SLEEPING REASON

18th Century Spanish painter Francesca Goya created a series of etchings entitled Los Caprichos: 'the sleep of reason produces monsters' which he described as depicting "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual". His criticisms were far-ranging and acidic; speaking against the predominance of superstition, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, pedagogical short-comings, marital mistakes, and the decline of rationality.

In short he describes perfectly the prevailing 'wisdom' of the 21st century.

Regarding the Queensland floods I am amazed at the capriciousness of global warming advocates who claim to have foreseen this situation. They are now unashamedly claiming that their 'models' had shown that the warming oceans will deliver excess precipitation blah blah blah!

When temperatures soar into overheat, blame global warming, when the temperature plunges into fridge-like temps blame global warming - heads I win tails you lose!

This is of course all claimed even in evidence of the opposite, i.e. statements made by these fanatics that rain will be forever in short supply (Flannery), snow will be something children of England will celebrate on seeing:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/i_dont_think_the_warmists_models_are_working/

These charlatans are completely without shame but perhaps given the lack of moral compass and an overwhelming will to power at all costs, it is to be expected,

What will be important in the future is how gullible the wider community is prepared to be.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me!

Take the recent case of the tragic shooting of Democrat Congresswoman Giffords. Almost instantaneously lefty journos worldwide are blaming Palin and the Tea Party. Regardless of what you feel about Palin such mendacity perfectly illustrates the depravities to which such 'journalists' and commentators have sunk in order to manipulate the public perception. What is the difference between this approach and that of the totalitarianist regimes? All the actual evidence in this case points towards a disturbed young man who had no connection to Palin whatsoever and was in fact more attracted to the communist perspective, see this link:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_the_framing_of_sarah_palin/

Unfortunately living in the age of irrationality means that evidence is subservient to ideology and whatever suits the ruling hegemony, i.e. the left-wing position.

The Dilemma

How long must we suffer the inanities of naive theologians (reflecting the 'expert' syndrome) whose personal interpretations of scripture mirror the dominant ideologies of the zeitgeist (syncretism) and are yet held before the wider public as the only representatives of Christian 'truth'.
Their gullibility plays right into the hands of the ideologues who hate the West and everything it stands for, and who are committed most of all, to the destruction of the Judeo/Christian faith which provided the very freedoms that offer the gullible 'representative' the platforms from which they preach.
I attach an article by Melanie Phillips which articulates quite profoundly one such egregious interpretation of scripture. An interpretation that is more closely aligned to Gramsci's 'Cultural hegemony' (neo Marxism) than it is to the true gospel. Interesting that it takes an agnostic Jew to effectively articulate the true values of 'muscular' Christianity.                                                                        Enjoy!

