Novaseeker
« Previous EntriesArticle Summary
- All good things come to an end [2010-Jan-13]
- Christmas 2009 [2009-Dec-25]
- Christian Ideas About Men and Women [2009-Dec-7]
- Matt Peterson: Gender Wars Are Over and Men Have Won [2009-Dec-2]
- A new direction for Novaseeker [2009-Nov-30]
- Thanksgiving 2009 [2009-Nov-28]
- Religion and Man Post [2009-Nov-22]
- One World Religion [2009-Nov-12]
- A worthy link on Harriet Harperson’s shameless manipulation of the facts in the UK [2009-Nov-8]
- Men Wising Up: Exhibit A … Gavin Mcinnes [2009-Oct-26]
- « Previous Articles
All good things come to an end
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
By Novaseeker, Uncategorized [source]
Yes, it’s come to that time. The time to officially shutter this blog.
I’ve said most of what I have to say, I think, and honestly don’t have much time for blogging any longer due to real life things. I’ve enjoyed the experience very much, and have liked getting to know some of my readers as well, but rather than have a semi-dormant blog creeping along like a husk, I thought it better to officially close the shop.
I’ll still be around — you’ll see me at The Spearhead from time to time, and at various other blogs on my link list. But maintaining this blog at this point is not something I have the time or energy to do, unfortunately.
I wish you all well, and thank all of my readers for their support. It’s been a good journey, and I hope to cross paths with you elsewhere in virtuality.
Nova
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Christmas 2009
Friday, December 25th, 2009
By Novaseeker [source]
Just a brief note wishing all of my readers a fine Christmas and New Year season! In the spirit of the season, I thought I would transcribe the following, which are the two principal Christmas hymns in the Eastern Orthodox liturgical tradition:
Posted in christianity, Culture, history of religion, orthodox, religion
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Christian Ideas About Men and Women
Monday, December 7th, 2009
By Novaseeker [source]
Talleyrand had an interesting post today about Christian morality, and his perception, which is in all too many cases regrettably accurate, that many Christians practice a morality that is rather secular, and in particular Christian women.
I wrote a response which probably merits cross-posting here as a proper post, since comments tend to get lost in the shuffle eventually:
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I think that the issue derives really from the relationship between church and culture in our Western setting, and specifically how this has played itself out over the past several centuries.
Christianity is not, in its essence, misandrist or gynocentric. In our Western culture, it has become so as a result of a quite lengthy process of undoing. The separation between the East and the West eventually led to the Reformation, which in turn led to the Enlightenment which, eventually, led to a desire to approach truth from the perspective of secular reason alone. The problem with this is that there isn’t a solid, consensus basis for “values” based on secular reason — there are merely arguments for and against certain values. Because of that, the Post-Christian West has largely inherited some of the basic moral ideas of Christianity but, importantly, unmoored them from their religious basis — which has enabled a cafeteria approach to them.
To take a relevant example — the notion of fundamental human equality is a very Christian one — all men and women are equal in the eyes of God, and as Paul himself said, among those who are “in Christ” there is no male and female, no Jew and Greek, and so on. This radical, fundamental equality, in spiritual terms, was a true revolution in thought brought about by Christianity — at least in the context of the dominant civilization of that time, and the civilization which was our cultural precursor as Westerners. However, this core reverence for the fundamental equality of human beings did not obliterate differences in sex and station and hierarchy, but rather affirmed these. Hence Paul’s admonitions about husbands and wives and so on, and his writings about authority, and the different talents and stations in the church and so on. This kind of “tension” between fundamental spiritual equality, on the one hand, and, on a more day-to-day level, fundamental difference only seems contradictory to modern minds because modernity has lost a truly Christian worldview. As a result, much of the West has “ditched” those aspects of Christian moral thought (such as the idea that fundamental equality expresses itself also as hierarchy and difference and is not antithetical to this) which it finds contradictory to the rather linear, and therefore misleading, ways and means of human reason.
The fundamental Christian worldview that underlies the harmony of fundamental equality expressed and lived as difference and hierarchy is, of course, the Holy Trinity itself. The persons of the Trinity are true persons, differentiated and unique, yet “one in essence” and hence fundamentally equal in essence and all God. Yet there is a hierarchy within the Trinity — the Father is the monarch, if you will, the fountainhead of divinity, of whom the Son is begotten, and from whom the Spirit proceeds. Father, Son and Spirit are all equally God, yet among them exists both differentiation and hierarchy — neither of which upsets their fundamental equality as God.
