I dug this gem out of my Microsoft Word due to a conversation on my Facebook. I was planning on going a different direction but after I found this from about 1999 via a debate in a forum on what is still SPACE BATTLES… it was late 99 or early 2000 that I cut my teeth on the Internet via Space Battles. I kept most of my debates from the 4 or so years I was on the forums there… at least my responses. This is one of those early debates — the main point here is that secularism is a religion. (I may add some media when I see fit):
SKEPTIC, YOU SAID:
I don’t know how you can say Jimmy Jones and the Branch Davidians weren’t believers in absolutism and God.
This is easy to say. Both rejected the God of the Bible, period. They were not Christians, period. They were cults who had sex with multiple partners and were power hungry and changed meanings of plain and clear scripture to get their way. This is important, because when anyone deals with a cult member, they need to realize that there is a language barrier. For instance, when a Mormon says he or she believes in Jesus, is this the same Jesus Christianity has preached for 2,000 years? How a bout the Jehovah’s Witness when they say they believe in Jesus?
JESUS
Mormons believe that Jesus is not God, but a god, they are polytheists. They believe that Jesus was born first in heaven in a spiritual body via sexual relations between “Heavenly Father” (God in Mormon terms) and one of his many wives. Lucifer also was a son born by “God” sticking his dingy in one of his wives. By the way, God was once a man like us, and now resides on the planet Kolob (according to the Pearle of Great Price – one of many added Mormon scripture). And be sure that all mentioned here have to take away, change, or add scripture to get their theology to work – just like Hitler and his cronies.
Jehovah’s Witness’s believe that Jesus was the first created being, that is, Michael the Archangel. Jehovah (God) then created all things THROUGHMichael the Archangel. When Michael came to earth in bodily form he was known as Jesus. And now is not Jesus any longer, but once again under the name and title Michael the Archangel, the first-born.
Jesus, according to the historic Christian faith is God, the creator of everything in heaven and on earth. He is not bound by time-space; for unlike the two before mentioned perversions of plain scripture, Jesus is the Creator of the space-time continuum. He is God Almighty.
SALVATION
Both Jehovah’s Witness’ and Mormons believe that the sacrifices given on the cross by “Jesus” was only in remission of Adam’s original sin, opening the way for these sincere persons to “work” their way into heaven or “salvation.” Jehovah’s Witness’s believe that 100 hundred hours a week of going door-to-door or standing in front of donut shops handing out booklets will one of the many rules sufficient enough to allow them to be resurrected here on earth to live forever more (only 144,000 get to go to heaven). Mormons don’t drink caffeine, cuss, marry in the temple, wear special undergarments, tithe, all in the hopes of making to the “best” heaven.
Christianity teaches that we can do nothing to please God, all our good works are like leaves in the wind, they blow away. Salvation is a gift that only can be fulfilled by an immutable, perfect, gift… man can never attain this in his finite state. Salvation is through Christ alone. This is one of the many proofs that Christianity is divine, that is, if this were a man-made religion, man would have made it conquerable. So like Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witness’ religious construct of lists of items to do for salvation to be attainable, Christianity has no such list. If man had made Christianity, there would be something we could do to please God for our salvation, in fact, we cannot. Christianity is unconquerable by man. (sorry, back to the point).
So when a Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon come to your door and say, “we believe in Jesus,” or, “we believe in salvation,” and, “we are followers of Christ, therefore we are the true Christians,” you can break through the fog by understanding what is meant by terms used.
(From a debate with a J-Dub):
The main problem is that the Watchtower gives ALL truth that is to be believed by the Jehovah’s Witness. I will show an example, and I quote the founder, Charles Taze Russell:
If the six volumes of SCRIPTURE STUDIES are practically the Bible, topically arranged with Bible proof texts given, we might not improperly name the volumes THE BIBLE IN AN ARRANGED FORM. That is to say, they are not mere comments on the Bible, but they are practically the Bible itself….
Furthermore, not only do we find that people cannot see the divine plan in studying the Bible by itself, but we see, also, that if anyone lays the SCRIPTURE STUDIES aside, even after he has used them, after he has become familiar with them, after he has read them for ten years – if he then lays them aside and ignores them and goes to the Bible alone, though he has understood the Bible for ten years, our experience shows that within two years he goes into darkness. on the other hand, if he had merely read the SCRIPTURE STUDIES with their references, and not read a page of the Bible, as such, he would be in the light at the end of two years, because he would have the light of the Scriptures.
Even if you’ve read the Scripture Studies for ten years, and you lay them aside and read the Bible for two years alone, you enter into darkness?!
This is a revealing quote.
It shows how brainwashed Jehovah’s Witnesses are to the fact that the ruling council and president of the Watchtower Society dispense nothing but truth and reality while the rest of humanity who points out the misquotes and misrepresentations are shunned as devils (almost literally).
I will go out on a limb here and say, “if the devil were to create a religious group that undermines the true message in the Bible, would the devil require someone to read the Bible by itself… or would the devil want to add something to it that would interpret everything within?”
Same goes for our current discussion.
When Hitler uses the words Christians, Jesus, church, and the like, you know he had changed the Biblical absolutes to fits his relativistic pantheism/paganism that we know he believed. If Hitler came to our door today passing out tracts talking of Jesus’ non-Jewish heritage and that he was going to finish what Jesus couldn’t, namely the extermination of the Jews, then we would know that this is not Christianity, not absolutes, but fascism at it most perverted. Remember what a philosophy major once said:
“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable” — Mussolini
Mussolini, Diuturna (1924) pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.
This is what Hitler did, Mussolini, Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, Jim Jones, David Koresh, and all others who relativize God’s plainly stated truth to fit their particular needs or situation. And in doing so, they must change, reject, or add to the Bible or the historic Christian faith in order to do so.
SKEPTIC, WHEN YOU SAID:
That I agree with! Claiming a personal revelation can hid a host of evils. But it seems like the religious are more likely to do that then a humanist…. I am also arguing that a humanist who believes he contains within himself the ultimate determination of what is moral, would not do the things that these people did without, at least, the recognition that he is being evil. These nazis, Branch Davidians, terrorists, and kool aid killers are all more dangerous because they believe they are doing good.
I almost fell out of my chair. The Communists killed many, many millions believing they were doing good? God revealing this is not mandated by Mao is it? Special revelation isn’t only from God. One needs only to read the Humanist Manifesto’s or the Communist Manifesto to see revelation without God. Huxley called evolution a religion without revelation. However, there can be revelation in non-belief. For instance, consider the following excerpt from a letter written by Charles Darwin in 1881:
“I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit…. The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”
Charles Darwin, Life and Letters, I, Letter to W. Graham, July 3, 1881, p. 316; cited in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), p. 343.
Or:
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1874), p.178.
How a bout this:
“No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest. But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.”
Thomas Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews (New York: Appleton, 1871), pp 20-1.
One more before I head to humanism:
“The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law [natural selection] did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all…. If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translator/annotator, James Murphy (New York: Hurst and Blackett, 1942), pp. 161-162.
These seem very revelational, just revelations from nature.
John Dewey, signer of the Humanist Manifesto I, says this regarding education:
education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform…. In this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.
John Dewey, Education Today, “My Pedagogic Creed,” (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), p. 15, 17.
You see, John Dewey argues that “scientific” education has made the notion of the supernatural “incredible,” and anticipates “the coming of a fuller and deeper religion” – Humanism. Dewey viewed public education as the vehicle to promote this “deeper religions.”
We certainly cannot teach religion as an abstract essence. We have got to teach something as religion, and that means practically some religion…. It is their business to do what they can to prevent all public educational agencies from being employed in ways which inevitably impede the recognition of the spiritual import of science ands of democracy, and hence of that type of religion which will be the fine flower of the modern spirit’s achievement.
Ibid – 1940 edition.
My point as I continue on here is that men are made for revelation, if God’s is thrown to the wayside, some other revelation will take its place. Roy Wood Sellers is also a signer of the Humanist Manifesto I, he says:
The center of gravity of religion has been openly changing for some time now from supernaturalism to what may best be called a humanistic naturalism…. There have been many steps forward in the past, for every age must process its own religion, a religion concordant with its knowledge and expressed of its problems and aims…. The coming phase of religion will reflect man’s power over nature and his moral courage in the face of the facts and possibilities of life. It will be a religion of action and passion, a social religon, a religion of goals and prospects. It will be a free man’s religion, a religion for an adult and aspiring democracy.
Roy Wood Sellers, The Next Step In Religion (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918), foreword.
Here Sellers makes the case for atheistic, naturalistic Humanism as the next world religion, or revelation. Again:
But the humanist’s religion is the religion of one who says yea to life here and now, of one who is self-reliant and fearless, intelligent and creative. It is the religion of the will to power, of one who is hard on himself and yet joyous in himself. It is the religion of courage and purpose and transforming energy. Its motto is, “What hath man not wrought?” Its goal is the mastery of all things that they may become servants and instrumentalities to man’s spiritual comradeship. Whatever mixture of magic, fear, ritual and adoration religion may have been in man’s early days, it is now, and henceforth must be, that which concerns man’s nobilities, his discovery of, and loyalty to, the pervasive values of life. The religious man will now be he who seeks out causes to be loyal to, social mistakes to correct, wounds to heal, achievements to further. He will be constructive, fearless, loyal, sensitive to the good wherever found, a believer in mankind, a fighter for things worth while…. The religion of human possibilities needs prophets who will grip men’s souls with their description of a society in which the righteousness, wisdom and beauty will reign together…. Loyalty to such an ideal will surely constitute the heart of the humanist’s religion…. If religion is to survive, it must be human and social. It is they who insists upon a supernatural foundation and object who are its enemies. Man’s life is spiritual in its own right. So long as he shall dream of beauty and goodness and truth his life will not lack religion.
Ibid., p. 212, 215-216, 225.
Curtis W. Reese likewise signed the Humanist Manifesto I, he says quite plainly:
Within the liberal churches of America there is a religious movement which has come to be known as Humanism…. There is a large element of faith in all religion. Christianity has faith in the love of God; and Humanism in man as the measure of values…. Hypotheses, postulates, and assumptions in their proper realm are comparable to faith in the realm of religion. In this way I speak of the faith of Humanism.
