Academic Freedom is Dying Out in Western Universities

There is a lot of talk about academic freedom but it is increasingly under attack by the Left in Western universities. Fierce battles take place between those committed to free inquiry and those committed to utilizing the university as a vehicle for leftist ideological purposes.

Here is a story about yet another Christian academic who has been fired by the Leftist censors.

The University of Illinois has fired an adjunct professor who taught courses on Catholicism after a student accused the instructor of engaging in hate speech by saying he agrees with the church's teaching that homosexual sex is immoral.

The professor, Ken Howell of Champaign, said his firing violates his academic freedom. He also lost his job at an on-campus Catholic center.

Howell, who taught Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought, says he was fired at the end of the spring semester after sending an e-mail explaining some Catholic beliefs to his students preparing for an exam.

"Natural Moral Law says that Morality must be a response to REALITY," he wrote in the e-mail. "In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same."

An unidentified student sent an e-mail to religion department head Robert McKim on May 13, calling Howell's e-mail "hate speech." The student claimed to be a friend of the offended student. The writer said in the e-mail that his friend wanted to remain anonymous.

"Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing," the student wrote. "Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another."

Howell said he was teaching his students about the Catholic understanding of natural moral law.

"My responsibility on teaching a class on Catholicism is to teach what the Catholic Church teaches," Howell said in an interview with The News-Gazette in Champaign. "I have always made it very, very clear to my students they are never required to believe what I'm teaching and they'll never be judged on that."

Howell also said he makes clear to his students that he's Catholic and that he believes the church views that he teaches.

Later, the article quotes the president of the American Association of University Professors as saying that professors need to be able to tell students what they believe.

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said professors should be able to tell students their own views and even argue in favor of them, provided students can disagree without being penalized.

"It's part of intellectual life to advocate for points of view," said Nelson, an emeritus English professor at the University of Illinois. "Hopefully when they go out in the world, they can emulate that. They can argue a case, and do it in a well-informed and articulate way, and can make a more productive contribution to our democracy that way."

The university is retreating from the basic principles that make a university a university. Universities were invented in Christian Europe and now exist all over the world, but Leftist, anti-Christian ideologues are destroying the university by replacing academic freedom with censorship of anything that promotes orthodox, historic Christianity.

This kind of attack on freedom of religion and free speech does nothing to advance openness in scientific inquiry and it reduces the opportunities for students to study Christianity from the inside with someone who professes it, rather than being fed a caricature by someone committed to subverting it.

This Blog is Medieval

In the minds of many contemporary "progressives" the word "medieval" has become an insult to hurl against anything that is barbaric and "insufficiently progressive." Tim Collard protests against this trend to defame the Medieval era in post called: "What is Medieval about Stoning People to Death?"

I was pleased to hear today that Sakineh Ashtiani, an Iranian lady convicted of adultery by one of that hellhole’s kangaroo courts, will not now be stoned to death, though it is still possible that she will be judicially murdered in some other way. (My reading of the Koran is that the Prophet demanded that four male Muslim witnesses had actually seen the act in progress before an adultery charge could be proved; but who am I, a benighted Anglican, to comment?)

Thanks are also due to prominent figures around the world who spoke up for Mrs Ashtiani, including our own William Hague. I don’t want to qualify my praise by carping, but I do take issue with Mr Hague’s choice of language. In condemning the proposed execution, he called death by stoning a “medieval punishment”. Following Mr Liam Fox’s dismissal of Afghanistan as “a broken 13th-century society”, one begins to wonder just what the new government has against the period.

As one who has enjoyed a lifetime love affair with the Middle Ages, I am pained by this. There really wasn’t a lot of stoning going on in medieval Europe.

This is a good point. As Collard goes on to note, it is not that the people of Medieval Europe were angels; there was violence in those centuries. But compared to the Dark Ages that preceded them and the modern era, the violence was not as extreme. There was law and order, peace, trade, the rise of universities, the beginnings of constitutional monarchy, the great synthesis of Aristotle (representing science and reason) and Augustine (representing Biblical revelation and Christian theism) into a unified and intellectually brilliant worldview.

Language matters. The way we speak is important. Even the term "The Middle Ages" (which I try to avoid in favor of "Christian Europe" or "Medieval Europe") was invented in the Enlightenment to describe the period between the "Dark Ages" and their own supposedly "enlightened" time (as they "modestly" saw it). They undoubtedly would have liked to label the entire period from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance as "The Dark Ages" because of the influence of Christianity on Europe in that period, but that was a stretch even for the rebellious imaginations of the 18th century French Philosophes. The truth is that the period of the conversion of Europe was its true "Enlightenment" and the period of atheism and humanism in modernity that stems from the "Enlightenment" is an increasingly dark era of nihilism. The 20th century was the darkest, most violent and most fanatical of any century in Western civilization going back to the Roman Empire. The culture of death characterizes Enlightenment Europe, not Medieval Europe.

