Obama’s 2010 health-care law was a levelling, socialist, collectivist, wealth-redistributing, government-enlarging measure. It was a power-grab, in the name of “compassion” as always –  the pretence by the left that the governing elite has nothing so much at heart as the welfare of the poor. The poor must have free stuff. Everyone must have free stuff so that no one is any different from anyone else – except of course the power-elite (what they called the “nomenclatura” in Soviet Russia).

But stuff does not come free. If some are getting something without paying for it, someone else is giving to them – involuntarily, in the collectivist state. “Free” means the state pays. The state gets its money from – well, from the people actually. The socialist, collectivist, redistributing state robs Peter to give free stuff to Pauline.

Among the free stuff Pauline must have is health-care. Obama’s health-care law requires contraception and sterilization to be included in all health insurance policies. There must be “free” contraceptives available to all women. They must be able to copulate without fear of conceiving. To have a baby is a “punishment” according to Obama. If conception accidentally happens, they must be able to have a “free” abortion. Copulating is good but conceiving is bad. Babies are bad for women’s health. And, besides, having a baby or an abortion is much more expensive than contraception.

Of course if every man and woman paid for their own health care just as they pay (or as most of them still do in America) for their food and shelter and clothing, the budgeting choices would concern nobody else. But freedom for the individual to make his and her own choices is precisely what the all-controlling, levelling, collectivist state is ideologically against. To prevent such freedom was the real reason why “Obamacare” was enacted.

To achieve their aim, Obama and cronies must ignore the Constitution. In any case it’s an outdated document, they say. As is stated in the official organ of the Dark Side, the New York Times:

The Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect … entitlement to food, education and health care.

By “the rest of the world” is meant places like Greece which recognize – to their financial embarrassment – that there’ s an entitlement to health care and everything. That’s the nub of the Obama collectivist ideology. All are entitled to have it, so some must pay for everyone to have it. Even if it brings the country to economic ruin.

However, those who pay must not be allowed to buy it for themselves. What selfishness! Private purchase is forbidden.

A Wall Street Journal editorial reports this and comments:

The HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] rule prohibits out-of-pocket costs for birth control, simply because Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s regulators believe no woman should have to pay anything for it. To take a larger example: The Obama Administration’s legal defense of the mandate to buy insurance or else pay a penalty is that the mere fact of being alive gives the government the right to regulate all Americans at every point in their lives

But there was a small difficulty, a minor nuisance. Some religions do not think of reproduction as a punishment and actually forbid contraception and abortion. They don’t see the question as one of health as the state pretends it is, but of morals. So the administration will allow an exception. Churches that object to birth control and abortion need not offer cover for them to their employees, and the employees may claim these “free” services directly from the insurers.

Of course they cannot and will not be free.

This is from PowerLine:

First, there is no possible constitutional basis on which the federal government can order insurance companies to provide specified services for free. Second, the idea that the cost of contraception and abortion services will be borne by insurance companies is absurd. Obviously, insurance companies will quote premiums based on the total cost of the coverage in the proposed policy. If the policy includes contraception and abortion, those costs will be included in the premium, regardless of whether those particular services are designated as “free” to the employee and/or the employer. It is the employee, of course, who ultimately bears the cost.

We’ll all ultimately bear the cost, which is our freedom.

Freedom itself, not health or religious doctrine, is the vital issue.

Religion has always been a principal cause – perhaps the principal cause – of Manmade Human Suffering.

Christians of all stripes practiced religious intolerance for hundreds of years. At present, however, Christians are the victims of it. They are being persecuted and killed in large numbers, mostly by Communists and Muslims.

In an article in this month’s issue of Commentary magazine, The Worldwide Attack on Christians, David Aikman writes:

A Pew Forum study in 2011 estimated that Christians are persecuted, either by government or hostile social forces, in an incredible 131 of the world’s 193 countries, and they constitute 70 percent of the world’s population. The World Evangelical Alliance believes that 200 million Christians are being singled out for persecution at any one time. At a 2011 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) conference in Lithuania on the topic of Christian persecution, one delegate estimated that approximately 105,000 Christians lose their lives every year for their faith — a figure that translates into approximately one Christian killed every five minutes.