Edited by Curtis W. Reese, Humanist Sermons, preface and “The Faith of Humanism,” (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1927), p. v, 39, 40
One last quote, as I could go on ad infinitum, another signer was Charles Francis Potter, he plainly states:
[Humanism] is a new type of religion altogether…. Is Humanism a religion? It is both a religion and a philosophy of culture…. Education is the most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching.
Charles Potter, HUMANISM: A New Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), p. 3, 114, 128
You can see that one revelation, say, “God exists,” is replaced with another that says, “God does not exist.”
Here is a quote from the famous 1961 court case, Torcaso v. Watkins:
Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.
See: Washington Ethical Society v. District of Columbia, 101 U.S.App.D.C. 371, 249 F.2d 127; Fellowship of Humanity v. County of Alameda, 153 Cal.App.2d 673, 315 P.2d 394; II Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 293; 4 Encyclopedia Britannica (1957 ed.) 325-327; 21 id. at 797; Archer, Faiths Men Live By (2d ed. revised by Purinton), 120-138, 254-313; 1961 World Almanac 695, 712; Year Book of American Churches for 1961, at 29, 47.
“Secular Humanism” is official atheism… BTW. It is a religion according to law, and why there are atheist (secular humanist) chaplains in the military.
Humanism is revelation, and just as “absolute” as the other.
Paul Kurtz says, “Humanism is a philosophical, religious, and moral point of view.”
Dewey states, “Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race…. It remains to make it explicit and militant.”
Chesterton said,
“When a man ceases to believe in God he does not believe in nothing, he believes almost in anything.”
Humanism is a religion, and the Supreme Court defined it as such in 1961 (Torcasov. Watkins, 1961; the word “religion” or “religious” occurs 28 times in the first Manifesto, 1933). While the initial Manifesto is specifically religious, the subsequent humanist documents are not. However, the democratic humanism of the Secular Humanist Declaration (1980), and the “planetary” humanism of Kurtz’s Humanist Manifesto 2000, do not contradict the major premises of the first Manifesto.
The initial Manifesto most plainly declares humanism to be a religious enterprise. The very first section (or article) states: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created” (1933, emp. added). Religionists familiar with the goals and practices of secular humanism may be surprised at the high praise of traditional religion in this seminal treatise:
Religions have always been means for realizing the highest values of life. Their end has been accomplished through the interpretation of the total environing situation (theology or world view), the sense of values resulting therefrom (goal or ideal), and the technique (cult) established for realizing the satisfactory life…. [T]hrough all changes religion itself remains constant in its quest for abiding values, an inseparable feature of human life (Humanist…, 1933, Preface, parenthetical items in orig.).
So the secularist’s problem is not with religion per se, but with religious beliefs and practices that are antithetical to certain humanist norms and objectives. Secularists reject “salvationism,” which they regard as based on mere “affirmation” (Humanist…, 1973). Practically all religion other than humanism falls into the category of religion that humanism would oppose. So, religion must be restructured into a humanist “faith” or belief system.
The first Manifesto unveils the humanists’ desire to reshape modern religion. “The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world. The time is past for mere revision of traditional values…. Religions the world over are under the necessity of coming to terms with new conditions created by a vastly increased knowledge and experience” (1933, Preface). In a sense, humanists see themselves as saving people from theistic religion: “There is a great danger of a final, and we believe fatal, identification of the word religion with doctrines and methods which have lost their significance and which are powerless to solve the problem of human living in the Twentieth Century…. Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created” (Preface-Section 1).
Because theistic religion is so “out of date” according to secularists, a mammoth adjustment is in order. Religion of practically every kind must be eliminated or restructured.
Today man’s larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion. Such a vital, fearless, and frank religion capable of furnishing adequate social goals and personal satisfactions may appear to many people as a complete break with the past. While this age does owe a vast debt to the traditional religions, it is none the less obvious that any religion that can hope to be a synthesizing and dynamic force for today must be shaped for the needs of this age. To establish such a religion is a major necessity of the present. It is a responsibility which rests upon this generation (Humanist…, 1933, Preface).
Humanists seem to have as their primary religious activity expunging God from society and the minds of people (see “Humanists Praise…,” 2007; “‘Church Polling Place…’,” 2006). Only when God is out of the picture may humanists convert all humans to the religion of humanism (and this is precisely what they intend to do; see Ericson, 2006; Lyons and Butt, 2007).
A chap in a Facebook group posted a few points in a post, of which I took this point up to respond to.
…My moral values have a simple root…if an action causes harm to another person, that act is immoral. If my inaction causes harm to another person, that inaction is immoral…
I first posted this as a response:
You would have to define and then implement this definition in a way that non-theistic governments would accept (like the many Eastern-block countries of our past for example). Some countries would view the disabled and farmers as harming society, and thus view the moral rout for said society as a whole to rid themselves of these persons/groups. They would say to NOT do so causes harm.
BUT, I didn’t have to really do any heavy lifting… this person did it for me. After reading through the discussion, the same person said this:
…Morality actually derives from human self interest in preserving the group they needed to be part of to survive in a hostile world. It had to be a feature in the lives of the earliest human ancestor species…
To which I replied:
Oh, this comment refutes you OP [original post]. “Morality actually derives from human self interest in preserving the group they needed to be part of to survive in a hostile world.”
So another group’s morality to survive in a hostile world (say, Pol-Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Caesars, etc) are just as “moral” then. Unless you are saying that there is a universal code you are tapping into to compare/contrast, and put on a higher plane? Not only that, but you would need to argue that another person would have to have that same ability…. At least if you are expecting your OP to carry any weight.
Otherwise you are merely here expressing your preference (emoting), like my children telling me they prefer chocolate ice cream over vanilla.
Not only that, but the majority group, whether in a country or in the world, would decide this ethos (what it “means” to survive). And thus, to speak out against this consensus (whether is science or in morality) would be immoral.
BONUS!
A couple examples of this ethos at work:
“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.”
Mussolini, Diuturna (1924) pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.
“The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law [natural selection] did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all…. If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translator/annotator, James Murphy (New York: Hurst and Blackett, 1942), pp. 161-162; found in: Norman L. Geisler & Peter Bocchino, Unshakeable Foundations: Contemporary Answers to Crucial Questions About the Christian Faith (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2001), 206.
“What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.” — Richard Dawkins
Stated during an interview with Larry Taunton, “Richard Dawkins: The Atheist Evangelist,” by Faith Magazine, Issue Number 18, December 2007.
Atheist Daniel Dennett, for example, asserts that consciousness is an illusion. (One wonders if Dennett was conscious when he said that!) His claim is not only superstitious, it’s logically indefensible. In order to detect an illusion, you’d have to be able to see what’s real. Just like you need to wake up to know that a dream is only a dream, Daniel Dennett would need to wake up with some kind of superconsciousness to know that the ordinary consciousness the rest of us mortals have is just an illusion. In other words, he’d have to be someone like God in order to know that.
Dennett’s assertion that consciousness is an illusion is not the result of an unbiased evaluation of the evidence. Indeed, there is no such thing as “unbiased evaluation” in a materialist world because the laws of physics determine everything anyone thinks, including everything Dennett thinks. Dennett is just assuming the ideology of materialism is true and applying its implications to consciousness. In doing so, he makes the same mistake we’ve seen so many other atheists make. He is exempting himself from his own theory. Dennett says consciousness is an illusion, but he treats his own consciousness as not an illusion. He certainly doesn’t think the ideas in his book are an illusion. He acts like he’s really telling the truth about reality.
When atheists have to call common sense “an illusion” and make self-defeating assertions to defend atheism, then no one should call the atheistic worldview “reasonable.” Superstitious is much more accurate.
Frank Turek, Stealing from God (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2014), 46-47.
….Darwin thought that, had the circumstances for reproductive fitness been different, then the deliverances of conscience might have been radically different. “If… men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering” (Darwin, Descent, 82). As it happens, we weren’t “reared” after the manner of hive bees, and so we have widespread and strong beliefs about the sanctity of human life and its implications for how we should treat our siblings and our offspring.
But this strongly suggests that we would have had whatever beliefs were ultimately fitness producing given the circumstances of survival. Given the background belief of naturalism, there appears to be no plausible Darwinian reason for thinking that the fitness-producing predispositions that set the parameters for moral reflection have anything whatsoever to do with the truth of the resulting moral beliefs. One might be able to make a case for thinking that having true beliefs about, say, the predatory behaviors of tigers would, when combined with the understandable desire not to be eaten, be fitness producing. But the account would be far from straightforward in the case of moral beliefs.” And so the Darwinian explanation undercuts whatever reason the naturalist might have had for thinking that any of our moral beliefs is true. The result is moral skepticism.
If our pretheoretical moral convictions are largely the product of natural selection, as Darwin’s theory implies, then the moral theories we find plausible are an indirect result of that same evolutionary process. How, after all, do we come to settle upon a proposed moral theory and its principles as being true? What methodology is available to us?
Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, eds., Contending With Christianity’s Critics: Answering the New Atheists & Other Objections (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2009), 70.
Dawkins spells out the contradiction: “As an academic scientist, I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs.” A Devils Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 10-11.
In another place, he admits to the logic of his own determinism (that people cannot be held responsible for their actions), but emotionally he cannot accept this. See the Dawkins interview by Logan Gage, “Who Wrote Richard Dawkins’s New Book?,”Evolution News (website), October 28, 2006:
Manzari: Dr. Dawkins thank you for your comments. The thing I have appreciated most about your comments is your consistency in the things I’ve seen you’ve written. One of the areas that I wanted to ask you about, and the place where I think there is an inconsistency, and I hoped you would clarify, is that in what I’ve read you seem to take a position of a strong determinist who says that what we see around us is the product of physical laws playing themselves out; but on the other hand it would seem that you would do things like taking credit for writing this book and things like that. But it would seem, and this isn’t to be funny, that the consistent position would be that necessarily the authoring of this book, from the initial conditions of the big bang, it was set that this would be the product of what we see today. I would take it that that would be the consistent position but I wanted to know what you thought about that.