So I think we should stop allowing the use of the term "Medieval" as an insult or as a symbol of barbarism and backwardness to go unchallenged. The Postmodernists have made a good start on turning the term "modern" into an insult. Maybe we should build on that and start saying things like: "Stalin that dirty rotten murderer and arch-modernist . . . " or "The regime in Iran has adopted most of the worst of modern fascist techniques of repression." We can follow up by really ticking off the progressives by saying: "If only they could be more Medieval."

But hey, it would make a lot more more sense than calling the stoning of women "medieval" when it is done by a theocracy that lives in the 7th century desert and hates Christendom.

Liberal Colonialism: Obama Administration Pressures Kenya to Make Abortion Legal

According to a Fox News report, the Obama administration is pressuring the Kenyan people to adopt a new constitution that imposes a Western, pro-abortion position on the people of Kenya.

The Obama administration is offering incentives to Kenya to approve a controversial new constitution that would legalize abortion for the first time, promising that passage will "allow money to flow" into the nation's coffers, including U.S. aid.

But there's a hitch to that pledge. A federal law known as the Siljander Amendment passed in 2006 makes it illegal for the U.S. government to lobby on abortion in other countries -- and three U.S. lawmakers say they want a federal investigation into the promises made by the administration.

Kenya has long been ripe for a new constitution, one that will balance power in the country and prevent the kind of violent rioting that followed Kenya's 2007 presidential election.

The Obama administration has vocally expressed enthusiasm for the new constitution, which it says will provide for easier transition of power through more balanced branches of government.
But according to anti-abortion groups in and outside of Kenya, the constitution will cause harm to the nation by overturning its ban on abortion.

Article 26 of the proposed constitution states that abortion is allowed if "in the opinion of a trained health professional, there is need for emergency treatment, or the life or health of the mother is in danger or if permitted by any other written law."

The problem for some is how much that provision is left open to interpretation.

"There are parts of this constitution that violate human dignity," Rebecca Marchinda, director of advocacy for the human rights coalition World Youth Alliance, told FoxNews.com.

"A trained health professional could be anyone who has health training, including a student or a physical therapist," Marchinda said. "The provision is also broadly defined to include any kind of health, including psychological health or emotional health. Finally, this clause opens the way to create other laws that make abortion available on demand."

In a speech delivered last month in Kenya, Vice President Joe Biden urged the Kenyan people to pass the constitution in a referendum scheduled for Aug. 4.

"The United States strongly supports the process of constitutional reform. ... Dare to reach for transformative change, the kind of change that might come around only once in a lifetime," he said.

"If you make these changes, I promise you, new foreign private investment will come in like you've never seen," Biden added.

This colonial "The West Knows Best" approach is immoral; but it is also arguably illegal under US law.

According to reports, U.S. ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger told Kenyan officials in May that the U.S. has offered $2 million in taxpayer funds for "civic education" to support the process of enacting a new constitution.

That's a problem for Republican Reps. Darrell Issa of California, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Chris Smith of New Jersey. In letters to the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Government Accountability Office and U.S. Agency for International Development, the lawmakers said they want a federal probe to determine whether the administration violated federal law with its assistance.

"Any advocacy by the administration in support of the proposed new constitution would constitute lobbying for abortion," reads one letter sent in May. "There is no doubt that the administration is advocating for adoption of the proposed constitution."

What is the administration of a black president doing bribing an African country to kill black babies as some sort of "solution"? There is such a thing as being pro-choice, but Obama is a fanatical zealot of the "abortion as a solution to the problems of the world" creed. This is just one more example of how this administration is becoming increasingly lawless in his ideological fanaticism.

After the publication of this story, a PR person for Joe Biden's office e-mailed Fox News with a statement that Biden said that it was up to the people of Kenya to decide about their new constitution. It would appear that he is "pro-choice," but he is only funding one choice.

Jeffrey John's Theology: A Scandal for the Church of England

I blogged about the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury allowed Dr. Jeffrey John's name to be on a shortlist for the open bishop of Southwark position. Well, it seems that now Jonathan Wynne-Jones is reporting that John did not get the position. (Thanks be to God!)