Following from a solidly Trinitarian concept of reality, and viewing humanity as being made in the image and likeness of God — that is, in the image and likeness of the Trinity — we can clearly see that humanity is characterized by both fundamental equality and differentiation and hierarchy. Not only do these characteristics not conflict, but rather they reflect, in a fundamental and constitutive way, the underlying nature and proper ordering of human beings. When contemporary “Christians” in our Post-Christian West read Paul to be contradictory when it comes to equality and contemporary notions of appropriate gender relations, this is really only a reflection of how profoundly un-Christian a worldview these “Christians” have. And it’s precisely because of this lack of a Christian worldview — something which has happened with the resurrection of humanistic philosophy in the West — that the moral ideas of Chistianity, which still inform the West even as a ghost to some degree, are hopelessly twisted and teased beyond recognition, in order to “get rid of” those aspects of Christian moral thought that appear contradictory to those who have a humanistic, as opposed to a Christian, worldview.
HT: Talley and Al
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Singlextianman also linked to an earlier post of mine on his blog, and included some nice YouTube links, to which I also added the following:
Posted in christianity, core principles, cultural decline, Culture, history of religion, orthodox, religion
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Matt Peterson: Gender Wars Are Over and Men Have Won
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
By Novaseeker [source]
From Pajamas Media comes a somewhat tongue-in-cheek article with yet much truth contained therein.
A few quotes:
Men, our long twilight struggle with the opposite sex is over. Our victory is total.
Can you believe the way things used to be? Remember when our fathers and grandfathers would drag themselves to mind-numbing jobs every day, having the sole responsibility for the feeding, clothing, and housing of their entire family?
And things were no easier before marriage, when men’s quest for sexual satisfaction was all too often hampered by the widespread moral code which taught women not to give out the “milk” for “free.”
Well, that state of affairs just wouldn’t do. So we men came together and did what we do best — formulate and implement a plan. First step, design the perfect world, the perfect male world. We decided such a world would consist of two things: less responsibility and more — and no-strings — sex.
Brothers, have we succeeded.
Indeed. And he goes on to note:
But that was only a start. To really fix things, we had to root out that old bourgeoisie mentality that had in previous times kept girls frustratingly modest and chaste. And what better way to do that than to convince women that the most reckless elements of our sexuality — the promiscuity — were in fact the correctbehaviors, which had to be imitated in order for them to be “liberated”?
Amazingly, they bought that, too.
Unfortunately, our sister selves are less suited to such behavior, which can cause painful and lasting tears in the feminine soul. But no matter — we were also able to convince them that there was no such thing as a “feminine” soul, any more than there is a “masculine” soul, and that both sexes are equally suited to all things.
(Many of you said that women would never buy this, that the accumulated history of our species speaks to the deep and abiding difference between the sexes, a difference which has benefited both sides from time immemorial. But I was sanguine about our ruse — have I not been vindicated?)
…
No — it is men who now have it all.
Congratulations, brothers. Our day is at last at hand, a day of no responsibility and easy mating access as far as the eye can see. Best of all, women are convinced that they have done this themselves, and for their own good.
Sure, there are downsides. Civilization has now entered into free fall; those masterpieces of art and science and literature, for which men have been almost exclusively responsible, have ceased to issue forth from our minds and hands — and is it any wonder? Such pyrotechnics are no longer necessary to impress women, which, really, was the only reason we bothered. High culture seems a small price to pay, though, for the loosening of morals and duties which has brought our present Sex and the City-fueled bounty.
So sit back, men, and enjoy the slide. It’s Miller time.
Well done, Matt Peterson. Well done.
It’s often struck me that the past 40 or so years have been in many ways an own goal for women. Let’s see what happens next.
HT: TFH
Posted in cultural decline, female power, Feminism, feminist culture, gender war, happiness gap, male happiness, male liberation
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A new direction for Novaseeker
Monday, November 30th, 2009
By Novaseeker, Uncategorized [source]
As most of my readers know, I haven’t really had all that much time to focus on this blog for quite some time now. I do not expect that this will change much in the months ahead, as work and other life responsibilities are leaving less time for blogging in general.