Dawkins: The philosophical question of determinism is a very difficult question. It’s not one I discuss in this book, indeed in any other book that I’ve ever talked about. Now an extreme determinist, as the questioner says, might say that everything we do, everything we think, everything that we write has been determined from the beginning of time in which case the very idea of taking credit for anything doesn’t seem to make any sense. Now I don’t actually know what I actually think about that, I haven’t taken up a position about that, it’s not part of my remit to talk about the philosophical issue of determinism. What I do know is that what it feels like to me, and I think to all of us, we don’t feel determined. We feel like blaming people for what they do or giving people the credit for what they do. We feel like admiring people for what they do. None of us ever actually as a matter of fact says, “Oh well he couldn’t help doing it, he was determined by his molecules.” Maybe we should… I sometimes… Um… You probably remember many of you would have seen Fawlty Towers. The episode where Basil where his car won’t start and he gives it fair warning, counts up to three, and then gets out of the car and picks up a tree branch and thrashes it within an edge of his life. Maybe that’s what we all ought to… Maybe the way we laugh at Basil Fawlty, we ought to laugh in the same way at people who blame humans. I mean when we punish people for doing the most horrible murders, maybe the attitude we should take is “Oh they were just determined by their molecules.” It’s stupid to punish them. What we should do is say “This unit has a faulty motherboard which needs to be replaced.” I can’t bring myself to do that. I actually do respond in an emotional way and I blame people, I give people credit, or I might be more charitable and say this individual who has committed murders or child abuse of whatever it is was really abused in his own childhood. And so again I might take a…
Manzari: But do you personally see that as an inconsistency in your views?
Dawkins: I sort of do. Yes. But it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with otherwise life would be intolerable. But it has nothing to do with my views on religion it is an entirely separate issue.
Manzari: Thank you.
2 Peter 1:5-8:
“For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
In other words, there is no absolute moral ethic, Dawkins wants to have a consensus of people agreeing what is “right” and “wrong” — he says as much in the audio above. Which means that rape and murder are only taboo… not really wrong.
Secondly, there can be no concept of “ought”
What about human actions? They are of no more value or significance than the actions of any other material thing. Consider rocks rolling down a hill and coming to rest at the bottom. We don’t say that some particular arrangement of the rocks is right and another is wrong. Rocks don’t have a duty to roll in a particular way and land in a particular place. Their movement is just the product of the laws of physics. We don’t say that rocks “ought” to land in a certain pattern and that if they don’t then something needs to be done about it. We don’t strive for a better arrangement or motion of the rocks. In just the same way, there is no standard by which human actions can be judged. We are just another form of matter in motion, like the rocks rolling down the hill.
We tend to think that somewhere “out there” there are standards of behaviour that men ought to follow. But according to Dawkins there is only the “natural, physical world”. Nothing but particles and forces. These things cannot give rise to standards that men have a duty to follow. In fact they cannot even account for the concept of “ought”. There exist only particles of matter obeying the laws of physics. There is no sense in which anything ought to be like this or ought to be like that. There just is whatever there is, and there just happens whatever happens in accordance with the laws of physics.
Men’s actions are therefore merely the result of the laws of physics that govern the behaviour of the particles that make up the chemicals in the cells and fluids of their bodies and thus control how they behave. It is meaningless to say that the result of those physical reactions ought to be this or ought to be that. It is whatever it is. It is meaningless to say that people ought to act in a certain way. It is meaningless to say (to take a contemporary example) that the United States and its allies ought not to have invaded Iraq. The decision to invade was just the outworking of the laws of physics in the bodies of the people who governed those nations. And there is no sense in which the results of that invasion can be judged as good or bad because there are no standards to judge anything by. There are only particles reacting together; no standards, no morals, nothing but matter in motion.
Dawkins finds it very hard to be consistent to this system of belief. He thinks and acts as if there were somewhere, somehow standards that people ought to follow. For example in The God Delusion, referring particularly to the Christian doctrine of atonement, he says that there are “teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support”.(6) And he claims that religion favours an in-group/out-group approach to morality that makes it “a significant force for evil in the world”.(7)
According to Dawkins, then, there are such things as good and evil. We all know what good and evil mean. We know that if no good person should support the doctrine of atonement then we ought not to support that doctrine. We know that if religion is a force for evil then we are better off without religion and that, indeed, we ought to oppose religion. The concepts of good and evil are innate in us. The problem for Dawkins is that good and evil make no sense in his worldview. “There is nothing beyond the natural, physical world.” There are no standards out there that we ought to follow. There is only matter in motion reacting according to the laws of physics. Man is not of a different character to any other material thing. Men’s actions are not of a different type or level to that of rocks rolling down a hill. Rocks are not subject to laws that require them to do good and not evil; nor are men. Every time you hear Dawkins talking about good and evil as if the words actually meant something, it should strike you loud and clear as if he had announced to the world, “I am contradicting myself”.
Please note that I am not saying that Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in good and evil. On the contrary, my point is that he does believe in them but that his worldview renders such standards meaningless.
What I find interesting about the article by Rachel S. Mikva (USA TODAY) is her grouping these people with Christianity. For instance, she seems to think that the horned guy mentioning “god” means he is referencing “God” (the Judeo-Christian God). For instance, here is a decent article zeroing in on the neo-Pagan aspects of the white supremacy movement. Of which I know personally about being that I was in jail for almost a year-and-a-half. I know their neo-Pagan systems of belief well. As well as studying the Third Reich love of this Paganism. See for instance:
…Then Jacob Chansley, sometimes called the “QAnon Shaman,” took his bullhorn and announced gratitude to God for being able to “send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.”Bare-chested to expose his white supremacist tattoos, he had paused briefly to remove his Viking-inspired horned headdress and cap — presumably to assume a properly humble posture as he claimed the United States for himself and his fellow-believers.
One thing that should make it very clear where Angeli’s politics lie are his tattoos. On his torso he has a large Thor’s hammer, known as Mjölnir, and what appears to be an image of the Norse world tree, Yggdrasill.
Mjölnir is one symbol we can be pretty sure was used by the original adherents of the Norse belief system, perhaps to summon the protection of the god Thor. Yggdrasill is the giant ash tree that supports the Norse cosmos, its branches reaching into sky realms inaccessible to humans, and its roots to the subterranean realm of the dead. Unlike Thor’s hammer, it was only rarely depicted by the Vikings, and representations such as the one below are modern interpretations.
Above these tattoos with a central place in Norse mythology is one that is more contentious. It depicts a valknut – an image that appears on two Viking-Age stones from Sweden carved with scenes from Norse mythology, including the Stora Hammars I stone on the island of Gotland.
The symbol’s original meaning is unclear, but it appears in close proximity to the father of the gods, Odin, on the stones. As Odin is closely connected with the gathering of fallen warriors to Valhalla, the valknut may be a symbol of death in battle.
Snorri Sturluson, a medieval Icelandic collector of myths, tells us in his “Language of Poetry” that a famous giant called Hrungnir had a stone heart “pointed with three corners”, and so the valknut is sometimes also called “Hrungnir’s Heart”. Whatever its original meaning, it has been used in more recent times by various neo-pagan groups – and increasingly by some white supremacists as a coded message of their belief in violent struggle…..
Another post with some names of the Norse gods is here. When I was in jail, I met a couple “Odinites”
ODINISM
…Odinism is another term for Asatru, a pagan religion. But in the FBI’s Project Megiddo, it was described as a:
… white supremacist ideology that lends itself to violence and has the potential to inspire its followers to violence in connection to the millennium. What makes Odinists dangerous is the fact that many believe in the necessity of becoming martyrs for their cause. — FBI Report: Project Megiddo
The New Romantics ”A Swedish expert on right-wing extremism says that racist Odinism is the radical religion of the future.” By Mattias Gardell, professor of religious history at the University of Stockholm’s Center for Research in International Migration and Ethnic Relations, writing in the Spring, 2001 edition of Intelligence Report (published by the Southern Poverty Law Center). See also: Clarification, by Mattias Gardell.
What is Asatru? Long before Christianity came to northern Europe, the people there – our ancestors – had their own religions. One of these was Asatru. It was practiced in the lands that are today Scandinavia, England, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other countries as well. Asatru is the original, or native, religion for the peoples who lived in these regions. Simply put, you might think of it as ”the religion of the Vikings” since they were its main followers in the years just before our ancestors were forced to adopt Christianity.
What does the word ”Asatru” mean? It means, roughly, “belief in the Gods” in Old Norse, the language of ancient Scandinavia in which so much of our source material was written. Asatru is the name by which the Norsemen called their religion.
[…]
What are the basic tenets or beliefs of Asatru? We believe in an underlying, all-pervading divine energy or essence which is generally hidden from us, and which is beyond our immediate understanding. We further believe that this spiritual reality is interdependent with us – that we affect it, and it affects us.
We believe that this underlying divinity expresses itself to us in the forms of the Gods and Goddesses. Stories about these deities are like a sort of code, the mysterious ”language” through which the divine reality speaks to us.
We believe in standards of behavior which are consistent with these spiritual truths and harmonious with our deepest being.
How does Asatru differ from other religions? Asatru is unlike the better-known religions in many ways. Some of these are:
We are polytheistic. That is, we believe in a number of deities, including Goddesses as well as Gods. (We have a tongue-in-cheek saying that a religion without a Goddess is halfway to atheism!)
We do not accept the idea of ”original sin,” the notion that we are tainted from birth and intrinsically bad, as does Christianity. Thus, we do not need ”saving.”
We do not claim to be a universal religion, a faith for all of humankind. In fact, we don’t think such a thing is possible or desirable. The different branches of humanity have different ways of looking at the world, each of which is valid for them. It is only right that they have different religions…..
Asatru (pronounced AS-a-tru or OW-sa-tru) is a word which means ”those true to the Gods” in Icelandic. It is one of the words used to label the pre-Christian, native religion of Scandinavia and the Germanic countries. Another term used for these beliefs is ”Odinism,” and it will be used throughout this document as meaning the same as Asatru. (Source: A Brief History of Asatru, or Odinism)
Finally, Odinism is anotherwhite supremacist ideology that lends itself to violence and has the potential to inspire its followers to violence in connection to the millennium. What makes Odinists dangerous is the fact that many believe in the necessity of becoming martyrs for their cause. For example, Bob Mathews, the leader of The Order, died in a fiery confrontation with law enforcement. Also, William King relished the fact that he would receive the death penalty for his act of dragging James Byrd, Jr. to his death. Odinism has little to do with Christian Identity but there is one key similarity: Odinism provides dualism — as does Christian Identity — with regard to the universe being made up of worlds of light (white people) and worlds of dark (non-white people). The most fundamental difference between the two ideologies is that Odinists do not believe in Jesus Christ. However, there are enough similarities between the myths and legends of Odinism and the beliefs of Christian Identity to make a smooth transition from Christian Identity to Odinism for those racist individuals whose penchant for violence is not being satisfied. (Source: White Supremacy, Project Megiddo)…..