It appears that Wynne-Jones has an inside contact in the search committee and, as usual, liberal churchmen and liberal reporters are working together to further the liberal agenda in the Church. The story he ran the other day was transparently designed to put pressure on Williams to push John's case on the committee. (The Archbishop of Canterbury is one of 14 members of the committee.) Wynne-Jones is obviously livid that John didn't get the job and is taking it out on the hapless Archbishop of Canterbury, who comes out of this looking like his only goal is to make nobody happy and ensure that the breakup of the Communion happens slowly.

However, John's homosexuality is not the only problem with his fitness to be a bishop of Christ's Church. David Virtue reports that his theology of the cross, which is surely the center of Christian faith, is heretical as well.

Friends of Southwark wannabe bishop Jeffrey John, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Canon Giles Fraser who tout him as a fine theologian, well trained and with all the right credentials for the job, should think twice, perhaps three times before recommending him for the job. It is not just his homosexuality they should worry about; it's his theology.

In 2007 at an Easter service, he delivered the view that Christ did not die for our sins. He went on to say that the Church's traditional teaching of Christ's crucifixion is "repulsive" and "insane".

The Very Rev. Jeffrey John, who had to withdraw before taking up an appointment as bishop of Reading in 2003 after it emerged he was in a long-term homosexual relationship, said clergy who preach at Easter that Christ was sent to earth to die in atonement for all the sins of mankind are "making God sound like a psychopath".

John went on to urge a revision of the traditional explanation, known as "penal substitution".

Christian theology has taught that because humans have sinned, God sent Christ as a substitute to suffer and die in our place.

"In other words, Jesus took the rap and we got forgiven as long as we said we believed in him," said John. "This is repulsive as well as nonsensical. It makes God sound like a psychopath. If a human behaved like this, we'd say that they were a monster." The Dean went on to offer an alternative interpretation, suggesting that Christ was crucified so he could "share in the worst of grief and suffering that life can throw at us".

The Rt. Rev. Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, accused John of attacking the fundamental message of the Gospel. Other church figures have also expressed dismay at his comments, which they have condemned as a "deliberate perversion of the Bible". http://tinyurl.com/2eelm7c

"He is denying the way in which we understand Christ's sacrifice. It is right to stress that He is a God of love, but he is ignoring that this means He must also be angry at everything that distorts human life," Wright said.

Bishop Wright criticized the BBC for allowing such a prominent slot to be given to such a provocative argument. "I'm fed up with the BBC for choosing to give privilege to these unfortunate views in Holy Week," he said. Wright went on to say that John caricatured the cross. http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5787

And this is the man who is on a short list of candidates to become the next Bishop of Southwark, an ultra liberal diocese not unlike the Episcopal dioceses of Los Angeles, CA or Newark, NJ in the United States.

Read the whole story to get further insight into the character of this man. The real scandal here is that a man who teaches that the Bible is wrong and outdated on serious issues like sexual ethics and the atonement would even be considered, let alone shortlisted, for a post as chief teacher and guardian of orthodoxy of a diocese. The Church of England is in bad shape when this sort of travesty takes place. We expect this sort of nonsense from the post-Christian Episcopal Church; is this a sign of how far the Church of England has fallen?

It's a Class Thing

I'd be willing to wager money that empirical studies could demonstrate that the biggest single predictor of whether a person believes in global warming, considers him or herself to be a feminist and is sympathetic to Marxism is their social location, especially their class.

Now, in North America we supposedly have no class structure and it is true that our's is not as rigid or based on birth as Europe's is, but we definitely have a class structure. To move from the working or lower middle class into the upper middle class is relatively easy in our society, which speaks well for our society. But, ironically, the one thing you need to make that transition is rage. You must be angry at your old class in order to demonstrate that you belong in your new class. So you must angrily reject anything associated with the lower classes in the minds of the upper middle class in order to show that you belong in the upper middle class. You must despise the society that enables easy class mobility in order to claim class mobility. Confused yet? If not, you don't understand what is going on.

Marxism, Feminism and Environmentalism all are upper middle class movements which presume to speak for the masses even though the masses are stubbornly resistant to the beliefs and values of the upper middle class. School boards in Kansas insist on questioning evolution, Texas puts good things about Ronald Reagan into school textbooks, the Senator from Oklahoma presumes to question global warming alarmism. Will it never end? When will the ignorant masses admit that their betters know what is good for them? Abstinence based sex education, anti-abortion views, a stubborn clinging to guns and religion - the fact that the masses refuse to toe the politically correct line leads to rage in the media and academic coastal elites and so the price of admission to the club becomes the willingness to join in the rage against the working classes.

