The Cult of Warm doesn’t accept that there is a debate. As far as they are concerned, the debate never happened because it never needed to happen because they were always right. They can’t intelligently address dissent, because their science is not based on discovering the evidence needed to lead to a consensus, but on insisting that there is a consensus and that accordingly there is no need to debate the evidence. …

So Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page.

Here are some more quotations that we like:

If you believe that freedom is at the core of what it means to be human, then the Warmists and what they stand for are instinctively repulsive to you. On the other hand, if you believe that human society must be organized into a moral collective for the betterment of all, then the Warmist idea provides a wake up call compelling us to form into ranks and goose step in recycled rubber boots into the green future. …

The Cult of Warm has no use for science except as a totem to wave over the crowd. They don’t want to be the seekers for knowledge, but the exclusive possessors of absolute truths. And that isn’t how science works. …

Global Warming has gotten too big to fail. Too many prominent names have committed to it. Too many serious people have nodded their heads and accepted it as an obvious truth, who would be unacceptably embarrassed if it were proven that the whole thing was nothing more than a giant prank. Too many business leaders and governments have invested serious money into it to just shake it off. And much of American and European policy-making is now routed through Global Warming. …

[But] Global Warming is not just a failure of a sizable chunk of the scientific establishment to put theory before ideology, it represents a failure of the entire process by which the West has been governed … It is a demonstration of how a handful of people in prominent positions can push through otherwise unacceptable measures by manufacturing a crisis and pipelining it through business and government. It’s a hack of our entire system of government.

Fortunately, economic realism compels a continuing reliance on fossil fuels, always argues for freedom, and in the long run must win the debate.

Melanie Phillips writes:

A new book, Die Kalte Sonne [The Cold Sun], written by Prof Dr Fritz Vahrenholt and geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning, has caused a sensation even in advance of its official publication yesterday. For Prof. Vahrenholt, a renewable energy expert, was one of the fathers of the modern German green movement and believed everything preached by the IPCC. But … he is now a far sadder and wiser man:

Doubt came two years ago when he was an expert reviewer of an IPCC report on renewable energy. “I discovered numerous errors and asked myself if the other IPCC reports on climate were similarly sloppy.”

In his book he explains how he dug into the IPCC climate report and was horrified by what he had found. Then add the 10 years of stagnant temperatures, failed predictions, Climategate e-mails, and discussions he had with dozens of other skeptical elite scientists. That was more than enough. … “I couldn’t take it any more. I had to write this book.”’

She concludes:

How could so many apparently sane and sensible people have departed so comprehensively from reason over the anthropogenic global warming scam and to have placed such blind faith in renewable energy sources? Several immediate reasons come to mind – indeed, I have enumerated them on many occasions – such as the brainwashing grip of environmental ideology, the western retreat from reason and truth, the manipulation of grant-funding, the intimidation of rigorous scientists, and the fact that so many [scientists] have sloppily endorsed AGW theory without bothering to look at how the IPCC actually reached its bogus conclusions.

But the deeper question still remains. What is it in the psyche of the western mind that has caused so many people not only to be seduced by a set of obvious myths and fallacies over AGW theory but to be utterly resistant to every scrap of evidence … that showed they were totally out to lunch?

(The same question could be asked of people who believe in God or gods.)

John Hinderaker at PowerLine quotes Melanie Phillips and comments:

One by one, the more honest of the scientists who fell for the anthropogenic global warming hoax are confessing their error. …

I would add, with respect to the IPCC reports, that they are not only sloppy but contradictory. If someone tells you he agrees with the IPCC report, you should ask him, Which one?

And this is also from PowerLine, by Steven Hayward:

As John [Hinderaker] noted here Tuesday, and I have noted several times over the last few weeks, the climate campaign is suffering body blows on an almost daily basis. The latest is the report, based on new and more comprehensive satellite data, that the ice melt in the Himalayas has been nil — zip, zilch, nada — over the last ten years.

Here’s how the left-wing [AGW-promoting] Guardian newspaper in Britain reports it:

“The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows. The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall. The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.” …

It’s fun watching these guys fall on their face in real time. The whole circus is falling apart much faster than I expected. I can tell you that around Washington the whole climate change angle is slowly being dropped from conversation … It’s almost like talking with normal people again.