Do you know what’s going on in your kid’s school? The three R’s – reading, writing, and arithmetic – have taken a back seat to a fourth R. Max Eden, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, explains what that fourth R is, and why it’s so destructive.
Renowned political science professor Carol Swain started out life with every possible disadvantage. She ended up teaching at two of the most prestigious universities in the country. How did she do it? She shares her story and her wisdom in this inspiring video.
FLASHBACK
I get “Whitesplained” to about white privilege by snowflakes!
(Posted late 2015)
I posted this earlier this morning as part of aLARGER POST… but it deserved to stand alone:
The above is somewhat — already — true:
This (the above and below) comes from EAG.org, here is part of the post by them, which can be linked to below:
…EAGnews has previously reported about the social justice math activists’ tricks in a book called “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers,” edited by Peterson.
The book includes “lessons and essays about racial profiling, environmental racism, unfair mortgage lending practices of Big Banks, the ‘overabundance of liquor stores’ in minority communities, and slave-owning U.S. presidents,” EAGnews’ Ben Velderman wrote.
“The book’s other major theme is that capitalism’s unequal distribution of wealth is the root cause of the world’s suffering. Students learn to despise free market economics in lessons about third-world sweatshops, ‘living wage’ laws, the earnings of fast food workers and restaurant CEOs, and the ‘hidden’ costs of meat production,” Velderman reported.
In the book, Peterson explains his rationale for attacking the American narrative:
“I figure that if kids start questioning the ‘official story’ early on, they will be more open to alternative viewpoints later on. While discovering which presidents were slave owners is not an in-depth analysis, it pokes an important hole in the godlike mystique that surrounds the ‘founding fathers.’”
Unionists now can’t even leave math alone and have hijacked it to push their own political agenda.
Thank goodness a growing number of parents have access to charter schools, cyberschools, voucher schools and homeschools – all of which provide an alternative to government schools, many of which have been infiltrated by left-wing activists like Lewis and Peterson.
During this interview, the “individual” came up. Why is this important? Because in totalitarian movements the individual is extinguished (which is opposite of our countries [the USA] documents). Below are some quotes from the socialist movement in Germany as an example. Here are the four parts mentioned in the above interview:
Why is the individual “being lambasted” (as mentioned above) important?
…Hitler noted that his task was to “convert the German Yolk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists.” Hitler informed Wagener that the task was to “find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution.” Hitler also admitted that Marx and Lenin had the right goal, but the wrong route.
[….]
Even the school textbooks were heavily peppered with opinions which exhibited a strong bias against free enterprise and capitalism. For example, a 1943 geography textbook stated: “Until the National Socialist takeover, the German economy followed the principles of economic liberalism, which held that a nation’s economy could develop irrespective of its natural economic foundations. If the National Socialist economic plan was to be successful in reviving the German economy, all participants in economic life had to be convinced of National Socialist economic thinking. In the economy too, the guiding principle had to be: The common good comes before the individual good.”…
Nevin Gussack, The NAZI War Against Capitalism (Self Published, can order on Amazon), 10, 26.
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” — Hitler
One may wish to read my “SCANDINAVIAN SOCIALISM” post for more info on Nordic socialism’s failure.
“It appears the real assault on ‘history’ can be found at CNN, where pundits compare a presidential administration they simply don’t like to one of the evilest and most violent regimes in human history” (LEGAL INSURRECTION)
More can be found at THE DAILY WIRE. Christiane Amanpour compared the Trump administration to Kristallnacht, a horrifying event that took place in November 1938 when Nazis “torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed close to 100 Jews,” according to History .com.
So, the only people “burning books” today (besides Muslims in Arab countries) is the Left. Here is a excerpt from a previous post:
?????
Dennis Prager discusses Amazons attempt to silence freedom in banning Dr. Joseph Nicolosi’s books. The son of the author in question calls into the show. Maybe the updated edition to the book, “120 Banned Books,” can have a “Jeff Bezos” chapter. In fact, If Barnes and Noble were smart, they would have a “Jeff Bezos Box-Set” of banned books during “Banned Books Week.” At any rate, I find it fascinating that Freud was a book burned by Nazis in Germany, and now we have another psychologist’s work being burned. The attack on free speech by the Egalitarian Left since the New Left’s birth is now being “fast tracked” via the WWW. These groups of activists are essentially no different than the jack-boot brown shirts of pre-war Germany: shouting down those who they disagree with, violently attacking those who merely hold another opinion, banning books, and the like…..
….Here are some stories detailing the above:
Amazon Bans Books on Conversion Therapy for Homosexuals Who Want to Change Their Lives (RED STATE);
Amazon Bans Books on Gay ‘Conversion Therapy’ – Is the Bible Next? (LIFESITE);
Amazon Bans Books On Gay ‘Conversion Therapy’ (DAILY WIRE);
Amazon Stops Selling Books by Catholic Psychologist Amid LGBT Activist Pressure (CHRISTIAN POST);
Amazon Bans Books On “Conversion Therapy” (DENNY BURK).
I just wish to note that I am as conservative of an Evangelical as can be. I am a young-earth creationist, believe the Biblical when it self-ascribes literalness, etc., etc. In my extensive library is the Satanic Bible (LaVey), the Book of Laws (Crowley), most anti-creationist books, most books by atheists, the Communist Manifesto, Mao’s Red Book, Margaret Sanger’s “Pivot of Civilization,” etc., etc…..
???????
I would like to note as well the only people tearing down history are Leftists:
Are conservative ideas allowed at American colleges? Protestors routinely try to shut down speeches by conservatives, like Heather Mac Donald, a Contributing Editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. She also wrote the book “The War on Cops,” which argues that Americans are less safe because police, for fear of being called racist, back off.
Dennis Prager sheds some thinking and light on the recent issue of the fascist left shutting down free speech. While I may parse a little of his position – for instance Cruz should have come out and have been clear on the main issue that this is a tactic of the left, to shut down freedom of speech while at the same time noting just how un-presidential Trump has been – Dennis Prager is still correct in his overall premise.
AND REPUBLICAN missed an opportunity to separate what conservatism “is” – the protection of all sides being heard; versus only one side using brown shirt type tactics:
Free Speech loses to Rollkommandos again:
JIHAD WATCH chimes in with the example from Richard Evans:
…Although this violence and brutalization of political opponents is a new phenomenon in American politics, it has a historical antecedent: the Nazi Brownshirts. In The Coming of the Third Reich, historian Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, Stormtroopers (Brownshirts) “organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers [and] staged mass disruptions of their lectures.”
To express dissent from Nazi positions became a matter of taking one’s life into one’s hands. The idea of people of opposing viewpoints airing their disagreements in a civil and mutually respectful manner was gone. One was a Nazi, or one was silent (and fearful). That is just the kind of public arena that the Left has been trying to bring to the United States for years, and is bringing to us now….
You can see a recent upload in this regards HERE. Free Speech is not a value of the Democrats…
I get “Whitesplained” to about white privilege by snowflakes!
(Posted late 2015)
I posted this earlier this morning as part of aLARGER POST… but it deserved to stand alone:
The above is somewhat — already — true:
This (the above and below) comes from EAG.org, here is part of the post by them, which can be linked to below:
…EAGnews has previously reported about the social justice math activists’ tricks in a book called “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers,” edited by Peterson.
The book includes “lessons and essays about racial profiling, environmental racism, unfair mortgage lending practices of Big Banks, the ‘overabundance of liquor stores’ in minority communities, and slave-owning U.S. presidents,” EAGnews’ Ben Velderman wrote.
“The book’s other major theme is that capitalism’s unequal distribution of wealth is the root cause of the world’s suffering. Students learn to despise free market economics in lessons about third-world sweatshops, ‘living wage’ laws, the earnings of fast food workers and restaurant CEOs, and the ‘hidden’ costs of meat production,” Velderman reported.
In the book, Peterson explains his rationale for attacking the American narrative:
“I figure that if kids start questioning the ‘official story’ early on, they will be more open to alternative viewpoints later on. While discovering which presidents were slave owners is not an in-depth analysis, it pokes an important hole in the godlike mystique that surrounds the ‘founding fathers.’”
Unionists now can’t even leave math alone and have hijacked it to push their own political agenda.
Thank goodness a growing number of parents have access to charter schools, cyberschools, voucher schools and homeschools – all of which provide an alternative to government schools, many of which have been infiltrated by left-wing activists like Lewis and Peterson.
During this interview, the “individual” came up. Why is this important? Because in totalitarian movements the individual is extinguished (which is opposite of our countries [the USA] documents). Below are some quotes from the socialist movement in Germany as an example. Here are the four parts mentioned in the above interview:
Why is the individual “being lambasted” (as mentioned above) important?
…Hitler noted that his task was to “convert the German Yolk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists.” Hitler informed Wagener that the task was to “find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution.” Hitler also admitted that Marx and Lenin had the right goal, but the wrong route.
[….]
Even the school textbooks were heavily peppered with opinions which exhibited a strong bias against free enterprise and capitalism. For example, a 1943 geography textbook stated: “Until the National Socialist takeover, the German economy followed the principles of economic liberalism, which held that a nation’s economy could develop irrespective of its natural economic foundations. If the National Socialist economic plan was to be successful in reviving the German economy, all participants in economic life had to be convinced of National Socialist economic thinking. In the economy too, the guiding principle had to be: The common good comes before the individual good.”…
Nevin Gussack, The NAZI War Against Capitalism (Self Published, can order on Amazon), 10, 26.
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” — Hitler
One may wish to read my “SCANDINAVIAN SOCIALISM” post for more info on Nordic socialism’s failure.
THE NATIONAL PULSE was one of the first places I could find a story (hat-tip to theWANAB3), Here is an excerpt from their story:
U.S. Park Police have told reporters they did not use tear gas in LaFayette Square last night ahead of the President’s walk to St. John’s Church. Instead, police officers used smoke canisters to disperse protesters who were hurling bottles at them.