I think that this reality explains why young Evangelicals are often attracted to liberal theology, leftist politics and progressive social movements. It is not a matter of logic or following the evidence; Marxism has been discredited long ago, Feminism is rejected by most women and Environmentalism is more of a tool to fight capitalism than a serious concern for the land, the water and the air. So why are young Evangelicals attracted to leftist causes?

The old joke about where liberals come from has two liberal Anglican bishops talking about the future. One says to the other: "You know, we liberal Anglicans never convert anybody and we don't have enough babies to keep up the numbers, so where will liberal Anglicans come from in the future?" The other bishop laughs and says: "Why, where they have always come from . . . from the ranks of the Evangelicals!"

This joke is funny because it is so true; the puzzle is why Evangelicals would sign up for a ride on the Titanic. I guess it must be because all the cool people are taking that ship and the ticket prices make it something only those of a certain class can afford.

Liberal theology is intellectually bankrupt, ethically incoherent and culturally accommodated. Whatever appeal it has could not possibly have anything to do with truth, justice or the Bible. I guess it must be a class thing.

The Hypocrisy of Rowan Williams and the Crisis of the Anglican Communion

As the Synod of the Church of England prepares to open this month, the issue of woman bishops looms over it like a doom. When women were ordained priests just under 20 years ago the traditionalists were promised protection for their consciences. This protection is about to be withdrawn now that most people are supposedly used to the fact of woman's ordination. So the liberals, who are pushing for the complete apostasy of the church and for whom woman's ordination is just the beginning, have been exposed for all the world to see as liars and schemers whose word cannot be trusted. The plan is now obvious: to rid the Church of England of all orthodox, believing Christians in the long run.

As one battle is won, the next front is opened. Dr. Jeffrey John is now on the short list for Bishop of Southwark. John is an open homosexual who teaches that biblical and orthodox sexual morality is wrong. He lives with another man in a "registered partnership" and has, apparently, signed a pledge to be celibate. But since nobody is going to go check out his bedroom, no one knows if he is celibate or not. If a heterosexual man claimed to be celibate but claimed that sexual activity is good and moral, taught that the church teaching that required him to be celibate was wrong, and lived openly with his wife, who would believe he was really celibate? If your daughter decided that there was nothing wrong with premarital sex, moved in with her boyfriend and yet claimed to be celibate, would you believe it without question? But in the end, it doesn't actually matter whether he is or isn't celibate; he is not living a lifestyle that is a sufficiently upright witness for a bishop, who according to Scripture is supposed to be "above reproach." And even if he were not living with another man, the very fact that a bishop's main job is teaching doctrine and he denies basic Christian doctrine should disqualify him regardless of his sexual orientation.

But according to Jonathan Wynn-Jones, writing in the Daily Telegraph, Archbishop Rowan Williams has signed off on having his name on the short list for Bishop of Southwark. If this is true, then Williams' criticism of the Episcopal Church USA for its ignoring of the will of the Anglican Communion and bulling ahead with the ordination of a second openly homosexual bishop is simply incredible. I don't pretend to be an expert on the byzantine world of Anglican politics, but if Wynn-Jones (a usually credible and well-informed religion reporter) is correct, then Williams is in the process of self-destruction. He will lose all credibility if he tries to get on his horse and ride of in two directions at once.

A sidebar to this story is the interference by Prime Minister David Cameron in the process. He has openly urged the Church of England to change its doctrine and accommodate itself to the political correctness of late modernity in order to win votes from homosexuals and their sympathizers, who would normally be expected to vote Labor. If a conservative PM were to interfere in this way, there would be screams from the liberals, but when a liberal PM does it then it is just fine. More blatant hypocrisy.

It does seem that the schism in the Anglican Communion is becoming permanent and deep. If woman bishops are imposed on the Church of England with all conscience protection removed and a homosexual bishop is appointed, then it seems likely that we will see the equivalent of an ACNA develop in England and the Church of England will be fatally weakened by the loss of perhaps one third of its worshipers, much of its revenue and many of its clergy. The next in line to the throne appears not to be a Christian believer, so the process of dechristianization of the state religion may accelerate. The official state church may become a kind of multi-faith religious expression of multiculturalism. Disestablishment is a real possibility and the reversion of England to the paganism out of which she was converted is also possible. The only alternative to paganism, besides the Evangelicalism that will have been rejected, will be Islam, which will be only too happy to fill the void.

Atlas Shrugged: A Brief Review

Ayn Rand's famous novel Atlas Shrugged, written over 50 years ago, is currently sitting at 977th place on Amazon.com. That is a pretty amazing fact, when you think about it. The ideas of Ann Rand are incredibly influential today within the conservative movement in America and show no sign of evaporating despite the studied indifference projected by the academic, journalistic and political elites.

