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Post by hibernicus on Jul 31, 2014 22:37:12 GMT
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Post by Tertium non Datur on Aug 6, 2014 1:09:46 GMT
The mainstream english speaking western media is deeply hostile to Christianity. The media in many catholic countries, including Ireland , reserves a particular virulence toward all forms of Catholicism. This is nothing new as Christ forewarned his followers with words to the effect "As the world hates me so it will hate you". The Vatican council 2 made the grave error of thinking it could make friends with the spirit of the world.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 12, 2014 21:01:04 GMT
Thirsty Gargoyle offers some thoughts on Sam Harris's popular atheist books, noting (for example) that he treats utilitarianism as self-evident and is unaware (for example) of the very concept of "virtue ethics" ("Aristotle? Who he?") and that much of his history is plagiarised or misunderstood. What is impressive about TG on Harris's use of history is that he in turn is not mealymouthed when Harris does identify genuinely shameful aspects of the Church's history: thethirstygargoyle.blogspot.ie/2014/07/oh-sam-part-one.htmlthethirstygargoyle.blogspot.ie/2014/07/oh-sam-part-two.htmlIncidentally, when I reviewed Fr Tony Flannery's apologia for the BRANDSMA REVIEW and discussed how he blames the Papacy and the Inquisition for witch-hunts, I did not include the detail that the Spanish Inquisition actually discouraged witch-hunting because they were sufficiently used to assessing evidence to realise that the charges were delusional. I did this because I could not just then lay my hand on an authority for this and I did not like to trust my memory. TG has the goods, drawing on REFORMATION by Diarmuid MacCulloch, who is well-known to be hostile to the Church and so would hardly fabricate evidence in its favour: EXTRACT Insofar as the Hammer [MALLEUS MALEFICARUM]and later [WITCH-HUNTERS'] manuals had an impact, it was largely in the secular courts of small states, especially those largely populated by Reformed Protestants; witch-hunting was far less common among the Holy Roman Empire’s Lutheran states than its Reformed or Catholic ones, was relatively rare in large polities like England with established legal systems, and was almost unheard of in Ireland and in Iberia, where MacCulloch – no friend of the Catholic Church – remarks that ‘the unlikely heroes of this self-denial were the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions’. The crown and the secular courts had led the attack on witches in the Spanish Netherlands, where the Inquisition did not operate, and some of their colleagues in northern Spain’s secular administration enthusiastically followed their lead. In response to this, MacCulloch explains, ‘Inquisitors scrutinized various outbreaks of persecution that did occur in the peninsula, particularly on the fringes of Iberia in the Basque country. They decided that evidence required for a satisfactory verdict of guilty was extremely difficult to obtain, and that in fact there was very little evidence for the widespread existence of witches, let alone active pacts with the Devil. They regarded even most confessions of witchcraft as delusions, to be treated with pastoral discipline not death, and they generally disciplined colleagues who took extreme measures, much to the fury of various secular officials who wanted to forward persecution.’ The Inquisition in fact worked to prevent persecution of ‘witches’ whether conducted by secular authorities or angry mobs, these, rather than ‘the church’, being the typical perpetrators of witch-hunting during the eras we know as the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Harris may claim that only the advent of science could undercut belief in witchcraft, but it seems clear that a combination of common sense, theological training, and thorough and fair-minded investigation was quite capable of just this; his assertion that it was only around 1700 that ‘some ecclesiastics’ began to question the persecution of witches is, it’s clear, a patent falsehood... END Father Flannery, please note
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 12, 2014 21:05:31 GMT
At this stage I think the New Atheists might profitably be ignored. Their moment is gone. Even ordinary secularists and atheists seem embarrassed by them.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 26, 2014 23:48:26 GMT
