Bishop takes Church’s side!

It is the destiny of the Catholic Church to once again become the world’s leading reactionary force, as it was in the days of Pius IX, a sort of Comintern of the Right.  As liberalism’s global onslaught continues, more and more of what remains of the world’s traditional cultures will take refuge under her umbrella.  Already, the Church is the only place where Aristotle’s realism or Cicero’s natural law theory is taken seriously.  I may live to see the day when the Catholic Church is the only place where Confucius can get a hearing.  Dim-witted prelates have been trying to deflect the Church from its destined role ever since the disastrous reign of John XXIII; they think that if they grovel before liberalism enough, the Church will be spared.  But she won’t, and the sooner they realize that, the sooner Catholics will be able to identify their real allies and mount an effective defense.

It is thus an excellent piece of news that Archbishop Robert Sarah has issued a direct condemnation of some efforts to impose liberalism on Africa.  What’s better, he criticizes one of liberalism’s most appalling but least-challenged beliefs:  what they call “sexual equality”.  (I call it “androgynism”; Sarah calls it “gender theory”.)  What’s more, he criticizes “gender theory” both for its incompatibility with Christianity and for its incompatibility with African traditional cultures.  Here is a little bit of what I’ve been waiting for.  The Church is stepping into a role that must be filled, and that only she can fill.

New book reviews

In case you haven’t been checking, I’ve been updating the “Book Reviews: Religion” section lately.  Over the past month, I’ve added reviews of

• Perfect Being Theology by Katherin Rogers
• God, Freedom, and Evil by Alvin Plantinga
• The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto
• The Beauty of the Infinite by David Bentley Hart

I recommend the first and fourth books.  (I was less impressed with the middle two.)  Sometime in the next couple of days, I’ll be adding my review of “Tradition and Traditions” by Yves Congar.

I must admit, Dr. Strangelove, you have an astonishingly good idea.

Roger Ebert reviews the new movie “2012” here.  The following jumped out at me:

Many gigantic arks have been secretly constructed inside the Himalayas by the Chinese, funded by a global consortium, and they’re the only chance of the human race surviving. Along with the animals on board, there’s the maybe well-named Noah (Liam James). In theory, ark ticketholders represent a cross-section of the globe, chosen democratically. In practice, Carl Anheuser pulls strings to benefit the rich and connected, and wants to strand desperate poor people on the dock.

So, they’re picking rich people to go in the arks instead of poor people.  How awful.  But wait.  If the whole human race is going to be wiped out except for, say, a few thousand people, why is it worse to choose those people based on wealth than to choose them based by lot?  (Choosing by lots is the only thing I can imagine Ebert means when he says they are chosen “democratically”.)  After all, one of the big arguments for socialism is that how much money you’re born with is just a sort of lottery, right?  Also, since the arks have a limited carrying capacity, isn’t it necessarily true that the vast majority of people who want in are going to be “desperate” and “stranded” “on the dock”, whether or not anyone wants to strand them?  In fact, to preserve the human race, wouldn’t it be someone’s grim duty to use force to keep the arks from being swarmed and destroyed by desperate people?  Of course, if the writers were to address these sorts of dilemmas, they might have actually made an interesting movie, instead of this piece of egalitarian idiocy.

All right, suppose I was dictator of the world and got to decide which, say, 2000 people to save.  How to do it?  First, I would realize that I’d be primarily picking not individuals, but genes.  Therefore, no one with an inheritable medical condition is let on.  Also, we’ll want to maximize genetic diversity to make the human remnant as robust as possible, so we’ll want to sample races and people from all over the world about equally.  Next, I’ll want to choose people so that I can repopulate the Earth as quickly as possible.  Humanity will be safer when there’s millions of us again.  Therefore, no women over 30 and no old men.  Also, there should be a few women for each man.

But Bonald, isn’t it wrong to advocate polygamy, even for the purpose of repopulating the Earth?  Believe it or not, the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus has actually addressed this issue.  His conclusion was that polygamy might be acceptable in such extreme cases, but only if God were to somehow provide explicit permission.  It would be a hard thing for each man to have four twenty-year-old, genetically perfect wives who he’d have to have sex with all the time.  To save the human race, though, it’s a sacrifice I’d be willing to make.

Hiding behind women and children

As I recall, one of the things that we used to hear about our (or Israel’s) Middle Eastern enemies–like Hezbollah or Iraq under Saddam–is that they deliberately endanger their own civilians.  They would put their gunmen and weapons in places like schools, hospitals, and residential areas.  Either they thought they could gain an advantage by own (or Israel’s) reluctance to endanger women, children, and noncombatant men, or else they were hoping to draw fire on their own civilians so that they could milk the casualties for propaganda.  Either way, what a bunch of dirty rats!  The other thing we’d hear about was that nasty people in places like Uganda would use chilren as soldiers.  Here, the offense is not putting noncombatants in harm’s way, but making someone a combatant who shouldn’t be put in such a role.

In defense of religion, Chapter 2

Here is chapter 2 of my defense of religion.  Actually, I’m still in the description part.  The defense part is still to come, so please be patient.  In this chapter, which is about four pages, I analyse the nature of holiness.

New reactionary articles on the web

EU plans to outlaw criticism of sodomy–see here

Blair associate admits the Labour party deliberately used mass immigration to destroy the native English culture.

Anthony Esolen on Anita Dunn’s infatuation with Chairman Mao

As America embraces leftism, is Russia becoming a conservative power?