Post Script: Go here to read about the work of  the  Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who holds that the central factor regulating Earth’s climate is the the intensity of solar radiation.

In our time and the foreseeable future, the war between intellectual light and darkness will, we envision, increasingly be fought out by secularists, rationalists, atheists against the religious of all denominations, but most necessarily and urgently against Islam.

This is by Daniel Greenfield, from Front Page:

Alexander Aan was just another bureaucrat holding down a desk at the [Indonesian] Department of Planning until his Facebook Atheism page came to the notice of Indonesian authorities in Obama’s old stomping grounds. Now Aan is facing a five year jail sentence for using social media to spread the message that Allah does not exist. 

Alexander is being charged with “defiling” Islam by using passages from the Koran to challenge the Islamic religion. And while the State Department and the media routinely go on the attack against any manifestation of what they call “Islamophobia,” it isn’t likely that they will be rushing to Aan’s defense. This isn’t exactly the first time that atheists have run afoul of the Islamic codes under which the Muslim world operates.

Two years ago, the Palestinian Authority arrested Waleed Hasayin on similar charges of blaspheming against Islam on Facebook. Waleed Hasayin had written that, “Muhammad was no different than barbaric thugs who slaughtered, robbed and raped women” and that “Islam has legitimized slavery, reinforced the gap between social classes and allowed stealing from the infidels, taking women in captivity during wars and sexual abuse of women slaves.” 

For these and other truthful statements, he was arrested and his family demanded that he be sentenced to life in prison. He has since written a letter of apology in hopes of being released.

The regimes imprisoning Aan and Hasayin are funded by the United States. Indonesia is on the list of the top twenty countries benefiting from USAID funding and the Palestinian Authority, including its security forces and prisons, is mostly subsidized by American taxpayers. The arrests were accompanied by mob protests and violence reflecting populist Muslim hostility toward non-Muslims.

Underlying these individual incidents is a legal code that goes to the very definition of what it means to be a citizen of a Muslim country. Muslim countries recognize a limited set of legal religions. Non-Muslims who are members of legal religions have fewer rights and run the usual risks that come with being a minority group. Non-Muslims who are not members of official religions do not. This includes Muslim sects that the Islamic system does not recognize as legitimate. It includes Muslims who wish to convert to another religion, and it includes atheists who are not a recognized religious group. 

Religious identity is linked to civic participation in public life in a way that most Americans are not aware of. It appears on identity cards, it is a basic requirement for doing anything from attending a university to getting married. Without membership in an officially recognized religious group, the atheist is a non-person.

Well, that’s in the Islamic world. We know how it is there. We know that in some Islamic countries – Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan – the punishment for “blasphemy”, which of course includes atheism, is death.

But in our Western world, where freedom is a high value, and freedom of speech a right enshrined in a constitution (as in the US) or established by tradition (as in the UK), such tyrannous bigotry is not tolerated.

Or is it?

Atheists no longer have to live in the Muslim world in order to be subject to Islamic rules. At Queen Mary, University of London, a public research university with roots going back nearly a thousand years, the Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society attempted to hold a discussion on “Sharia Lw and Human Rights.” The discussion came to an abrupt end when a man entered the room and warned that they would be murdered if they said anything critical about Mohammed. 

The return of blasphemy laws to the United Kingdom has been slow, but not all that stealthy. At the University College London, the president of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society resigned after the college student union backed a Muslim student association’s complaints about a cartoon strip of Mohammed having a drink that was posted on Facebook.

The steady flow of Muslim immigrants into London has turned it into Londonistan with nearly a tenth of the city answering the Call of the Mosque. In two decades their numbers will double and with 40 percent of British Muslims polling for Sharia, it’s not difficult to see that the trajectory for atheists in London is not a very promising one.

Atheists are a minority with legal protections in the West. Which is why the majority of the signatories on the Manifesto for a Secular Middle East and North Africa were activists who had left the Muslim world and were living in Europe or the United States. The impossibility of signing a similar manifesto while living full time in Iran or Pakistan went without saying.

But as the Muslim populations of Western countries continue to grow, they are becoming dangerous places for non-Muslims, including atheists. If a dialogue on the consequences of Islamic law can be shut down with threats of violence at University College London, then it’s hard to think of any place that it cannot be shut down. 

