Atheism Leads to Authoritarianism

As a statement about societies this is a reasonable argument. The most authoritarian regime of recent times was Communism and it was certainly atheistic. But are individual atheists automatically more supportive of authority? As a libertarian and an atheist I would have to say No.

There is certainly not a 1-to-1 correspondence between atheism and personal authoritarianism but there would appear to be some connection. Leftists are great promoters of government control of most things and Leftists are often atheistic. So faith would appear to be some protection against government authoritarianism

On the other hand, religion can be very authoritarian. Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses (etc.) demand a lot of their followers -- and get obedience to it

Perhaps it all boils down to what authority you respect, as my research into political authoritarianism suggested. Left and Right simply respect different authorities. See here and here

Conservative Christian author and radio host Eric Metaxas has written several best-selling biographies, including one about the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Metaxas released another book not long ago with the provocative title Is Atheism Dead?. The title was clearly intended as a nod to the 1966 Time Magazine title “Is God Dead?”

Metaxas argues that recent scientific research and historic archeological discoveries have served only to further point to God’s existence and against the atheist claim of there being no compelling evidence for God.

So, while Metaxas makes his impressive case that science is indeed favorable to theism rather than opposed to it, the answer to his question as to whether atheism is dead has long been answered. And that answer is “no.”

In fact, the Bible itself says as much. In the first chapter of the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul points out that the truth of God’s existence and power has been made plain to all humanity in creation (Rom. 1:19-21). However, humans in their state of sinful rebellion actively work to suppress this truth. God, therefore, gives them over to their foolish thinking and as a result they become effectively blind to Him. Practically speaking they become atheists, rejecting any evidence for God that is built into the fabric of creation everywhere as merely a convent coincident but with no greater reality behind it.

There have been times throughout history where atheism has ebbed and flowed. One of those times when it ebbed was during the birth of this nation, as America’s founders, though not all Christians, still recognized the fact that only a God-believing people could be motivated to uphold the virtues necessary for a free society. Logically, less government is needed when everyone is careful to do the right thing by their neighbor. A free people that is law-abiding doesn’t need a big controlling government.

However, as Metaxas observes, “When we become less active in governing ourselves we look to the government for solutions. Government thereby grows and our abilities to govern ourselves quickly atrophy.” When atheism grows, so does authoritarian government. If people don’t recognize that our Creator God is watching their every action and thought, and that He will hold every individual to account for not only their actions, but their very words and thoughts, then immorality and lawlessness grows.

A truly free people are those who are held by a personal virtue that is based upon a knowledge of God. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” said John Adams. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

https://patriotpost.us/articles/90533-atheism-leads-to-authoritarianism-2022-08-15

****************************************************

Why is the Globe theatre making a play about Joan of Arc non-binary?

Julie Bindel

Feminists tend to be fascinated with the story of Joan of Arc. She was irreverent, impertinent, way more intelligent than her enemies, and was true to herself and her beliefs right to the end.

War hero and religious martyr, Joan has been described as ‘Jesus with a sword’. A 16-year-old peasant girl who decided to take on an entire army is a female to admire and hold up as a role model. But it would seem that we have to make allowances for an ‘intersectional’ and ‘inclusive’ approach and consider whether Joan was female after all.

A tweet from Shakespeare’s Globe theatre explained: ‘Our new play I, Joan shows Joan as a legendary leader who uses the pronouns ‘they/them’. We are not the first to present Joan in this way, and we will not be the last. We can’t wait to share this production with everyone and discover this cultural icon.’

Why the title of the play was not changed to I, John I do not know. Surely, Joan is not androgynous enough?

As feminist writer Claire Heuchan pointed out on social media, arguing that Joan of Arc was not a woman is similar logic used by the church to burn her alive at the stake: the idea that wearing men’s clothes, military acumen, leadership and political authority are skills belonging to men.

Joan was all the more impressive and courageous because she was a woman. For many little girls growing up in a male-dominated, sexist society with male historical figures, both real and fictional, dominating the school curriculum and libraries, Joan existed as an exhilarating possibility about what one young girl could do against ranks of powerful men. Rewriting her as not female and presenting it as progress is deeply offensive and totally ridiculous.

Joan was charged with the crime of heresy, as have those of us that speak out against transgender orthodoxy, but we refuse the labels of TERF, bigot and fascist, just as Joan refused to surrender. She took on an entire army, but so do feminists when we resist the patriarchal boot.

I remember reading about Joan in a book about brave women in history, when I first became a feminist. There were few female figures that made it into literature and were it not for feminist historians there would be even fewer.

Playwright and directors have long swapped the sex of famous historical characters and mixed it up a bit. This can work brilliantly to make the point, often by feminist directors, that not all historical heroes were male. But unfortunately, the demand that we all capitulate to extreme trans ideology has made it impossible for Joan being re-represented as non-binary to be anything but the erasure of women’s achievements.

