Monday, May 21, 2018



THE RELIGION OF RACISM

Only believing in white evil can save you now

Obama once called slavery, “America’s original sin”. Jim Wallis, a member of Obama’s White House Faith Council, has a book out titled, "America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege".

Accusations of sinfulness usually tell us more about the values of the accuser than the accused.

If racism is America’s original sin, then its redemption lies in anti-racism. For liberal theologians, Christian and Jewish, who no longer believe in the traditional biblical sins, racism is a godsend. It provides the moral drama of damnation and redemption, confession and absolution, in a way that is compatible with the larger secular culture and their own political ambitions.

Fighting racism isn’t just a cause, it’s a religion. And all that remains of major religious denominations.

The most resonantly dramatic events for Christian and Jewish liberal denominations remain the fight against slavery and the struggles of the civil rights movement. They revisit and recreate them ceaselessly. And each protest movement, whether it’s Muslim migrants at airports, illegal aliens from El Salvador at the border or Black Lives Matter racists at coffee shops, is a religious revival experience.

The trouble is that the hunt for this particular sin has come to pervade our legal system, taint workplaces, terrorize campuses and unleash social media mobs on random offenders. We are not in a libertine age just because sexual morality is as dead as disco and drugs are on the verge of being legalized. The sins of traditional morality have been replaced by an even more ruthless moral code.

Employees, employers, students and businessmen still fear being fired, expelled and hounded out of society for offending the sensibilities of a fanatical sect and its zealous enforcers. They hide behind hypocrisy, denouncing others while living in terror that their own private offenses will be outed.

A drunken tweet, an indiscreet joke or a mere implication can end even the most respected career.

The religion of racism has become a twisted creed that has perverted its own origins. What began as a unitary effort to bring together different races around religion has instead become a cult that uses its beliefs to divide us with white people as perpetual sinners and black people as unstained saints.

Its fetishization of black victimhood is bad for black people and its conviction that white people are inherently sinful is bad for everyone. As real racism has diminished, its conviction in the ubiquity of this particular sin has not. Fighting the overt discrimination of segregation turned into hunting for covert bigotry by working backward through disparate impact creating a guilt through lack of association.

If black people weren’t visiting national parks or living in sufficient numbers in Utah, it was evidence that national parks and Utah were racist. Racism was no longer something to be discovered by witnessing its presence, but by noting the absence of some ideal multicultural diversity statistic. Civil rights shifted from lifting state sanctions that mandated discrimination against black people to imposing state sanctions that mandated discrimination on behalf of black people. Like the segregationists, they were abusing government power to impose the version of the ideal racial balance that they wanted to see.

The absence of the realization of this vision became its own evidence of racial sinfulness.

One fundamental difference between a free society and an oppressive society is that the former punishes bad behavior while the latter punishes the absence of good behavior. A free society, such as America, punishes theft. An oppressive society, such as the Soviet Union, punished the failure to work.

When civil rights shifted from punishing mandatory segregation to punishing the lack of integration, it ceased to be a movement pursuing freedom and instead became a totalitarian movement.

Racism diminished, but the religious, emotional and financial need for its existence on the part of the religion of racism did not. Their mission became manufacturing racism. The most mundane interactions were reinterpreted through the discriminating eye of the microaggression. Otherwise neutral institutions were accused of pervasive whiteness. Racism ceased to be an observable interaction between individuals and became the unseen gluonic binding block of all social matter in America.

The religion of racism had reached its logical conclusion. It was no longer the absence of black people, but the presence of white people that was racist. Racism was America’s original sin. White people carried it everywhere with them like radiation. To be white was to have your body and your mind, your thoughts, your writings and even the inanimate objects around you be infected by racial radioactivity.

Racism was no longer an objectively measurable phenomenon. It had taken on all the characteristics of metaphysics. It was everywhere and yet undetectable. It was transmitted by the immutable nature of race, a phenomenon that was paradoxically a construct and yet inflexibly inescapable.