We like to think of our cities as fundamentally different places than Tehran or Islamabad, but it’s the population that shapes the character and values of a city. Demographic change means cultural and religious change and as the norms of Tehran and Islamabad become the norms of London and Paris, religious minorities and irreligious minorities will both find themselves silenced. …

Muslim persecution of a hated minority group increases proportionally in relation to their numerical advantage. Atheists are a larger percentage of the population in Europe, but demographics are still catching up to them. In the United States the demographic race may already be done, as far as atheists are concerned.

In the United States approximately 0.7 percent of the population identifies as atheist and 0.8 percent of the population as Muslim. If these surveys are correct then the number of Muslims in the United States has already exceeded the number of atheists. While not a single member of Congress identifies as an atheist, two identify as Muslims.

We may accept Daniel Greenfield’s finding that 0.7 percent of Americans “identifies as atheist”, but we doubt that only 0.7 Americans are atheist. We suspect that tens of millions of Americans do not believe in the supernatural.

We think it more than likely that many members of Congress and the Senate are atheists but are aware that saying so publicly would end their political careers.

We suspect – and ardently hope – that with each generation more and more adult, sane, educated, intelligent people realize that the supernatural is superfluous to requirement; that gods do not exist; and that religion is a major cause of conflict.

Whether this intellectual evolution will dominate forcefully enough to save the world from the growing and spreading counter-movement of Islam – the darkest, most ignorant, most stupid, and in our day the cruelest of all superstitions and all systems of totalitarian tyranny – remains to be seen.

Here are a couple of picks from an article  in Canada Free Press, by Dr. Karl L.E. Kaiser, on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recently held in Durban, South Africa. We’re glad to say it fizzled out with no result to please the delegates other than an agreement to meet and try again to scare the world into enriching the UN.

First, here are some figures to startle and amuse. The first column of figures may be overlooked; not only because they’re uncertain, but the heading is nonsense – not every country, certainly not every little island, has a “federal government”. The second and third columns taken together have the flavor.

Table 1. Official pre-registrants at the Durban conference (COP17).

*) Data from unfccc.int; some registrants’ government affiliations are uncertain.

Clearly there are groups which were represented at extraordinarily high levels on a per capita basis. Without fail, they are the ones who feel that much (or any) of the “green” dollars to be funded (by other countries on this table) are owed to them. To underline the need and claim, the myths about “drowning in a rising sea” are perpetuated. Unfortunately, for them, the facts are somewhat different. Rather than becoming de-populated as we are told, and just prior to the last ocean wave sloshing over the remaining few square miles of land, their populations are doing the opposite. They are expanding in size and “happily living thereafter”. All of the ocean island nations claiming to be inundated by rising seas have had growing populations in recent years, without exception. If you really want to see what is happening, just look, for example, at a Google Earth picture of the Maldives’ main island Male at the coordinates 4° 10’ N, 73° 30’ E. You’ll see luxury yachts at the moorings, hotels, buildings, and residences from shore to shore.

Next, here is news, funny or sad depending on your point of view. (Sad anyway about the birds.)

One of the great green developments touted were thousands of wind mills, sorry, wind turbines, installed in California. Under various state governments, generous tax-subsidized handouts were given to manufacturers and buyers of such. But now, some 14,000 of such turbines are cluttering the landscape of the western US, without producing any power whatsoever. Their gear boxes are broken and they just keep on flailing without generating anything. (But they still keep shredding any bird getting into their path). As the tax subsidies have disappeared, it is not even profitable to repair them any longer, even with the existing (and generous) “feed-in” tariffs. Of course, the groups which were early in the game and have all left the game since, were the real winners. Who cares about any electricity actually being produced?

Dr. Kaiser concludes that “the green bubble has burst”.

We hope he’s right.

The Reverend Dr. Peter Mullen, rector of the delightfully named St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London (and a conservative with whom I have had the pleasure of co-operating on the battlefield of British politics – JB) has written this article about Richard Dawkins’s views on whether God comes into the purview of scientific enquiry. Dr. Mullen thinks he does not, and we agree with him. 

Dawkins is not  … an intelligent atheist. … For example, he writes: “Either God exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question. The existence of God is a scientific question, like any other.”