This was my first direct exposure to the secular libertarianism of Ann Rand and, while she represents a strand of the conservative coalition that is very different from my traditional, religious and social conservative beliefs strand, it is important to see in what sense she could be considered a co-belligerent in the war against collectivism.

First, let me say something about the merits of the novel from the point of view of art. I found the novel poorly written and the characters shallowly portrayed. The portrayal of the developing crisis is out of focus with too much time spent on a few characters making philosophical speeches and not enough time examining the actual process of social breakdown and disintegration. It seems that there is only enough of a plot to serve as a backdrop for the philosophical exchanges between the characters. But in fairness, that could be said of Plato's dialogues as well - although they are incomparably better written.

Second, let me say what I appreciated about the book. I found the portrayal of the philosophy of the "looters" (i.e. the socialist government and its admirers) to be bitterly accurate and telling. She has those guys nailed and this, I suspect, is the real motive power of the book. This is what makes her positive philosophy credible: that she understands her opponents more profoundly than they understand themselves. She describes the slogans, the rhetoric, the tricks, the manipulation, the jargon and the self-deception of those who use high sounding ideals to cover over their selfish pursuit of power and are so convincing that they even fool themselves.

Third, I turn to what I disagreed with in the book. Rand is a throwback to the Enlightenment Philosophes and it seems that, for her, the 18th century has never ended. (I don't begrudge anyone their favorite century; mine is the 13th. And I share her revulsion toward the ugly, violent, squalid 20th century.) But Rand does not seem to know that the Enlightenment is over.

The Medieval Synthesis of Aristotelianism and Augustinianism and the Enlightenment attempt to exalt Autonomous Reason without God both have in common a love and respect for the power and reality of human reason. Both believe in truth and logic. Both reject pragmatism, relativism and ideology. Augustinian Thomism and the Enlightenment are united in the rejection of superstition and the right of brute force to rule the mind and both have a deep respect for the individual human being and profound antipathy toward the rule of power that is not grounded in law.

Nevertheless, Thomism and the Enlightenment represent two great mutually exclusive alternatives philosophies of life. One grounds reason in the Logos of Creation and the other rests it on thin air (Chance). Rand does not acknowledge that the swirling universe of atoms in random motion coming together by chance could never produce consciousness, morality or natural law. The Personal cannot arise out of the Impersonal and to assert that it does is to invite skepticism as to whether one really believes in Personality at all. She shares the eager faith of the 18th century that Reason can be its own foundation, that science can rest safely and securely on nothing but itself. She refuses to recognize that the contemporary irrationality and socialist ideology, which dominates Western elite culture, is a degenerate child of the Enlightenment rejection of God and proud assertion of individual autonomy.

The faith in Reason of the Enlightenment gave way to the faith in Feeling in the 19th century Romantic reaction to the Age of Reason and then degenerated into the worship of the will prophesied by Nietzsche and acted out in the brutal 20th century - the century of genocide and mass murder. She has no sense of the internal contradictions of freedom that rests not on natural law written on creation by the Designer of that creation, but only on what individual men choose to recognize as law. She does not see that a world without design imposed on it from the outside is a world that can have meaning only as strong-willed individuals impose a meaning on it by their own strength of will.

Perhaps, in the end, this is what secular libertarianism amounts to: a philosophy of life appropriate only for the Overman. This problematic relationship between will and reason is the elephant in the room throughout the book. She sees how the "looters" degenerate into subhumans as they follow nothing but their animal urges and inclinations of the moment. Yet, her heroes and heroines engage in sex whenever they feel like it and glorify the satisfaction of bodily urges outside any moral framework as the rejection of gnostism and the affirmation of the life impulse. Yet, she does not seem to see that gnosticism has a libertine form as well as an ascetic form. Her heroes are superior to the socialist looters only as the Nietzschean Overman is superior to the last men.

This defect in understanding apparently is rooted in the rejection of revelation and God's sovereignty. Like the 18th century Philosophes, she views religion as nothing but mysticism: the antithesis of reason. She claims that all other philosophies have divided man into a ghostly soul and an animal body and that only her philosophy holds him together in a unity. But she falls into the trap of the reason-revelation dualism and is like the man out of whom a demon was cast only to have seven demons worse than the first come to fill the void.

The void is that lack of a God in her philosophy. Man cannot be his own God and Reason cannot do the job either. This is what Rand cannot seem to admit. And so her worship of Reason ends in the rule by the will to power instead of by law. For Reason can only be a servant - it can serve either the will or the instincts - but it needs to serve something just as man was created to serve something - or Someone.

Happy 4th of July to My US Friends!

