Author Archives: rg

Interesting quote from Charles Darwin

In his "Journal of a Voyage Round the World", he praised Christian culture and the work of missionaries.

In his book “The Mission of God” (Wilberforce Publications, London 2016), the author Joseph Boot quotes Darwin. On page 381 of that book, he introduces the quote thus:

On his world voyage on the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin, despite his growing agnosticism and deistic religious confusion, found himself unable to overlook the profound impact of Christian missionaries in Tahiti and the Pacific Islands. In the first work he ever wrote, before the implications of his theory gripped and ruled him, Darwin’s Christianized background caused him to rain praise on the evangelical missionary.

There follows this quote, which, according to the endnote, is from

Charles Darwin: Journal of a voyage round the world (London: T. Nelson and Sons, Paternoster Row, 1890), 496-947.

This is it:

It appears to me that the morality and religion of the inhabitants are highly creditable. There are many who attack … both the missionaries, their system, and the effects produced by it. Such reasoners never compare the present state with that of the Island only twenty years ago, nor even with that of Europe at this day; but they compare it with the high standard of gospel perfection … [T]hey forget, or will not remember, that human sacrifices, and the power of an idolatrous priesthood – a system of profligacy unparalleled in any other part of the world – infanticide, a consequence of that system – bloody wars, where the conquerors spared neither women nor children – that all these have been abolished, and that dishonesty, intemperance, and licentiousness have been greatly reduced, by the introduction of Christianity. In a voyager to forget these things is base ingratitude; for should he chance to be at the point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have extended thus far … [T]hose who are most severe should consider how much of the morality of the women in Europe is owing to the system early impressed by mothers on their daughters, and how much in each individual case to the precepts of religion. But it is useless to argue against such reasoners; – I believe that, disappointed in not finding the field of licentiousness quite so open as formally, they will not give credit to a morality which they do not wish to practice, or to a religion which they undervalue, if not despise. 

NATO Chief Openly Admits Russia Invaded Ukraine Because Of NATO Expansion

Writes Caitlin Johnstone:

During a speech at the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism.

His comments, initially flagged by journalist Thomas Fazi, read as follows:

The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

Stoltenberg made these remarks as part of a general gloat about the fact that Putin invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO expansion and yet the invasion has resulted in Sweden and Finland applying to join the alliance, saying it “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.”

Stoltenberg’s remarks would probably have been classified as Russian propaganda by plutocrat-funded “disinformation experts” and imperial “fact checkers” if it had been said online by someone like you or me, but because it came from the head of NATO as part of a screed against the Russian president it’s been allowed to pass through without objection.

In reality Stoltenberg is just stating a well-established fact: contrary to the official western narrative, Putin invaded Ukraine not because he is evil and hates freedom but because no great power ever allows foreign military threats to amass on its borders  —  including the United States. That’s why so many western analysts and officials spent years warning that NATO’s actions were going to provoke a war, and yet when war broke out we were slammed with a tsunami of mass media propaganda repeating over and over and over again that this was an “unprovoked invasion”.

Continue reading here.

How Science is Done These Days

With the example of climate science

Article by Tony Thomas.

Excerpt:

There’s nothing new about mainstream climate scientists conspiring to bury papers that throw doubt on catastrophic global warming. The Climategate leaks showed co-compiler of the HadCRUT global temperature series Dr Phil Jones emailing Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, July 8, 2004:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth, a colleague] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Thanks to a science whistle-blower, there’s now documentation of a current exercise as bad as that captured in the Jones-Mann correspondence. This new and horrid saga – again involving Dr Mann – sets out to deplatform and destroy a peer-endorsed published paper by four Italian scientists. Their paper in European Physical Journal Plus is titled A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming and documents that extreme weather and related disasters are not generally increasing, contrary to the catastrophists feeding misinformation to the Guardian/ABC axis and other compliant media.

The witch-hunt has Australian elements. Last September, The Australian’s environment writer, Graham Lloyd, highlighted the paper (paywalled) and its conclusion that the “extreme events emergency” was overblown. Sky News Australia, which twice reported the study, picked up more than 400,000 views and thousands of comments.

The green-left Guardian countered with a hit-piece by in-house cataastrophist Graham Readfearn featuring professors Lisa Alexander and Steve Sherwood, both of NSW University. They alleged cherry-picking and misquoting. Their main specific complaint was that the Italians’ paper had drawn on the 2013 5th IPCC Report rather than the recent 6th Report. (The Italians say they submitted the paper before the 6th Report emerged).