This is idiotic. Science investigates material phenomena, observable entities in the universe. No competent theologians or philosophers – not even the atheist ones – have ever declared that God (if he exists) is an object in his own universe. Perhaps there is no God, and intelligent Christians readily admit that there may be some legitimate doubt. But if the Judaeo-Christian God exists, then he is the maker of the universe and not an entity within it.

It is not the business of science to ask if there is a God. It is not a scientific question. Science is concerned with nature, not the supernatural. (See our review of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, by C.Gee.)

It may be that Christians are tragically misled and that there is no God. But before you rush into atheism, you have to know something about philosophical reasoning and how theology works. In other words you have to know what it is about and what it is not about. When he discusses religious belief, Dawkins does not know what he is talking about. And to fire off ignorant opinions is only the first mark of a fool.

We don’t think Dawkins is a fool. Far from it. His books on evolution are wonderfully reasoned. But we disagree with him on political issues as well as on this one.

It is as if I should presume to lecture the zoologist Dawkins on his own subject: as if I should idiotically declare that all the subtleties of modern biological science could be summed up in a book entitled Janet and John Look at Frogs.

By contrast, there have been, and no doubt are still, competent atheists. If I were asked to name my favourite atheist, I would say David Hume. Hume was a thorough-going atheist, a man who on his deathbed declined the consolations of religion, saying: “I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.”

Moreover, the atheist David Hume did not possess an irrational, inhumane, roaring opposition to men of faith. He was a close friend of that great English Christian, Samuel Johnson. Unlike Dawkins, Hume did not wish to obliterate Christianity from the public realm.

Well, he might have, even if he didn’t say so.

Though we don’t have “an irrational, inhumane, roaring opposition to men of faith”, only a rational opposition to their ideas, we would be happy to see the obliteration of Christianity and all religion – by argument, not force.

Another UN conference  on “climate change” with the ulterior motive of setting up a world government to redistribute wealth from prosperous Western countries to the bank accounts of Third World tyrants is running now in Durban, South Africa.

As we hoped and expected, Lord Christopher Monckton is there, speaking out as he constantly does against this conspiracy:

Mainstream science, politics, bureaucracy, academe, banking, business, media – all were of one mind. The West, so the playbook ran, must be shut down at once to Save The Planet from “global warming”, er, “climate change”, um, “climate disruption”, no, “extreme-weather events”, ah, that is, “energy-security challenges”. …

I find myself … in Durban among the creatures of “consensus” for the annual UN climate gabfest. Yet the party line was wrong. … Every dire prediction that the usual suspects had made with such sneering arrogance has failed.

Just look. Professor “Phil” Jones of the “University” of East Anglia had to admit … that there had been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. …

Arctic sea ice was supposed to be gone by 2013. Then it rebounded. Then it was going to reach a new low on 15 September this year …. [but] Antarctic sea ice has been on the up throughout the satellite era. Global sea ice shows little trend in 30 years.

Polar bears were supposed to be headed for extinction. … Today there are five times as many polar bears as 70 years ago.

Kilimanjaro has been losing ice since 1880. …  “Global warming” could not have caused the recent ice loss … The summit temperature, monitored by satellites, has not changed. Now the glacier is growing again.

Sea level is the big one. James Hansen of NASA, who made more than $1 million out of the climate scare last year alone, had predicted it would rise imminently by 246 feet. Was he right? No. The increase over the past eight years, according to the Envisat satellite, was at a rate equivalent to 2 inches per century. Not meters, not even feet. Inches. Two of them. Per century. …

Malaria was going to spread because of “global warming.” Yet the terrible leap in mortality from 50,000 to 1 million child deaths a year occurred a generation ago, when the Environmental Defense Fund – which, with Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund, spent $1 billion of taxpayers’ and donors’ cash on anti-Western pseudo-enviro propaganda last year alone – successfully campaigned for a worldwide ban on DDT, the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria.

When the Board of the EDF met to plan the DDT ban, its then legal advisor, Victor John Yannacone Jr., begged it to ban only outdoor use: DDT sprayed inside houses would harm only the mosquitoes and spare the children. The then chairman, furious, fired Yannacone on the spot. As he left the room, someone said: “That’s the last time we employ anyone who knows any science.” That ban has killed 40 million children.