Daily Mail, 27 December 2010

As predictable as the bells pealing out the ­arrival of Christmas, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has once again managed to mark the festive ­season by a display of painful moral confusion.
First, he used his sermon at Canterbury Cathedral to rebuke the most prosperous for having yet to ­shoulder their load in the economic downturn.
And then in an article for yesterday’s Mail on Sunday he wrote that the poor should be absolved of any responsibility for their own circumstances.
True, he acknowledged that there were doubtless ‘some who make the most out of the benefits ­culture’ — although even here he couldn’t resist a swipe at ‘some who have made the most out of other kinds of perks available to bankers or MPs’.
But he warned: ‘The Victorian distinction between the deserving poor and the rest is very seductive.’
And he added: ‘Even if there are those who are where they are because of their own bad or foolish choices in the past, that doesn’t mean they are any less in need in the present. And it can’t be said often enough that most people in poverty — and we should be thinking of children in particular — haven’t chosen it.’
This was an extraordinary thing to say. It means that even if poor people are dishonest or irresponsible, the rest of society must regard them as just as deserving of society’s largesse as the honest poor.
But the notion that those who have behaved immorally or irresponsibly should be treated in exactly the same way as those whose behaviour has been irreproachable is itself profoundly amoral.
Of course, no one chooses to be poor. But some people do choose lifestyles that cause them to become poor — such as choosing not to work, or deciding to bring up children on their own.
And what was so disturbing about Dr Williams’s observation was that he seemed to be negating the importance of such choices.
Indeed, by demonising the better-off while investing the poor with a halo, he came close to suggesting that wealth — however honestly or arduously earned — is intrinsically evil, while poverty is a holy state.
His core point was that no distinction should be made between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor — which to him clearly conjures up Dickensian nightmares of workhouses, cruelty and destitution.
This distinction was, indeed, a key concept in Victorian times. However, after the development of the Welfare State, the idea that any poor people could be considered ­‘undeserving’ was ruled out of court.
Contrary to the beliefs of the founder of the Welfare State himself, William Beveridge, it became the accepted view that it was odious to hold any poor people responsible for their own poverty. The question of individual behaviour and its consequences was airbrushed out of the welfare picture altogether.
This was in large measure because Left-wing thinking — in the famous aphorism — replaced Methodism with Marx. And Marxist analysis holds that people are not responsible for their own circumstances, but are instead helpless tools of the capitalist system.
Obviously, many do become poor through cruel twists of fate. But others certainly ­contribute to their poverty through their own behaviour.
For example, many women choosing to have babies without a permanently committed father on board doom themselves and their children to poverty and a host of other terrible disadvantages.
Of course, some lone mothers are the innocent victims of desertion. But it is crucial to offer all poor people assistance which will give them a leg up and out of poverty rather than kick away the ladder of opportunity from beneath their feet.
Yet leaving them stranded with no escape route is precisely what the ‘non- judgmental’ view of poverty represented by Dr Williams has brought about.
Which is precisely the woeful state of affairs that the Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is determined to end.
True, Dr Williams paid dutiful credit to the Government’s welfare reforms for its ‘clear intention to put things in place that will actually reduce poverty and help people out of the traps of dependency’.
But clearly, he simply doesn’t understand that this depends to a large extent upon restoring the distinction between the ­‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor that he finds so abhorrent.
That is because it is not motivated by an absence of compassion, as he implies, but by its precise opposite — a deeply principled desire to end the trap of permanent poverty. And the way to do that is encourage behaviour that will end it, through viewing the poor as governed by the same impulses as everyone else.
Dr Williams’s view, however, effectively treats the poor as less than human. The essence of being human, after all, is to be capable of moral choice. And all of us, rich and poor, are capable of making those choices.
The choice to be honest rather than fiddling the benefits system. To work, however demeaning the job, in preference to taking state charity. To bring children into the world only where there is a committed father to help bring them up.
But if people who make immoral — or amoral —choices benefit from these, that creates a fundamental injustice throughout society. For there is no surer way of undermining and demoralising those who refuse to cheat the system or who are living lives of self-restraint and responsibility.
Yet that is precisely what our non-judgmental culture of dependency has given us — the moral degradation of an entire society.
You might think that the Church of all institutions would be in the forefront of ­fighting such cultural collapse. So why does Dr Williams put himself on the wrong side of the moral tracks?
Well, his disapproving reference to the ­Victorians is more than a little revealing.
For during that period, it was Christians who spearheaded the great social reform movements which turned Britain from a society riven by crime, illegitimacy and drunken squalor into a tranquil country in which the traditional family was the crucible of social order.
That transformation came about through a profoundly moral view of the world rooted in a muscular Christianity. This upheld the dignity of every human being and the optimistic belief that people could redeem themselves through their own behaviour.
It was these Christian attitudes that led to the abolition of slavery and a host of other reforms. Yet Dr Williams has in the past ­apologised for the role of the church during this period, radiating deep embarrassment about religious impulses which once were a synonym for progressive attitudes.
This is rooted in a collapse of religious belief within the Church of England which has been going on for decades. Accordingly, it has steadily eroded its commitment to the moral codes embodied in the Bible and embraced instead the secular alternative – the religion of Left-wing ideology.
Thus Sunday school was replaced by social work, morality by expediency and holy war by class war.
Dr Williams undoubtedly wants to do good in the world. And he is far from being a ­stupid man; he is considered to be a profound thinker and theologian.
But it took Iain Duncan Smith, in the striking article he wrote for this paper last week, to use without embarrassment the Biblical figure of Joseph to illustrate one of the key antidotes to permanent poverty — the committed father.
The fact is that what Mr Duncan Smith is doing embodies Christian conscience in a way that appears completely to elude the leader of the Anglican communion.
When a politician boldly links morality, religion and compassion while a religious leader can only spout Left-wing cliches, a society’s foundations have become shaky indeed.