The informative article is let down by an absurd conclusion:

However much it helps those being persecuted is a matter of debate. But, still, we can pray.

What sort of a god have they invented who needs to be asked to protect his suffering faithful before he’ll take any notice of what’s happening to them and do something about it? And how many centuries of his failing to live up to his reputation for infinite goodness will it take to convince them that he isn’t going to do what they ask anyway?

But to return to the human persecution of Christians: suddenly it’s become a topic in the mass media, or at least in Newsweek.

Nina Shea reports in the National Review:

Best-selling author, film director, women’s-rights advocate, former Dutch parliamentarian, Islamist death-threat survivor, refugee from a Somalian forced marriage, and a fierce champion of individual freedoms — that of others as well as her own — Ayaan Hirsi Ali has demonstrated her courage once more. In the cover story she penned for the current issue of Newsweek, entitled The War on Christians, … Hirsi Ali gives a tour d’horizon of the most politically incorrect subject of all human-rights reporting: the ongoing religious persecution of Christians in the Muslim world. … She criticizes the media for giving short shrift to this development, favoring instead the [totally false – JB] narrative that Muslims are the victims of religious persecution by the West. …

She asserts: “The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity — and ultimately of all religious minorities — in the Islamic world is at stake.”

Nothing less. And nothing more.

We deplore religious persecution. We deplore religion.

We don’t say religion has never been good for anyone, but we do say it has done incalculable harm.

We don’t imagine that wars and persecutions would never happen again if religion were to vanish from the earth. But we profoundly wish it would. By as much as human suffering would be reduced by its going, happiness would be increased.

Everything possible should be done to save children and their mothers from a sinking ship.

Feminists though, if they’re to be true to their professed principles … Pause. True to their professed principles? Principles such as freedom from male oppression? Never. Vide their indifference to the subjugation of Muslim women. So let’s say, their clamor… If they’re to be true to their clamor for equality with men, feminists on board a sinking ship insufficiently supplied with lifeboats should be willing to go down with it.

This post is about the sinking of a particular ship, about the captain and most of his men pushing past women and children to save themselves, and how the event is a metaphor for the sinking of Europe – and of  civilization. We view feminism, along with all leftist egalitarian movements, as a cause of our civilization’s decline.   

On what happened when the cruise-ship Costa Concordia hit the rocks and sank, Mark Steyn writes:

There was no orderly evacuation from the Costa Concordia, just chaos punctuated by individual acts of courage from, for example, an Hungarian violinist in the orchestra and a ship’s entertainer in a Spiderman costume, both of whom helped children to safety, the former paying with his life.

The miserable Captain Schettino, by contrast, is presently under house arrest, charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship. His explanation is that, when the vessel listed suddenly, he fell into a lifeboat and was unable to climb out. Seriously. Could happen to anyone, slippery decks and all that. Next thing you know, he was safe on shore, leaving his passengers all at sea. On the other hand, the audio of him being ordered by Coast Guard officers to return to his ship and refusing to do so is not helpful to this version of events.

In the centenary year of the most famous of all maritime disasters, we would do well to consider honestly the tale of the Titanic.

On the Titanic, the male passengers gave their lives for the women and would never have considered doing otherwise. On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.” …

The principle that when a ship sinks the women and children should be first in the lifeboats was established, Steyn says, on February 26, 1852, when –

HMS Birkenhead was wrecked off the coast of Cape Town while transporting British troops to South Africa. There were, as on the Titanic, insufficient lifeboats. The women and children were escorted to the ship’s cutter. The men mustered on deck. They were ordered not to dive in the water lest they risk endangering the ladies and their young charges by swamping the boats. So they stood stiffly at their posts as the ship disappeared beneath the waves. As Kipling wrote:

“We’re most of us liars, we’re ‘arf of us thieves, an’ the rest of us rank as can be,

But once in a while we can finish in style (which I ‘ope it won’t ‘appen to me).”

Sixty years later, the men on the Titanic – liars and thieves, wealthy and powerful, poor and obscure – found themselves called upon to “finish in style,” and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too, ‘ope’d it wouldn’t ‘appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure and across all classes.