The Guardian’s fuss caught the attention of Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) Marlowe Hood, who modestly styles himself “Senior Editor, Future of the Planet” and “Herald of the Anthropocene”. He penned his own diatribe for The Australian (paywalled but also here) against the Italians’ paper. Jumping the gun on any editorial inquiry, AFP branded the study “faulty” and “fundamentally flawed”, involving “discredited assertions” and “grossly manipulated data”. This abuse was normal since AFP and The Guardian are leaders of the Covering Climate Now (CCN) coalition of some 500 media outlets with reach to a 2 billion audience. These outlets signed the CCN pledge to hype catastrophism and rebut and censor any scepticism about our planet’s forecast fiery fate.

The whistle-blowers’ documents reveal how this media pile-on – as distinct from reasoned scientific complaint — led the journal’s owner, Springer, to demand “action”. Springer’s aim was to force the editor to publish at least an erratum and, preferably, retract it altogether, restoring climate right-think.

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published

Patrick T Brown lays out why science, in particular climate science, is so corrupt.

At the same time, the UN announces that “climate breakdown”, whatever that means, has begun. Just a few weeks after it announced that “the era of global warming is over, the era of global boiling has begun”. How anyone can take that seriously is beyond me.

Interview with Rvd. Dr. Joseph Boot

Author or The Mission of God

Boot was recently interviewed by Revelation TV.

Here are my notes:

How do we address the culture we’re living in?

JB: In the Western World, the objections to Christianity have been changing. 27 or so years ago, the focus was still on questions such as “does God exist”, “what about evil and suffering”, “is Jesus the only way to God”. Objections have changed, in university, media etc, people are not literate in theological points to ask these questions any more. The challenges are now civilizational. Christianity is deemed imperialistic, colonial, oppressive, anti-choice, misogynistic, transphobic etc. These are the kind of questions the pagan world asked Christians in Augustine’s time. He in turn wrote as an answer to these questions the tome “The City of God”.

We need a cultural apologetic to the challenges of our time.

The challenge to Christianity now is that Christianity itself is deemed evil.

What we’re facing now is radical de-Christianisation, it’s a revolutionary movement. It began in Europe with the French Revolution, which was the political expression of the philosophy of the enlightenment. Reason leading to the autonomy of man. Existence precedes essence. We’re not image-bearers of God, we are merely a choice, standing on the edge of the abyss. Everything’s about me. Then there was the neo-Marxist movement, the Frankfurt School which gave us Critical Theory, everything is socially constructed. The male Christian is the oppressor. The oppressed must become the oppressor.

The opposite movement to that has been the retreat of the church.

The Ezra Institute is trying to put some backbone back into the church. What does it truly mean to be a Christian? Great Commission. We’ve retreated from externalising the faith. Culture is religion externalised. We’ve left the various institutions of cultural life to the forces of secularism, humanism and paganism. We’ve sent our children to Caesar to be educated and are shocked that they return as Romans.

We’ve reduced Christianity to personal salvation and neglected that we pray “Your Kingdom come, your will be done ON EARTH as it is in heaven”. We’ve surrendered Jesus’ Lordship over all life.

The temptation for the church has always been to be synthesised with the culture around it. This happened when the pagan elites became Christianised. They wanted to synthesise their culture. Roman Catholicism was a synthesised culture. Then the Reformation came along. And with that the rediscovery that Jesus is the king of kings. Meaning that in economics, law, education, political life, in the arts etc. we must bring to bear the claims of the Lord Jesus.

What we’re saying in the West now is that we like the fruits of Christendom: Freedom, the rule of law, economic prosperity, peace and stability, etc. But we don’t want the root, which is Christ. We thought we could retain those things without the Gospel of Jesus Christ and submission to his word. We’ve been living off the energy of Christendom for a long time. We now find the Christian capital so eroded we’re in a crisis spiritually.

What principle markers should we be looking for in the path to recovery?

We need to recognise that Jesus is not just our saviour, but also our Lord. Christ is not just redeemer, he is also creator. He is Lord over all areas of life, not just in the church and a little bit in the family.

Our situation is like in a double-decker bus. Where in the upper deck we do the spiritual disciplines. In the lower deck we have the “secular area” which can be governed by the neutral forces of reason. Problem: That’s where the driver is. And it’s driving off a cliff. Paul says be transformed by the Holy Spirit and present your bodies as a living sacrifice.