Extreme-weather deaths are down sharply. Global tropical-cyclone and hurricane activity is almost at its least in 30 years. Severe tornadoes have declined. Patterns of drought and flood remain as unpredictable and as devastating as ever. Bangladesh and nearly all of the Pacific atolls are gaining land mass, not losing it.

Net primary productivity of trees and plants worldwide is up. If you want a greener planet, add as much CO2 to the air as you can. Your emissions are also helping to stave off the next Ice Age. It’s already 6000 years overdue.

Yet the dreary, wasteful, pointless congresses of the greedy feeble-minded continue. The Bali Road-Map to Nowhere. The Copenhagen World-Government Treaty that collapsed as soon as it saw the light of day. The Cancun Concordats to establish 1000 – yes, 1000 – new bureaucracies: the structure of the unelected world government that every ex-politician from Gore and Chirac to Attali is demanding.

Everyone says nothing will happen at Durban. That worries me. It suggests the process of building a totalitarian global junta by what one UN official at Cancun called “transparent impenetrability” – publishing documents of such prolix length and complex obscurantism that no one can understand a word and yet no one can later deny the information was available – will invisibly gather pace. …

We like “transparent impenetrability”! Could we suspect that the UN official who invented it had a sense of irony?  No – too unlikely.

The Marxists’ wet dream …  is global totalitarian dictatorship. … But the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and I are in Durban to stop them. So perhaps you’re not going to have it after all.

It’s good to know that a Committee and the noble lord are defending us from world totalitarian dictatorship. But it would be better if the United States, which should be and can be and was always meant to be the truly powerful defender of liberty, had a president and administration that would put an end to the UN and a stop to all its evil schemes forever.

The UN must be destroyed.

From an article by Mano Singham in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the anti-evolution forces in the 2005 “intelligent design” trial.

That was Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District. Eleven parents of students in Dover, York County, Pa. sued over the school board requirement that  intelligent design should be taught in ninth-grade science classes along with evolution. They lost. US District Judge John Jones ruled (inter alia):

We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents. To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

Mano Singham continues:

The new war concerns questions that are more profound than whether or not to teach evolution. Unlike the old science-religion war, this battle is going to be fought not in the courts but in the arena of public opinion. The new war pits those who argue that science and “moderate” forms of religion are compatible worldviews against those who think they are not.

The former group, known as accommodationists, seeks to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world — such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the origin of the universe — allow for God to act in ways that cannot be detected using the methods of science. Some accommodationists, including Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, suggest that there are deeply mysterious, spiritual domains of human experience, such as morality, mind, and consciousness, for which only religion can provide deep insights.

Prestigious organizations like the National Academy of Sciences have come down squarely on the side of the accommodationists.

What? The National Academy of Sciences … ? Pause here for that to sink in.

Then on we go:

On March 25, the NAS let the John Templeton Foundation use its venue to announce that the biologist (and accommodationist) Francisco Ayala had been awarded its Templeton Prize, with the NAS president himself, Ralph Cicerone, having nominated him. The foundation has in recent years awarded its prize to scientists and philosophers who are accommodationists, though it used to give it to more overtly religious figures, like Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. Critics are disturbed at the NAS’s so closely identifying itself with the accommodationist position. As the physicist Sean Carroll said, “Templeton has a fairly overt agenda that some scientists are comfortable with, but very many are not. In my opinion, for a prestigious scientific organization to work with them sends the wrong message.”

In a 2008 publication titled Science, Evolution, and Creationism, the NAS stated: “Science and religion are based on different aspects of human experience. … Because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways. Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist. … Many religious beliefs involve entities or ideas that currently are not within the domain of science. Thus, it would be false to assume that all religious beliefs can be challenged by scientific findings.”

Those of us who disagree — sometimes called “new atheists” — point out that historically, the scope of science has always expanded, steadily replacing supernatural explanations with scientific ones. Science will continue this inexorable march, making it highly likely that the accommodationists’ strategy will fail. After all, there is no evidence that consciousness and mind arise from anything other than the workings of the physical brain, and so those phenomena are well within the scope of scientific investigation. What’s more, because the powerful appeal of religion comes precisely from its claims that the deity intervenes in the physical world, in response to prayers and such, religious claims, too, fall well within the domain of science. The only deity that science can say nothing about is a deity who does nothing at all.