Today there is no social norm, so it’s every man for himself – operative word “man,” although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize those on the Costa Concordia as “men.” From a grandmother on the latter: “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”

Whenever I write about these subjects, I receive a lot of mail from men along the lines of this correspondent:

“The feminists wanted a gender-neutral society. Now they’ve got it. So what are you complaining about?”

We think that’s a pertinent and cogent argument – though a distressing one, since we’re not all feminists.

And it doesn’t exonerate the men.

So the manly virtues (if you’ll forgive a quaint phrase) shrivel away to the so-called “man caves,” those sad little redoubts of beer and premium cable sports networks.

We are beyond social norms these days. A woman can be a soldier. A man can be a woman. A 7-year-old cross-dressing boy can join the Girl Scouts in Colorado because he “identifies” as a girl. It all adds to life’s rich tapestry, no doubt. But I can’t help wondering, when the ship hits the fan, how many of us will still be willing to identify as a man. …

Now to the nub:

The Costa Concordia isn’t merely a metaphor for EU collapse but – here it comes down the slipway – the fragility of civilization. Like every ship, the Concordia had its emergency procedures – the lifeboat drills that all crew and passengers are obliged to go through before sailing. As with the security theater at airports, the rituals give the illusion of security – and then, as the ship tips and the lights fail and the icy black water rushes in, we discover we’re on our own: from dancing and dining, showgirls and saunas, to the inky depths in a matter of moments.

A case for debate

Milton Friedman – why drugs should be legalized

In the light of certain altercations that have taken place recently on our comment pages – less arguments than cursing and mud-slinging – we offer the balm of some words by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, one of the (few) great moral thinkers of our time. The quotation comes from his recent book of collected essays, Anything Goes. We more than recommend it, we urge our readers, commenters, visitors and critics to read it. You’re unlikely to agree with every word, but every word is worth reading.

The essay we are borrowing from is titled Freedom And Its Discontents.

There are few of us who have never felt the temptation to silence those fools and scoundrels who have views different from our own. They must, after all, be either stupid or malevolent (or, of course, both). If the means to silence them were at hand, we’d be sorely tempted to use them.

Which of us listens without impatience and even anger to the arguments of our opponents? …

Love of free speech in most men is only fear of being shut up. If they were a bit stronger than they are, they would just have monologues, the most pleasurable of all speech forms. …

The threat to free speech does not inhere, therefore, solely in governments, but in our hearts.

We welcome debate.  Please put your arguments, the more persuasively the better. Agree, disagree, criticize, give your reasons. The slinging of invective is not argument and never persuades anyone to anything. Mere abuse is not productive, and not interesting to read.

One more thing. Listening (and its equivalent, reading attentively) is an art worth practicing. Ideally, we need first to comprehend, then to test with internal argument, and only then to express ourselves freely.

We are of course against the deliberate infliction of physical pain. But the infliction of humiliation, especially on enemies who hold what they call honor as their highest value, seems to us a very good way of punishing them or, used as a threat, of eliciting information from them. Which is why we do not condemn the humiliating treatment some Muslim terrorists famously received at the hands of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

Now the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – and the bien pensant throughout the West –  are claiming to be shocked by a video of some marines pissing on Afghan corpses. Comparisons are being made with Abu Ghraib. A criminal investigation is underway.

Since the Afghans are dead, they are not even being humiliated. The pissing merely relieved the feelings as well as the bladders of American soldiers. But by publicizing the picture, condemning the soldiers, launching criminal enquiries, the ISAF are choosing to feed propaganda fuel to the enemy.

President Karzai, he who wears literally the mantle of power in his hell-hole of a country, purses his mouth and blusters – frankly taking the piss out of the US and its allies:

“The government of Afghanistan is deeply disturbed by a video that shows American soldiers desecrating dead bodies of three Afghans. This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms. We expressly ask the U.S. government to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

The enemy will only see self-castigation by the Western allies as proof of weakness. For them, war has to be ruthless. Muhammad and his followers slaughtered all the men of a tribe and enslaved the women and children, setting the god-authorized pattern for Muslims to follow forever. The desecration of enemy corpses is routine for jihadis.

