Triple tragedies of our times

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The great tragedies of the 20th century are commonly accepted as Marxist Communism and National Socialism. No one should be so naive as to think that we have seen the end of either. But we can regard them as contained. But there was a third tragedy which may prove to be far more lethal. It is all-pervasive and is destroying societies across the globe. It is the elevation of sexuality as the most important element in life.

Think about it for a minute.

First of all, from its impact on lives. The combined body count of civilian deaths under the Nazis and under Stalin is about 20 million, according to Timothy Snyder, the author of the highly-praised 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. But according to the World Health Organization, there are about 40 million abortions, world-wide, every single year.

Second, from its impact on politics. In 2012 the most powerful nation on earth goes to the polls. The world is facing the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. The war on terror enters its tenth year. And what are the issues which divide Americans most? Same-sex marriage and abortion.

Opinion polls on the American presidential election show once again that the issue which concerns most people is the economy. Nevertheless, what is being highlighted by the Democrats is not the economy. Social policy issues, what they call human rights issues and personal attacks on their opponent’s characters – back down as far as schoolyard misdemeanours – seem to be their main concerns.

The issues they have chosen to fight on are important. Their policies on these issues, however, are leading their society further down the road of multi-faceted destruction through unrestrained individualism, coupled with chaotic and ungoverned sexual license provoking family break-up and educational dysfunction on a scale never seen before in a civilized society. They, of course, call this “progress”.

Where did all this come from? Prospect magazine in its February issue this year carried a short letter from a psychiatrist commenting on a feature on Sigmund Freud in its January issue. In it he rather unceremoniously rejoiced that the father of psychoanalysis was no longer flavour of the month – the idea suggested by the philosopher John Gray in the January article.

“Freud is out of favour because he was a deluded pervert who wrote a lot of idiotic tripe with about the same value as the Book of Mormon. I had to put up with this nonsense as part of ‘a balanced education in psychiatry’ as a medical student in the 1980s.”

Freud may be out of favour but the impact of what he did has remained long after the niceties of his theories on therapy have been forgotten or have been rubbished. He and the sources from which he derived his ideas and popularised them have had a devastating effect on the way a large portion of humanity now thinks about the human condition. The elevation of sexuality as the most important element in the life of human beings, the destruction of the idea of religion as anything other than – at best – a useful delusion, the coupling of science with atheistic determinism, can be clearly seen as a central plank on the platform of 21st century liberalism. This is the liberalism which is now responsible for the holocaust of the unborn; it is the liberalism which is behind the destruction of marriage and the family – with the consequent evils which flow from that. It is the liberalism which has generated the contraceptive mentality, separating the sexual act from its most fundamental raison d’etre, the generation of children.

Gray’s article emphasised the importance of the sources for Freud’s theories and among them highlighted Schopenhauer. He maintains that Schopenhauer

“shaped much of the central European intelligentsia’s thinking at the start of the 20th century. Schopenhauer’s impact on fin-de-siècle European culture can hardly be exaggerated. His view that human intelligence is the blind servant of unconscious will informs the writings of Tolstoy, Conrad, Hardy and Proust. Schopenhauer’s most lasting impact, however, was in questioning the prevailing view of the human mind—a view that had shaped western thought at least since Aristotle, continued to be formative throughout the Christian era and underpinned the European Enlightenment.”

“Schopenhauer posed a major challenge to the prevailing Enlightenment worldview. In much of the western tradition, consciousness and thought were treated as being virtually one and the same; the possibility that thought might be unconscious was excluded almost by definition. But for Schopenhauer the conscious part of the human mind was only the visible surface of inner life, which obeyed the non-rational imperatives of bodily desire rather than conscious deliberation. It was Schopenhauer who, in a celebrated chapter on ‘The Metaphysics of Sexual Love’ in The World as Will and Idea, affirmed the primary importance of sexuality in human life, suggesting that the sexual impulse operates independently of the choices and intentions of individuals, without regard for—and often at the expense of—their freedom and well-being.”

Isn’t that were we are now, whether we accept it or not. If not, why the all-pervasive exploitation of sex in advertising and marketing, in entertainment, and its emphasis in education? Gray argues that

“From one point of view, Freud’s work was an attempt to transplant the idea of the unconscious mind posited in Schopenhauer’s philosophy into the domain of science. When Freud originated psychoanalysis, he wanted it to be a science. One reason was because achieving scientific standing for his ideas would enable them to overcome the opposition of moralising critics who objected to the central place of sexuality in psychoanalysis.”

