them.

“I’m a patriotic American. I served my country. I get out there and celebrate the Fourth, too,” Blair Scott, who calls himself a proud atheist, proclaimed.

Proud to be an atheist? We could understand taking pride in being rational, but what is there to be proud of in not believing in divine beings? It’s not a great achievement, it’s simply a use of one’s intelligence.

Blair Scott, according to CNN’s “belief” blog, is “the communications director for the New Jersey-based American Atheists” and maintains that “atheists in the United States often feel alienated and face accusations of being anti-American because of their lack of belief in God“.

The blog goes on:

To combat those notions, his group is using Independence Day to say atheists love their country, too. …

Planes with banners that read “God-LESS America” or “Atheism is Patriotic” will be flying over 27 states on Monday. While people might be leery to see the messages overhead, the $23,000 campaign has had a struggle with those who are supposed to bring it to life.

We cannot see how atheism is “patriotic”. We understand that a person can be both an atheist and a patriot, but atheism as such has nothing to do with patriotism.

The would-be advertisers are having some difficulty finding pilots who will dare to fly their banners.

Again we wonder why. What will happen to the pilots if they do?

Justin Jaye of Fly Signs Aerial Advertising, who is orchestrating the flights for American Atheists, said out of the 85 people in the country who fly these sign-pulling planes only about 17 have agreed to fly the messages.

“I’ve been in this business for 20 years and I’ve never run into so much resistance on people flying,” Jaye said. “I’ve had pilots who are actual atheists who said, ‘Justin, I am an atheist and I won’t fly it because I can’t wear a bulletproof vest.'”

They think they might be shot for flying a banner?

Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, says the reaction to the organization’s campaign before it takes off shows how much work the group still needs to do. “This is a clear reminder of why we need to keep fighting because the bigotry against us is so thick that a lot of the pilots are afraid to fly our banners,” he said.

Jaye said while some feared for their lives, others feared for their marriages. He had one pilot say his wife would divorce him if he made the flight.

She knows she’s married to an atheist, and that’s okay with her; but if he flies a banner she’ll divorce him?

“A pilot and president of Pro-Air Enterprises in Indianapolis” named Red Calvert, who – one gathers – is not an atheist, though he doesn’t seem to be religious either, is reported as saying:

“I respect our country and I respect our churches and we’ve got enough problems in our country without stirring up some more,” he said. “If those people want to do something they believe in, fine, just don’t include me.”

He fears being mistaken for an atheist. But why should flying these banners “stir up problems in the country”? Are angry lynch mobs going to turn up at Fly Signs Aerial Advertising and Pro-Air Enterprises with guns and rope?

Would any reader who is afraid to make his unbelief known, hides it like a guilty secret, or has been denied his “rights” as an American citizen because he is an atheist, please inform us. What have they done to you? What might they do? What does “keep fighting” consist of (other than trying to fly banners)?

We know that the children of atheists have been bullied at school. We have also heard of some discrimination against atheists in the armed forces. But have adult atheists been killed for their unbelief? Hounded and hunted? Have crosses been burnt on your front lawns?

Tell us about it.

Have you heard of Cafayate?

It’s way down south in Argentina. In a wine valley.

It seems to be the nearest thing to John Galt’s hidden valley that exists in the real world.

You can read a little about it here – though not nearly as much as you might want to know if you’re a free-market libertarian.

Jeff Berwick is the author of the report. He issues a free-market financial newsletter called The Dollar Vigilante.

Berwick explains that the people associated with it are “best described as financial freedom fighters“.

The Dollar Vigilante (TDV) is unwilling to live under a corrupt statist system of finance controlled by a few to impoverish the many. TDV began as a way to help foment a movement, long in progress, by individuals worldwide, to rid themselves of government controlled fiat money in favor of assets of real value void of manipulation. It is the hope of TDV that it can help create a community of dollar crash survivors who can survive the collapse of the global financial system and prosper from the new free-market financial system which will take its place.

The world is changing. The nation-state is passing away. Socialism is failing as it must.

Back to tribalism? Or forward to new communities of members freely associating according to their taste? – In “phyles”, to use the Greek word for clans. But not clans in the old sense, not clans bound by kinship or place of birth, but elective clans. You choose the company you want to keep, the type of economy you want to participate in.

A new vision of an emerging world, different from any other.

Not even quite the same as Ayn Rand’s, though she and her Atlas figures who carried an ungrateful world on their shoulders would surely have liked it.