And what else do they do? What do Afghans themselves do to their own people?

This is from the Telegraph:

“You must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night’s sleep.”

These were the instructions of the commandant of the Afghan secret police to his new recruits. For more than three years one of those recruits, Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, ruthlessly carried out his orders. But sickened by the atrocities that he was forced to commit, last week he defected to Pakistan, joining a growing number of Taliban officials who are escaping across the border.

In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, he reveals for the first time the full horror of what has been happening in the name of religion in Afghanistan. …

He became a Taliban “volunteer”, assigned to the secret police. Many of his friends also joined up as land owners in Kandahar were threatened that they must either ally themselves with the Taliban or lose their property. Others were bribed to join with money given to the Taliban by drug smugglers, as Afghanistan became the world’s largest producer of heroin.

At first, Mr Hassani’s job was to patrol the streets at night looking for thieves and signs of subversion. However, as the Taliban leadership began issuing more and more extreme edicts, his duties changed.

Instead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any woman who dared venture outside her house. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.

The state of terror spread by the Taliban was so pervasive that it began to seem as if the whole country was spying on each other. “As we drove around at night with our guns, local people would come to us and say there’s someone watching a video in this house or some men playing cards in that house,” he said.

“Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed,” Mr Hassani said, “and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water – like a knife cutting through meat – until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.

“We always tried to do different things: we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together. We would stretch the arms out of others and nail them to posts like crucifixions.

“Sometimes we would throw bread to them to make them crawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer so he could see how innovative we had been.” …

After Kandahar, he was put in charge of secret police cells in the towns of Ghazni and then Herat, a beautiful Persian city in western Afghanistan that had suffered greatly during the Soviet occupation and had been one of the last places to fall to the Taliban.

Herat had always been a relatively liberal place where women would dance at weddings and many girls went to school – but the Taliban were determined to put an end to all that. Mr Hassani and his men were told to be particularly cruel to Heratis.

It was his experience of that cruelty that made Mr Hassani determined to let the world know what was happening in Afghanistan. “Maybe the worst thing I saw,” he said, “was a man beaten so much, such a pulp of skin and blood, that it was impossible to tell whether he had clothes on or not. Every time he fell unconscious, we rubbed salt into his wounds to make him scream.

“Nowhere else in the world [is there] such barbarity and cruelty as in Afghanistan. At that time I swore an oath that I will devote myself to the Afghan people and telling the world what is happening.”

Before he could escape, however, because he comes from the same tribe, he spent time as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the reclusive spiritual leader of the Taliban.

“He’s medium height, slightly fat, with an artificial green eye which doesn’t move, and he would sit on a bed issuing instructions and giving people dollars from a tin trunk,” said Mr Hassani. “He doesn’t say much, which is just as well as he’s a very stupid man. He knows only how to write his name “Omar” and sign it.

“It is the first time in Afghanistan’s history that the lower classes are governing and by force. There are no educated people in this administration – they are all totally backward and illiterate. … I think many in the Taliban would like to escape. The country is starving and joining is the only way to get food and keep your land.”

This Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani should not be let off his crimes simply because he piously promised himself to tell the world about them and has done so. Why isn’t he being tried, condemned, executed – and pissed on?

The Washington Post usefully informs us:

U.S. military law and the Geneva Conventions prohibit desecration, mishandling or exploitation of bodies of people killed in war.

Prohibit do they? To our own certain knowledge their prohibition has been about as useful as the Pope’s pudenda. (In Lebanon in 1982-1983, the corpses of men killed by the PLO had their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths, and no cry of “Foul!” went up from Geneva or anywhere else – JB.)

The human capacity for indignation is inadequate to react commensurately to the savagery of the murdering, torturing Afghans.

The best thing our soldiers can do is kill them. They should also, if they feel like it, piss on their corpses.