Every tragedy, grievance and outrage was ultimately attributed to this primal evil and original sin.

Political opposition to Obama, poor water management decisions, infant mortality rates, environmental shifts, the vagaries of entertainment industry casting, gun violence and a thousand others could be put down to racism. The religion of racism, like all religion, had found something that explained everything.

To understand America, all you had to do was understand racism. And then you would know that we were a country perpetually divided between privileged white people and powerless minorities.

Implicit bias is the final catechism of a faith in racism. It is a pseudo-religious ritual whose purpose is to force its victims to confess their sins and assert its doctrinal belief in the innate racism of white people. Like all cults, it does this through the familiar brainwashing process of challenging and breaking down identity, through twisted reasoning and emotional abuse, and then reconstructing it in its own image.

To its believers, implicit bias is the truth that we are all racist. But that we can be saved from our racism by confessing it. Activism is penance. Denounce others and you too can make it to multicultural heaven.

The religion of racism has the right to believe in its hateful creed. What it does not have the right to do is enforce it on others. And yet the left has made a mockery of the separation of church and state by making its own secular religion, obsessed with planetary and racial damnation, into a national creed.

And, like all efforts at imposing a religion, it has led to a religious war which some call a culture war.

The religion of racism is less concerned with actual racists, than with racial unbelievers. The ultimate heresy, the one it’s rooting out with implicit bias and extreme prejudice, is that racism isn’t everywhere. And it’s not a burning national crisis that requires handing out unlimited witch hunting powers.

The theocrats of social justice prefer opposing views to skepticism. The existence of racists reaffirms their belief in the defining power of racism. It’s the skeptics of racism who are the real threat.

If you don’t believe that racism is significant, you challenge their entire reason for being.

And the religion of racism meets these challenges by manufacturing a racial crisis as it strings together anecdotal incidents from a Waffle House to a New York City apartment to a student dorm to a coffee shop, to support its unified field theory of universal bigotry and suppress skepticism about its powers.

The puritanical panic has less to do with fear of racism than the emotional needs of the witch hunters. Informing on your neighbors, denouncing fellow students and becoming the center of attention is emotionally fulfilling for the same psychological reasons that it was for the Salem accusers, the Parisian mobs of the French Revolution and the rampaging Communist students of the Cultural Revolution.

But beyond the twisted psychology of the activist accusers, the judges of kangaroo courts and the town criers of the media eager for scalps, the human sacrifice of the purge releases social tensions. This was the social function of human sacrifice. The shocking spectacle of bloodletting, the mob psychology and adrenaline release, relieved the fears and anxieties bedeviling society and left them feeling cleansed.

The constant hunt for scapegoats is a feature of an anxious society fearful for the future. Social justice scapegoating gives a generation on the edge of history a temporary sense of control by abusing others.

The left likes to believe that it’s a positive movement, defined by its utopian aspirations, not its brutal tactics. But it is a movement built on fear and hate, on a historical inevitability that is premised not on human progress, but on human collapse, on inescapable problems and necessarily ruthless solutions.

The religion of racism isn’t unique to America. But there is something special about it in this country. It stinks of the soured beliefs of liberal religious denominations, their loss of faith in God and man, and their growing conviction that salvation lies only in wielding the unlimited power of their governments.

SOURCE





MIT professor Eric Lander apologizes for praising controversial Nobel winner James Watson

Watson's statements on IQ were well-grounded in psychometrics

Eric Lander, the founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has apologized for toasting 90-year-old Nobel Prize winner James Watson over the weekend.

In a contrite e-mail to colleagues, first reported Monday by Stat, Lander said he was aware of Watson’s racist and misogynist views, and had even been present when the celebrated scientist made anti-Semitic statements, but ultimately agreed to praise Watson for his role in the Human Genome Project.