Back to the hypocritical coalface

I have just spent almost a week in the hospital and being released was like being let out of jail, amazing. Unfortunately i have to go back in next week for open heart surgery, sounds worse than it actually is, so I'm told...looking forward to the benefits not the procedure.
Been going through the backlog of political and societal commentary since I arrived home, and have been reading some very interesting stuff...i cannot help but reproduce this comment by Andrew Bolt on the green hypocrisy...green intellectuals (an oxymoron if ever there was one) are truly religious in their thinking.

Andrew Bolt – Saturday, January 08, 11 (08:30 am)

Graeme Wood makes his billions by helping people to travel more, emitting God knows how much more greenhouse gases:

Four years ago, Mr Wood stepped back from executive duties at wotif, the online travel company he founded in 1999, but he remains a director and retains a 23 per cent stake, valued at $222 million based on yesterday’s share price of $4.63.

But he bankrolls a party campaigning against the very emissions his own customers belch out:

Wotif founder Graeme Wood, whose wealth is estimated at $372 million, gave $1.6 million to fund the Greens’ television advertising campaign, helping to significantly increase votes for the party in key states.

Incidentally, wasn’t Greens leader Bob Brown once against the super-rich using their wealth to influence politics? Why, yes:

This opposition is coming from some of the richest people in Australia… We are seeing a contest between plutocracy and democracy. - the power of billionaires versus the rights of 22 million other Australians.

Being Green means losing track of how many times you contradict yourself.

CLASSIC WIT

This blog by Tim Blair is so marvellously witty and insightful that I thought it best to publish it in its entirety rather than try and reword or paraphrase it. It captures and uncovers the occultic heart at the centre of the 'science' scam of the century.

Tim Blair

Monday, January 03, 2011 at 01:30pm

 