 

P.S. Seems the four marines didn’t actually piss at all.  (Hat-tip Indigo Red)

It is our contention that Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. It extinguished the bright light of classical culture, of which Socratean doubt, the need to examine all ideas critically, was the enlightening principle. Christianity claimed a monopoly of truth, and the  totalitarian-minded Catholic Church did its utmost to suppress dissent by the cruelest means imaginable. So did Protestant churches as far as they could reach. Like Communism and all ideological orthodoxies, Christianity feared open criticism, recognizing that it’s power could not survive argument. The Enlightenment proved that to be the case; a great upwelling of doubt, criticism, exploration and discovery, it loosened the grip of theocratic tyranny, dispersed the darkness of superstition, and let Europe flower again after a long and terrible night. Science flourished once more, achieving an immense extension of knowledge and giving birth to new technologies. The might of the West is rooted in the Greco-Roman culture revived in the Enlightenment, not in a “Judeo-Christian tradition”.

Now darkness is descending again on the West. Islam, a tyranny of the mind as cruel as Christianity and even more intolerant, an ideology from the Dark Ages that forbids criticism and kills critics, is spreading rapidly through Europe and America, zealously assisted by Western governments and passionately defended by the intelligentsia of the political left – which on principle favors ideological conformity and its totalitarian enforcement.

This is from the Stonegate Institute, by Soeren Kern:

The European Union has offered to host the next meeting of the so-called Istanbul Process, an aggressive effort by Muslim countries to make it an international crime to criticize Islam.

The announcement comes less than one month after the United States hosted its own Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC.

The Istanbul Process – its explicit aim is to enshrine in international law a global ban on all critical scrutiny of Islam and/or Islamic Sharia law – is being spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries.

Based in Saudi Arabia, the OIC has long pressed the European Union and the United States to impose limits on free speech and expression about Islam.

But the OIC has now redoubled its efforts and is engaged in a determined diplomatic offensive to persuade Western democracies to implement United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) Resolution 16/18, which calls on all countries to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of … religion and belief.” (Analysis of the OIC’s war on free speech can be found here and here.)

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted at HRC headquarters in Geneva in March 2011, is widely viewed as a significant step forward in OIC efforts to advance the international legal concept of defaming Islam.

However, the HRC resolution – as well as the OIC-sponsored Resolution 66/167, which was quietly approved by the 193-member UN General Assembly on December 19, 2011 – remains ineffectual as long as it lacks strong support in the West.

The OIC therefore scored a diplomatic coup when the Obama Administration agreed to host a three-day Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC on December 12-14, 2011. In doing so, the United States gave the OIC the political legitimacy it has been seeking to globalize its initiative to ban criticism of Islam.

Following the Obama Administration’s lead, the European Union now wants to get in on the action by hosting the next Istanbul Process summit, tentatively scheduled for July 2012.

Up until now, the European Union has kept the OIC initiative at arms-length. But Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the OIC, says the EU’s offer to host the meeting represents a “qualitative shift in action against the phenomenon of Islamophobia,” according to the International Islamic News Agency (IINA), the OIC’s official news/propaganda organ.

According to the IINA, “The phenomenon of Islamophobia is found in the West in general, but is growing in European countries in particular and in a manner different than that in the US, which had contributed to drafting Resolution 16/18. The new European position represents the beginning of the shift from their previous reserve over the years over the attempts by the OIC to counter ‘defamation of religions’ in the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations. …

Europe is retreating from the Enlightenment. But not without  protest.

The OIC is especially angry over its inability to silence a growing number of democratically elected politicians in Europe who have voiced concerns over the refusal of Muslim immigrants to integrate into their host countries and the consequent establishment of parallel Islamic societies in many parts of Europe.

According to the IINA, “Ihsanoglu said that the growing role of the extreme right in politics in several European countries has become stronger than the capacity of the Organization [OIC], explaining that the extreme right, who [sic] hates Muslims, became leverage in the hands of politicians. He added that the rise of the extreme right through elections has become an issue that cannot be countered, considering the democratic way in which these extremists reach their positions. He pointed out to the referendum held in Switzerland, as an example, which resulted in suspending the construction of minarets there following a vote by the Swiss people.”