In his tribute to Watson at a Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Saturday, Lander credited Watson for “inspiring all of us to push the frontiers of science to benefit humankind.” He neglected to mention that the man who helped discover the double helix also has suggested there’s a link between exposure to sunlight and sexual urges, and argued that there is racial disparity in intelligence based in biology.

In his e-mail Monday, Lander said he should not have toasted Watson. Though he did make an oblique reference to Watson’s past statements when he called him “flawed,” that wasn’t enough, Lander said.

“I’d like to do that now: I reject his views as despicable,” Lander wrote, according to Stat. “They have no place in science, which must welcome everyone. In retrospect, I should have followed my first instinct, which was to decline the invitation. As someone who has been on the receiving end of his abhorrent remarks, I should have been sensitive to the damage caused by recognizing him in any way.”

Before the apology, social media reacted angrily to Lander’s remarks.

“By toasting Jim Watson, Eric Lander is saying that sexism, racism, anti-semitism, and all sorts of forms of harassment and vile behavior by someone in power in science is A-OK — disgusting,” tweeted University of California-Davis professor Jonathan Eisen, who also posted a video of Lander’s tribute, calling it “a horrific action.”

“I hope we can all pause and think deeply about which scientists we choose to honor & why,” tweeted Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley. “How it is that someone everyone knows to be racist, sexist & anti-semitic is still among us, let alone toasted. And how many lives and careers have been & are being ruined by our silence?”

SOURCE





Rev. Graham Slams Episcopal Church on 'Marriage' Change: 'Caving to the Gay Agenda'

Commenting on the Episcopal Church's decision to change marriage terminology from "husband and wife" to "union of two people," evangelical leader Rev. Franklin Graham said that to "change what God has defined" is "disobedience," sin, and added that "all of this is caving to the gay agenda."

In a May 18 post on Facebook, Rev. Graham said, "I have many friends in the Episcopal Church and I was saddened when I recently learned that the church wants to remove the terms 'husband' and 'wife' from their standardized marital vows. They want to replace the phrase the 'union of husband and wife' with the 'union of two people.'"

"I’ve got news for them -- just changing their words in their ceremony won’t make it right," said Graham. "You cannot change what God has defined."

"Through the centuries, people have tried to reinterpret, repackage, or rewrite God’s laws to suit themselves and their own evil desires," he said.  "It’s nothing new; but the end result is always the same. It’s called disobedience—it’s called sin. And sin brings God’s judgment."

"All of this is caving to the gay agenda," said Rev. Graham.

He continued,  "I read that the Church of England’s Secretary-General William Nye has been an outspoken critic of this change—good for him. More Christians and more people in church leadership should speak up about the sins that are within the church and stand against things that would not be aligned with the authority of God’s Word.

He ended his post with the passage from 1 Peter 1:25:  "the word of the Lord remains forever."

SOURCE





Against hate-speech laws

Nadine Strossen’s new book makes an important case for the importance of free speech without limits.

Hate speech is the thorniest of issues for defenders of free speech. When asked where those who champion freedom of expression would draw the line on ‘acceptable’ speech, many of even the usually most stalwart proponents of free speech draw it here.

In particular, attitudes towards hate speech are what divides a European approach to free speech from a US, First Amendment-based approach. In Europe in recent decades the net on what speech is permitted has been drawn ever tighter as governments seek to rein in speech they say harms individuals based on a variety of their characteristics: from race and religion, to sexual orientation. In the US, backed by a First Amendment that places far more protection on speech, courts have traditionally firmly resisted temptations to place limitations on speech, even when it is deemed hateful.

Nevertheless, with the rise of nationalist rhetoric in the US, and in particular following a number of protests against speakers on university campuses that have in some instances turned violent, there has been a renewed interest in the US in potentially introducing some kind of hate-speech measures.

It is this that has spurred veteran free-speech campaigner, Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008, to revisit the question of hate speech in her new book Hate: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship.