I will still be posting entries here, and the blog isn’t going away, but I think in the period ahead the focus will be somewhat different from what it has been in the past. I think that with the advent of many quite good men’s-oriented blogs — many of which are located in my link list to the right — as well as the rise of The Spearhead into a true clearinghouse of sorts for men’s issues, an opportunity presents itself to focus on this blog on other sorts of issues that interest me from time to time. I suspect that, in practical terms, this means more articles on some of the other things described in my masthead (philosophy, politics, theology and so on) and less on men’s issues at least on this blog.
I will have to see exactly how this pans out, because of my lower posting availability these days, but in any case it’s likely that you’ll continue to see this blog shift a bit directionally in terms of the kinds of posts it contains.
As always, thanks for reading and commenting.
Nova
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Thanksgiving 2009
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
By Novaseeker, Uncategorized [source]
It’s been a busy few days around Thanksgiving this year. I hope that all of my readers in the United States had a fantastic Thanksgiving, and for those readers outside the United States, I hope that you all have much in your lives to be thankful for as we approach the end of 2009.
Belatedly, I’d like to share a Thanksgiving prayer by Fr. Alexander Schmemann:
Thank You, O Lord!
(by Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann)
Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy.
Thank You, O Lord, for having accepted this Eucharist, which we offered to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and which filled our hearts with the joy, peace and righteousness of the Holy Spirit.
Thank You, O Lord, for having revealed Yourself unto us and given us the foretaste of Your Kingdom.
Thank You, O Lord, for having united us to one another in serving You and Your Holy Church.
Thank You, O Lord, for having helped us to overcome all difficulties, tensions, passions, temptations and restored peace, mutual love and joy in sharing the communion of the Holy Spirit.
Thank You, O Lord, for the sufferings You bestowed upon us, for they are purifying us from selfishness and reminding us of the “one thing needed”: Your eternal Kingdom.
Thank You, O Lord, for having given us this country where we are free to Worship You.
Thank You, O Lord, for this school, where the name of God is proclaimed.
Thank You, O Lord, for our families: husbands, wives and, especially, children who teach us how to celebrate Your holy Name in joy, movement and holy noise.
Thank You, O Lord, for everyone and everything.
Great are You, O Lord, and marvelous are Your deeds, and no word is sufficient to celebrate Your miracles.
Lord, it is good to be here! Amen.
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Religion and Man Post
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
By Novaseeker, Uncategorized [source]
Cross-posting here a rather elaborate comment I made at The Spearhead earlier today.
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1. There isn’t really any precedent for having consensus moral rules (beyond a few least common denominators) without these rules being based on some consensus transcendent reality – a higher purpose, at the very least. This is missing in our current society because almost all of the contemporary philosophy rejects transcendent reality as a concept, and instead has embraced relativism in one form or another. In a very real way, relativism is the inevitable philosophical outcome of a society which places individual autonomic freedom as its core value – as ours does. The “price” of having that as the core social value is that there are no other consensus values beyond a few common denominators, and even there, there is no consensus (murder would seem to be a consensus moral rule at first blush, but the abortion debate demonstrates how easily even the most baseline consensus moral rule can crumble in the face of the absolute value of personal autonomic freedom).
2. It’s for this kind of reason that the idea that there can be wide-consensus moral rules outside a wide consensus about the content of faith is, while understandable, rather far-fetched and misplaced. A division, therefore, between “theoretical truth” and “practical truth” is not workable, in practice, and is incoherent even in theory when viewed from the perspective of someone standing inside any of the main faith traditions. The reason for that is, again, the reality that relativism acts as an acid that dissolves consensus moral rules – and there is nothing more relativistic than the notion that “all faith traditions are basically the same”. In fact, this is a fantastically contemporary notion which has no basis in history, and is incoherent in its perception of reality.
3. The trouble with the West at the moment is that it has literally lost its faith. It has been tried (and some are still trying) to cobble together a secularized, non-transcendent “practical faith”, but of course this doesn’t work, because there truly is no reason for consensus to emerge. A society simply cannot extol individual autonomic freedom as its core value while at the same time having consensus moral rules – for consensus moral rules will always act to suppress individual autonomic freedom to some degree. So our thinkers have lost their faith in Western religion (mainly Christianity), but try though they might, they have been unsuccessful in “replicating” what they consider to be the “good parts” of Christianity, in order to forge some kind of a socio-moral consensus – but this will never work without a religion as the glue. And religion is outright rejected by our contemporary thinkers, for the most part. That is the crux of the issue.
