Magic Statistics

As the French riots slowly die down, Western Europe is anxious to get back to normal. But things will never be the same again. Alexandra Colen at The Brussels Journal thinks this is a good time to ask what generated the anger so evident in rioters' demeanour and actions.

Is this Islam waging Jihad? Is it social breakdown caused by welfare dependency? Or are the young Muslims filled with contempt for the secular Western culture of intolerance and indecency, a hedonist society that does not believe in God, that no longer procreates and merely consumes to the detriment of its own future generations – a civilization which discusses gay marriage and adoption while its girls and women dress as whores and are displayed as such on the pictures and in the songs that fill the streets and shops of European cities?

Yet the European political and cultural leaders think that the Muslim youths can be mollified and seduced. This will not happen.

The "youths" burned down schools and sports centres because they perceived these for what they are: attempts to lure them into the culture of Western liberal society. From this point of view all the policies promoting integration and participation, equality, education and employment, especially when they are shrouded in liberal, "tolerant" rhetoric, can only be interpreted as insults to their dignity. They are Europe’s future because they are its youth, and they know it. The liberal media, by unqualifyingly describing them as “youths” confirmed this for all to see. What we witnessed in France in the first half of November 2005 was the writing on the wall: Europe’s Mene Tekel Upharsin – Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

The writing is on the wall, but European secularists refuse to read it.

St Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, died on this day in 680. Todd Granger, The Confessing Reader, has posted a short biography, collect, and Scripture readings.

At least, the number of Canadians receiving cards saying that they’re Liberal Party supporters is proliferating.

A colleague tells me that his son, who is attending a large university in Ontario, was horrified to get this card in the mail earlier this year. He does not now, and never has, and says he never will, support the Liberals. Yet the party sent him this card. How could such a thing happen?

After talking with class mates and friends, he deduced that the Liberal Party sent a supporter card to every student enrolled at the university. So, if the Liberal Party claims that the number of party supporters is growing by leaps and bounds, keep in mind that not all those who have a supporter card with their name on it asked for it.

My colleague’s son is so upset to have his name on a Liberal Party card that he insists that it be removed before posting here. Thus, the blank space in the middle. That young man is no dummy.

About two weeks ago I blogged an article by the prominent atheistic evolutionist Edward O. Wilson, in which I argued that his historical knowledge of the relationship between evolutionary theory and Christianity was wayward and that his defence of evolution was replete with question-begging assertions masquerading as proven scientific fact.

Now today, I have been alerted to this post at Touchstone Magazine’s Mere Comments, where Wilfred M. McClay criticises the same argument by Edward O. Wilson. (Prof McClay references a longer version of the same article by Prof Wilson.) Whereas my critique was based on history and logic, Prof McClay takes a more philosophical approach.

The thing that the materialist cannot explain is where and how, in his vision of things, and absent the banished traditions of religion, we can find plausible ground for a belief in the dignity of the human person, and ground it in a sturdy enough way to resist the growing instrumentalization of life, and the frighteningly posthuman prospects that science now has brought within our reach.
. . .
[Wilson’s view] takes for granted the possibility of liberal institutions that are founded upon respect for the dignity of the individual, a respect that in turn has never existed apart from the cultural presence of the religious traditions he now feels prepared to discard because their price has become too high. And then he stares in wonder at the fact that half of Americans do not want to believe in evolution of any kind. This does not seem so hard to understand.

I, too, have noticed that atheists often assume the existence of social institutions and cultural traditions that have been made possible by Christian convictions. They seem to assume that those institutions and traditions will continue to exist once their foundation has been removed. As the über-atheist Nietzsche pointed out over a century ago, that assumption is naïve and foolish.

via CaNN.