Pope Benedict vs the calculating elites

O'Neill defends the late Pontiff

In this interesting obituary of (ex-)Pope Benedict XVI, Brendan O’Neill, a self-proclaimed atheist, castigates “preening macho rationalists of the New Atheist set”, who, as humanists, were, according to O’Neill, more anti-enlightenment than the Pope himself:

There was also a profound irony in this Benedict-bashing spectacle. Because this man they loved to hate, ‘Pope Ratzinger’, as they demeaned him, was a far keener defender of reason than they were. He was a more rigorous student of Enlightenment, too. And he did more than they ever will to challenge the real menace to truth in the 21st century – not religion but the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, as Benedict called it. There was more humanism in Benedict’s brave, often lonely battle against today’s tyranny of nothingness than there is in the New Atheists’ snotty rage against religion.

The obituarist gets to the point:

In short, absent any notion of universal truth, devoid of social standards we might define ourselves by (or against), we’re left with just the individual, playing around in his own prison of identity.

[…]

Indeed, Benedict held that Christianity was a ‘religion according to reason’. He argued, rightly, that the Enlightenment sprung from the traditions and tensions within Christianity itself – ‘the Enlightenment is of Christian origin’, he said. One of his most striking utterances was to say that the Enlightenment had ‘given back reason its own voice’. That is, it took ideas of reason from Christianity and expressed those ideas in the voice of reason alone. 

O’Neill hints at the fundamental problem the enlightenment has, without discussing it:

Benedict’s beef was not with reason, then, as his ill-read critics would have us believe, but with what he referred to as ‘purely functional rationality’. Or scientism, as others call it: the modern creed of evidence-based politics that judges everything by experiment rather than morality.

Here’s the fundamental problem: Without morality, rationality will become ‘scientism’, the consequences of which we were able to observe since WWI in the liberal use of weapons of mass destruction, genocides and lately the Covid tyranny, environmental tyranny and other attempts at building a Tower of Babel 2.0.

O’Neill is right to defend the late Pope against the “New Atheist” set, but he does not touch the question that begs: How do we arrive at morality, without God? Rationality alone doesn’t seem to suffice.

Radical Leftist Turned Conservative Activist

Jordan Peterson talks with Amala Ekpunobi

Video here.

At one point, JP says something like: “I was capitalising on my intelligence. Until I realised that being prideful in that manner means participating in a process that leads to totalitarian atrocities.”

Contents:

Dr Jordan B Peterson and Amala Ekpunobi discuss her early life being raised in a far left household, the instances that caused her to question the all-encompassing ideology she had been fed, and her rise to providence as an internet and podcast personality, advocating for the truth across party lines.

Raised in a far-left activist household, twenty-two-year-old Amala Ekpunobi was once a student organizer for the left. Unanswered questions–and a search for the truth–led her to a complete ideological transformation. Passionately sharing her new conservative values online, Amala became a viral social media sensation. Now the host of PragerU’s popular show “Unapologetic with Amala,” she inspires millions of young people every day to discover the truth, defend their values, and lead better lives.

Birmingham City Council believes in the power of even silent prayer, apparently

And they don't like it, apparently

I wonder what the A of C or the C of E have to say about this. Nothing, as far as I can see. At least, not yet. And I’m not holding my breath.

Excerpts:

Earlier this month, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was standing silently in a public street. She was doing, saying and displaying absolutely nothing, apparently lost in thought. A policeman approached her. He asked if she was inwardly praying. When she said she might have been, he immediately arrested her, took her to a police station and searched her. Last week, Vaughan-Spruce was told she faces prosecution.

Whatever your view on abortion, even if you are strongly pro-choice, this whole episode should worry you immensely. The implications for personal liberty are terrifying. If an arrest for silent prayer is not an instance of Orwellian ‘thoughtcrime’, then I don’t know what is.

This whole affair highlights how our leaders are becoming increasingly authoritarian. Their rules and restrictions on what we can say or think are casting an ever wider net. Concerns for individual freedom are frequently sidelined.

The World is Not Ending

Jordan Peterson discusses with Bjorn Lomborg how to make the world a better place

Fitting perhaps for this time of year (Christmas) is this discussion between psychologist Jordan Peterson and statistician Bjorn Lomborg.

Here‘s the beginning of a 5-minute summary, mainly by JP, of the whole previous discussion.

Here are some snippets of ideas from this conversation:

Making climate change the only problem to focus on, and making it look apocalyptic, drives us to make poor decisions in this regard.

Enticing young people to stick themselves to roads and chucking food at beautiful pictures [signs of infantilization and narcissism] makes them believe they are messianic saviours of the world and provides them with feelings of unearned moral virtue.

They are made to believe that they are heroes defending the benevolent virginal earth from rapacious patriarchal human culture.

While there is some truth in that view, psychologically it’s only half the story. On the feminine side, there is also a negative aspect: the rapacious, overprotective mother. And on the masculine side there is a positive aspect: the provider and explorer.

Lomborg stresses that there are many solutions for many problems available, technology has provided us with them.

Peterson stresses the importance of free speech to the finding and implementation of solutions to problems. He quotes Alfred North Whitehead: “The reason humans think is so that our ideas can die instead of us.”

One of the ideas being implemented, reports Lomborg, is self-learning programs in cheap tablets given to children in the developing world, e.g. Malawi.

Another is giving nutritional supplements to pregnant women, to prevent the babies from being stunted and enabling them to develop their full potential.

It’s only in the last century or so that we have learnt to love nature. Before we mostly feared it, for it was likely to kill us. A richer humanity will feel better protected from the dangerous aspects of nature and will be much more willing to protect the environment.

World Health Organization publishes video calling COVID jab skeptics a ‘major killing force’ 

Dr. Peter Hotez said that 'anti-vaccine activism' is 'anti-science aggression' and links people who refused the COVID injections to the 'far right.'

Article by Andreas Wailzer, LifeSiteNews.

Excerpts:

The WHO has made this wholesale condemnation of “anti-vaccine activists” despite the fact that many people have been seriously injured or even died after receiving the experimental COVID jabs. A Swiss study for instance found elevated troponin levels – indicating heart injury – across all vaccinated people, with 2.8 percent showing levels associated with subclinical myocarditis.

[…]

Hotez is a pediatrician who works in the field of vaccine research and development and, in addition to his post at Baylor College of Medicine, is the Chair of Tropical Pediatrics at Texas Children’s Hospital.  

The WHO is known for its radical pro-abortion stance and promotion of “abortion access” all around the world. 

 Its current director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was a member of the Ethiopia’s communist Tigray People’s Liberation Front and served its Minister of Health when it was in power. The party was declared a terrorist organization by the Ethiopian government in 2021. 

Hotez appears to be very close to Ghebreyesus, as he recently described him as “my brother and mentor Dr. Tedros,” in a Tweet responding to the murder of the WHO director’s uncle.