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!

Recently seceded from the state of Sudan, South Sudan is to become an independent state on July 9, 2011. The majority of its population is Christian. The north is Muslim. Between the two countries is a disputed oil-rich area where the Muslims are attacking the Christians.

According to the following report by Faith J.H.McDonnell, they are also using proxy forces, notably the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), to attack the western region of South Sudan.

The Lord’s Resistance Army is so atrocious a thing that no words – “atrocious”, “evil” – seem strong enough to convey how evil it is.

The LRA is a Northern Ugandan rebel group led by the now-middle-aged madman Joseph Kony. For over twenty-five years it has been abducting children, and so brutalizing them that they become mindless killing machines. It has used these children to kill hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in Northern Uganda, Southern Sudan, and more recently, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. By 2006, the LRA had abducted over 50,000 children to make child soldiers and sex slaves. …

Escaped child soldiers and other LRA abductees frequently have reported seeing Sudan Armed Forces trucks during their time in captivity … delivering food, weapons, and uniforms to LRA commanders. And in recent days, the LRA has teamed up with the Janjaweed, the killers in Darfur, receiving training and weapons at Islamic camps that have been set up there. For although some (usually secular elites, hostile to Christianity) refer to Kony as a “Christian,” his current belief system is a combination of the demonic and Islam.

Kony claims he is possessed by “spirits”. Possession by spirits and Islam – that’s demonic squared!

Details of horrific acts … have been repeated in villages all over East Africa since Kony began taking children in 1986, to ensure himself an ever-replenished army of boys and girls, some as young as five or six years old. …

The rebels gathered all the children together and started killing people right in front of their eyes. They forced the children to kill their own parents. After the slaughter, the boys had to carry large metal barrels, and the girls had to fetch water to fill the barrels. They built fires around the barrels, and while the water was heating up, the children were forced to hack up their parents and fellow children’s bodies and throw their dismembered parts in the boiling water. After some time, the children were then made to eat the flesh. In this way the LRA commanders knew that the children were so traumatized that they would do anything. They would not try to run away because there was nowhere and no one left to which to run.

That’s what happened. The children were forced to cook and eat their own parents. Behold Africa in the 21st century. Still the heart of darkness.

Why are the Muslims using the LRA to destabilize South Sudan?

They are targeting Western Equatoria State, which borders Uganda, because it is so fertile, and has the potential to be the breadbasket for the region. If it is destabilized, it will affect the food supply of the country, as well as lessening the possibilities of profitable commercial agriculture. Khartoum’s proxy militia is also targeting it because it is a strong Christian community. …

The people of Western Equatoria … have always been extremely self-sufficient… Now people are abandoning their homes and attempting to find shelter in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. …

The Equatorians do not want to be dependent on NGOs and the U.N. for their existence. At present they are trying to provide their own security with “arrow boys,” young men armed with nothing but homemade bows and arrows who protect against the well-armed LRA. They want the government to supply them with real arms, but there is little chance of that taking place if only for the reason that the Government of South Sudan is well aware that it is under scrutiny by the global community, and it is always held to a higher standard than the Islamists in Khartoum.

Can this really be true? Is defense with arms now held by “the global community” to be impermissible? Well yes, for some it is – Israel, for instance.

What is really needed to help the people of Western Equatoria State as Khartoum wages its proxy war against them via the LRA is the full implementation of U.S. law found in the “Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act” of 2010. In this legislation, which was heartily supported on both sides of the aisle, Congress required the U.S. government to develop a regional strategy supporting multilateral efforts to stop the LRA. The president was to report on the creation of that strategy within six months of the act’s passage.

In November 2010, the Obama administration presented its strategy. The four major objectives were: protect civilians, apprehend Kony and senior commanders, promote the defection and disarmament of LRA fighters (remember these were abducted children), and increase humanitarian access to the region.

A fine strategy that was not implemented. The author of the report has this opinion:

Ending Khartoum’s proxy war on South Sudan would cost far less than our continual bombing of Libya, or our largess to President Mubarak’s successors in Egypt, or our unending jizya to the Palestinian Authority. And in this case, we actually would know that in helping the people of South Sudan we were helping true friends and allies in the fight for secular democracy and religious freedom.

Religious freedom? Freedom from religion is what’s needed. There would still be a struggle for control of oil fields, and men like Joseph Kony would still brutalize and kill for the joy of it. But one persistent excuse for the infliction of massive human suffering would be gone.

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.

This review was written in 2007, the year the book was published. It needs to be on our pages.

Christopher Hitchens has cancer and may not live much longer. He has expressed some opinions that chime well with those of The Atheist Conservative, and some that are decidedly different. As an atheist he has won our approbation; as a political commentator he has often earned our criticism. In agreement with him or not, we have always appreciated his eloquence and wit.