Hate considers the way in which the First Amendment has been interpreted in the US over the past century, examines the use of hate-speech laws in developed democracies elsewhere, and explores some of the arguments used to defend hate-speech legislation – and why they do not stand up to scrutiny.

Strossen provides an excellent overview of the ‘neutrality’ and ‘emergency’ principles. The former guarantees that speech will be protected no matter the viewpoint of the speaker. This is essential in a democracy because it ensures that the government does not become the arbiter of the acceptable viewpoint at any given time. Strossen points out how vital this principle has been in defending not just what society might now classify as ‘hate speech’ such as racism but also pro-civil-rights messages. Proponents of hate-speech laws would do well to study the 1972 Chicago v Mosley case Strossen cites, in which an African-American postal employee was only allowed to protest outside a high school, with a sign that read ‘Jones High School practices black discrimination’, on the basis of the First Amendment.

The cases covered by Strossen demonstrate time and again how freedom-of-expression protections – as opposed to limitations offered by hate-speech laws – protect minority and persecuted groups, citing US Civil Rights leader, Congressman John Lewis’s observation: ‘Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the Civil Rights movement would have been a bird without wings.’ And she goes on to show how hate-speech laws can often have the opposite effect – that they end up targeting the very minority groups such laws purport to protect. Examples include that of a prominent journalist and member of the Uzbek minority in Kyrgyzstan who was charged with ‘inciting ethnic hatred’ for reporting on conflicts between Uzbeks and the majority Kygryz.

Too often free-speech advocates seem to want to have it both ways: arguing that speech is so vital to a democratic society that it needs to be protected and yet not powerful enough to cause hurt

Strossen also lays out clearly the ‘emergency’ principle in which the government may suppress speech only when it directly causes specific, imminent and serious harm, citing an opinion from a 1927 case in which Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: ‘Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of speech… Men feared witches and burned women.’

Strossen is a lawyer and the book is strong on legislation and the court rulings that have interpreted such laws, both in the United States and Europe. She also does not shy away from the notion that words can harm. This is refreshing. Too often free-speech advocates seem to want to have it both ways: arguing that speech is so vital to a democratic society that it needs to be protected and yet not powerful enough to cause hurt.

‘[W]e cherish speech precisely because of its unique capacity to influence us, both positively and negatively’, she writes. ‘But even though speech can contribute to potential harms, it would be more harmful to both individuals and society to empower the government to suppress speech for that reason.’

Strossen gives a brief overview of various research that shows both that hate-speech laws do little to limit the hateful views they seek to suppress, and that by limiting the exposure individuals have to hateful views, the less resilient they become to a whole raft of potentially distasteful and intolerant viewpoints.

However, at 208 pages, this element of Hate felt a little light, and while overall it provides an excellent overview of the legal frameworks of hate speech and their impacts, I would have liked more examples and personal stories exploring the sociological and psychological arguments against hate-speech laws. Given that the psychological and social effects of hate speech is are a key element in the demands of various groups for increased restrictions on speech, it seems to me this is a vital part of the polemic on hate-speech legislation.

One of Strossen’s challenges is that she lays out the direction of her argument – and her conclusions – from the outset, meaning that the conclusion (hate-speech laws do not protect us from harm or promote greater tolerance in societies) often comes before the evidence that supports this argument. This is particularly true of the overview, which meant that at times I felt Strossen failed to bring me along with the thread of her arguments. I agree wholeheartedly with Strossen’s views on hate speech – 45 years of evidence from the work of Index on Censorship chimes entirely with her conclusions. But I did wonder whether Hate would be as convincing to a reader who currently either sits on the fence or is firmly in favour of hate-speech law.

However, in these times of censure by the mob, and of major corporations with the power of governments to limit speech, it is welcome to hear voices like Strossen’s making themselves heard and reminding us why the urge to limit speech in the name of protection ultimately offers no protection at all.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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