In support of its position, the National Academy of Sciences makes a spurious argument: “Newspaper and television stories sometimes make it seem as though evolution and religion are incompatible, but that is not true. Many scientists and theologians have written about how one can accept both faith and the validity of biological evolution. Many past and current scientists who have made major contributions to our understanding of the world have been devoutly religious. … Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies have increased their awe and understanding of a creator. The study of science need not lessen or compromise faith.”

But the fact that some scientists are religious is not evidence of the compatibility of science and religion. …  Jerry Coyne, a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, notes, “True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind.”

Accommodationists are alarmed that their position has been challenged by a recent flurry of best-selling books, widely read articles, and blogs. In Britain an open letter expressing this concern was signed by two Church of England bishops; a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain; a member of the Evangelical Alliance; Professor Lord Winston, a fertility pioneer; Professor Sir Martin Evans, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; and others. The letter said, “We respectfully ask those contemporary Darwinians who seem intent on using Darwin’s theory as a vehicle for promoting an anti-theistic agenda to desist from doing so as they are, albeit unintentionally, turning people away from the theory.” …

What people? Why?

Accommodationists frequently brand us new atheists as “extreme,” “uncivil,” “rude,” and responsible for setting a “bad tone.” However, those accusations are rarely accompanied by concrete examples of such impolite speech. Behind the charges seems to lie the assumption that it is rude to even question religious beliefs or to challenge the point of view of the accommodationists. Apparently the polite thing to do is keep quiet. …

Why have organizations like the National Academy of Sciences sided with the accommodationists even though there is no imperative to take a position? After all, it would be perfectly acceptable to simply advocate for good science and stay out of this particular fray.

One has to suspect that tactical considerations are at play here. The majority of Americans subscribe to some form of faith tradition. Some scientists may fear that if science is viewed as antithetical to religion, then even moderate believers may turn away from science and join the fundamentalists.

But political considerations should not be used to silence honest critical inquiry. Richard Dawkins has challenged the accommodationist strategy, calling it “a cowardly cop–out. I think it’s an attempt to woo the sophisticated theological lobby and to get them into our camp and put the creationists into another camp. It’s good politics. But it’s intellectually disreputable.”

Evolution, and science in general, will ultimately flourish or die on its scientific merits, not because of any political strategy. Good science is an invaluable tool in humanity’s progress and survival, and it cannot be ignored or suppressed for long. The public may turn against this or that theory in the short run but will eventually have to accept evolution, just as it had to accept the Copernican heliocentric system.

It is strange that the phrase “respect for religion” has come to mean that religious beliefs should be exempt from the close scrutiny that other beliefs are subjected to. Such an attitude infantilizes religious believers, suggesting that their views cannot be defended and can be preserved only by silencing those who disagree. …

We think religious belief is childish. And we recall that for long ages the religious defended their beliefs by forcibly silencing those who disagreed, and we suspect that many would do it again if they could. (They do in Islamic states.)

But see how far the religious have had to retreat as science demolishes dogma after dogma. We do not hear their advocates talking nearly as much or as loudly as they used to of the seven days of creation, of a virgin giving birth to God in Bethlehem, of God dictating commandments. (Okay – of the Angel Gabriel dictating the Koran we still hear too much.) Mano Singham informs us that they’re not even insisting on “intelligent design” as much as they did. Backs to the wall, they’re only begging us to concede  that, because of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and continuing conjecture about the Big Bang (for example), we “must allow for God to act in ways that cannot be detected” by science. And if we don’t, we’re being rude. “Be nice to us”, they’re implying, “let us nurse our fantasies. If you don’t, you’re just a lot of rationalist bullies.”

Let them put their thumbs in their mouths and sulk. We’re winning!

Professor Herman Philipse, of the University of Utrecht, talks in this video about Science versus Religion.

We don’t agree with everything he says – eg. his accusation that the US is putting Holland under water –  and we think he takes rather too pedantically, professorially, seriously the manifestly absurd claims of religion, such as the veracity of revelation and the efficacy of prayer, even though he does so in order to demolish them.

Also he uses up too much of his time before reaching the main theme of his address, science warring with religion. Try starting at about the 10 minutes mark.

But his conclusion is that atheism and not agnosticism is the right response to the failure of religion’s arguments, and that’s why we like his address enough to post it.