Not only is it incredibly beautiful here but most of the value lies in the community. … Doug Casey often talks about “phyles” – which is an ancient Greek term for a tribe or clan. He is of the belief that nation states as they exist today are a brief abberation and that the world will trend more towards likeminded people living in areas (call them countries if you wish) with other similar like minded people.

This makes a lot of sense and is, in general, the way things are trending. If people like communism, let them all gather together somewhere and create their own communist phyle. A few years later and most of them will be dead from starvation or murder but, hey, at least they got to do what they wanted with other like minded people as opposed to forcing the rest of us to follow their insane socialist/communist ideas.

In Cafayate, “libertarian/anarchist/austrian-economics adherents” are gathering. We – not anarchists ourselves, but libertarian austrian-economics adherents who argue for minimal government – suspect that many if not all of them are atheists too.

It, quite possibly, is the world’s first libertarian enclave!

Galt’s Gulch does exist and it is in Cafayate, Argentina!

Worth reading about, thinking about – and visiting perhaps.

Atheists have become a significant menace  in Britain. They pose so severe a threat that they could “drive religion underground”, according to Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

This is very good news to us, though we confess it comes as a surprise. We had no idea that our fellow atheists in Britain had become so forceful, and suddenly within sight of overwhelming success.

But before we uncork the celebratory champagne and start organizing victory parades, let’s take a closer look at this Phillips guy who’s issuing the warning to the British nation.

Are his judgments sound and his predictions reliable?

What else does he assert?

From the Telegraph, which published an interview with him:

Trevor Phillips … accused Christians, particularly evangelicals, of being more militant than Muslims in complaining about discrimination, arguing that many of the claims are motivated by a desire for greater political influence.

Christians in Britain are more militant than Muslims? Sounds a bit off-beam, that. Have Christians been bombing the London underground, buses, airports, nightclubs? Kidnapping Scottish boys and torturing them to death? Demonstrating aggressively against soldiers returning from battle? We know Muslims have been doing these things, so does Trevor Phillips have secret evidence that Christians have been doing more and worse?

No; keeping such information secret isn’t possible. So – Oh dear! – it looks as if he might have been exaggerating when he said:

People of faith are “under siege” from atheists … attempting to “drive religion underground”.

The Commission he heads is issuing a report tomorrow which, according to the Telegraph, says that some religious groups have been the victims of rising discrimination over the last decade. (We know that this would be true of the Jews, discriminated against and increasingly attacked mainly by Muslims, but the Telegraph report does not tell us whether the report deals with them.)

Mr Phillips went on:

Fundamentalist Christians … are holding increasing sway over the mainstream churches because of the influence of African and Caribbean immigrants with “intolerant” views. In contrast, Muslims are less vociferous because they are trying to integrate into British “liberal democracy”, he said. “Muslim communities in this country are doing their damnedest to try to come to terms with their neighbours to try to integrate and they’re doing their best to try to develop an idea of Islam that is compatible with living in a modern liberal democracy.

They are? Well now, there’s a revelation! And without the Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission saying so, who would ever have supposed it?

“The most likely victim of actual religious discrimination in British society is a Muslim but the person who is most likely to feel slighted because of their religion is an evangelical Christian.”

Wow! More, more … we need to know more about this man and his thoughts. The Telegraph informs us:

Mr Phillips, who is a Salvationist from a strong Christian background, expressed concern over the rise in Britain of anti-religious voices, such as Richard Dawkins, who are intolerant of people of faith.

No. That we know is plain untrue. Richard Dawkins is intolerant of irrational ideas, of “faith” yes, but not of people.

Anyway, “people of faith” are lucky enough to have Mr Phillips and his Commission dedicating themselves to their protection from dangerous atheists like Dawkins.

Phillips said that the Commission is committed to protecting people of faith against discrimination …

Yet this noble aim may be hard to realize because, it transpires, the Commission’s “£70 million annual budget … is to be cut drastically”.

Well, there’s good news again! Not quite warranting champagne, but worth a cheer or two.

Our verdict on this guardian of Equality and Human Rights: Trevor Phillips is misinformed, or lying, or dense, or overestimating the gullibility of Telegraph readers.

Which means we must reluctantly put the unopened champagne back in the refrigerator.

Celebrations are postponed. But still, ye British atheists, fight on! Strike terror into their craven hearts!

Most conservative writers take it for granted that those who share their political opinions also share their religiousness, and are surprised, even shocked, that some conservatives are atheist.

We look at the matter the other way round. It is a perpetual puzzle to us why so many persons who are clear-sighted and rational enough to be conservatives yet believe in the supernatural.