The ABC’S Science Show – normally given over to scientific issues, as the title suggests – took an unexpected turn on Saturday night. Host Robyn Williams suddenly found himself in the presence of a religious fundamentalist.
You don’t often hear during a science broadcast of spirit beings taking physical form. Nor are rocks and soil usually credited with the capacity to develop brains and nervous systems. But that’s what we heard during Williams’s interview with Tim Flannery, recorded before a presumably stunned audience at the University of Sydney’s Seymour Centre.
Flannery, previously an Australian of the Year and still on various government panels, predicted that the inanimate Earth would soon come to life in the form of Gaia, an ancient Greek god. He’s previously flirted with Gaia-belief, but never quite to this extent. Flannery’s exact words:
“I think that within this century the concept of the strong Gaia will actually become physically manifest.”
Well, that’s something we can all look forward to. A living god, not only on this earth, but of it. Flannery, a frequent ABC presence, continued:
“I do think that the Gaia of the ancient Greeks, where they believed the earth was effectively one whole and perfect living creature, that doesn’t exist yet, but it will exist in future.”
Flannery says it and I believe it. He’s a scientist, after all. Come on down, Gaia! Hey, if the big guy can take out Australian citizenship by this morning and hold a cricket bat, we’ve got a job for him at the SCG. Jimmy Anderson might be able to confound most of our top order, but let’s see his punishing outswingers beat a whole and perfect living creature.
Although it could be difficult sourcing at short notice a 40,075km baggy green cap to contain Gaia’s earthly circumference. He’s got a big head on him, this Gaia, and that’s before he’s even scored a single Test run. In other words, he should fit right in with the rest of the team.
Back to the Science Show, where Flannery expanded on the conditions needed for an appearance by the G-dog. “We’ll never be able to control the earth, there’s no doubt about it,” he said, which kind of shoves to one side the earnest efforts of climate change activists, including Flannery himself. “We can’t control its systems. But we can nudge them and we can foresee danger.”
With Global Nudging underway, it’s just a matter of time. “Once that occurs, then the Gaia of the ancient Greeks really will exist,” exulted Flannery. “This planet, this Gaia, will have acquired a brain and a nervous system. That will make it act as a living animal, as a living organism, at some sort of level.” All right! And people thought Oprah was a big deal.
Flannery has been talking up this transformation for some time. He told an audience at La Trobe University in 2009 that “just over the last decade Gaia is on the threshold of acquiring a brain … the Kyoto Protocol was a first failed attempt by Gaia to regulate its conditions … Gaia now has a consciousness. Just as we have a consciousness.”
That’s some serious science right there, friends. But how will the rest of us – those who aren’t so rational and sciencey and all – know when the great moment is upon us? How will we know that the Earth has grown a brain? For that matter, what will this sentient Frankenplanet spirit monster look like?
According to a Flannery piece in the New York Review of Books, James Lovelock – the British science guy who came up with this Gaia rubbish in the first place – “often describes Gaia as an elderly lady”. Presumably a really big one, with a cloud-sized blue rinse and bingo wings so gigantic that they can trigger hurricanes.
Also, she’s into incest. Ancient Greek poet Hesiod wrote that Gaia “lay with her son, Uranus,” thus spawning a whole pile of inbred godlets. No surprise that one of them, Cyclops, only had a single eye. Thanks for the diminished gene pool and depth-perception issues, Gaia and uncle-daddy.
Do we really want this child-sexing redneck mama walking among us? Sure, it’s fine for Flannery, who’s on Gaia’s team. He can even communicate with the beast, as he explained to Andrew Denton in 2008. “It’s life that makes the atmosphere what it is, that’s a very important aspect of Gaia, you know,” said the bearded Gaia-whisperer. “Gaia is life working as a whole to maintain the atmosphere as it is, so that life can go on. So, Gaia I think is saying to us ‘it’s time you took control.’ “
It’s definitely time we took something. Chlorpromazine, possibly, or anything else in the anti-hallucinogenic range. Flannery’s audience never sees a bad side to Gaia’s looming incarnation, but many of us should fear it. She’s likely not to be impressed by carbon polluters, for example. To them, Gaia will no doubt materialise in the manner of a vengeful Japanese movie monster. Instead of Godzilla or Mothra, she will be Carbonara, slayer of coal-fired power plants and non-cyclists. It’ll be quite a show.
Problem is, we already have a Gaia, complete with brain and central nervous system. She’s the sweet little daughter of British actress Emma Thompson, who bestowed that name on her girl ten years ago following successful – if not completely natural and possibly even anti-Gaia – IVF treatment. Fun will abound in the Thompson household during Gaia’s teenage years: “Gaia, finish your homework!” “It’s your turn to do the dishes, Gaia.” “Come back here, Gaia! You are NOT going out dressed like that!”
Still, it’s nice that science folk and ABC presenters are getting behind peculiar religious beliefs and general occult weirdness. During last year’s election campaign, most of these types were spooked by Tony Abbott’s relatively benign Catholicism. Now they’re easily able to cope with the summoning of a dirt god. Truly, we live in an age of miracles.

IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS NEW YEAR MAKE IT THIS ONE

Melanie Phillip's new book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power is in the words of one reviewer: "A brilliant tour de force, beautifully written and powerfully argued."