Of course, the “moralising critics” have not gone away you know. They are still battling against this terrible legacy of Schopenhauer and his disciple and all their descendents. Just now it seems an uphill struggle but it is without doubt one on which the future character of civilised society depends: one where man will either succumb to a hedonistic and materialistic slavery, characterised by the callous destruction of life of the very young, the old and the infirm, or one where he can live a life in true freedom.

(This is an edited and shorter version of an article posted last Wednesday. Part of the original article has been incorporated in the article about Jonah Goldberg’s new book which will be posted later today)

A very sobering but useful presentation

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Mercatornet’s Conjugality blog has just posted a video presentation from the American Family Research Council on one of the burning social policy issues of the hour. What? The political drive to change the definition of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman to a bond between – well, who knows where it will stop? It looks at the the issue from a Judaic-Christian point of view but the factual picture it presents is truly disturbing from any perspective. Watch it here.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly – that’s nature’s way

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

“No celebration for this lesbian”, Lauren Taylor tells us in yesterday’sWashington Post. She makes some good points in her response to President Obama’s jump off the fence earlier this week – but she still misses the truth at the heart of this debate.  Like her we all “love the idea of commitment, of getting community and family support for a relationship, and of the accountability to that community and family.” The institution of marriage as we have known it for millennia is about far more than that. Essentially the things it is about have to do with the very special relationship which a man and a woman can share, a relationship which can never be equated with that between two men or two women. In other words, conjugality.

We will all agree with her that “anyone who wants to should have a ceremony and make a commitment and throw a big party. But that shouldn’t affect whether they then get health insurance, or get to take time off to take a sick person to the doctor, or are able to sign a permission form for a field trip.”

She tells us that  she is “not fighting for access to marriage, and I wish that wasn’t where the gay rights movement was putting most of its effort and resources. (Violence, housing, employment, education, anyone?) But (with apologies to Groucho Marx), if someone is trying to keep me out of this club, I want in. How dare anyone say that I don’t deserve access to marriage and all it brings? How dare they say I, and my relationships, aren’t good enough?”

Those fighting for the very existence of the institution of marriage are not telling her that her relationships are not good enough. They are just telling her that they are not the kind of relationships which fit the definition of marriage. Try this analogy: If you want to swim you need water to swim in. Mountain air is very refreshing and beautiful but it won’t support you swimming. Pretend you are swimming in it and you will just look silly. If you are a man and want to marry you need a woman to marry, and vice versa. Or as Julie sings in Jerome Kern’s Showboat, “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, I gotta love one man till I die, Can’t help loin’ dat man of mine.” The sea is for fish, the air is for birds and marriage is for men and women – sorry, that’s Mother Nature’s way.

(Posted earlier to MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog)

Are Obama and Cameron playing with electoral fire?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

As was widely anticipated, President Obama’s “evolution” on the marriage question has now reached its final resting place in the gay lobby camp. But the political consequences are not so clear and the electoral rout which the other convert to the redefinition of marriage cause, Britain’s David Cameron, experienced at the polls last week might be worrying him. But really, given his imprisonment – not necessarily an unwilling confinement – by the ultra liberal caucus, he had little choice as to which side of the fence he was ultimately going to choose.

Political observers in Britain are already speculating that the coalition government there, following the disastrous showing in last week’s nation-wide local elections, rewrote the content of yesterday’s Queen’s Speech, the speech written by the Prime Minister but read by the Queen to Parliament and outlining the forthcoming legislative plans. “Gay marriage” was not mentioned in the speech…. Read more on the Conjugality blog.

“The most abused Faith on earth”

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith Matters1 Comment

One of Irish television leading public square venues, The Frontline, recently took up the question of whether or not Irish faith communities were under attack from an aggressive secularism. It was, to say the least, a somewhat inconclusive debate. It might have been much better had it been asked to confront Michael Coren, whose latest book, Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity has just been published.  

Coren, English born Canadian journalist and broadcaster, of Jewish antecedents, convert to Catholicism (twice), has just been interviewed by Charles Lewis in the National Post and spells out his view very clearly. In the West generally, he believes, Christians are now

“marginalized, they’re mocked, they’re told their views don’t belong, they’re told to keep their views out of the public square and keep their religion at home. And where it can be quite sinister is at universities where Christian students are told that their ideas are stupid. I’ve even seen it with my children who are in university. Somehow Christianity is not a valid area of thought any longer. You can bring your socialism, your feminism, your homosexuality, your anti-Zionism into the class but if you bring your Christianity that’s not to be taken seriously.”