Writing in the American Thinker, Lloyd Marcus opines:

Without beating around the bush, I believe the battle being fought in America today goes beyond politics; right vs. left. It is a spiritual battle; good vs evil.

We agree that the battle is between good and evil. We think the Left and Islam – in alliance with each other at present – are evil.

But what do the religious mean when they use the word “spiritual”? We understand “spirit” to be adverbial: one does this or that in such and such a spirit. They believe that spirit is a noun, identical with the “soul”. And what is the soul? It’s the ghost inside “you” which will continue to live when “you” die. Christians believe that it will live forever in “heaven” if it was good on earth, and will suffer forever in “hell” if it was naughty.

As if to strengthen his argument, Marcus quotes a passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians, ascribed to St. Paul, but of disputed authorship. Whoever wrote the epistle put into it one of the most egregiously Gnostic passages in the New Testament, and that’s the one Lloyd Marcus quotes:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. – Ephesians 6:12

In Gnostic systems there were layers of heavens between the ascending spirit of the Gnostic and the highest sphere of the good God. In them dwelt powers called Aeons (heavenly beings and ages in time) and principalities (Archons). A low-dwelling, evil god, identical to Jehovah the god of the Jews, created this world and ruled it with his own set of Aeons and Archons.

That is not orthodoxy to any Christian sect. Christians are hard put to interpret the passage in their terms, which is probably why some argue that St Paul  didn’t write it.

But Marcus means that flesh and blood Democrats are the “powers and principalities” he and his fellow Christians are wrestling against, and the Senate and the White House are his “high places”. In other words his battle is within the realm of politics. He just vaguely supposes that good and evil are terms that belong only to religion, so quotations from his scriptures leap to his mind:

The mindset of the American left is a spirit of Antichrist which is man making himself God.

Before writing me off as a Bible nut, please hear me out. Understanding this reality will explain much of the left’s behavior. Because they believe man is God, in their insane arrogance, the left think they can fix everything; legislate equal outcomes and even save or destroy the planet.

Now we agree with him that lefties arrogantly “think they can legislate equal outcomes and even save or destroy the planet”. And we know they cannot. Not because they lack divine power, but because equal outcomes cannot be legislated, and because the human beings who “infest” the planet (as H. L. Mencken once put it), cannot affect the thing to any significant extent.

What the religious right cannot or will not see, is that you can believe in the market economy, small government, low taxes, strong defense, individual liberty under the law – all the important conservative ideas – without believing that they issue from, or are sanctioned by, a supernatural source.

Marcus defends Sarah Palin:

Make no mistake about it folks, we are in a spiritual battle. Ask yourself. Specifically, what about Sarah Palin inspires such visceral hatred from the left? The word is “wholesome.”

We agree that she is wholesome. We like her wholesomeness. We like her decency and probity and patriotism and moral strength. We like what we have gathered are her favored policies. We agree with Marcus that the Left hates her for the very things we admire in her. And we are willing to disregard her religious views, as we have to disregard the religious views of all possible presidential candidates because the time has not come when a self-confessed atheist will stand a chance of being elected to the White House. (We suspect, however, that many a presidential candidate is a secret atheist – and perhaps a few presidents have been too.)

Our point is, good values make good sense and don’t require the sanction of a Nobodaddy-in the-sky. All moral ideas, all ideas proceed from the minds of human beings. A person who knows this to be the case is not one who “thinks he is God”; “God” is superfluous to him or her.

Marcus holds that without God to tell us what to think, none of us would ever get it right.

Because liberal elitists think man is God, they assume moral authority to confiscate as much control over our lives as we simple-minded god-fearing peons will allow them, including procreation. I picked up a government-funded brochure at my local library which basically said birthing babies is an irresponsible abuse of the planet.

Folks, this is leftist control-freak hogwash!

Yes it is.

The seven billion people who live on the planet could fit in Texas enjoying about the same amount of living space as residents of New York.

True. But he adds:

God said be fruitful and multiply. But then, what the heck does God know?

Sarcasm of course. But what the heck does “God” know? If there is a being who knows more than man, how can man know that he does?

The rest of the article (see it here) rambles on about this and that – “Christianity only religion not respected, Jesus is divine, true Christians trust God, zz-zzzz” – the points being tied together only by the buzz in his head that they all represent aspects of wrong guidance by “the Antichrist”.

Like an episode of Star Trek, the left believes universal peace can be achieved via America apologizing and admitting to the world that we suck, surrendering our power, signing treaties and singing a few verses of Kumbaya. They believe the greatest source of evil in the world is warmongering Christian white guys like George Bush. If only Bush had “Given peace a chance.” Liberals always cater to man’s lowest base instincts. They hate standards for behavior, labeling all rebuke of bad behavior as being intolerant and judgmental.