*

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens,Twelve, New York , 2007, 307 pages.

Religion cannot survive in our Age of Science. Until I read this book I thought that there was life in it yet, enough for it to continue as an important force in human affairs for another century or so. But I am persuaded by Hitchens that it is already dead, even though there are many millions who still believe in gods or God and even more who observe the rituals of worship, and even though some act politically and devastatingly in its name.

How then is it dead? Hitchens puts it this way, with characteristic elegance: ‘Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago … We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday.’

So – Hitchens encouragingly claims – although Islam has risen all over the globe to fight for its life with fire and tongue against scientific truth, against criticism, against freedom of body and mind, and continues successfully to rake in its converts by intimidation and even persuasion, it is doomed just as the other religions are doomed, being but the ritual perpetuation of a long-outdated belief, and will dwindle away to nothing as so many religions have done before it. Coming generations in an ever more closely communicating world will find it harder and harder to believe in the unbelievable.

We know that there are scientists who are religious. Amazingly, there are quite a few who find it possible to accept all that cosmology and physics tell us about the nature of the universe and yet still believe in a Creator God with mysterious purposes for His Creation. Of course – Hitchens says – you can do this, but ‘the theory works without that assumption’. God can be retained, but is not required. Believe in him if you will, but to questions of how the world has come to be as it is, God is irrelevant, superfluous, an added extra, an unnecessary decoration contributed by nostalgia and habit. Further knowledge of the stars will not come through prayer, and though an astronomer may pray for knowledge and go to church every seventh day to win the approval of his god, it is to his telescope he will go to find the truth.

Hitchens dismisses the argument for ‘intelligent design’ – part of religion’s last-gasp vocabulary of euphemism – with illustrations of how if nature were indeed the result of design, unintelligence would better characterize the designer who achieved such results: the ‘useless junk’ in our DNA string left over from lower creatures; our appendix; our vestigial tails; all of which are explained satisfactorily by evolution but make no sense at all as intelligent design. One could add many more. I like to cite the inability of bees to alight easily on a flat surface.

The presence among us of tormenting and life-destroying viruses does not say much for the designs of an intelligence that is also supposed to be beneficent to the human creature. Scientific discovery and skepticism have removed the need to justify horrors, to answer such questions as to ‘who inflicted the syphilis bacillus or mandated the leper or the idiot child’.

‘Intelligent design’ implies that intelligence existed before anything else. But we are aware that what we call intelligence requires human physiology – including most immediately a brain – which, of all things known, has taken longest to evolve. It has come at this – our – end of the process. An assertion that such a thing was already there at the very beginning is not rationally persuasive

I have long wondered why so many find it easier to conceive of there being an original Nothing then Something (the universe) and then again eventually Nothing, than to conceive of Something always having existed and forever to remain. We know Something exists. We know that matter is imperishable: it changes but does not dissolve into nothingness. Why, if we can accept the idea that it will have no ending, do we need to think of it as having had a beginning?

In the grip of the belief that there was ‘a beginning’ of existence, believers like to raise their favorite ‘logical’ argument that since everything must have a cause there must be a First Cause, Hitchens logically asks for the cause of the First Cause, or ‘Who designed the designer?’ No theologist or philosopher has ever satisfactorily answered that (Thomas Aquinas’s argument that God could set the cause-and-effect chain working in the universe because he is outside it does not abolish the question of how he came into existence) – or ever produced a sound argument for belief in a god of any sort.

The onus rests always on the believer to prove his case. It is not necessary for the unbeliever to prove that the object of others’ belief is not there. As Karl Popper expressed it: ‘Seeing no reason to believe is sufficient reason not to believe.’ It is an argument against belief most useful to be armed with. Another of course is David Hume’s, who asserted, in the light of the immense suffering that God coolly watches his creatures undergoing, that if he is omnipotent then he must be evil, or if good he cannot be omnipotent. (Hitchens mentions both philosophers but neither of these arguments which would have served him well.)

Hitchens does not accept the shop-worn argument that without religion there would be no morality. He is as certain as I am that religion is not the indispensable source of ethics or law. Reason and experience teach people, and have surely always taught them, that it is better and safer to live in a world where certain kinds of behavior are by and large avoided and certain rules by and large obeyed. I was interested to find, when I got round not long ago to reading the Hammurabi Code that it deals chiefly with what punishments should be imposed on those who disobey rules of conduct rather than in laying down or even reiterating the rules themselves. Rules against murder, adultery, lying, stealing pre-date all recorded codifications, any tablet of commandments. As Hitchens says, ‘Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.’