Some naughty commenters point out that the membership fees for the different grades of the Richard Dawkins fanclub are much more extortionate than those charged by your average dodgy televangelist: blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/08/richard-dawkins-and-the-cost-of-rationality/www.spectator.co.uk/features/9286682/the-bizarre-and-costly-cult-of-richard-dawkins/EXTRACT the Richard Dawkins website offers followers the chance to join the ‘Reason Circle’, which, like Dante’s Hell, is arranged in concentric circles. For $85 a month, you get discounts on his merchandise, and the chance to meet ‘Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science personalities’. Obviously that’s not enough to meet the man himself. For that you pay $210 a month — or $5,000 a year — for the chance to attend an event where he will speak. When you compare this to the going rate for other charismatic preachers, it does seem on the high side. The Pentecostal evangelist Morris Cerullo, for example, charges only $30 a month to become a member of ‘God’s Victorious Army’, which is bringing ‘healing and deliverance to the world’. And from Cerullo you get free DVDs, not just discounts. But the $85 a month just touches the hem of rationality. After the neophyte passes through the successively more expensive ‘Darwin Circle’ and then the ‘Evolution Circle’, he attains the innermost circle, where for $100,000 a year or more he gets to have a private breakfast or lunch with Richard Dawkins, and a reserved table at an invitation-only circle event with ‘Richard’ as well as ‘all the benefits listed above’, so he still gets a discount on his Richard Dawkins T-shirt saying ‘Religion — together we can find a cure.’ The website suggests that donations of up to $500,000 a year will be accepted for the privilege of eating with him once a year: at this level of contribution you become a member of something called ‘The Magic of Reality Circle’. I don’t think any irony is intended. At this point it is obvious to everyone except the participants that what we have here is a religion without the good bits... END How long before they're charging people to drink his bathwater? ecclesandbosco.blogspot.ie/2014/08/the-book-of-st-richard-chapter-20.html
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 26, 2014 23:58:26 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 6, 2014 22:35:41 GMT
In the current issue of the SPECTATOR the father of a Down's Syndrome child (he also appears to be an atheist, at least he says he admires Dawkins - or used to) takes Dawkins to task over his views that Down's people contribute nothing to the general welfare. I think we ought to be wary about using such articles to score points off Dawkins - claiming the benefit of the love and sacrifices of Down's parents without necessarily making such sacrifices ourselves - but this particular comment is too good to pass up: www.spectator.co.uk/features/9303832/i-know-that-richard-dawkins-is-wrong-about-downs-syndrome-because-i-know-my-son/EXTRACT Dawkins’s website contains a vigorous pseudonymous defence of Dawkins on Down’s. It’s written in duh! duh! logic designed to make even us stupid people grasp the subtleties of Dawkins’s argument, and makes clear that this argument stands or falls on the question of whether or not people with Down’s syndrome live in perpetual hell. And they do nothing of the kind. Dawkins’s argument is based on an error. He hasn’t researched Down’s syndrome, he just assumed that people with the condition live in constant suffering. It’s a shame that Dawkins wasted his title The God Delusion for his fundamentalist tract. He should have saved it for his autobiography... END OF EXTRACT It might be worth buying the SPECTATOR to see the whole thing (and to acknowledge their printing such a powerful article). BTW the current issue of PRIVATE EYE has yet another hilarious parody of Dawkins' Twitter account by Craig Brown, which among several other nice points neatly skewers how Dawkins equates assertion (his own assertion, that is) with logic. Worth taking a look at that, too.
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Post by Young Ireland on Dec 3, 2014 17:26:11 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 3, 2014 20:48:35 GMT
I notice that Atheist Ireland (or an individual member) in calling for the cross not to be re-erected, referred to it as having symbolised Ireland as it was in the past and wanted it replaced by something symbolising Ireland as it is now. Note the assumption of inevitable historical progress towards atheism. I remember when Youth Defence had a big poster drive an anarchist group put up videos on their website showing individuals going around defacing the posters; the group claimed it had merely received the video. The video reported by the Iona Institute, if genuine, would suggest a similar mindset. Incidentally, I gathered from the news reports that the mountain-top is private property and the owners wished to have the cross maintained/re-erected (so Atheist Ireland, if I am correct, are on even shakier ground than they would be if it was state land). Is the cross itself someone's property, and can compensation be claimed for the damage?