No Christian carrying a banner for their Faith in the cultural mainstream of the West today would have any difficulty producing evidence to uphold every one of these assertions.  Any Catholic in Ireland today, seriously faithful to the teaching authority of that Church knows full well that they are on the frontline of a battle with a very militant force opposing them on all and more of the issues listed by Coren.

Coren calls Christianity the most abused faith on Earth. “I believe the evidence is overwhelming,” he writes.

 “I believe… that Christianity is the main, central, most common, and most thoroughly and purposefully marginalized, obscured, and publicly and privately mis-represented belief system in the final decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first century.” He rails that the same intellectual class that so quickly condemns anything Christian will do cartwheels to explain away Islamic terrorism.

Lewis put it to Coren in his interview that there is a lot about Christianity that can seem unreal: the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection of Jesus. Is it any surprise that people sometimes have trouble taking it seriously? To this Coren replies that these are really side-shows in the mocking game and that what they are really mocked for are the moral consequences of their beliefs: that life begins at conception and ends at natural death, that abortion is wrong, that promiscuity is wrong. “We live in a culture where no one wants to hear the word ‘no’” he says.

He lays bare the culture of intolerance facing orthodox Christianity:

“Intelligent people will give other ideologies and other religions a great deal of room to try to understand. When it comes to Christianity they seem to assume that any sense of fairness or sympathy should be thrown out the window. They will say things that are blatantly stupid.

“The idea that because a tiny number of Catholic priests acted in an appalling manner should jaundice everything said by the Roman Catholic Church is also so illogical. You might as well say that no comment by a Canadian should ever be taken seriously because there are some serial killers in Canada.”

On the issue of orthodox Christians’ position on homosexual acts he says they are being told our view on homosexuality is somehow wrong and called homophobic. “They’re going to be called homophobic whatever they do. I think the Catholic Church has spent too much time worrying about the reaction it might get rather than reacting itself.

“If someone calls me a homophobe because I believe marriage is between one man and one woman, then I would rejoice in that. But frankly, with gay friends, I try to avoid the subject. They know I am opposed to gay marriage and they also know I’m fond of them as people and would defend them against personal attack. But let me be clear, anyone who hates gay people is a moral criminal.”

 In the book Coren defends, but also contextualizes, the fact that the abortion question has such a high profile for Christians in the culture wars. In the first place it is because they feel intensely that they’re part of an institution given by God. This institution upholds the sacredness of all human life. Because of that “they feel it more when the most vulnerable are destroyed. And they feel it more intensely than other people. I guess we are obsessed because it is such a tragedy. And if we dare to mention it, the world tells us to be quiet.”

In his book Coren takes on Dan Brown’s ludicrous but astonishingly popular The Da Vinci Code. Why, his interviewer asks, given that by now Brown’s pot-boiler has become somewhat passé?

“Well,” he says, “it has influenced millions of people. They’ve been led by the book to read other books that oppose Christianity. Brown quotes real people and he makes a lot of it seem like non-fiction. I thought it was worth taking on again.” Above all he wanted to make sure that what is in The Da Vinci Code is shown again to be false.

So, the next time Radio Telefis Eireann, the BBC or any other broadcaster, takes up the issue of whether or not militant secularism is a reality, perhaps they should get an airline ticket for Michael Coren and bring him on to give us his formidable point of view.

Let this unseemly vendetta end now

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith Matters1 Comment

Let this unseemly vendetta end now. Not our sense of justice, but perhaps our sense of prudence – and certainly our utter frustration – inclines one to say that Cardinal Brady should resign and let the shame for forcing that act on a good and just man fall on the heads of his relentless persecutors.

He should not resign because he is guilty of any serious dereliction of duty but because the ravaging wolves pursuing him have tasted his blood and will not stop until they have torn him to pieces and with him much of what he loves.

He did what he thought was his best at the time. Objectively it wasn’t good enough but there is no evidence that his intentions were anything but good. At worst they were the faltering efforts of a young priest who had made a heroic decision to give his life to the service of God, God’s Church and souls.