There surely cannot be any doubt that religion has been the cause of much human misery, cruelty, torture, oppression, and probably the majority of wars. It is fair to add that some religions have inspired good deeds as well as evil ones. But then, people have always done good and evil regardless of what they do it in the name of. And surely always will. As for great works of art which it has inspired, it is not unreasonable to suppose that if religion had not supplied the inspiration something else would have done for the same artists. There must be at least as many marvelous pictures of mortals and ordinary scenes as there are of angelic gatherings and Christians suffering; at least as many admirable buildings dedicated to secular as to religious uses; and many more great poems and plays without religious themes than with them. Hitchens points out that beautiful and valuable things that have grown out of religions can be and are as much enjoyed and valued by civilized non-believers, such as himself, as by the pious. (My own list of such things is long, including: the King James translation of the bible; La Chapelle; certain painted angels and saints of the Renaissance; Bach’s compositions dedicated to God.) Hitchens cites, among things that do not require faith to treasure and preserve them, and in this case would have lasted better without it, the Buddha statues blown up by the Taliban in Afghanistan in the name of their religion – a type of vandalism that atheists are very unlikely to commit, having no reason to.

The author confesses to once having had a faith of his own, the secular faith of Marxism. He is now recognizably conservative, even traces of his former leftism becoming almost imperceptible. We welcome him among us.

Jillian Becker

In a fervently, almost ecstatically, favorable review of Terrence Malick’s “mystical” movie The Tree of Life, John Boot writes:

Malick gorgeously imagines the creation of Earth and its development through periods of fire and mayhem. We see wonderfully done shots of the early days of the planet that include images of dinosaurs. At one point, one dinosaur lies stricken and perhaps dying on the ground while another dinosaur comes up and seems bent on killing it — but then apparently thinks better of this and walks away again. It’s as if Malick is illustrating the most rudimentary appearance of mercy.

He goes on to say:

Each of these [human] characters ultimately stands for the same idea: That we are all, in a sense [what sense? – JB], children of a great power that we can never hope to understand. … It’s entirely proper, and refreshingly unusual, for a filmmaker to try to use the majesty of cinema to make us feel the majesty of God.

We’d enjoy feeling awed, but how can we when we’re still laughing at the merciful dinosaur?

Typically, this Christian report of an attack by Muslims on Christians stupidly avoids mentioning the word “Muslim” or “Christian”.

Sudan was recently partitioned, following a referendum on independence in the largely Christian south.

Sudanese forces attacked Abyei town on Saturday at around 8pm. The whole town was completely set on fire and approximately 20,000 people fled towards the bush and towns in Warrap State. The situation on the ground is worsening. Displaced people and children are seriously affected living under trees in Agok. Civilians are down on streets and in bushes, no food, no shelter, no water and no medical assistance.

A local school has accommodated 2,800 displaced people despite the fact that there is very limited space for such a huge number of people. There is no other option, the deteriorating conditions force us to accept them in. The majority are still under trees with children, sick people and elderly people. People with communicable diseases are forced to sleep together with healthy people. … We [the Anglican Alliance] are left no choice but to raise the voice of the voiceless for relief assistance.

Implying?: We hate to complain, we know we should just thank Jesus for the martyrdom of the 2,800 people, but we feel somehow forced to ask for some help for them.

The humanitarian situation, already critical, was compounded last night by heavy rainfall and the cancellation of a planned food distribution due to lack of security.

Lack of security? So they’re afraid? But surely either Jesus will protect them or they’re missing another chance of martyrdom!

A fertile area claimed by both the North and the South, Abyei was due to vote on its future during a referendum on independence in the South earlier this year. The vote was postponed because of disagreements over eligibility and fears over increasing tension.

Which was not avoided by trying to avoid it:

Continuing ambiguity over the town’s final status has led to … ongoing friction and conflict.

No “conflict” actually – just Christians being victimized by Muslims. They say “conflict” to suggest that both sides are equally to blame, which is not the case. But they fear to offend Muslims. Christians the world over are afraid to offend Muslims. The Christian world has been thoroughly dhimmified – even outside of the Muslim-ruled countries.

Oh, Christians! Ye of little faith! You could be enjoying martyrdom at their hands!

Anglicans who would like to donate money to the relief efforts in this emergency are encouraged to do so through the Anglican aid agency where they live.

Anglicans are also asked to provide prayers of support and sympathy to those who need assistance.

That’ll do the trick of course  – putting their hands together and mumbling some words. Works every time.

They shouldn’t bother to send money or food or medicine themselves. They should just ask God to do it. They know that God exists and is all good and merciful, and if he is only prayed to, he will surely do what he is asked.

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What excuses will they make when it doesn’t happen?