In other words, the OIC is now seeking the support of non-elected bureaucrats at the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels to enact pan-European hate speech legislation to limit by fiat what 500 million European citizens – including democratically elected politicians – can and cannot say about Islam.

To be sure, many individual European countries that lack First Amendment protections like those in the United States have already enacted hate speech laws that effectively serve as proxies for the all-encompassing blasphemy legislation the OIC is seeking to impose on the European Union as a whole.

The author lists a dozen examples of Europeans who have dared to raise their voices to criticize the barbarous ideology of Islam and defend their own culture, only to be prosecuted and punished for it under recently enacted, bad and stupid laws. Among them, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and Geert Wilders, whose cases we have discussed in our posts: The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11,2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010);The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26/11).

Almost everywhere in Europe now, “speaking the truth about Islam is subject to swift and hefty legal penalties” as the author says.

Why should any religion be exempt from criticism? Religious ideas above all need to be criticized, being the most irrational and the most oppressive. And even more than other religions, Islam needs to be dragged into the sunlight. It is the only intolerant religion of our time –  and it is asking to be protected from intolerance!

Right now, when Islam is intent on conquering the West by all possible means including terrorism, it is especially necessary to be Islamophobic.

Americans must resist the Obama administration’s efforts to help the OIC drive our world back into darkness. At least in the United States – the great product and political embodiment of the Enlightenment – the light of liberty must be kept burning.

As an answer and antidote to St. Paul who spoke on our front page yesterday, here’s Ayn Rand speaking against self-sacrifice, and against loving everybody:

This essay follows A man named Jesus or something like that (September 23, 2011) and The invention of Christianity (October 28, 2011) in our series outlining the early history of the Christian religion.

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St. Paul is one of very few persons who have single-handedly set the course of history. In the last two thousand years, human affairs have been to a large extent shaped by what he thought and said. Yet very little is known about him: his background, his birth-name, the religion he was raised in. Those are subjects for a later essay. What is known is that he invented a new god, a new religion, and a new morality.

He gave out his moral instructions in letters to congregations of Greeks in the eastern Roman Empire. How many letters he wrote is not known. Of the thirteen letters ascribed to him in the Christian bible, only seven [1] are believed by most contemporary scholars to have actually been written by him. From these seven we learn how Paul wanted followers of his Christ Jesus to live and behave.

It must be remembered that Paul started spreading his new religion and writing his letters before the gospels were composed to narrate a life story of Jesus of Nazareth and report what he said. Paul himself shows little or no interest in Jesus’s life before the crucifixion. He says that “he was rich and became poor for your sake”. [2] But he claims to be repeating actual words of Jesus only when he tells the story of “The Last Supper”, in which he has Jesus breaking bread and instructing his disciples that it is his body, and taking a cup of wine and instructing them that the wine is his blood, and bidding them eat his body and drink his blood in memory of him. But that event and those words, Paul admits or boasts, were made known to him by revelation [3] in the same mystical way that his apostolic appointment and Jesus’s divinity were made known to him. In other words, he made up the whole thing; the entire dramatic episode and the commandments in obedience to which the rite of the Eucharist was instituted by the Christian church.

What Paul taught was his own prescription for how human beings should live and conduct their relations with others. He wanted his converts to believe that it was what Jesus asked of them, implying in his letters that that was the case. [4] But it is his own, original, moral teaching that founded and formed the greater part of what came to be known as “Christian morality”. [5]

Briefly, but including all salient points, here is Paul’s moral teaching:

We are the filth of the world, the scum, the muck that is scoured from things. [6] The lowest of the low. [7]

Let us abase ourselves; be fools [8]; be humble, and associate with the lowly. [9]

Do only the most menial work for a living. [10]

Bear affliction with patience [11], even with joy. [12]

You must consider all others to be greater than yourselves. [13]

Love one another, love all. [14] Then you will be harmless and blameless. [15] That is what I ask you to do to make me proud of you. [16]

Present your bodies as a living sacrifice. [17] Bless those who persecute you. [18] Let them do the most evil things to you, and return only good to them. [19] We glory in our suffering. [20] However hard your life is, rejoice and give thanks. [21] Never seek revenge. [22]