The news – from Park Police themselves – potentially renders virtually every mainstream media organization and Twitter verified user guilty of spreading misinformation.
WTOP’s Neil Augenstein reported this morning: “U.S. Park Police is explaining its decision-making in clearing Lafayette Square, at least 20 minutes before DC’s 7p curfew, on night 4 of protests. A source says tear gas was never used — instead smoke cannisters [sic] were deployed, which don’t have an uncomfortable irritant in them.
“And, the source says Park Police didn’t know President Trump would be walking across the park several minutes later. Park Police say the reason the crowd was disbursed with smoke cannisters is that at that moment, officers were being pelted with water bottles. Another factor was that protesters had climbed on top of the structure at the north end of Lafayette Square that had been burned the day before.”
Adding to this, Augenstein said: “In theory it’s possible another agency used tear gas, in addition to Park Police using smoke cannisters [sic], but my source was on the scene, got a dose of smoke, but didn’t feel the irritants of tear gas.”
[….]
UPDATE 11:40AM – WTOP reports: “DC Police Chief Peter Newsham just said the only time his agency used tear gas and pepper balls last night was later in the evening, when protesters had gotten “very aggressive” near Judiciary Square.”
Then I cam across the FOX NEWS story: Attorney General William Barr gave the order to push protesters out; Kristin Fisher reports from the White House.
A really good article on this comes from THE FEDERALIST, and it is worth adding some emphasis to a portion of it:
For the media, however, these actions were further proof that Orange Man Bad is literally the worst, restoring rule of law is criminal, and standing in front of a church holding a Bible is an assault on the American conscience. They focused on how the Park Police had cleared the area ahead of the city-wide curfew declared by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Facts were no barrier to their narrative. They spun a tale of violent, jack-booted cops running rampant through the streets over innocent docile protesters, using tear gas to clear the area. It turns out none of that was true.
Every single major media outlet falsely reported that Park Police were unprovoked when they used “tear gas” to clear the area. If any of that were true, it might mark the first time in history that cops without gas masks launched tear gas in an area that the president of the United States easily walked through minutes later.
After thousands of false tweets, print stories, and broadcast stories to the contrary, local journalist Neal Augenstein of WTOP reported that a Park Police source said “tear gas was never used — instead smoke canisters were deployed, which don’t have an uncomfortable irritant in them.” Further, the source said the crowd was dispersed because of projectiles being thrown by the “peaceful protesters” at the Park Police and because “peaceful protesters” had climbed on top of a structure in Lafayette Park that had been burned the prior night.
Sgt. Eduardo Delgado, the public information officer for the Park Police, confirmed the agency did not use tear gas. And later this afternoon, United States Park Police acting Chief Gregory T. Monahan exploded the entire false narrative:
On Monday, June 1, the USPP worked with the United States Secret Service to have temporary fencing installed inside Lafayette Park. At approximately 6:33 pm, violent protestors on H Street NW began throwing projectiles including bricks, frozen water bottles and caustic liquids. The protestors also climbed onto a historic building at the north end of Lafayette Park that was destroyed by arson days prior. Intelligence had revealed calls for violence against the police, and officers found caches of glass bottles, baseball bats and metal poles hidden along the street.
To curtail the violence that was underway, the USPP, following established policy, issued three warnings over a loudspeaker to alert demonstrators on H Street to evacuate the area.Horse mounted patrol, Civil Disturbance Units and additional personnel were used to clear the area. As many of the protestors became more combative, continued to throw projectiles, and attempted to grab officers’ weapons, officers then employed the use of smoke canisters and pepper balls. No tear gas was used by USPP officers or other assisting law enforcement partnersto close the area at Lafayette Park. Subsequently, the fence was installed.
Prior to getting the actual facts, nearly every major media outlet falsely reported that canisters of tear gas, not smoke canisters, were used against peaceful protesters. ….
TRUMP IS HITLER
THE FEDERALIST then goes on to document just how wide-spread the lie was.
Some other lies not so widely picked up are these two. LEGAL INSURRECTION details one of them by Debra Messing (actress):
I already covered one fake photo today. Now the left claim President Donald Trump held a Bible yesterday as Hitler did during his reign of terror.
It was photoshopped. Why would people fall for this? Hitler hated religion….
[….]
Debra you’re literally sharing fake news. Even Buzzfeed will tell your the Hitler photo is photoshopped. God you guys are gullible. Do you have the decency to delete this lie? https://t.co/UivI70b3Y3
TWITCHY has a story about the second photoshopped (not really photoshopped but mislabeled year-wise). They note this and then the TWITTER response:
There’s a “Trump’s afraid” narrative going around on the Left, and Democrat Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell has done her best to try and reinforce that perception:
Hillary Clinton appears to have used the same photograph in her “compare/contrast” tweet of Obama vs. Trump:
I combine a segment from a recent Hodge Twins video (https://youtu.be/rGwAjPgo8Jc) along with yesterdays Larry O’Connor Show (790-KABC: https://tinyurl.com/yaak4jkd). The Hodge Twins play Don Lemon’s audio that Larry O’Connor plays and refutes as well with President Trump actually speaking out on the issue of the riots. Kinda a hodgepodge, but well worth the listen.
‘He was a vegetarian. He never ate any meat during the entire time I was there,’ Woelk said of the Nazi leader. (DAILY MAIL)
As you read the following, keep in mind both this post detailing the size of government to do everything the 2020 Democrats want to do, which includes even our diet. Walter Williams called these people LIFESTYLE NAZI’S a long time ago
Without any real evidence, Mrs. Obama has claimed that poor Americans are trapped in what she calls “food deserts,” where they must apparently trudge for miles outside of their dismal neighborhoods to buy a piece of fruit or some celery sticks. According to Mrs. Obama, a food desert is an inner city without a grocery store. She envisioned spending millions of federal dollars to plant grocery stores in those blighted areas so the “poor” won’t have to buy food at mini-marts.
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan actually attended Al Sharpton’s National Action Network annual convention in April 2012. There he told an absurd story about how Barack Obama, who attended Harvard University, knows what “it’s like to take a subway or a bus just to find a fresh piece of fruit in a grocery store.” No fruit at Harvard?
The story may be ridiculous, but Michelle Obama was dead serious about extorting $400 million from American taxpayers to solve the nonexistent problem of food deserts.
In reality there are no such things as food deserts. Researcher Roland Sturm at the Rand Corporation studied food desert claims and found that individuals in urban areas can get any kind of food they want within a couple of miles. He suggested we call these areas “food swamps,” rather than food deserts.
In addition, researcher Helen Lee at the Public Policy Institute in California found that in poor neighborhoods, citizens had twice as many fast-food restaurants and convenience stores as wealthier neighborhoods had, and more than three times as many corner stores. These areas had twice as many supermarkets and large-scale grocery stores as wealthier neighborhoods.
The truth was exactly the opposite of Mrs. Obama’s claim, but hers satisfied the mind-set of the utopians, who believe they alone could solve problems that never existed. Mrs. Obama later began a second crusade to force restaurants and schools to serve “healthy” foods, ban “junk food,” and bully restaurants into serving smaller portions.
Michelle Obama worked in 2010 to get Congress to pass a nutrition bill that would give the Department of Agriculture new powers to regulate school lunches. The bill was passed in December of that year, and now that the regulations have gone into effect, it is having a devastating impact on students and their angry parents.
Under Department of Agriculture edicts, cinnamon rolls and chili are banned. School bands and groups can’t sell candy bars for fund-raising. The government is now mandating portion sizes, including how many tomatoes must go into a salad!
Children are permitted to refuse three items on a tray, but not fruits and vegetables. Of course, the Food Police can’t yet force them to eat their veggies, but it’s not far-fetched to think they might someday. After all, the Obamas have rammed through legislation that initially demanded that nuns buy insurance coverage for contraception and pregnancy. Fortunately the Supreme Court ended that requirement in 2014.
The new federal guidelines, thanks to Michelle Obama, now limit caloric intake to between 750 and 850 a day for schoolchildren. Teenagers require between 2,000 and 3,000 calories a day to be healthy and grow, and high school athletes need up to 5,000 calories per day. In short, the First Lady is responsible for malnourishing kids through the school lunch program.
In 2006 the three-term mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, decided to add the title “Food Police Chief’ to his list of duties in the Big Apple. That year, he banished trans fats from city restaurants and, in 2010, forced food manufacturers to alter their recipes to include less sodium. He failed, however, to remove salt shakers from the tables. Patrons who receive a dish of food at a New York restaurant that they deem not salty enough may still simply add salt.
In spring 2012 Bloomberg decided that New Yorkers had to be protected even more from themselves, so he issued an edict banning soft drinks larger than sixteen ounces. The ban applied to restaurants, movie theaters, stadiums, and arenas.
In August 2012 Bloomberg banned the distribution of baby formula in city hospitals unless it is medically necessary because he, a man, had decided that new mothers should always breast-feed regardless of their weight, professions, or other personal details. Free formula provided to mothers was also eliminated. Bloomberg determined that breast-feeding is best for children and that new mothers should not have a voice in the decision regardless of their circumstances. But Bloomberg did want women to have freedom of choice to kill their young before they are born. He was willing to give moms the option to abort their unborn babies, but not to feed formula to those who are living.
What is next for those like Obama and Bloomberg? Mandated calisthenics each morning at six? Currently the United States seems to be incubating and hatching utopian tyrants at an alarming rate.
Keeping in mind as well as my bullet-points regarding the supposedly “right wing” El Paso Shooter:
a basic universal income
universal healthcare
complain about cost of college
talk about how oil companies are polluting water
how we waste resources — trees for overuse of paper-towels and other wasteful indulgences
think corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over-harvesting resources
corporations merely want illegal immigration for cheap labor
overpopulation is a real danger/threat that needs immediate dealing with
In an excellent post at CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION, we find some concerns about diet and environment similar to the 2020 Democrat candidates and Left leaning people:
Hitler was a vegetarian, as many of his close associates affirmed, particularly once WWII began, although some claim that he ate some meat occasionally. He would tell dinner guests the graphic details of a slaughterhouse that he visited in order to shame his guests into not eating a “corpse.” Hitler’s vegetarianism was not just a personal health-kick. It was what he thought was necessary to make the master race healthier, but it was also integral to his nature-worshipping, Christianity rejecting worldview. Goebbels says,
We come back to religious questions again. The Fuhrer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race. This can be seen in the similarity of religious rites. Both (Judaism and Christianity) have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end, they will be destroyed. The Fuhrer is a convinced vegetarian, on principle. His arguments cannot be refuted on any serious basis. They are totally unanswerable. He has little regard for homo sapiens. Man should not feel so superior to animals. He has no reason to. Man believes that he alone has intelligence, a soul, and the power of speech. Has not the animal these things? Just because we, with our dull senses, cannot recognise them, it does not prove that they are not there.