I would like to recommend it to all of my friends and anyone else who might read this blog.

Melanie is a well known English journalist who calls herself an agnostic Jew, and whilst I think that some of her observations about Christianity in particular are more about 'cultural' Christianity rather than 'theological' truth her basic thesis is both remarkable as well as insightful.

I quote from pages 258/9 to engage your interest:

"...that in doing so, the secular west is not merely adopting a quasi religious posture but a specifically Christian one. The governing story of Islam is the imposition of its doctrines through conquest and submission. Accordingly, it is today attempting to fashion its utopia through conquest and submission. The governing story of Christianity by contrast, is of sin, guilt and redemption. And remarkably, that is precisely the pattern lying behind the Utopian agendas of Western secular progressives-even though by severing these concepts from their transcendent Christian context, they have perverted their meaning and turned them from the engines of truth and justice into their antithesis.

For the left, the West is guilty of exploiting the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed. Britain has to do penance for the sins of imperialism and racism. Israel has to do penance for the sins of colonisation and racism. America has to do penance for the sins of imperialism. slavery and racism.

For the environmentalists, the West is guilty of the sins of consumerism and greed, which have given it far more than it needs. So these things must be taken away and the West must return to a simpler, austere, pre-industrial way of life.

Because of its sins, the West is being punished through the wars and terrorism against it. The West 'had it coming' on account of its manifold iniquities. America is responsible for Islamic terrorism. Israel is responsible for Palestinian terrorism. And Britain is responsible for the radicalization of British Muslims and the 7/7 attacks on the London transit system because it has backed America and Israel and lied' about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

As a result of all this sin, guilt and punishment, the Western progressive soul yearns for expiation and redemption. By electing Barack Obama as president of the United States, Americans wanted to redeem their country's original sins of slavery and racism. Through it s strictures against Israel, post Christian Europe wants to redeem its original sin of antisemitism. by campaigning against carbon dioxide emissions, environmentalists want to redeem the original sin of human existence. As for the scientific materialists, the sin to be redeemed is not by man against God but by God against man. Their governing story is that uncorrupted man fell from the Garden of Reason when he partook of the forbidden fruit of religion-which now has to purged from the world to create the Kingdom of Man on earth.

For all of these millenarian and apocolypticists and Utopians, both religious and secular, the target is the West. As Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit write in their book Occidentalism, the West is seen as an enemy not because it offers an alternative system of values but because of its promises of material comfort, individual freedom and dignity of unexceptional lives deflate all Utopian pretensions. The anti-heroic, anti-Utopian nature of Western liberalism is the greatest enemy of religious radicals, priest -kings and collective seekers after purity and heroic salvation.

That's why the West is squarely in the sights of all who want to create utopia and are determined to remove all the obstacles it places in the way. For environmentalists, that obstacle is industrialization. For scientific materialists, its religion. Fro transnational progressives, its the nation. For anti-imperialists, its American exceptionalism. For the Western intelligentsia, its Israel. For Islamists, its all the above and the entire un-islamic world. And in their desire for redemption and their suppression of dissent from the one revealed truth, Western progressives and radical Islamists are closer than either would like to think."  

Diminished humanity

I watched a program last night on TV about the earths beginnings...of course the only options they provided were all diametrically opposed to the idea of a personal creator (horrors) i.e. studiously non-religious, yet their 'theories' all sounded very sci-fi and rather metaphysical to me. Scientism masquerading as science once more. But the one unifying thread linking all the disparate philosophies and theoretical inanities that leaped out at me was how these 'experts' viewed humanity. From the evolutionary advocates, and the 'star-dust pollinators' to the believers in panspermia (alien influence) all uniformly held humanity in utter contempt. The one says we have evolved from slime in a random haphazard way,  another believes that we are no more important than the lowliest creature, environmentalists think of us as the earths greatest virus whilst the alien believers pontificate that if said master race were to actually visit they would no doubt look upon us with the same contempt that we view the ant with.