4. It’s always humorous when someone tries to portray Jesus Christ as some kind of democratic national committee chairman or something like that. The notion that is often lost is that Christ did not advocate “social justice” – rather he advocated “personal justice”. His admonitions to feed the poor and tend to the sick and so on were directed at individual persons, and not at the state apparatus. In fact, when pressed by his followers about the political issue (and the pressing need to rebel against the Romans who were “oppressing” the Jews of the age), he famously responded that they should pay their taxes, rejecting the notion that the faith he was preaching was a socio-political movement, or one which was directed at uprooting the oppression of the state. It was nothing of the sort.
5. As far as “sola scriptura” goes, that idea is part of the core problem we face today. But of course the issue goes back much further than that. To me, the beginning of the problem was the alienation of the Eastern and Western empires, which eventually led to a separation of the Eastern and Western churches. That separation created problems for both Eastern and Western Christians. For the East, it meant being cut off from the rising West, a gradual shrinking in power, and eventual conquest by Arabs and Turks, and later, communists. Cut off from the Western church, the Eastern church suffered as a result of its weakness and isolation. For the West, it meant being cut off from much of the tradition of the early church fathers, merely for the reason that Greek became largely unknown in the West, and few Greek texts made their way there. This paved the way for the development of scholastic theology in the West (based as it was, on the translation into Latin of Aristotle by Arab scholars in Spain). Scholasticism developed the way that it did in many ways, I think, because of the “newness” of the encounter of the Christian West with Greek philosophy. The Greek fathers of the first millenium were of course quite familiar with Aristotle and the rest of the Greek canon, and had never pursued a scholastic approach based on them, but, as I note, the heritage of the Greek fathers was not available in the West at this time, and so the scholastic movement created its own momentum, reinterpreting anew the proper relationship between philosophy and faith in a way that the early church would not have recognized. There were a few contacts in this period between the rising Scholasticism in the West and the continuing tradition in the East, and they were not particularly cordial. But, in any case Scholasticism led directly to the Protestant Reformation, because in many ways the reformers were reacting against the Aristotelian-esque soteriology that had developed in the wake of scholasticism in the church. The battle cry of “sola scriptura” was quite understandable seen in this context, because it was a rallying of theology away from the winding paths of scholastic theology and back towards the core elements of the Christian faith. However, sola scriptura led to its own problems as time moved forward, as Protestant and Reformed Christianity splintered again and again and again over different interpretations of the Bible – a process that continues today. For while in theory it is attractive to hold that the text of the Bible is a baseline criterion of shared truth, in reality a text like the Bible is subject to many different interpretations, and so while the text is authoritative for all Protestant Christians, the text itself does not serve to unite them, but rather serves to divide them, because there is nothing other than the text itself (which, again, can be interpreted differently) which can resolve a conflict of interpretations. As a practical matter, we know what this has resulted in: a splintering of Protestant/Reformed Christianity into a sea of “denominations” and, now, “non-denominational churches”. But, more importantly for the purposes of what I am discussing here, this way of thinking about absolute truth led inexorably and directly to the relativism we see around us today.
Why is that? There are a few reasons. The main one is that once one claims that the text of the Bible is the sole criterion for truth, yet one observes that this “truth” is disagreed about in seemingly endless ways even among those Christians who also hold that the text is the sole criterion – you end up with a crisis of “faith”, because what constitutes the substantive content of the truth appears to be “relative” → that is, some people think it means “A” and others think it means “B”. Yet both the A partisans and the B partisans are, according to themselves, using the same sole criterion of truth. This leads an observer to conclude that this sole criterion can in fact be “interpreted” in different ways – leading to the conclusion that the truth given by such criterion is, in fact, relative, and dependent on interpretation, even though, of course, neither Partisan A nor Partisan B would agree, each seeing their own interpretation as more or less exclusively true. In other words, to an outside observer, it begins to appear that the absolute truth claim based on sola scriptura is, in fact, a relative truth claim, because others use the same criterion to reach a different “truth”.