Every day this man stands at the foot of the altar and confesses his and – on our behalf – our sins, saying “through my fault, through my fault, through my own most grevious fault”. We have absolutely no reason to doubt his sincerity in uttering those words. What more do they want?

The heroism implicit in his vocation and the sincerity of his intentions, of course, cuts no ice with the motley gang pursuing him, any number of whom have been implicated in far more compromising activities than the Cardinal – 3000 murders in Northern Ireland, hobnobbing with one of the 20th century’s most monstrous regimes scrounging for funds for their own socialist political agenda, and who knows what else. It is enough to make one sick.

St. Peter’s weakness was of a much more devastating kind than any shown by Fr. Brady in and around 1975. Yet Christ did not ask for Peter’s resignation from the office he had given him.

If Cardinal Brady chooses to go now there will be no shame in that for him but history will judge otherwise on those who have pursued him to this end.

Their ulterior motives, their not very hidden agenda of the denigration of the Catholic Church, is clear to many now and will be clearer when history is written. It is not very far removed from the futile agenda of Diocletian et al in the 4th century. What hope is there of a Constantine emerging in our political world today to put an end to this different, but in truth no less brutal persecution? Not much just now.

How do these people get away with it?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

There is a very interesting post in MercatorNet’s Demography is Destiny blog again today. It focuses on a generally uncritical review in The Guardian of a new book by that famous doomsayer from the Sixties, Paul Ehrlich.

Ehrlich was described by many as alarmist in the 1970s but was taken seriously by at least as many more. He now says most of his predictions have proved correct…‘Most of the predictions [in Population Bomb] have proved correct’ The Guardian reports.

Really?  The Daily Telegraph calls that particular bluff in its look at some of his predictions. There, on April 26,Tom Chivers gives us a taste of their accuracy:

“1) “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” he said. He predicted four billion deaths, including 65 million Americans.

What actually happened: Since Ehrlich wrote, the population has more than doubled to seven billion – but the amount of food per head has gone up by more than 25 per cent. Of course there are famines, but the death rate has gone down. I don’t think a significant number of Americans have starved.

2) “The train of events leading to the dissolution of India as a viable nation is already in motion.” India was doomed, and should be left to die in a “triage” system that would concentrate resources on those places that can be saved.

What actually happened: The Green Revolution, a series of technological and agrarian advances led by a man called Norman Borlaug, transformed our ability to produce food. These techniques were introduced to India by one Prof Monkombu Swaminathan. “They [Ehrlich, and Paul and William Paddock, authors of Famine: 1975!] said Indians, and others, were like sheep going to the slaughterhouse. They’ll all die,” Swaminathan told Gardner in an interview. But thanks to Borlaug, Swaminathan, and human ingenuity, India is now one of the few countries with a booming economy, and is a net exporter, rather than recipient, of food aid. But if Ehrlich’s and the Paddocks’ advice had been followed, there could have been tens of millions of deaths, says Swaminathan.

3) “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

What actually happened: I’m not hungry. I just ate. Are you hungry? Were you hungry in 2000, especially? Does England exist?”

What is wrong with us? How do these people get away with it?

A truly draconian law in the offing

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith MattersLeave a comment
Montgomery Clift in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film on the inviolable seal of Confession, “I Confess”.

At the very heart of freedom is freedom of religion – and at the very heart of religious freedom is freedom of conscience.

The Irish Government has just published a piece of draft legislation which places a time bomb in this very heart, and if the legislation is enacted it will blow a people’s freedom to smithereens.

Is that first assertion too much? No. Every freedom which has been won for mankind, by mankind, over millennia of our history shows that where freedom was truly won it was won essentially in the context of a freedom of religion and the right to freedom and integrity of personal conscience. Freedoms won by forces hostile to religion – the freedoms won by the French Revolution, the freedoms won by the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution – have invariably ended in tyranny and have never succeeded in establishing authentic freedom until they have recognised the need for freedom of religion and conscience.

In contrast with the tyrannies which emanated from those struggles for freedom you have the greatest freedom of all, that won by Christians through centuries of persecution by the slave-owning and humanly deluded powers of the ancient world. In more modern times you have the great freedom won by the enslaved races of the 18th and 19th centuries, a struggle driven above all by a Christian consciousness of injustice. Accepted, history is more nuanced than this, but nevertheless the core truth is undeniable. Without recognition of the inviolability of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, the pursuit of freedom will be fatally flawed and will promise only tyranny.