Yes, the culture of the West is superior to all the rest in every way that affects life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Here’s part of what Daniel Greenfield writes at his website Sultan Knish, thoroughly endorsing our boast on behalf of a maddeningly diffident and self-deprecating Western world, specifically America:

We are better than them. When all the other arguments for why we can’t fight back have been exhausted this is the one that remains in the background presenting our moral exceptionalism as the reason we shouldn’t fight to protect ourselves.

“Fight back? But then we’d be no better than them?” If we waterboard then we are no better than the headchoppers and mutilators. If we profile then we are no better than the genocidal jihadists. …

But is that really the difference between us, that we treat everyone equally even when they are cutting our throats, and the moment we deviate from the standards of the Trial Lawyers Association then we’re no better than the Taliban or Al-Qaeda? Does our exceptionalism derive from our laws, in which case if we compromise our laws then we [have] given up the only worthwhile thing about us and there is nothing more to fight for – or are our laws the means by which we protect our individual and national exceptionalism?

We are better than they are, is the argument put forward so often by those who do not truly believe that we are, and even when they do they don’t understand why we are. The Bill of Rights did not spring full-grown out of a barbaric culture …

We are not better than they are because we guarantee civil rights to our enemies – we are better than they are because of Michelangelo, the microchip and universal education. We are better than they are because of Shakespeare, the space shuttle and the World Trade Center. We are better for all the reasons around us, the accomplishments, the achievements, the knowledge we have gained and the society we have built.

Our laws were crafted to protect these achievements, the exceptionalism of the individual from the government, and that of the nation from internal and external enemies. The laws have no individual life apart from the culture of the nation that created them and maintains them. It would be possible to transpose the United States Constitution to Indonesia, Libya or Pakistan and it wouldn’t last a single day there. No mere document can safeguard rights and freedoms that a culture does not value, and no culture that does not value them is deserving of their protection if such protection has the cumulative effect of destroying those same rights and freedoms.

Freedom isn’t just defended on the battlefield, by the time things get that bad then the damage will be hard to contain. We defend it every day by defending the culture that makes it possible. Against external enemies there is the war of armed conflict, economic competition and geographic positioning. Against the internal enemy there is the culture war, the war of ideas and institutions. …

Governments are instituted to keep laws and laws are implemented to keep the people. Governments serve the law, but the law serves the people. And the people are not some random mass, they are not defined by passports and identity cards or place of birth – the people are the keepers of the flame of their culture. This need not be a matter of birth, immigrants can be among the greatest heroes and natives among the greatest traitors. But no one who is committed to the destruction of the culture, in concrete or abstract terms, in the immediate present or the indefinite future, can enjoy the protection of legal codes that exist to protect the freedom of the individual within the integrity of a free culture.

The more sophisticated a culture becomes the less it is concerned with survival. Bubbles grow in its centers of government and learning within which philosophies and ideas seem more real than reality. Opposing philosophies struggle to lobotomize the culture with revisionist histories and social philosophies that place their own ideal at the center of all human striving. But ideas are sterile without a culture to carry them forward. Kill the culture and the ideas become orphans that [are] adopted in an altered form by some other culture – if they are lucky.

Tolerance and civil rights are worthless unless the countries and cultures where they are expressed are also defended. Any form of tolerance which leads to its own destruction is not only poisonous to a host culture, but is also literarily self-destructive. All healthy entities whether biological, organizational or intellectual contain the means for their own continuance and self-perpetuation. Any entity which does not is poisonous and must be treated as such, and to defend any idea or code above the survival of the culture that carries it is a homicidal act.

When conflict comes, two questions are asked. Is the threat real and is our culture worth fighting for. The latter question is most often asked by elites whose bubble ideals no real culture can ever measure up to, and by outsiders who have the least invested in the survival of the culture.

“If we do this how are we any better than they are?” is the question of the bubble elite whose abstract ideals exist apart from flesh and blood people, who do not measure their ideals by the culture, but measure the culture by their ideals, and always find it wanting, who think that the culture with its millions of people and centuries of history exist to shepherd their ideals and die for them – and ought to be grateful for the privilege of dying so that no Muslim is ever profiled at an airport.