We don’t argue with that. But this follows:

And yet, they believe without divine influence, man is capable of someday achieving universal peace. Totally absurd.

Has he not noticed that a great many wars have been fought over religious issues? What has “divine influence” ever done for peace?

Christians believe that though we strive to do the right thing, the heart of man is critically flawed which is why we were in need of a savior, Jesus Christ.

And just when will his “savior” remove the flaws in the human heart?

This is how he concludes his article:

Despite the left’s relentless attempts to ban God from America’s public square, the emergence and power of the Tea Party tells me God is still on our side.

Mr. Obama, though your liberal zealots perceive you to be “the messiah,” God is still on the throne.

Totally absurd.

Jillian Becker   June 11, 2011

Professor Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University.  As one might expect of a professor of religion, he makes unwarrantable assumptions.

He does so in a column he’s written for USA Today titled You can’t reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus.

Who’s trying to?

The Tea Party, he assumes.

The Tea Party protests against the Obama government’s economic policies of redistribution, deficit spending on ever-increasing entitlements, the robbing of “the rich” and the enforced dependency of “the poor”, resulting in high unemployment and a load of debt on future generations.

Ayn Rand would be sympathetic to such protest. Some Tea Partiers carry signs quoting her.  So  – Professor Prothero reasons – the Tea Party is inspired by her philosophy.

“But hold on a mo!”, he says to himself, figuratively scratching his head. “Everyone in the Tea Party is conservative – and aren’t all conservatives religious? Aren’t most of them evangelical Christians?  Sure they are. So they’re in deep confusion. Ayn Rand was an atheist. I must straighten them out. Make them see that they hold contradictory views. Explain to them that they cannot be both for Jesus and for Ayn Rand.”

For what Jesus? We surmise that everyone who thinks about Jesus, whether or not he’s a Christian, has his own Jesus in his head. Stephen Prothero’s Jesus is a lefty.  He quotes the biblical Jesus as saying: “Blessed are the poor”. Lefties have reason to bless the poor every day of their lives, and hope they never go away (ie become rich), for in the name of that imaginary caste lefties pursue their egalitarian cause, believing the pursuit to be so ennobling that they can be as nasty as they choose to real people without losing a drop of their moral pride.

Professor Prothero will remember that the biblical Jesus is reported as saying not only “Blessed are the poor” (Luke 6:20), but “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:6), which lefties plainly are not.

But let’s go to the professor’s own words (you can read them all here if you care to):

In Rand’s Manichaean world, it is not God vs. Satan, but individualism vs. collectivism.

Right. And we too see the great political divide as being between individualism and collectivism.

He goes on:

While Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” she sings Hosannas to the rich. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged (which, alas, is only slightly shorter than the Bible) are captains of industry such as John Galt. The villains are the “looters” and “moochers” — people who by hook (guilt) or by crook (government coercion) steal from the hard-won earnings of others.

The professor’s sympathies are all with the moochers. He praises Jesus for being “a first-class, grade-A ‘moocher’.”

He proceeds, scornfully and sarcastically:

Turning the tables on traditional Christian morality, Rand argues that altruism is immoral and selfishness is good.

Our argument is that selfishness is essential to our survival, though it doesn’t preclude generosity or even altruism (which is very rarely practiced). See our post Against God and Socialism, April 29, 2011.

Moreover, there isn’t a problem in the world that laissez-faire capitalism can’t solve if left alone to perform its miracles.

Of course there are problems that cannot be solved, but individuals left free to innovate profitably can and do solve a lot of them. Collectives cannot and do not.

The solutions that capitalism facilitates are not claimed to be miracles. Miracles happen only in the minds of the religious and the gullible.

Ayn Rand was as much against religion as we are. “Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life,” Prothero quotes her as saying, without comment. To him her words are shocking, and he expects them to shock his readers. We, however, agree with her. Our pages provide ample evidence that religion has always done and continues to do immense harm.

He himself, Prothero half confesses, was a bit of a fan of Ayn Rand when he was in his adolescnce. But, he implies, her appeal can only be to the adolescent mind:

I first read Atlas Shrugged and her other popular novel, The Fountainhead, while festival-hopping in Spain after graduating from college, so I can attest to the appeal of this philosophy to late adolescents of a certain gender.

“A certain gender”? What gender would that be? And why only that one? He doesn’t say.

As an adult, however, Rand’s work reads to me like a vulgar rationalization for greed lying on top of a perverse myth of the right relationship between individual and community.