I know its after midnight in Ontario where I live, but I'm in Alberta where it is actually still July 4th and I have not had time for blogging today. The grandparenting work is engrossing and fulfilling. My grandson Isaac does not stand still for long and we have been busy today.

But I want to say to American readers of this blog that I congratulate you on your wonderful country and your great heritage of Christian culture. You have the right to celebrate despite the darkness emanating from Washington DC these days. November 10 is coming.

I have a faculty friend who delights in bashing the idea of American exceptionalism, as is the custom in academia. Let me give you my take on American exceptionalism: for me, American exceptionalism consists very simply in the refusal of the socialist temptation. Americans have said no to socialism, though they have had a welfare state forced upon them by an unelected Supreme Court and a cowardly Congress. But in America one can still breath the air of freedom and the individual is still not the slave of the bureaucratic masters.

You can tell that all is not yet lost by the venomous hatred the socialists have for America. They know an enemy still exists which has not come into their claws and it galls them. At a moment when Russia lies in ruins, China is on the brink of demographic disaster, and Europe is drifting toward totalitarianism, America still fights back against collectivization, slavery and the destruction of the human spirit.

Fight on, happy warriors. You give the rest of us hope in this world, who otherwise would only be able to hope for the next world. The socialists, anarchists, nihilists and lovers of death can be defeated by faith in God and belief in man as a creature created not for slavery but for friendship with God.

The Injustice of G20 Protesters

Well, after weeks of unrelenting pro-protester and anti-capitalism coverage, the Toronto Star today suddenly discovers that there is actually another side to the story. In the story, "Angry Merchants ask: "Why did G20 protesters attack us?" the Star reveals the brutality and senseless violence of the socialist thugs against innocent store owners who are just trying to make a living.

The story notes that many of the store owners who lost days of business and had windows broken by the protesters were immigrants to Canada from places like Afghanistan and China. It also notes that many of the employees were college students working at summer jobs and some were terrified as the vandals attacked.

All this is supposedly in the name of opposing rich countries and big corporations. Just what makes rich countries and big corporations bad is unclear in itself. But dont' ask how terrorizing college kids and small business owners trying to build a life in Canada as immigrants advances that agenda anyway - because there is no answer to such a question. If you are going to use logic in the fight against postmodern socialists/anarchists you are using weapons against unarmed people - just like they did on Yonge St. last weekend.

Global Warming in Decline - Canada Ahead of the Curve as the US is Stuck in the 60s

It seems like just yesterday that serious people actually believed that the oceans were about to inundate London and New York and the polar bears were all drowning. The scare tactics, the inflated and ridiculous claims of vanishing glaciers and the melting of the polar ice caps and the corrupt science that hardly anyone dared to question - all of it it is melting away now faster than than the Himalayan glaciers were supposedly melting.

Lawrence Soloman has a nice little piece in The National Post entitled: "Catastrophism Collapses" in which he shows how fall down on the priority list the issue of global warming has fallen as illustrated in the recent G20 Summit.

Last week’s G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and its environs confirmed that the world’s leaders accept the demise of global-warming alarmism.

One year ago, the G8 talked tough about cutting global temperatures by two degrees. In Toronto, they neutered that tough talk, replacing it with a nebulous commitment to do their best on climate change — and not to try to outdo each other. The global-warming commitments of the G20 — which now carries more clout than the G8 — went from nebulous to non-existent: The G20’s draft promise going into the meetings of investing in green technologies faded into a mere commitment to “a green economy and to sustainable global growth.”

These leaders’ collective decisions in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their global-warming advocacy.

Read the rest here. Solomon chronicles how politicians from France to Australia to Spain have experienced the wrath of voters and retreated from global warming as an issue and the so-called "Green Economy" strategy. Ironically, just as Spain pulls subsidies for renewable energy industries, Obama announces 2 billion dollars for solar energy projects.

About the only true believer left is the dinosaur of left-wing ideology, Barack Obama. He is not a dinosaur because he spouts leftist rhetoric - including the "Green Religion" line - because lots of world leaders still do that. He is a dinosaur in the sense that he, from all appearances, still believes in that failed agenda and is aggressively trying to ram through as much of it as possible during the last days of the Democratic majority in Congress. Nothing will stop his 1960s agenda except an election and the American people are preparing to do just that on Nov. 10.

Solomon also notes that Canada, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, was ahead of the curve on this issue (just like on national debt reduction) and now other G8 countries are falling into line and following Canada's lead. It is nice to see our country acting sanely for a change.