The Irish government, seeking to deal with the problem of protecting children from abuse by adults, has now gone down this very path. In its proposed legislation it not only ignores freedom of religion and conscience but directly denies it head-on. It is promising to penalise and imprison any Catholic priest who does not report to the relevant secular authorities a sinful act for which a penitent sinner seeks the forgiveness of God as promised to him, as he believes, by the teaching of Jesus Christ. This is not stated explicitly in the draft but will be the inevitable outcome if the legislation is enacted.

Ominously the Irish Times reports today, “The Department of Justice was unable to confirm last night whether priests will be legally obliged to report serious offences against children to gardaí (police) that are disclosed during Confession.” That is a lame and disingenuous kicking to touch. This issue has been in focus for several months now and a number of government ministers have gone on record saying that the so-called sacred seal of confession no longer stands as a legal entity. Justice Minister Alan Shatter confirmed the mandatory reporting requirement would apply to priests hearing confession. Some priests have already proclaimed their defiance in defence of the freedom of conscience of those who come to them as penitents.

In this proposed legislation the State has effectively invaded a sacred realm of the religion of Christians and has countermanded that power which Christian believers understand to have been given by Christ when he said, “whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven; whose sins you shall retain they are retained.”  What the State does not recognise in this whole matter is that while the same act may be both a sin and a crime, these two things have to be resolved in separate ways and in separate fora. A Catholic person accused, convicted and condemned to death for murder, innocent or not, may go to Confession before his execution. The priest who hears that confession might, by revealing all he had been told by the penitent, redeem that person’s reputation. Even to achieve that justice, he may not do so. The two realms are absolutely separate and the priest’s silence about what was confessed must also be absolute.

By invading this realm of conscience in this way the Irish State has now taken away the freedom of a sinner to get the absolution promised by God because it has radically changed the terms and conditions for that absolution – that is, the secrecy given to the act of confession by the wisdom and teaching of the Catholic Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit as that sinner’s religious faith leads him to believe.

Let there be no doubt about it. This is a draconian law, posturing as a necessary law under the shadow of the crimes of child abuse with which Irish society, among others, has been plagued for over 40 or 50 years. It is also a bad law, penally hostile to the practice of the religious faith of the majority of the citizens of Ireland. The fact that a draconian executive is not running the country – although some might dispute that – is irrelevant. For nearly 300 years the Roman Empire had penal laws against Christians in place. For most of that time Christians were free to practice their religion but periodically the executive power of the time deemed that they were bad citizens by practising their faith and moved murderously against them. The pattern has been repeated many times throughout history whenever and wherever laws of this type came into being. Ireland beware.

Hiding from the truth

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

MercatorNet.com’s blog, Conjugality, is pro-marriage. It exists because, in its effect, the drive to redefine marriage to enable it to encompass civil unions between same-sex couples will destroy marriage. It will simply drain it of the meaning it has in nature itself.  This argument is simply not being faced up to. The tactic of the opponents of a piece of legislation being processed in North Carolina in the United States in the next couple of weeks – and the media generally in its opposition to those who defend the nature of marriage – is to paint them into an anti-gay box and throw as much mud at them as they can. They are ignoring the need to maintain truth in language itself – indeed this is but another wound they are inflicting on human kind.

Let us leave aside the question of the rights or wrongs of the use and abuse of sexuality and simply work this controversey out in the context of all the things which the institution of marriage has been about since the first conjugal union of man and woman took place, of what its essence is. Perhaps then we may see some light in the suffocating darkness created by these multiple smoke screens which surround us.

On Tuesday, April 24, Frances Kelly asked in her Home Griddle blog, “Why does media call pro-gender measure ‘anti-gay’?” This was all in the context of media treatment of the legislation being processed in North Carolina.

“Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.”  Amendment 1, North Carolina. Kelly wrote:

When it votes on Amendment One in two weeks, North Carolina will decide whether or not to uphold gender integration in marriage.  This pro-gender bill would ensure gender-diversity in families.  Rather than intentionally depriving children of either their mother or father, this measure would ensure that children have both.

However, opponents call this pro-gender language “anti-gay.”  For example, the Washington Post’s Amy Gardner called Amendment 1 “one of the toughest anti-gay measures in the country.”

Why is pro-gender language called anti-gay?

Isn’t it more accurate to consider pro-gay measures as anti-gender?

The answer to that question is, “Yes, of course it it.” The answer to the former? Because smoke screens hide us from the truth.