The Church should have the freedom to refuse allegiance to the State on the issue of Gay Marriage.
If Australia’s Prime Minister is serious about fairness, he’ll preserve the right to a conscientious objection to SSM; the right for people to hold the view, and teach their kids that marriage is between a man and a woman; and that those children have a right to equal access to their biological father and mother. As I have hopefully made clear in the written contributions I’ve made to this national debate, I see the issues as a matter of social justice. The “no” vote has been about defending truth, liberty, fraternity, science, and even equality, from unbalanced ideological servitude. The State wants…
Multiculturalism has failed: Identity politics sets people on a trajectory towards tribalism and slavery.
In 1944, C.S Lewis wrote: “The demand for equality has two sources; First, the noble: the desire for fair play. Second, the mean-spirited: the hatred of superiority. If you seek to appease envy: 1. you will not succeed. Envy is insatiable. 2. you are trying to introduce equality where equality is fatal. “Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into the higher spheres of beauty, virtue and truth. Neither of which are democratic. Ethical, intellectual or aesthetic democracy is death.” Lewis’ position can be read as a push back against extreme egalitarianism and the quagmire…
Simone Weil: Marxism is a badly constructed religion.
Details about Simone Weil’s life and thought are enigmatic. Other than what’s included in the general encyclopedic biographies circling the internet, I know very little about her. Unlike someone such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, there is no long, authorised biography written by her friends. What knowledge I have been about to find out about her, is padded by what I’ve learnt from conversations with internet friends, whose admiration for her work has increased over the years. Simone was a French intellectual. Like Jacques Ellul, Weil worked in the French resistance, was an admirer of Karl Marx, and a contemporary of Albert…
The Attractiveness of Sin
One of the most startling insights into sin and the nature of this world comes from the French Jewish philosopher, Simone Weil, who died in 1943 but not before she was converted through reading George Herbert’s poem, ‘Love bade me welcome’. She observed: ‘Nothing is so beautiful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy as the good. No deserts are so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. But with fantasy it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied, intriguing, attractive and full of charm.’…
Hundreds of radicalized Muslim inmates to be released from prisons: ‘We run a huge risk’
Hundreds of inmates radicalized during the war in Syria and the rise of Islamic State are set to be released from French prisons before the end of next year, the Wall Street Journal reports. Of those set to be released, about 50 were serving terrorism-related sentences, and a further 400 were classified as “radicalized” while in prison. According to the WSJ, “That group includes inmates finishing longer sentences who were convicted before the Syrian war, such as Djamel Beghal, who left prison on Monday.” “Mr. Beghal was handed his first terrorism-related conviction in 2001, another in 2013, and French magistrates…
Theodore Roosevelt on Assimilation and Multiculturalism: “There Is No Room in This Country for Hyphenated Americans”
Theodore Roosevelt once said: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all… “This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to…
The Case for the Crusades
“What about the Crusades?” If you’ve ever criticised the unprovoked brutality of Islam, you’ve probably been asked that question. What’s implied is that Christianity was just as cruel as Islam, if not worse. This, however, is merely a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by post-World War I British and French imperialism and the post-World War II creation of the state of Israel. In his book, God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, Rodney Stark summarized the current understanding of the Crusades as follows: “During the Crusades, an expansionist, imperialistic Christendom brutalized, looted, and colonized a tolerant and peaceful Islam.” But that’s…
For we are dumb and policed
“For we are Young and Free.” What a lovely line. I think of swimming at the beach, a cheering crowd at a concert, a happy family eating Christmas lunch. Or we might think of the freedom to live where we want, to study what we want, to work where we want, and to buy what we want. Below these delightful tip-of-the-iceberg freedoms, lie the four foundational freedoms of conscience, assembly, religion, and expression. Freedom of conscience is your freedom not to be coerced to act against your convictions about what is good and what is evil. Mel Gibson’s 2016 movie Hacksaw Ridge, for…