Holocaust Guilt and the Pathological European Hatred for Israel

In a very perceptive article in The Weekly Standard, "Why Europe Loathes Israel," Benjamin Weinthal, attempts to get to grips with the puzzling question of why Europe has come to hate Israel so much since the 1970s. Sure, the Arab oil embargo in the 70s terrified Europe's leaders into falling into line with the Arab narrative that the land of Israel is Muslim land (because it was once upon a time conquered by Muslim armies) and that Israel is an oppressor just by virtue of presuming to exist.

But there surely were other policy alternatives. The US did not change sides and Europe could have relied on American military and economic might to shield it from Arab anger. So, we are left with a pair of interrelated questions. First, why did Europe capitulate so cravenly to Arab pressure and blackmail? and, second, why has this anti-Israel attitude become so pervasive in European thought and culture to the point where the number of Israel's defenders in Europe has shrunk almost to the vanishing point? In other hands, why did the change occur and why was it so drastic?

I think Weinthal is correct in seeking a deeper reason and that he is on to something important in divining holocaust guilt as a major factor in the psychology of European anti-Zionism.

The widespread condemnation Europeans have expressed toward Israel after its commandos boarded the so-called peace flotilla on May 31 - and used force only when threatened with death - signals a desire to turn every Israeli action of self-defense into absolution for the crimes of the Holocaust.

While the European Union and the UN Human Rights Council somehow managed to contain their displeasure over brutal human rights violations in Libya, Iran, Turkey, China, and Russia, both organizations reacted in their standard Pavlovian way to Israel's justified measures of self-defense aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara.

The UN Human Rights Council – chaired by none other than Muammar Qaddafi’s government – issued a resolution condemning Israel. Meanwhile, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom blasted Israel's "disproportionate" response, and their handmaidens in the European media turned Israel into a punching bag.

The Europeans' vicious attacks on Israel are animated less by the Jewish state's foreign policy than by Europe's ongoing fixation on the Holocaust. What else could explain the presence of posters equating Israel with Nazi Germany at pro-Hamas demonstrations in Vienna? According to one recent German university study, 45.7 percent of the European respondents supported the contention that "Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians."

In their eyes, apparently, maintaining a naval blockade against a government sworn to destroy you – while providing the unfortunate people living under that government with tens of thousands of tons of supplies and humanitarian aid – now equates to looting and butchering six million people.

Here Weinthal shows that the irrationality of the pattern of condemning Israel for "conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians" needs explanation and he proposes that every action of Israeli self-defense is seized upon as mitigating the guilt Europe feels for the Holocaust. Whenever Israel does something aggressive, it proves that Jews, given the chance, will demonstrate that they are far from innocent.

Of course, nothing Israel has ever done can even begin to compare to the crimes of the Shoah. But to help alleviate their feelings of guilt, Europeans delegitimize Israel, ignore modern anti-Semitism, and portray Muslims – who number over one billion and whom no one seeks to eradicate from the earth – as the new persecuted Jews of Europe.

Israel's measures against the phony peace flotilla also provided Europeans an opportunity to demonstrate their hypocrisy when it comes to Jews flexing some muscle. Many of these same Europeans, after all, have attempted to shift at least some blame to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust for their own suffering, arguing that the Jews allowed themselves to be carted off to extermination camps without resistance.

That helps explain the crude theory of Ekkehart Krippendorff, a Berlin Free University professor in the 1990s, who wrote in the left-liberal Tagesszeitung, "Imagine if no German Jews had followed orders to assemble at the designated collection points for group transports - a few dozen, a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, the Germans could have dragged individually from their homes and loaded on trucks; but hundreds of thousands? Or imagine that the colonies of hundreds and thousands on the way to the train stations had simply sat down, we call them 'sit-down' strikes today."

There are many ways to blame Jews for their own misfortunes and Europeans, who are engaged in a flight from history and consumed with self-hatred, avail themselves of all the ways they can think of to do so.

Europeans also vent pathological guilt about the Shoah by elevating Jewish conduct to a higher standard because of it. The standard European posture toward Israel is to present Auschwitz as a cynical form of cognitive and behavioral therapy. This particular European view has caught on with Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who recently told the New York Times that the Israelis are uniquely positioned to be reminded about the "the dangers and inhumanity of ghettoes [such] as the one we currently witness in occupied Gaza."

The equation of Gaza with the Warsaw ghetto is perhaps the most prevalent analogy used by Europeans in their attempts to shake off guilt about the Holocaust. . . . The shoddy one-sided accounts of the flotilla raid with which Europeans have comforted themselves, and the continual denial of any Jewish right to self-defense, reveal that many Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.

I think that last sentence gets to the heart of the matter.

Read the rest here.