Hitler’s attachment to “the animal element” led him to be an opponent of vivisection, even though, according to Nazi press chief Otto Dietrich, he regarded humanitarianism as “a mixture of cowardice, stupidity and intellectual conceit.”
Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax created controversy when they published “Understanding Nazi Animal Protection and the Holocaust” in 1992. In Sax’s later book, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust, he relates: “That the Nazis might be capable of humane legislation was such a disconcerting idea that even the detached, academic style of our paper could not make it acceptable to many people. The topic of animals, like the Holocaust itself, evokes passions of great intensity and confusion.”
Within months of gaining power, the Nazis passed laws regulating the slaughter of animals and banning vivisection, with some exceptions, in regions of Germany. On the radio in August 1933 Hermann Göring announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments” and promised “to concentration camps those who still think that they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property.” Animal protection efforts continued to be a prominent part of the Nazi agenda:
In 1934, the new government hosted an international conference on animal protection in Berlin. Over the speaker’s podium, surrounded by enormous swastikas, were the words “Entire epochs of love will be needed to repay animals for their value and service” (Meyer 1975). In1936 the German Society for Animal Psychology was founded, and in 1938 animal protection was accepted as a subject to be studied in German public schools and universities.”
The Nazis enthusiastically promoted all the causes of late twentieth-century American environmentalists: Vegetarianism, organic farming, homeopathic medicine, animal rights laws, special protection of certain species of animals and plants, creating nature preserves to block development. Peter Staudenmaier, in “Fascist Ecology: The ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents,” documents the extent of environmentalist legislation during the Nazi era:
The prominence of nature in the party’s philosophical background helped ensure that more radical initiatives often received a sympathetic hearing in the highest offices of the Nazi state. In the mid-thirties Todt and Seifert vigorously pushed for an all-encompassing Reich Law for the Protection of Mother Earth “in order to stem the steady loss of this irreplaceable basis of all life.” Seifert reports that all of the ministries were prepared to co-operate save one; only the minister of the economy opposed the bill because of its impact on mining….
With Hess’s enthusiastic backing, the “green wing” was able to achieve its most notable successes. As early as March 1933, a wide array of environmentalist legislation was approved and implemented at national, regional and local levels. These measures, which included reforestation programs, bills protecting animal and plant species, and preservationist decrees blocking industrial development, undoubtedly “ranked among the most progressive in the world at that time.” Planning ordinances were designed for the protection of wildlife habitat and at the same time demanded respect for the sacred German forest. The Nazi state also created the first nature preserves in Europe….
Along with Darré’s efforts toward re-agrarianization and support for organic agriculture, as well as Todt and Seifert’s attempts to institutionalize an environmentally sensitive land use planning and industrial policy, the major accomplishment of the Nazi ecologists was the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz of 1935. This completely unprecedented “nature protection law” not only established guidelines for safeguarding flora, fauna, and “natural monuments” across the Reich; it also restricted commercial access to remaining tracts of wilderness. In addition, the comprehensive ordinance “required all national, state and local officials to consult with Naturschutz authorities in a timely manner before undertaking any measures that would produce fundamental alterations in the countryside.”
[….]
After Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species, evolution became integrated into German environmentalism. Staudenmaier writes:
In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ‘ecology’ and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment. Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for the German-speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social darwinist philosophy he called ‘monism.’ The German Monist League he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views. Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics.
He held a naturalistic, yet Romantic, view of the oneness of nature, which included the oneness between society and nature. This allowed the Nazi horror of science being used to treat human beings as lab rats. Haeckel held that “civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.” Haeckel thus helped lay the foundations on which National Socialism would be built.
A hippie-type youth movement began in the early 1900s in Germany. Known as Wandervögel (‘wandering free spirits’), Staudenmaier recounts that this youth movement included such beliefs as neo-Romanticism, Eastern mysticism, and a “back-to-the-land emphasis [that] spurred a passionate sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered.” Thousands of these youth later came to be aligned with the Nazi movement….
The following excerpt come from an entire Chapter I have HERE... but I narrowed it a bit:
MELANIE PHILIPPS
THE CONTINUUM OF FASCISM AND ENVIRONMENTALISM
Perhaps the most striking continuation of fascist ideas under the guise of left-wing progressive thinking lies in the modern environ-mental movement, with its desire to call a halt to dehumanizing modernity and return to an organic harmony with the natural world.
Veneration of nature and the corresponding belief that civilization corrupts man’s innate capacity for happiness and freedom go back to the eighteenth century and Jean Jacques Rousseau—who bridged the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment, the world of reason and the world of emotion, movements of the left and the right. His idealizing of a primitive state of nature, along with a theory of human evolution through survival of the fittest that predated Darwin by a hundred years, became a galvanizing force in the nineteenth century among those who were sounding a retreat from modernity and reason, into the darkness of obscurantism and prejudice. And one of the principal routes they took was through the natural world.
In the mid nineteenth century, Darwinism was sowing the seeds of environmentalism, and in doing so it also fed into fascism. The critical figure in making this crossover was Ernst Haeckel, the most famous German Darwinist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Haeckel believed that the theory of evolution would transform human life by dethroning man from the pinnacle of Creation. He and his followers saw Darwinism as far more than just a biological theory; it was the central ingredient of a new worldview that would challenge Christianity. His Darwinist views led him and his followers to espouse scientific racism, the belief that racial competition was a necessary part of the struggle for existence and—even though he opposed militarism—that the extermination of “inferior” races was a step toward progress.31
Haeckel also believed that mind and matter were united everywhere, and he ascribed psychic characteristics to single-celled organisms and even to inanimate matter.32 As the authoritative historian of the ecological movement Anna Bramwell relates, it was Haeckel who in 1867 coined the term “ecology” to denote a scientific discipline focusing on the web that links organisms with their environment.33 With his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bolsche and Bruno Wille, Haeckel deeply influenced subsequent generations of environmentalists by binding the study of the natural world into a reactionary political framework.34
The twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Klages was firmly in the Haeckel mould. In 1913, he wrote an essay titled “Man and Earth” for a gathering of the Wandervogel or Free German Youth, the prewar movement that rejected materialism for excursions in more basic outdoor living. According to Peter Staudenmaier,
“Man and Earth” anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement. It decried the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global ecosystemic balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats, urban sprawl, and the increasing alienation of people from nature. In emphatic terms it disparaged Christianity, capitalism, economic utilitarianism, hyperconsumption and the ideology of “progress:’ It even condemned the environmental destructiveness of rampant tourism and the slaughter of whales, and displayed a clear recognition of the planet as an ecological totality.35
A political reactionary and virulent antisemite, Klages was described as a “Volkish fanatic” and an “intellectual pacemaker for the Third Reich” who “paved the way for fascist philosophy in many important respects:’ Denouncing rational thought itself, he believed that the intellect was parasitical on life and that progress merely represented the gradual domination of intellect over life.36
During the interwar period, most ecological thinkers subscribed to this way of thinking. There was a particularly close association between ecologists and German nationalists, among whom a number subsequently became Nazis. Their thinking was that nature was the life force from which Germany had been cut off, ever since the days of the Roman Empire, by the alien Christian-Judaic civilization, the source of all the anti-life manifestations of urbanism.
In 1932, the proto-fascist intellectual Oswald Spengler wrote about the deadening effect of machine technology” on the natural world and humanity:
The mechanisation of the world has entered on a phase of highly dangerous over-extension…. In a few decades most of the great forest will have gone, to be turned into news-print, and climatic changes have been thereby set afoot which imperil the land-economy of whole populations. Innumerable animal species have been extinguished…. Whole races of humanity have been brought almost to vanishing point…. This machine technology will end the Faustian civilisation and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten—our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman Roads and the Chinese Wall.37
Such ecological fixations were further developed in German Nazism. According to Ernst Lehmann, a leading Nazi biologist, “separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations.”38 The Nazis thus fixated on organic food, personal health and animal welfare. Heinrich Himmler was a certified animal rights activist and an aggressive promoter of “natural healing”; Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, championed homeopathy and herbal remedies; Hitler wanted to turn the entire nation vegetarian as a response to the unhealthiness promoted by capitalism.39
There was top-level Nazi support for ecological ideas at both ministerial and administrative levels. Alwin Seifert, for example, was a motorway architect who specialized in “embedding motorways organically into the landscape.” Following Rudolf Steiner, he argued against land reclamation and drainage; said that “classical scientific farming” was a nineteenth-century practice unsuited to the new era and that artificial fertilizers, fodder and insecticides were poisonous; and called for an agricultural revolution towards “a more peasant-like, natural, simple” method of farming “independent of capital.” Himmler established experimental organic farms including one at Dachau that grew herbs for SS medicines; a complete list of homeopathic doctors in Germany was compiled for him; and antivivisection laws were passed on his insistence. As Anna Bramwell observes,
“SS training included a respect for animal life of near Buddhist proportions”40
They did not show such respect, of course, for the human race. Neither does the ecological movement, for which, echoing Malthus, the planet’s biggest problem is the people living on it. Even though our contemporary era has been forged in a determination that fascism must never rise again, certain viilkish ideas that were central to fascism—about the organic harmony of the earth, the elevation of animal “rights” and the denigration of humans as enemies of nature—are today presented as the acme of progressive thinking.
This astounding repackaging was accomplished during the 1970s. While Western politicians were committed to growth and consumer society was taking off, the dread of overpopulation also grew. It is probably no coincidence that the fear of global immiseration coincided with the end of empire and the West’s loss of control over the developing world. Reports by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos presented to the UN World Conference on Human Environment in 1972 preached imminent doom as a result of rising technological capacity and argued that man had to replace family or national loyalties with allegiance to the planet. The Club of Rome, which was founded also in 1972, prophesied imminent global catastrophe unless resource use was curbed, a view that the oil shock of 1973 served to validate and embed in Western consciousness.