Now we don’t recognize the sin of greed, but we do recognize the sin of envy. Socialism – or “redistributionism” – is the politics of envy.

The obvious tendency of Prothero’s argument is that Jesus is right and Rand is wrong. Towards the end of his column he claims, however, not to be trying to win readers from Rand to Jesus, he’s only trying to point out that the two contradict each other. “You cannot worship both the God of Jesus and the mammon of Rand,” he says. Choose one or the other,  “or say no to both. It’s a free country. Just don’t tell me you are both a card-carrying Objectivist and a Bible-believing Christian. Even Rand knew that just wasn’t possible.”

That’s his message to Tea Partiers who display Rand quotations, and to Republicans, who also, he assumes, are guilty of trying to reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus.

Any Republicans in particular? He names Paul Ryan:

Among Rand’s adoring acolytes on Capitol Hill is Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who at a Library of Congress Symposium held in 2005 on the centenary of the Rand’s birth called her “the reason I got involved in public service.”

We are delighted, and not at all surprised, to hear that Paul Ryan learnt from Ayn Rand. If we had nothing else to be grateful to Ayn Rand for, her getting Paul Ryan “involved in public service” would put us hugely in her debt. His capitalist convictions and economic know-how is already doing good for the Republican Party, and would do good for America (and therefore to the world) if he were to become president. We see him as the desperately needed leader under whom the United States of America would again embody the great idea of individual freedom on which it was founded.

(Hat tip to our reader George for bringing Stephen Prothero’s column to our attention.)

Note added in 2020: We sure were wrong about Paul Ryan! But we still like both the Tea Party and Ayn Rand. Not Jesus.

We despise belief in the supernatural, and are against all religion. But we recognize that some religions are worse than others.

At present, the worst of the world’s major religions is Islam. Since the Enlightenment, Christianity has dropped to second-worst.

Is there anything at all that can reasonably be called good in the ideology of Islam?

If anyone knows of anything to commend it, please tell us what it is.

It is a cult of death. As Hamas representative Fathi Hamad said boastfully:

For the Palestinian people death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the Jihad fighters excel, and the children excel. Accordingly [Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine, as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: We desire death as you desire life.

Here is a view of Islam by Daphne of Jaded Haven, posted November 29, 2008. We agree with almost everything she says:

I find myself increasingly repulsed by Muslim practices and beliefs. Middle Eastern, African, Asian, American, the country of origin makes no difference. Women and children treated as chattel, genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings, culturally accepted pedophilia, the black drapes and head coverings, no rights, no votes, little to non-existent educational opportunities, no voice, no chices, no recourse. Persecution of homosexuals. Imprisonment, stoning and whipping for morality crimes. Lack of free speech. The foul treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic countries. The demented hatred of Jews. Sharia Law. Wahhabism. Madrasas. Blind obedience to Mullahs. Praying towards Mecca – a place on the map few will ever see. Individuality is shut down, originality and freedom of the mind discouraged. Islam pisses on human talents that fall outside the dark walls of its faith. Hell, I even dislike their dislike of dogs.

I don’t believe Mohamed was holy or a prophet. I think he was evil incarnate carrying the words of Satan himself to a crew of desert simpletons. Islam is a barbaric, unpeaceful, vile, unthinking distortion of worship. The fact that the majority of its adherents can’t even read the Koran smacks of mindless ignorance. I see no enlightenment elevating individual singularity or acknowledging gifted greatness in this corner of archaic darkness. My lip curls at their love of theocracies, a willingness to subjugate themselves to the whims of dissolute rulers along side an ancient text they can’t even begin to comprehend, subsuming their divine individuality to a tide of dogmatic mandates. I have no use, or respect, for the people who follow this religion. I’m past tired of their bombing, shooting, acid throwing, coup d’etat loving, rioting asses and it looks like the rest of the world could stand a break from these murdering bastards, too. According to a website that does nothing but track worldwide Islamic terrorism, there have been 12,328 Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11*. Don’t tell me this isn’t an Islamic issue, the rest of us aren’t practicing murder on a worldwide scale in the name of religion.

We take issue (of course) with the word “divine”: to us,”individuality” is essentially, exclusively, and necessarily mortal. “Distorted worship” makes no sense to us, and we judge the Koran to be a repulsive, immoral book, often unintelligible, and not worth the effort to “comprehend” it. We do, however, accept “Satan” in this context as a personification of evil.

*The number of deadly terrorist attacks by Muslims since 9/11, tallied today by the (ironically named) website the Religion of Peace, and reproduced in our margin, is 17,266.