With swathes of young women being enabled to opt out of puberty, as we have seen with the emerging medical scandal at the Tavistock and elsewhere, it is even more important that females are accepted and celebrated.

Joan has long been a feminist icon, and the suffragette movement used her image on some of their posters. She lived in the 15th century when sex was the defining characteristic, when women had little or no rights, freedom, or choice. This is what made Joan extraordinary – she was female and challenged the constraints placed on women. The idea that a dead historical figure can be portrayed as though she existed as a different gender identity is quite unbelievable.

The whole point of Joan is that she was a woman in a man’s world. When the English held her as a prisoner and tried to prove she was a religious heretic they failed to find anything she had done that could justify her execution. The only heinous crime she was found guilty of was that she had dressed as a man. They said that was enough to deserve death and pronounced her guilty. When a woman is killed because she has dared to transgress rules and laws about how we should dress and act, as decided by men, that makes her a feminist martyr, not a they/them.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/why-is-the-globe-making-joan-of-arc-non-binary/

**************************************************

The most powerful force in British politics is the veto

England is in the grip of its most widespread drought in 20 years. Water companies are implementing hosepipe bans. Half the country’s potato crop is expected to fail. Photographs of reservoirs show them drained, dry banks open to the sky. Another heatwave is here, bringing little prospect of imminent relief.

Britain hasn’t built a reservoir since 1991. The population has grown. Hot weather has become more frequent. Water use has become more strained. The barriers to actually doing something about it remain in place. Take Layla Moran, Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West. As late as March, she was doing the media rounds vigorously opposing the construction of a new reservoir in Abingdon; it would be unsightly, the population projections might be wrong, she said. Something needed to be done for ‘our water supply’. Just not this. Her efforts to block it even extended to securing a parliamentary debate.

The most powerful force in British politics is the veto. Britain is a country carefully constructed on a system of checks and balances. Wherever there is a need for economic development, a need for housing, a need for infrastructure, and a risk that this need might overcome local objections in the service of the national interest, there is a check: planning laws; and a balance in the form of judicial review. The end result of this vetocracy is stasis.

People wield these vetoes in the happy expectation that the government will bail them out if they are ever in danger of facing the consequences of their own actions, trucking in bottled water to meet their demand. The Abingdon reservoir’s construction is meant to meet a potential supply shortfall in 2040 of 1.1 billion litres a day. Local residents would instead prefer ‘the transfer of water from other parts of the country’. In other words, they want the benefits of infrastructure, but not the costs.

This isn’t exactly surprising, but it doesn’t mean we should indulge it. Water is heavy and difficult to transport; the longest transfers in England are around 120km from source to tap, and there is no national water grid. Unlike electricity, where everybody can be a Nimby (not-in-my-back-yard) in the confident but inaccurate expectation that there’ll be an offshore wind farm somewhere to pick up the slack, water infrastructure needs to be relatively local.

We’ve known we need new reservoirs for a long time. The 2008 water strategy emphasised the need to ‘speed up the process of planning permissions for reservoir development’. We still haven’t built new sources of supply. Even when the layers of Nimby objections are overcome, there are further layers of vetocracy at Ofwat. When Bristol Water won permission to build a £100m reservoir in 2014, no budget was allocated to its construction in Ofwat’s ‘final determination’. Nothing has been built since, although Ofwat would later list the plan as a possible solution for future water supply.

At times it feels like every problem in Britain is neglected due to the government’s terror that someone, somewhere, will be upset by change. The layers of vetocracy are built in to prevent the headlines that would result. We can’t build housing because of vetoes. We can’t build lab space because of vetoes. Even something as basic and essential as making sure water comes out when we turn on the taps can be vetoed, because we wouldn’t want an unsightly reservoir over the road, or for a village to put up with construction vehicles rumbling by.

If it’s any consolation when you’re freezing this winter, these vetoes have also made sure that our electricity supply is as insecure and strained as it can possibly be. When the Business Secretary granted permission to build one of the world’s largest offshore windfarms – the type of plan meant to shut Nimby objections up – a single man who lives nearby brought a legal challenge complaining that the project would affect the view of the sea. The High Court then quashed the planning permission.

This attitude might just pass muster if nothing else ever changed: no people were born, no people moved to Britain, the climate remained stable, and nobody had any desire to ever be financially better off. But none of these things are true, so instead we end up bursting at the seams with infrastructure built for a population from the past.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/britain-is-a-vetocracy/

***************************************************

American Stasi

Monday’s shocking images of police sirens blaring outside Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s magnificent Palm Beach, Florida, estate, will not soon be forgotten.

Much has already been said and written about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that precipitated those sirens: “outrageous,” “unprecedented,” a “crossing of the Rubicon” moment. Regrettably, all of that is true.