If ecology was to take off, however, it had to shed altogether its unhappy links with fascism, racial extermination and ultranationalism. It took a number of different opportunities to do so. During the 1960s in both Europe and North America it identified itself with radical left-wing causes, latching onto “alternative” politics such as feminism and, in Britain, Celtic nationalism. In the 1970s, the “small is beautiful” idea of the anti-Nazi emigre Fritz Schumacher took hold.41
In 1971, Schumacher became president of the Soil Association in Britain, which was critical in both promoting deeply ecological ideas and laundering them as fashionably progressive. Rudolf Steiner was the arch-proponent of “biodynarnic” agriculture, which eschewed artificial fertilizers and promoted self-sufficient farms as preserving the spirit of the soil. When the Soil Association was created in 1946, it embodied this “organic farming’ ideal. But Steiner was the also the founder of a movement called anthroposophy, which was based on the development of a nonsensory or so-called supersensory consciousness. It held that early stages of human evolution possessed an intuitive perception of reality, including the power of clairvoyance, which had been lost under the increasing reliance on intellect. It promoted the belief that the human being passed between stages of existence, incarnating into an earthly body, living on earth, leaving the body behind and entering into the spiritual domain before returning to be born again into a new life on earth.42
These essentially pagan and irrational ideas were, as we shall see later, intrinsic to ecological thinking. But they were also to surface in a remarkable new alliance between neo-Nazi doctrines and radical left-wing, anticapitalist and New Age ideas. Towards the end of the 1960s, finding itself criticized for espousing reactionary views, the Soil Association turned sharply leftwards and developed an egalitarian socioeconomic perspective instead. It published articles admiring Mao’s communes in China and suggested that plots of land a few acres in size should be distributed similarly among the British population.43
In Germany, the green movement that emerged from the student protests of 1968 bitterly attacked the “biodynamic” organic farmers for their perceived authoritarianism and social Darwinist beliefs. Thus German Greens of the 1970s, with a considerable communist element, had less to do with ecology than with participatory democracy, egalitarianism and women’s rights.44
Among radicals in America, there was a split after 1968 between those favoring organized terrorism and alternative groups. Young radicals in the latter camp, galvanized by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1966), claimed that multinational capitalism was responsible for pollution. Environmental concerns offered up a radicalism for the middle classes. The anarcho-communist Murray Bookchin wrote of a utopian future in communes when scarcity would disappear and man would return to living close to the land. American feminists in particular took up ecology, drawing upon its foundational belief in a primitive matriarchal paradise to support their attacks on patriarchal oppression.
The result of all this ferment was that the green movement became not just radical but radically incoherent. It became the umbrella for a range of alternative, anti-Western causes and lifestyles. But its constant factor was a strongly primitive, pagan and irrational element. As Anna Bramwell caustically comments, “The new paganism, often based on Atlantean theories of a lost golden age and theories of cultural diffusion via a vanished super race, is open to all and especially attractive to the semi-educated, semi-rational product of today’s de-naturing educational process, stripped of religion, reason, tradition and even history.”45
Despite a veneer of fashionable progressivism, the fact is that environmentalism’s fundamental opposition to modernity propels it straight into the arms of neofascism. For just like their precursors in the twenties and thirties, today’s ultranationalist and neo-Nazi groups chime with many of the ideas that also march under the green banner. In France, Italy and Belgium, the Nouvelle Droite combined Hellenic paganism with support for the dissolution of national boundaries; it was anticapitalist and anti-American, adopting sociobiological arguments to stress the uniqueness of each race and culture within national boundaries and to oppose colonization and empire. In Germany, the radical-right journal Mat was pacifist and ecological.46 Such groups met the left on the common ground of New Age paganism, expressed in particular through the religions and cultures of the East.
From the 1970s onwards, neofascist extremists began to repackage the old ideology of Aryan racism, elitism and force in new cultic guises involving esotericism and Eastern religions. Some groups mixed racism with Nordic pagan religions, celebrating magical signs of ancestral heritage and mystical blood loyalty. In the United States, Britain, Germany and Scandinavia, racial pagan groups today ponder runes, magic and the sinister mythology of the Norse gods Wotan, Loki and Fenriswolf. Like the Nazis, these groups resort to the pagan world to express their antipathy to any extraneous organisms that disturb their idea of racial or national purity. As Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes, “The racial interpretation of these esoteric ideas, cosmology and prophecies betrays these groups’ overwhelming anxiety about the future of white identity in multiracial societies.”47
In Italy, Julius Evola, who inspired a whole generation of postwar neofascists, embraced Hinduism and Tantrism, a radical Hindu cult focusing on women, goddesses and sexual energy, and revolving around the notion of breaking all bonds. By means of taboo and spiritually dangerous practices such as orgies and intoxication, the superior adept can raise his consciousness to supreme levels of unity with the divine female power of “Shakti;’ which animates and inspires the whole universe, thereby acquiring exceptional knowledge and power. Tantrism’s secrecy and elitism, writes Goodrick-Clarke, negates the modern world of rationalism and democracy.48
In Chile, the diplomat, explorer and poet Miguel Serrano adopted the mystical doctrines of Savitri Devi, the French-born Nazi-Hindu prophetess who described Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu and likened Nazism to the cult of Shiva because of its emphasis on destruction and new creation. Tracing semidivine Aryans to extraterrestrial origins, Serrano recommended kundalini yoga to repurify “mystical Aryan blood” to its former divine light. He also proposed a gnostic war against the Jews, promoted the idea of the “Black Sun” as a mystical source of energy capable of regenerating the Aryan race, and believed that the Nazis built UFOs in Antarctica….
[33]Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History (Yale University Press, 1989), p. 39.
[34]Peter Staudenmaier, “Fascist Ecology: The `Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents;’ in Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier (AK Press,1995)… [see new edition]
[35]Ibid.
[36]Ibid.
[37]Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics (Allen & Unwin, 1932).
[38] Staudenmaier, “Fascist Ecology.”
[39]Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, pp. 385-87.
[40] Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 204.
[41]Ibid., p. 213.
[42] Robert A. McDermott, “Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed. Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (Crossroad Publishing, 1995).
[43]Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 218.
[44] Ibid., pp. 219-25.
[45]Ibid., p. 232.
[46] Ibid., p. 232.
[47]Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York University Press, 2003), pp. 5-6.
[48]Ibid., p. 54.
WILLIAM J. MURRAY
REGULATORY UTOPIANS
CASS SUNSTEIN
Cass Sunstein was the Edward Mandell House/Rexford Tugwell character in the Obama administration. He was appointed to run Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2009. He left the administration in 2011 to return to Harvard, where he continues to brainwash his students into supporting his anti-Constitutional and totalitarian beliefs.
Sunstein is the consummate Progressive and utopian tyrant. He believes that the Constitution is a “living document”—code words for liberal judges having the power to interpret the Constitution and law in general to support the latest leftist political agenda.
Writing in The Partial Constitution (Harvard University Press, 1993), Sunstein pushed the idea of a “First Amendment New Deal,” which would create a government panel of experts to ensure a “diversity of views” on the airwaves. Imagine a panel of presidential appointees determining what constitutes diversity on TV and radio.
Sunstein also believes hunting should be banned, that animals should have the same rights as humans, and that lawyers should be empowered to file lawsuits on behalf of animals. Despite being against the killing of rabbits or deer, he is, like all Progressives, perfectly agreeable to destroying unborn humans at any stage of pregnancy.
In 2004 he published A Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. In it, he proposed a series of “rights” for individuals that would inevitably result in greatly expanding the power of the federal government over every aspect of our lives.
According to Sunstein, “Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust ‘government intervention’ and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions.”
Sunstein’s views sound like those of Benito Mussolini or Philip Dru in the utopian novel.
JOHN HOLDREN
President Obama appointed John Holdren to run the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and to cochair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Holdren sounds like a very dangerous tyrant in his written statements on population control and other issues. In 1977 he coauthored a book with Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich, titled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (W. H. Freeman, 1978), which seriously proposed, among other things, that women should be forced to abort their children; that populations should be sterilized by dropping drugs into the water supply; that people who “contribute to social deterioration” should be forcibly sterilized or forced to abort their children; that a “Planetary Regime” should assume total control of the global economy; and that an international police force should be used to dictate how all of us are to live our lives.
Because this was a White House office, the Senate did not have the authority to stop the appointment; however, some senators should have come forward and pointed out on the record that Holdren’s suggestions were very much the same as those of fascist utopian Adolf Hitler.
Holdren openly condemns the free enterprise system as the enemy of the people and a threat to the environment. Writing in his 1973 book, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions, also cowritten with the Ehrlichs, he called for a “massive campaign . . . to de-develop the United States” and other Western nations.
According to Holdren, the “mad czar” of science and technology:
De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation…. The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.
Elsewhere, he wrote, “By de-development, we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.”
The Soviet Union successfully did away with “planned obsolescence” by eliminating innovation. As no new cars were designed for decades, vehicles like the unsafe Lada lived on unchanged for decades. Like many Progressives who believe jobs should be “preserved” as a right, Holdren does not understand that artificially preserving outdated industries and nonproductive jobs results in a failure for new industries to come into existence.
William J. Murray, Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World With Central Planning (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2016), 165-171.
The media has been lying for two years about who President Trump called “very fine people.” The lies continue this very week. Did President Trump call neo-Nazis “very fine people” during a famous press conference following the Charlottesville riots of August 2017? The major media reported that he did. But what if their reporting is wrong? Worse, what if their reporting is wrong and they know it’s wrong? A straight exploration of the facts should reveal the truth. That’s what CNN political analyst Steve Cortes does in this critically important video.
PRAGER U has another version showing some video of the press saying this. I also include Larry’s audio montage HERE, at the 5:03 mark.
(Updated Media Original Post, Aug 2017)
Dennis Prager quickly deals out some common sense to squelch a mantra regarding Trump and Charlottesville.
Larry AGAIN takes us through Trump’s “good people on both sides” quote.
My somewhat humorous and hopefully challenging response to this issue if asked is this:
I am enjoying it… you have a radical socialist group on one-side clashing with a radical socialist group on the other — all fighting over Democratic history.