The bubble elites distrust nationalism and patriotism because they center not around ideas, but the people’s sense of solidarity. The only exceptionalism that they will accept is the exceptionalism of ideals, and if the nation does not represent its ideals then it does not deserve to live.

In the face of such reasoning it is important to remember that we are not better than our enemies because we represent ideals, but because we create ideals along with skyscrapers, paintings, high powered microscopes, novels, better mousetraps, systems of philosophy, muscle cars, musical styles, theorems, charities and sandwiches.

Of course a comprehensive list would be immensely long, but we’d like to add computers and the internet to Greenfield’s samples. How did people endure existence before they came into common use?

We are makers and shapers, movers and thinkers, seers and doers. We reach for the stars and find ways to keep premature babies alive. We are imperfect, dynamic and changing – and the world would be a much poorer place without us in it.

Whatever we do to protect ourselves against outside enemies in thrall to a hostile ideology, regardless of where they were born is fully justified by our accomplishments, our past, our present and our future – and even if all these things were not present by our right to individual, national and cultural survival.

It is not by becoming pacifists that we will be better than them, but by fighting for what we have and who we are. And if we do not stand up for our countries, our peoples and our cultures then we will not inherit the moral high ground, but the low killing pits of the victims of the thousand year spree of terror. There is no moral high ground to be gained in refusing to struggle to your utmost for the things that you hold dear, only through the struggle to protect our individual and national exceptionalism, can we gain the high ground and justify the assertion that we are better than them.

The Europeans are discarding the rich Western culture built and paid for with blood and tears by their forefathers through hundreds of years, as though it were trash. Will Americans, who so enormously augmented and enhanced it, preserve it now that it’s under severe threat? Not if Obama, the Democratic Party, the Occupy Wall Street protestors, academia and the mass media have their way.

If there must be a culture war, dulce et decorum est to become warriors on the side of our inherited, enlightened, culture.

You might consider this post to be a recuiting ad. We want YOU!

Although this article from PowerLine by Steven Hayward, referring to another in Nature, doesn’t deal specifically with retractions of scientific papers on climate change, it provides a needed lesson to those warmists who argue that consensus is in itself a scientific proof.

[B]ehind at least half of [the retractions] lies some shocking tale of scientific misconduct — plagiarism, altered images or faked data — and the other half are admissions of embarrassing mistakes. But retraction notices are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade.

There’s a lot more here to ponder, such as the essentially hollow and meaningless nature of modern peer review, and the increasingly tribal and ideological drift of much of the academic scientific establishment. …

Elsewhere in this week’s issue of Nature, Dan Sarewitz of Arizona State University, one of the truly honest brokers in the academic science and policy world, offers a terrific essay on what’s wrong with so-called “consensus” science reports. …

When scientists wish to speak with one voice, they typically do so in a most unscientific way: the consensus report. The idea is to condense the knowledge of many experts into a single point of view that can settle disputes and aid policy-making. But the process of achieving such a consensus often acts against these goals, and can undermine the very authority it seeks to project. . .

The very idea that science best expresses its authority through consensus statements is at odds with a vibrant scientific enterprise. Consensus is for textbooks; real science depends for its progress on continual challenges to the current state of always-imperfect knowledge.

Yet it was probably peer review criticism that revealed the errors in at least some of the retracted papers. The fact that so many more papers are being retracted is a healthy sign. To what extent, one may wonder, is the international row over climate-change claims and counter-claims responsible for the rise.

What seems to have happened with the papers on man-made global warming (AGW) is that a politicized posse of immoral scientists did everything they could to silence criticism.

They wanted AGW to be believed like a religion, with faith rather than reason. That made them betrayers of science itself, its enemies: anti-scientists.

If their thesis was true, why did they need to fake data (the “hockey-stick” graph), suppress facts (the Climategate emails), and conspire to block criticism?

Because – one must conclude – they wanted “scientific fact” to support policies that mattered more to them than truth. See here and here and here.

Change happens. Warming happens. It’s the causes of change that are in dispute – and whether it is a threat, so serious that impoverishing redistribute policies must be enacted by governments to save the earth from doom. In regard to which, there is this statement (from this source):

In the room where you are sitting right now, the temperature difference between the floor and the ceiling is about one degree. That’s the kind of imperceptible change we’re talking about — over the next century!

Arguments supporting and disputing that are invited.