The second, and related, reason is that because sola scriptura relies on textual interpretation, with no higher authority to interpret authoritatively, the resulting approach to thinking about absolutes tends to become increasingly anarchic, precisely because authority beyond textual interpretation has been eradicated. In other words, while it is true that Christians from the beginning disagreed about the meaning of the scriptural texts, they did devise means of “breaking” these disagreements – of authoritatively picking an interpretation as definitive and, importantly, binding. The reformers understandably rebelled against this as an idea, because they perceived the church authority of their time and place as having made incorrect decisions about such interpretation. However, following the wake of reformation, the lack of such a “breaking” authority – indeed, the lack of any authority above the interpretation of the scriptural texts, something which can, in fact, be a very individual thing and which characteristically has been so in post-reformation Protestant/Reformed Christianity – led to the splintering mentioned above, rather than the coalescing of Protestant/Reformed Christianity into one main tradition. The broader impact of this was even more pernicious, and would eventually undo Christianity in general in the West: namely, the conclusion that the “truth interpreting” authoritativeness of the individual was primatial, and not in need of any higher “human” authority in order for the truth to be authoritatively grasped. While the reformed churches eventually did institute discipline inside the churches, the dangerous idea itself was already out of the bottle. The broader significance of the depth and breadth of this rejection of authority beyond the individual led, quite apart from the churches and in terms of philosophy, directly to the enlightenment, and the philosophical and political worldviews of our contemporary culture. After all, if there is no authority needed beyond the human ability to interpret reality – based as it must be on human reason – there can also be no “checks” on that ability, either. In other words, once authority beyond the individual was trashed as being a necessary criterion for determining truth, it was only a matter of time until the Bible itself was rejected as a criterion once it, itself, started to act as a kind of constraint on the power of the individual mind to authoritatively define reality and truth. These ideas led directly to the rise of the primacy of the individual and the ideas of the enlightenment, which bit by bit crept away from religion in favor of unlimited, untrammeled human reason free from any external authority whatsoever. And hence, indeed, the importance placed by our culture on untrammeled individual autonomic freedom as the core political and moral value of our age.
The core problem we face today is, again, the fact that this entire enterprise of exercising human reason without the constraints of a truly “breaking” external authority (rather than a text which can be variously interpreted) has led to a society where the ability to have shared moral rules is drastically impeded. In short, it has led to a culture which is inherently relativist. It’s true that people like Wright and Armstrong and others recognize this as a problem for the society as a whole, but it’s also true that you can’t concoct a religion, and a moral system based on that, out of a relativist stew, and particularly not when so many of our thinkers over the past 200 years have so assiduously and relentlessly attacked the very concept of religion and absolute truth – whether moral or otherwise. Relativism, as the contemporary practical belief system of the West, does not admit of many moral absolutes, and at the same time is not a system without rather deep roots in our ways of thinking at this point in time. We can see the strength of that system of thought reflected in many of the comments on this thread, it seems to me.
Note that my intention here is not to “knock” Protestant/Reformed Christianity any more than it is to “knock” the Catholics and the Orthodox for bungling their ecclesial relations 1000 years ago (the event which started the train running down the wrong track, in my opinion), but rather to point out what I see as causes and continuities in terms of how our own Western history in this area has played itself out.
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One World Religion
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
By Novaseeker [source]
I recently came across the latest entry in the mostly useless attempt by contemporary “spiritualists” to inaugurate a new age which is both spiritual, religious and pluralistic, based on the spurious yet all-too-common idea that all of the world’s “great religions” teach basically the same thing. The goal here, at least, is stated more explicitly than is often the case:
One of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to build a global community, where men and women of all races, nations and ideologies can live together in peace. …
Religion, which should be making a major contribution to this endeavor, is often seen as part of the problem. All too often the voices of extremism seem to drown those that speak of kindness, forbearance and mutual respect. Yet the founders of every single one of the great traditions recoiled from the violence of their time and tried to replace it with an ethic of compassion.
Well, there’s something to be said for honesty, particularly in a world where socio-political subterfuge and deliberate obfuscation seem to have become regrettably normative. But the refreshing nature of the candor shouldn’t distract from the troubling nature of the substance: one world community, and – more or less — one world religion (albeit different “cultural faith traditions”) — one ring to bind them all.
The idea behind this is simple enough: reduce the existing religions of the world to some least common denominator and hammer away at that common denominator in an effort to convince people that religions which are vastly different in huge ways are nevertheless “basically the same” because — lo and behold — they all share the same reductive common denominator.