That means take off that upper deck altogether. Just have one deck. It’s called the Kingdom of God. No area of life is outside the Kingdom rule and reign of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We’ve lost the Christian life view. Human existence is in every area a response to the Word of God. You can’t have Christian action if you don’t have Christian thinking. Young, enthusiastic Christians who want to do something end up doing things with are “Karl Marx baptised” or some other world-life view sprinkled with some Christian name. We’ve got to recover a Christian world and life view so we can act and live Christianly.

We’re currently not the salt and light of the culture.

There’s the elements of Prophet, Priest and King. It’s the King element that’s missing. My father was told “we shouldn’t be interested in property”. He said: “Well the devil is.”

Every square inch of the universe is contested between Christ and the Enemy. People want to stay on the mountain, have the sort of monastic life. No, you have to come down from the mountain and deal with the boy possessed by an evil spirit.

“Antiracism” Sounds Benign

Writes Tom Woods:

I’d like to introduce you to somebody you should know.

The name will not be familiar. But it should be.

I’ve had Wanjiru Njoya on the Tom Woods Show, and I’ve been following her ever since. She does not care what people think of her, and speaks blunt truths because somebody has to.

Let’s get her credentials and background out of the way: Njoya is originally from Kenya, where she attended the University of Nairobi. She is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter Law School, UK, and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.

She previously taught law at St. John’s College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Queen’s University, Canada. She has published widely in employment law and labor regulation.

She’s been an outspoken opponent of egalitarianism, censorship, “hate speech” nonsense, “antiracism,” and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in the workplace.

Of course, as an academic, she’s been published plenty in professional journals. But here I’ve stitched together material she’s posted over the past day or so on Twitter:

Did you know there are actual Departments of Hate Studies? Do you think you will win any argument about the meaning of “hate” against people who spent years learning CRT and now have a PhD in Hate Studies? While you were busy living your life, they were busy studying Hate.

They’re known as Hate Experts, and they’re now saying people should be jailed for “hate speech.” You may think you stand a chance debating with them the definition of “hate” because you’ll win them over with reason and logic, but you’d be wrong. Hate Studies isn’t about reason.

The rule of law is failing. Legal concepts are increasingly defined by people with PhDs in Hate Studies. Lawyers argue in court that white people mourning the death of their loved ones is “selective outrage,” as they should be mourning the historical grievances of black people.

Example [from South Africa]: “Kill the Boer is just a song. Why should Boers care about the killing of Boers? That’s selective outrage. What about my historical grievances and my land stolen in 1652? Ban the old flag; it makes me feel very unsafe when I see it displayed anywhere.” That is insane.

Example 2: people saying whiteness is psychosis, and you’re meant to treat that as a perfectly sane argument.

A civil servant sued the government for race discrimination, [on account of] DEI training that included “The Psychosis of Whiteness,” a paper which suggests white people are “psychotic, cannot be reasoned with and must be destroyed.”

The tribunal says: that’s fine, it’s just a paper, it’s not discrimination.

What can you do to help? You can’t go everywhere and fight every battle. But you can stand where you are and say no to antiracism and DEI. If more people said no they wouldn’t be as powerful as they are. Part of their power comes from the fact that most people go along with it.

If you’re still saying “well, antiracism has some good aspects and DEI could work very well if it’s done properly” then you are part of the problem.

Next time you’re sitting in your mandatory DEI training learning all about “white privilege” think about those white families in South Africa mourning the loss of their children, only to be told that’s “selective outrage” and in any case white children are just “future problems.”

Imagine not even being able to mourn the loss of your own children, your own family, because that’s “selective outrage.” Instead of expressing sympathy for your loss they tell you “land or death.” This level of horror is not even “hate speech.” It’s simply unimaginable evil.

This insanity runs very deep, and there’s nothing anybody can do to uproot it. Anybody who sees white children as “future problems” really can’t be won over with fine arguments. The best thing to do is to stop encouraging them. Yet DEI ideology does the opposite. It fuels them.

[TW note: The “future problems” remark is a reference to comments from members of the Black First Land First (BLF) party, one of whom reacted to the news of at least three white children having died after a bridge collapsed at their school by saying, “Don’t have heart to feel pain for white kids. Minus three future problems.” Another said, “I celebrate the death of our enemies, their children, their cats and dogs. That is our position.”]

Not only are they killing white farmers, but they get offended when their families express grief and sorrow. They say that’s “selective outrage.” “Why are you sad your parents were killed? That’s selective outrage because you don’t seem sad about all the black victims of crime.”

South African courts are not sure whether there’s any link between chanting “Kill the Boer” and the killing of Boers, as they say it’s just a song. But the same courts are very sure that if any black person sees the old South African flag they’ll melt, so they banned the flag.

That’s a sampling.