Trinitarian Theology as a Spiritual Discipline

French Dominican theologian Gilles Emery, O.P. argues that the Trinitarian theology of both St. Augustine and St. Thomas is presented as a spiritual exercise in which the practitioner of theology is a pilgrim seeking wisdom and, ultimately, union with God. In other words, all Trinitarian theology from the early Fathers to St. Thomas, including those parts which are often derided as "rationalistic" or "abstract" is actually spiritual theology, not mere speculation. A short presentation of his argument is found in his essay: "Trinitarian Theology as Spiritual Exercise in Augustine and Aquinas" in Aquinas the Augustinian, edited by Dauphinais, David and Levering (Catholic University of America Press, 2007).

The classical tradition of Christian theology that is rooted in the creedal orthodoxy of the first five centuries and which flowers in the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition has come under fire in the modern period for many reasons. One of those reasons has to do with the modern obsession with individual autonomy, which begins systematically with Descartes although it is foreshadowed in Renaissance humanism. This autonomy is not merely the self-assertion of the individual over against the state, tradition or law, but has is roots in a metaphysical decision to claim that the true view of the universe must begin with the individual reason and situation of the individual thinker rather than with an understanding of our situation as one of God and man in relationship. Emery's interpretation of the thought of St. Thomas as continuing a type of theology that typified the early Fathers and flowered in the writings of St. Augustine helps us see why the starting point of modern philosophy (and the theology - mainly liberal Protestant - which has adopted its anthropocentrism) is inadequate for understanding reality.

In this post, I want to describe how Emery interprets St. Augustine and in a subsequent post I will discuss his argument for reading St. Thomas as continuing the same kind of theology.

Emery points out that, the purpose of St. Augustine's De Trinitate, can be expressed as (1) to show that whether one searches for the substance of God through God's creature or through the Scriptures, the same nature of God can be discovered, (2) to show the conformity of Catholic faith to Holy Scripture and (3) to show that the end result of believing in order to understand is, in fact, an enhanced understanding of faith. For St. Augustine, faith is the beginning point of intellectual or scientific inquiry because it is only from the standpoint of faith that insight into ultimate reality can be attained. The purpose of Christian theology is to demonstrate that greater understanding does in fact arise from such a starting point.

It is in this last result that theology contributes to the evangelistic and apologetic task of the Church by increasing knowledge of the universe and man and not merely of God. Emery points out that the so-called "psychological" analogy is misnamed because the modern sense of the term does not connote what was central in St. Augustine's intentions: namely the ontological truth of the analogy of the soul to God. He says: "in turning toward God, whose image it is, the soul attains what it is, its proper nature." (7) We might think here also of the arguments of David Bentley Hart and T. F. Torrance about how it was Christianity which made the rise of modern physical science possible. Christianity "works" and this should commend it to all unbiased minds.

Emery shows that the analogy between the image of God in the human soul and God is not a one-way analogy, but rather a back and forth process of eliminating errors, exploring dead ends and finding one's way forward gradually and only by much effort. Emery writes:

So one discovers that the interminable detours, repititions, and digressions of the De Trinitate are on purpose and are part of Augustine's deliberate intention: to exercise the spirit of his reader, to lead it to the ascension toward God the Trinity by sharpening the tip of his soul (acies mentis). This objective is recalled each time Augustine glances retrospectively at the preceding books. It is formulated very clearly, for instance, at the beginning of book XV: 'We wanted to train the reader [exercere lectorem] in the things that were made, so that he might know Him by whom they were made.' In this Christian setting, the spiritual exercise takes on a specific aspect. It is performed on the foundation of revelation, through divine grace, in the adherance of faith to the Triune God.

Here we see arguments against "natural theology" decisively refuted. For one thing, the knowledge of God is not limited to what nature can say. Rather, nature must be read in the light of revelation and can only point to what is beyond its scope. For another thing, the back and forth of the soul suggest the interplay of the grace of the Holy Spirit interacting with the human mind leading the sinner to greater and deeper knowledge of God step by step. Human capability is insufficient both in the beginning point and at each step along the way. Finally, there is no hint of the human mind grasping or comprehending God; in actual fact, much of the point of the exercise is that the mind needs to become aware of its possibilities and its limitations.

Theology done in this way is prayerful, humble and intellectually rigorous. It is a path of purification and a way of wisdom. We distort it when we project our modern lust for power and domination (which has so distorted and debased scientific inquiry in modernity) backwards in time on to thinkers whose purpose in intellectual analysis was much different than our own. Instead of being motivated by a desire to control, manipulate and use, it was motivated by a desire to see and submit to the ontological reality we inhabit.