I just wanted to make more visually clear that Trump was correct in saying there were groups on both sides equal in their racism, hate, and violence. From Black Lives Matter to the KKK, both sides are cut from the same socialist cloth. In the video (HERE) you can see a Black Lives Matter person holding a sign up to block a street preachers sign. In the lower right of that sign is this: Workers World Party (WWP). Here is a short list of this groups terrible history:
International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) is a front group for the communist Workers World Party. The Workers World Party is, literally, a Stalinist organization. It rose out of a split within the old Socialist Workers Party over the Soviet Union’s 1956 invasion of Hungary — the breakaway Workers World Party was all for the invasion. International ANSWER today unquestioningly supports any despotic regime that lays any claim to socialism, or simply to anti-Americanism. It supported the butchers of Beijing after the slaughter of Tiananmen Square. It supports Saddam Hussein and his Baathist torture-state. It supports the last official Stalinist state, North Korea, in the mass starvation of its citizens. It supported Slobodan Milosevic after the massacre at Srebrenica. It supports the mullahs of Iran, and the narco-gangsters of Colombia and the bus-bombers of Hamas.
The despicable record of WWP in promoting Stalinist and fascist dictators is old news. WWP, the patron of International A.N.S.W.E.R., is on record supporting:
The pitiless massacre of Chinese protestors by the armed forces in Tiananmen in 1989. WWP states, “troops were issued arms… after some students took some soldiers hostage. On June 4, [1989], the demonstration changed from a peaceful protest to violent attacks on the soldiers… events were a battle – not a massacre.” Everybody in the world knows this is a disgusting lie.
The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, among whose defenders WWP are doubtless the most fawning. Their newspaper, also titled Workers World, wrote gleefully, in 2001, “more and more countries had begun individually breaking the ban on flights and other sanctions against Iraq.” Right: countries with an equally bad or worse record, like Yugoslavia, which supply Iraq with illegal chemical, biological, and other weapons.
The evil regime of crazed North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. WWP hack Deidre Griswold, who has been shoveling this manure for some 35 years, recently wrote, from the Communist hell itself, “People here in the socialist north of Korea are well aware of U.S. President George W. Bush’s remarks branding their country as part of an ‘Axis of Evil.’ It has in no way dampened their ardor for their independent socialist system… Koreans today are celebrating… the continuity of leadership represented by unity around Kim Jong Il, who is pledged to follow the course of national independence and socialist construction charted by Kim Il Sung… the North Korean socialist system, which has kept it from falling under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to most of the world.” No mention here of the numerous individuals and families that have risked their lives and those of their relatives to escape the reality of North Korean socialism, or of North Korean international weapons sales, kidnapping of foreign nationals, terrorist attacks, or other details.
In one of its most disgusting, and continuous, displays of admiration for genocidal fascists, WWP, the leaders of International A.N.S.W.E.R. are prominent defenders of indicted Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. When the trial of Milosevic began last year at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands. The International Action Center (IAC), predecessor of International A.N.S.W.E.R, “sent a delegation to take part in activities showing solidarity with the defendant and opposing the ‘trial’ as a NATO frame up.” They declared, “Washington and its NATO allies hopes (sic) to pin the guilt for the 10 years of civil war in the Balkans on the Yugoslav leader.” Who in the world, aside from fevered extremists, believes this swill? WWP has also published expensive volumes defending Milosevic.
Stalin and these dictators like Mao have killed more people than the National Socialists (NAZIs) could ever have dreamed.
THE VIDEO IS NO LONGER AVAILIABLE
Black Supremacist: ‘It’s Open Season On Killing White People And Crackas’ (DAILY CALLER)
#BlackLivesMatter Radio Show Calls for Race War “Kill Whites and Cops” (GATEWAY PUNDIT)
On August 29, 2015—just hours after a lone black gunman had murdered a white sheriff’s deputy in Texas while the latter was pumping gasoline into his car—demonstrators affiliated with the St. Paul, Minnesota branch of BLM disrupted traffic as they marched—with police protection—to the gates of the Minnesota State Fair. Carrying signs bearing slogans like “End White Supremacy,” they repeatedly chanted in unison: “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” “Pigs” was a reference to police officers, and “blanket” was a reference to body bags. The slogan echoed what gunman Ismaaiyl Brinsleyan had posted on the Internet—”Pigs in a blanket smell like bacon”—in December 2014, just before he murdered NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.
During the September 1, 2015 airing of a blog-talk-radio program associated with BLM, the hosts laughed at the recent assassination of Texas Deputy Daron Goforth, a husband and father who was shot 15 times at point blank range from behind while he was gassing up his patrol car. One host, a self-described black supremacist known as King Noble, said the execution of that “cracker cop” was an indication that “it’s open season on killing whites and police officers and probably killing cops, period.” “It’s unavoidable, inescapable,” he added. “It’s funny that now we are moving to a time where the predator will become the prey.” After claiming that blacks were like lions who could win a “race war” against whites, Noble declared: “Today, we live in a time when the white man will be picked off, and there’s nothing he can do about it. His day is up, his time is up. We will witness more executions and killing of white people and cops than we ever have before. It’s about to go down. It’s open season on killing white people and crackas.”
Another aspect of this “clash” that garnered such attention is that the violence started BECAUSE of the LEFT. That doesn’t mean the racist people in the other Leftist group (the KKK) didn’t reciprocate… but theorder of events is important.
THE DAILY WIRE notes an article from a New York Times reporter who said this:
“I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”
In other words, these KKK types were leaving peacefully, being escorted out, and they were attacked. They continue:
New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg made the mistake of admitting that along with the abhorrent, violent, white supremacists who terrorized Charlottesville over the weekend, many Antifa protesters were also enacting “hate-filled” violence, as they’ve done in several other cities in recent months. For noting that the “hard left seemed as hate-filled as the alt-right” — citing “club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park” — Stolberg was hammered online, even after repenting and issuing a correction that depicted the violent left in more heroic terms.
[here are her Tweets]
A few wrap-it-up thoughts from Charlottesville:
1. Striking how many of the white nationalists were young people, almost entirely men.
2. The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding “antifa” beating white nationalists being led out of the park.
3. Among my unanswered questions: police response. Why did things get out of hand so quickly? Could violence have been prevented?
Wow, sounds just like President Trump. And HOTAIR notes that both NBC news and the BBC have “put out videos offering fact-checks on some of president trump’s claims about what took place in Charlottesville. Both agree there were violent anti-fascist protesters who came to the protest looking for a fight.” Here is a portion of the NBC, BBC, and others -videos- I wish to note:
Jake Tapper notes as well that reporters who were attacked were attacked by Antifa. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) took to Facebook to go after President Donald Trump and his “many sides” comment on yesterday’s violence in Charlottesville. But the ACLU disagrees:
A response that highlights the combined NBC, BBC video via my RUMBLE above is this:
What about that “famous” parking garage fight where a man “explained that his attackers “rushed” him, forcing him off the street and into the parking garage where they set upon him.” As if he were innocent. Here is my description of the video:
This is a video setting straight the media narrative that an innocent black man was “pounced upon” by racist whites in Charlottesville. WHY AM I POSTING THIS?It is NOT to defend racists on either side. It is sad I have to post this at all, and to be clear, JESUS is the only real answer to the racism we are seeing come up today. That aside, this video shows how the media consistently gets it wrong, seemingly on purpose to push a narrative.
A caller asks about the importance of human tragedies visited upon men by fellow humans. Dennis Prager responds in agreement, notes the difference between the Holocaust and other “killing fields,” which allows me to insert the previous weeks segment about a particular Japanese comfort woman, Kim Bok-dong (which starts at the 4:11 mark).
Dennis reads from a NYTs obituary of the 92-year old Korean woman who never knew love in her life. Here is the portion from the NEW YORK TIMES:
…After Ms. Yoon met Ms. Kim, in 1992, she described her as an unhappy woman who drank heavily and chain-smoked. Ms. Kim never married or had children.
“I have never known love in my life,” she once said.
But she proved to be one of the most outspoken, persistent campaigners for the women’s cause, which over time has won broad support in South Korea. They have become a deeply emotional symbol of the country’s suffering under Japanese colonial rule, which lasted from 1910 to 1945….
….She was one of the first to break decades of silence and talk about what had been done to her, and she traveled around the world to testify about it, including at the United Nations…
It doesn’t matter if your libertarian atheists, or Democrats (which all of the below are), if you step out of line with the end goal (socialism), violence from the Left is the consequence in and failing society.
Antifa Mob Shouts Down Dr. Yaron Brook, Assaults Students At King’s College In London (DAILY WIRE)
A mob of masked Antifa members stormed a lecture hall at King’s College in London on Monday night, shouting down — and then shutting down — an event being held by the Ayn Rand Institute featuring Ayn Rand Board of Directors chairman Dr. Yaron Brook and internet personality Sargon of Akkad.
According to The Washington Times, the event, hosted by the King’s College Libertarian Society, was supposed to be a “discussion about Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism … followed by a question and answer period.” But the event took a turn for the terrifying when Antifa burst into the hall, made their way to the stage and began threatening the speakers with violence. Fights broke out on stage.
Dr. Brooks was lucky to escape unscathed. Audience members were able to catch the shocking incident on video, but the student recording was attacked……..
In order to become ‘Führer’ of Germany, Hitler felt that speeches and propaganda were not enough to win him the election. His own private army, the SA, helped him; they beat Communists up, interrupted their meetings and deterred their campaigning. Next, Hitler had about 4000 Communists arrested and imprisoned. The newspapers were shut down. SA were waiting in the streets to beat anti-Nazis up. (IN)
Progressives Shout Down Christina Hoff Sommers At Portland Law School (HOT AIR)
Christina Hoff Sommers was scheduled to speak today at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. Yesterday, in anticipation of her arrival, a coalition of progressive groups led by a local chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild announced they would be protesting her appearance. Specifically, a letter released by the group said that Sommers was a “known fascist” and that her invitation to speak was an “act of aggression and violence” toward others.
In case you had any doubt, the violence and aggression they are talking about here is speech. “Free speech is certainly an important tenet to a free, healthy society, but that freedom stops when it has a negative and violent impact on other individuals. There is no debate here.” Here’s the letter in full….