Obey the government. [23] Pay your taxes. [24]

Women, be silent in church. [25]

Marry if you must, but I would rather you remained unmarried and chaste as I am. [26] All of you should imitate me, as I imitate Christ. [27]

No matter how poor you are, no matter how hard you must toil, give all you can to me to take to the saints in Jerusalem. [28] Remember that when I was with you I worked night and day so as not to be a burden to any of you. [29]

Pray constantly. [30] Never feast or carouse, and stay sober. [31] Do not commit sexual immorality. [32] Attend quietly to what you must do, and mind your own business. [33] Be patient always, even when you need to admonish those among you who do not work hard enough. [34]

Share all you have so that you’ll all be equal in worldly possessions. [35]

Do all this for the sake of Christ. Because he died for you, because he suffered on the cross for you, you must bear all things for his sake. You belong to him because he bought you for a price. [36]

It is a morality that demands and glorifies self-abasement and self-abnegation, as a perpetual repayment of a debt imposed on all humanity by Jesus’s “self-sacrifice”.

It scorns talent, disregards personal ambition, forbids individual self-fulfillment.

So when conservative Christians claim – as they often do – that Christianity initiated and promotes individualism, they are plainly wrong. To the contrary: from its inception Christianity has been the enemy of individualism.

It planted the perverse value of subservience in Western culture; a value that was to re-emerge as an ideal in other collectivist ideologies. Paul’s idea that it was greatly good for the individual to subjugate himself to the community contributed even more profoundly to the ideology of Communism than did his doctrine of sharing and equality.

A morality that makes cruel and unnatural demands on human nature will nurture hypocrisy and breed despair: hypocrisy because sustained self-denial is impossible, so lip-service is substituted for obedience; and despair because to strive for the impossible is to ensure failure.

How then did a moral philosophy that requires men and women to be as worms in the dust succeed in attracting throngs of enthusiastic followers? That is a question for another essay on Paul and Christian morality.

 

Jillian Becker    December 22, 2011

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[1] Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon

[2] 2 Cor 8:9

[3] 1 Cor 11:23-26

[4] Rom 15:15, 1 Cor 14:37, 1 Thess 4:2, 5:18

[5] Paul’s morality, but Jewish moral law remains in the background, with a shift of emphasis towards the sentimental, as in Rom 13:9

[6] 1 Cor 4:13

[7] Phili 2:3

[8] 1 Cor 4:10

[9] Rom 12:16

[10] 1 Thess 4:11, 1 Cor 4:12

[11] Rom 12:12-14

[12] 1 Thess  5:16,18

[13] Phili 2:3

[14] 1 Thess 4:9 , Rom 13:8, 1 Cor 13

[15] Phili 2:15

[16] Phili 2:16

[17] Rom 12:12

[18] Rom 12:14, 1 Cor 4:12

[19] 1 Thess 5:15, 1 Cor 4:12-13

[20] Rom 5:3

[21] 1 Thess 5:16-18, Rom 5:3

[22] Rom 12:19-21

[23] Rom 13:1-5

[24] Rom 13:6

[25] 1Cor 14:34,35

[26] 1 Cor 7:1-9.

[27] 1 Cor 4: 6 & 11:1

[28] 2 Cor 8:1-7 & 9:5-13, 1 Cor 16:1-3

[29] 1 Thess 2:9

[30] Rom 12:12

[31] 1 Thess 5:8, Rom 13:13

[32] 1 Cor 6:18

[33] 1 Thess 4:11,12

[34] 1 Thess 5:14

[35] 2 Cor 8:14, Rom 12:13

[36] 1 Cor 6:20

We have had a plea for help from a young man in Afghanistan. His name is Zvahedd. He writes as a comment on About us:

i am afghan boy i donnu wich god is better to have or no GOD!! help me AT:zvaheed@yahoo-DMLNMRM3XVTGX5CBFAY62PPK74:disqus .com

What can we do? What should we do?

Send him our arguments against religious belief in general and Islam in particular?

What if he found them persuasive?

If a person in Afghanistan is known to be an apostate from Islam, he will in all probability be killed.

Readers’ responsible suggestions are invited.