At church service this morning we heard of how wonderfully and magnificently we were created and what marvellous creatures we actually are...I tend to hold with the latter view, and in keeping with the golden rule, I believe that it is only when we can view ourselves in this regard that we can love others as well.

Funny how the 'progressives' are always talking about love yet do not appear to see the disjunction between what they preach and what they believe. 

marxist, schmarxist & the whole kaboodle

Andrew Bolt blogs about the indefatigably stupid, Southpark-like caricature that is Kevin Rudd and his most recent inane tribute to the, anti Semitic Marxist, deceased ex-Chilean President Salvadore Allende, as Rudd's unfortunate tendency to open his mouth without reflecting too deeply about what emerges out of it. More often than not what he says at any one moment contradicts what he said just before it.

Although Rudd was once the prime minister of Australia ( I sometimes wonder whether Mark Latham might have actually been an improvement on what came after him!!!) his peripatetic wanderings around the globe have increasingly revealed to the public just how fortunate we were to have witnessed his demise from the top job.

Rudd's increasingly bizarre mutterings and wasteful squandering of public monies on behalf of winning him friends and UN votes outrageously underscores the self aggrandizing qualities that so many politicians of the left appear to display, and so few (sleuth-like, cynical, investigative?) 'journalists' appear to notice, hence the fact that Rudd's latest excesses whilst in Chile did not even stir their philosophical curiosities! What is it about these post-modern 'progressive' political elites (politicians, administrators and commentators) that makes them so blind to the excesses of socialistic jingoism?

Perhaps the answer might be found in the educational indoctrination that most of these unfortunates receive. I use the word indoctrination deliberately because the ideology that underpins the 'new educational imperatives' that exist in contemporary Australian higher (inroads are being made into the schooling at alarming rates, note the latest modern history curriculum [amongst other]) education follow the dictates of one of the modern world's most influential doctrinaire ideologues, i.e. Antonio Gramsci, and it is no accident that one of the centres of the worlds Gramscian revival is right here in Australia. His 'long march through the institutions' has borne fruit in ways that I am sure would amaze even his wildest expectations. One only has to consider that Obama, Cameron, Rudd, Gillard and many European leaders openly acknowledge his or his acolytes influences.

And what do we read about and watch on the various TV programs when the leaders of our country waste public monies, trash our heritage, promote hedonistic and potentially disastrous policies and mismanage our natural resources...we see how the various 'elite' commentators make mockery of those who lead lives of exemplary (but traditional) moral  attributes. We watch how they pick on the most elemental failings of those who represent the 'other' whilst ignoring or explaining away the excesses of those who choose to live without restraint.

Why is that?

Unfortunately to disagree nowadays no longer means to be able to live in harmony with difference, because in an environment where reason no longer matters, i.e. in a philosophically relativistic universe, to disagree with the ruling ideological hegemony is shorthand to being in rebellion against it (the totalitarian impulse), which therefore gives those in power the excuse to use all of the instruments of manipulation that are currently available to transform the intellectual environment in favour of those who hold the power. That is why you and I will generally only see someone like Tony Abbott when he is fluffing his lines (don't we all!), or whilst he is pursuing his fitness regimes (on his own time mind you), all the while being made a mockery of, or having his words taken out of context even absurdly so. All of this is all designed to show how conservative or traditional values are actually the reasons why we have racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, inhumanity towards refugees etc, etc. What is actually happening is a mass manipulation of the popular perspective (often even unknowingly), and here I say to my own astonishment...thank goodness for the Internet...even with all of its failings. Unfortunately however, even the Internet is being threatened with control by the ruling powers (if possible) or manipulated by information 'bombing' and hackers such as the amoral anarchist Assange who appears to have emerged as the patron Saint of anarchistic ideology. 

Welcome to our brave new world....incidentally I would recommend that we all re-read Orwell's classic novel to see just how prophetic he has been.