In this particular case, it is supposed that the great religions of the world are all more or less the same because they all are founded on “compassion”. This reductionist similarity is contrasted with — you guessed it: ”extremism”, thereby painting every religious believer who does not have a reductive view of his/her faith, but actually believes what the faith teaches, as an “extremist”. Despite the poor salesmanship involved in this kind of an effort (alienating the core audience is a pretty poor way to sell an idea), it is nevertheless instructive of the worldview of the purveyors of the one-world-religion concept. Per the admittedly syncretistic ex-Catholic nun Karen Armstrong:
Every single one of the faiths regards compassion and the Golden Rule as the litmus test of true spirituality and sees it as one of the main ways in which we come into relation with the transcendence that we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Tao.
The problems with the assumptions of the article are many, and perhaps are to be expected coming from someone like Armstrong, who believes in no religious tradition at all, and simply holds to an open “spirituality” based on least common denominators. However, the idea — even if it were to have practical merit, which it does not — is bound to fail, precisely because it drastically distorts what religions actually teach. While it’s true that in some sense many faith traditions place an emphasis on practical compassion in various ways, certainly this is not the “core” of what any of these religions hold.
To state that Christianity, for example (Armstrong’s usual bugbear due to her own background) is — as a faith tradition — principally about compassion and acting compassionately is laughable coming from a woman who used to be a Catholic nun, and a man who is an Archbishop of the Anglican Communion (well … maybe not so surprising for him!). Christianity is about the personal and corporate deliverance from death by the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of the Father, through whom the world itself was made, and the ongoing process of sanctification, or growth in holiness, which comes through union with Christ in baptism and subsequently “walking with Him” in the newness of life, having “put on Christ”. Christ taught compassion as a way of being, that is certainly true, and it is a critical aspect of the Christian “walk”, but to reduce the religion to that “ethic” is simply to ignore much else of what the Gospels portray Christ Himself as saying:
“And this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life, and I shall raise him on the last day” (Jn 6:40)
“Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad. … Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be I AM.” (Jn 8: 56, 59)
“Whoever rejects me and does not hear my words has something to judge him: the word that I spoke, it will condemn him on the last day” (Jn 12: 48)
This, of course, is not to deny that Jesus Christ often preached about the virtues of love and compassion — of course He did. But to reduce Christianity to being about compassion when so many other aspects of the faith — including its core narrative — point elsewhere is rather beyond useless and has no hope of serving the purpose Armstrong and her ilk have in mind. Again, it is a question of audience. Calls for reductive quasi-syncretism will never go over well with actual believers, because these people, well, believe in the truth of their own faith. And these faith traditions often conflict quite strongly in their core narratives. To take a few notable examples from the Qur’an (Yusuf Ali translation):
“O People of the Book! Commit no excesses in your religion; nor say of Allah aught but the truth. The Messiah Jesus son of Mary was (no more than) a messenger of Allah, and his word, which he bestowed on Mary, and a spirit proceeding from him, so believe in Allah and his messengers. Say not “Trinity”: desist: it will be better for you for Allah is the One God: Glory be to Him: (Far exalted is He) above having a son …” (4: 171)
“Say: He is Allah, the One and Only; Allah, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; and there is none like unto Him.” (112)
“It is not befitting to (the majesty of ) Allah that He should beget a son. Glory be to Him!” (19: 35).
And others.
Now you may say: this is missing the point. These theological niceties are not the core of the faith in either case. But in order to claim that, one must have either a reductionist view of Christianity (which Armstrong and Tutu clearly seem to have) or perhaps an Islamic view of it (Jesus Christ as prophet and teacher and so on), but in either of those cases, Christianity, as a religious tradition (and as an ethical system as well), becomes unintelligible. If Jesus Christ was not the Son of God, the entire soteriological tradition of Christianity — that is, its narrative and its raison d’etre — in both the Eastern and the Western soteriological traditions, is made impossible, and the faith of the religion itself collapses — including its ethical traditions. To state it another way: for Christians, it is precisely because Christ is the eternally begotten Son that true Christian compassion is made possible. The “ethical content” of Christianity simply cannot be separated from its theological tradition, and its theological tradition cannot be reconciled with other religions.