The siccing of the national law enforcement apparatus to execute a pre-dawn raid on a top partisan rival—especially when that rival is the head of state’s predecessor and perhaps likely future opponent—is a contemptible act of raw political bloodlust. It is an act far more befitting a crumbling hellhole like Venezuela, or a Third World country in sub-Saharan Africa, than it is the land that was to be, per Benjamin Franklin’s alleged quip, “a republic, if you can keep it.”

America, it seems, won the Cold War only to see its own federal law enforcement/national security apparatus morph into a version of the old East German Stasi—and barely three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to boot.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Thursday press conference, remarkably defensive and defiant in tone, did not dispel any concerns or assuage any critics. (Those critics, incidentally, include even former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.)

The scuttlebutt is that Trump was hoarding deeply secretive, classified information deep in the bowels of Mar-a-Lago, in violation of the Presidential Records Act. But the back-and-forth between the National Archives and Trump’s personal legal team surrounding the boxes of material, entirely routine for an ex-president when it comes to things like establishing a presidential library, was by all accounts unfolding amicably: A subpoena was issued this spring, Trump’s lawyers were cooperative, and archivists had already recalled 15 boxes earlier this year.

Furthermore, the Presidential Records Act isn’t even a criminal statute, and probable cause for the violation of a criminal statute is the necessary precondition for a magistrate to sign off on a search warrant.

As the case may be, the magistrate who signed off on this particular warrant, Bruce Reinhart, is a Jeffrey Epstein-connected ex-defense attorney who just so happened to donate thousands of dollars in 2008 to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Go figure.

Many of the Biden regime’s apologists are out in full force, suggesting that the raid was necessary because Trump was obstructing the return of existentially vital documents. This is demonstrably specious.

First, whatever documents Trump may have had in his private Mar-a-Lago possession, there was absolutely nothing there that is new to Biden, Garland, and FBI Director Christopher Wray; Trump has been out of office for nearly 19 months, by now.

Second, as a former president, Trump had unilateral, plenary authority to declassify any document that he wanted to declassify—period. Without seeing the specific search warrant, then, it is impossible to know whether the documents the feds sought had already been declassified.

Third, all ex-presidents receive various taxpayer-funded accoutrements, among them a staff with security clearances and secure facilities for the maintenance of classified records. It simply beggars belief that any document at Mar-a-Lago was at risk of falling into the wrong hands.

The FBI, at this point, is also undeserving of any benefit of the doubt.

We are now two years after former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pled guilty for lying to a court to obtain a FISA warrant against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

The FBI under Wray’s predecessor, James Comey, of course, was complicit in the propagation of the bogus “Steele dossier” and the general Russia-collusion hoax, whose raison d’etre was solely to delegitimize Trump’s presidency from the outset.

That would be the same Comey, incidentally, who let 2016 Trump challenger Hillary Clinton off the hook for—you guessed it—storing reams of classified documents on an unsecured personal server on the grounds that she merely exhibited “extreme carelessness.”

Most recently, the FBI disgraced itself during the controversy surrounding the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer—a plot that bears all the markings of a nefarious deep state entrapment scheme.

Similar entrapment speculation remains about the role Ray Epps played during the Jan. 6, 2021, jamboree at the U.S. Capitol, although one is usually lambasted as a “conspiracy theorist” for this entirely reasonable inference.

There are three primary conclusions to draw from Monday’s unprecedented raid—an epochal moment in the history of American law enforcement, opening up a Pandora’s box that will never be put back into place.

First, it seems that Trump’s fundraising and support metrics have only increased due to his perceived martyrdom, thus bolstering his prospects in his likely-impending 2024 Republican presidential primary.

Since this “rally around the flag” effect was so easily foreseeable, it seems likely that this was a factor in Garland’s decision to approve the raid. The regime seems to think that, since it defeated Trump in 2020, it can do so again in 2024.

The other two conclusions are even more nefarious.

The second conclusion to draw is that every alarm conservatives have sounded over the past few years about the spiraling out of control of America’s two-tier system of justice has now been vindicated.

The Biden regime is completely unapologetic about its targeting of political opponents—just ask Peter Navarro, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Steve Bannon, or even Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe.

The imperative for conservatives is to respond not merely by tsk-tsking but by recognizing “what time it is” in this ailing, late-stage republic and to demonstrate a willingness to counter the left’s brazen assaults with our own willingness to prudentially engage in escalatory, tit-for-tat, mutually assured destruction tactics. Sometimes, the only way out is through.

The third and final conclusion is the most terrifying: The Biden regime has demonstrated its willingness, and indeed its eagerness, to take America to hitherto unprecedented depths of depravity—and it has done so for the very simple reason that it can. For this was an act of power qua power—an act of public humiliation intended to make a political opponent bend the knee once and for all before The Regime.

Welcome to the era of the American Stasi.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/08/12/american-stasi/ ?

****************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

*****************************************