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Post by maolsheachlann on Dec 3, 2014 21:14:02 GMT
I can't help but feel that this was a major own goal for Atheist Ireland. For all the secularism of the Irish media and professional classes, few people share their level of animosity towards religion tout court. I got the impression that nobody agreed with them about the cross in the first place; then it turned out that it was private property anyway, and they just looked stupid.
I think the bien-pensant classes in Ireland are generally all in favour of a cultural, sentimental sort of Christianity-- "A Little Bit of Religion", to quote Fr. Brian D'Arcy.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 4, 2014 19:02:13 GMT
Their problem was that their position amounted to endorsing the vandals. They might have got a better hearing if they had called for the cross to be removed without its having been cut down. The fact that the vandal appears to be defending his actions on secularist grounds may also prove something of an embarrassment to them - at least it should; in the same way that hooliganism by self-professing Catholics is an embarrassment to us.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 5, 2015 22:53:33 GMT
Here's a reply to Stephen Fry's recent statements about God, which treats him at his true intellectual worth ccfather.blogspot.ie/2015/02/frying-tonight.htmlEXTRACT ...he reveals a degree of self-regard that is worthy of note: 'I think of myself as someone who is filled with love; whose only purpose in life was to achieve love...' I can't help but wonder if his former lovers, dumped in his search for new young love, would see it in the same way. He also has remarkable powers of self-forgiveness to sustain such a self-image after putting thousands of pounds in the hands of murderous cocaine barons, given how harshly he feels the injustices he perceives others to commit... Or does he protest too much? Is one of the roots of his hatred a projection of his own deep unease with himself? 6 is something of a tired trope. Of course, the sexual abuse perpetrated by a small number of Catholic priests and brothers is a grave and terrible scandal. However, to try to make some causal link between their wickedness and their vocation is increasingly untenable. As the BBC, the political classes, the educational establishment, and so many other spheres start to yield their terrible secrets, it becomes clear that the problem lies elsewhere. Fry doesn't rant about how the BBC is corrupt, despite the huge number of cases of abuse involving BBC presenters and DJs, and the fact that the culture was collusive of abuse. Why? Because he approves of the BBC. In fact, the common factors in the abusers across all these organisations is that they were raised precisely in the sort of culture that Fry wishes to establish and perpetuate: a permissive culture that views sex as 'fun, jolly, a primary impulse.'.. END OF EXTRACT
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 13, 2015 21:44:09 GMT
It turns out that the person who murdered three Muslims in North Carolina was a militant atheist given to online rants about the evils of religion in general, and Islam in particular, with musings about how all the problems of the Middle East would be solved if its inhabitants all became atheists. This does not mean that his atheism is responsible for his murderousness (the killings appear to have been triggered by an argument over parking space) and Richard Dawkins and Co are rushing to offer "Nothing to do with us, guv" excuses. But you just have to wonder how willing Dawkins and Co would be to accept those excuses if the killer had been a Christian fundamentalists and it was Christians using such arguments to disavow any connection between religious faith and murder: www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/new-atheist-muslim-killer/#post-commentswww.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/new-atheist-muslim-killer/#post-comments
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Post by Deleted on Feb 19, 2015 15:50:17 GMT
Not to focus in on this one case, but the excuse atheists usually give is that Atheism isn't a religion, therefore no wrong can be done by it as a whole. Atheism isn't a religion, but it is an ideology that can group people together the same way religions can, and many Atheists seem happy enough to almost treat it like a religion when it helps. That's the convenience of Atheism I find. You get to be treated as a religious group without the religious aspect, but when anything goes wrong it is easy to wash your hands and announce it has nothing to do with Atheism because Atheism isn't a religion. Whether they want to believe it or not, on a human level many atheists have a lot in common with religious people; for better or worse.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 21, 2015 10:40:12 GMT
There's a certain local irony here - Atheist Ireland are quite happy to present themselves as representing each and every person who listed no religion in the census when they are seeking meetings with the government to express their concerns, in precisely the same way that the leaders of the different churches are seen as representing church members. (What is worrying is that the government appear to take Atheist Ireland at their own valuation by having meetings with them.)
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