In reality, what people like Armstrong, Tutu and Robert Wright are trying to do is to morph the existing faith traditions into reductions of themselves so that eventually they can syncretize into a new world religion — or perhaps a world federation of hollowed-out shells of former religious traditions which “believe more or less the same thing but have different cultural traditions”. This is desired because they realize — quite rightly, in my view — that without the input of religion, societies (or at least our own Western culture) eventually tumble towards nihilism. But a campaign to reduce the great faith traditions into shadows of themselves is doomed to fail — precisely because it ignores the actual content of the faiths themselves, and each faith’s internal raison d’etre. People of different faith traditions can engage each other in the spirit of mutual respect, but when that crosses into syncretism or a denial of the truths of each faith tradition, it becomes reductive and disrespectful of the various traditions themselves. It’s quite true that religious traditions conflict — this is a part of life that we must accept, and it is quite a natural one. Seeking to overcome that conflict through a crude reduction of quite different faiths is both disrespectful and doomed — but likely that won’t stop more such calls in the years ahead from “spiritualists” like Armstrong and Wright.
Posted in christianity, cultural decline, Culture, history of religion, nuns, religion, Robert Wright, spirituality
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A worthy link on Harriet Harperson’s shameless manipulation of the facts in the UK
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
By Novaseeker, Uncategorized [source]
The blog Exposing Feminism has posted a good, brief article on the recent quasi-reprimand received by Harriet Harperson, the deputy leader of the UK’s governing Labour Party, regarding the misleading use of statistics in claiming that there is a substantial “wage gap” based on sex in the UK.
Statistics is largely an exercise in smoke and mirrors, as any statistically-fluent academic can confirm. Yet it is good to see that at least some voices are rising in the governments of the West to say: it is a time to try to get past some of the worst obfuscations and stereotypes, and drill down to what the differences actually are, and, hopefully, what drives them.
Specifically, this letter from Sir Michael Scholar, the Chair of the UK Statistical Authority, states that the actual mean wage gap for full time employees in the UK is 12.8%, not the 22.6% “blended” figure spouted by Harperson and her minions at the Orwellian-named “Equality and Human Rights Commission”. Sir Michael further notes that:
The casual reader would be surprised to learn then that median hourly earnings of women and of men (excluding overtime) are very close, with women’s median pay actually being slightly higher than men’s (by 3.4 per cent).
We should not entertain illusions about what this means. It means nothing other than this: feminist women in government institutions are making up statistics to justify passage of laws that will screw men when women, in actual fact, are mostly earning as much as men are if not more.
The reason for the average disparity, as compared to the mean, I would suspect is the infamous “glass ceiling” canard, which I commented on here. Needless to say, the story is a familiar one: when you peer past the smoke and mirrors of statistical obfuscation and selective reporting of them in “studies” generated by politically-slanted interest groups, the bottom line is that the wage gap based on sex is almost entirely due to female career choice and lifestyle choice decisions. To blame men, the so-called “patriarchy”, or discrimination for the decisions women are themselves making is rank misandry, full stop.
It’s good to see that at least one man has the courage to raise his hand and call foul on this vile, shameless misinformation campaign by the UK’s feminist regime.
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Note: I have been extremely busy at work this Fall, which has led to fewer posts here. As I speak I am getting ready to leave for the UK later today, which means another week of less than average participation in the blogosphere. It’s an occupational hazard of mine, but thanks for reading, and I hope to be back to posting more regularly when things calm down a bit on the professional front. Cheers — N
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Men Wising Up: Exhibit A … Gavin Mcinnes
Monday, October 26th, 2009
By Novaseeker, Uncategorized [source]
Aye, lads. There is some reason (and humor) yet in the blogosphere.
Gavin McInnes has a fantastically funny yet poignant post here.
A relevant and hilarious excerpt:
Anyway, during our “debate” the Middle East kept getting high fives and I was starting to hear talk of the burqa being empowering. “So why is it made out of black polyester,” I asked. Why not some flowing white cotton? “It’s not made out of polyester” she retorted before adding, “Polyester is an oil based product. They export oil.” Huh? Is that why toothpicks are verboten at the lumber yard? “Get that out of your mouth Harv! We need to export that! We only use plastic toothpicks here!” Megan realized she wasn’t making sense so she pulled out the Jezebel race card: “What about rape?” she asked. As Heart’s “What About Love” played in my head with new lyrics, I smiled and said, “Honey, America ain’t got nuthin’ on the Middle East when it comes to rape.” She then said, “Did you just call me honey?” and stormed out of the bar. Thank God.
LMAO. I was in laughing fits reading that. Just. Brill.
Worth much more than the price of admission I must say. Kudos to you, Mr McInnes.
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