Pat Condell: "The crisis of secularism"

Post Reply New Topic

When senior clergymen have nothing better to do, which is usually all the time, they love to complain about the threat of secularism which they always depict as barbarism on a stick, essentially; a kind of dark atheist totalitarian nightmare where religion has been stamped out and we've all reverted to a kind of amoral hedonistic savagery.

Well, whatever that may be, and however attractive it may sound to some people, that is not secularism. Secularism doesn't mean no religion. It means religion for those who want it and no religion for those who don't. It means freedom of religion and freedom from religion in equal measure, for a change. It means less unearned power, privilege and influence for the political organisation of religion and the people who make their living from it, but not for anybody else. So naturally clergy regard it as the work of Satan.

As do evangelical leaders, according to a poll from last summer. Although many ordinary Christians are rightly worried about the spread of Islam, their leaders, the ones who make a living from their religion, regard secularism as a greater threat. Of course they do. (Send money now, by the way, in Jesus' name.)

Recently an American Christian judge made the extraordinary statement that secularism leads to sharia law, which is a bit like saying that penicillin causes infection. Now American judges are not known to be the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree at the best of times, so we can probably give this guy the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was confusing secularism with multiculti dhimmitude. You see, a person who opposes Christianity but who appeases and enables Islam is not a secularist. The word for such a person is a dhimmi. Well, there are other words, but I want to keep the language in this video as clean as I can so that the whole family can enjoy it.

In fact, secularism is the only way to guarantee that sharia law can never get a foothold so Christians, if they had any sense, would be lobbying for it and voting for it in droves. If they had any sense.

The truth is that secularism is under threat today in a way that it hasn't been for many years, thanks partly to the uncompromising nature of the religion of permanent offence, and also thanks to our ridiculous culture of accommodation and unwarranted respect for religious belief, which Christian leaders are exploiting to the max, of course, because they are politicians first and foremost. They don't seem to care that, in misrepresenting secularism for their own selfish ends, they're aiding and abetting the most virulent and dangerous form of religion on the planet, political Islam. Unlike the fantasy sin of denying the holy spirit, that's a sin that really is unforgivable, because Islam has only been a prominent feature of western life for a couple of decades or so, yet in that short time it has managed to eat into our basic civil liberties with constant demands for special treatment always backed by the implicit threat of violence. As a consequence, our diet has been adulterated with the barbarism of halal, we have sharia courts here in the UK where women are treated as less than human, and all over the western world we've been saddled with repressive hate speech laws that are more dangerous than the opinions they criminalise, all in the name of not offending Islam. Wherever this religion goes in the world, there's intolerance and there's conflict, and people become less free. The evidence is right there for us. We have no excuse. It's happening before our very eyes in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring. Surely it's obvious that only a rigorously secular society is capable of keeping Islam at bay.

Well, not apparently to Christian clergy, who carry on blithely spreading their lies and depicting secularism as the epitome of evil. None more assiduously than the Pope of Rome who claims that secularism has left deep scars on traditionally Christian countries. Really? I bet they're nowhere near as deep as the scars the Catholic Church has left. He shouldn't be so modest. He says that humankind is groping in the dark unable to distinguish between good and evil, when in fact over the last few years we've had ample evidence that it's the Catholic Church and the men who run it who are unable to distinguish good from evil. This pope presided over years of child rape by Catholic priests and did nothing about it, then stonewalled the issue when it confronted him. Every concession has had to be dragged out of him. The fact that some people still regard him as a source of moral authority is frankly perverse. It's as if OJ Simpson ran for US president and won in a landslide. Yet this wretched man has the nerve to depict secularism as somehow immoral. To him, the only thing worse than a secularist is a secularist wearing a condom. He's even gone to the trouble of setting up a whole new evangelical unit within the Vatican to combat what he calls the crisis of secularism. That's right, the crisis of religious freedom, the freedom of everyone to believe whatever they like and to worship whatever they like, but not to impose it on others, which, again, is what secularism actually means. And the Pope is against this, which shows that he knows better than Jesus, because if we all took the advice of Jesus to keep your religion to yourself and seek the kingdom of heaven within we would automatically have a secular society because we'd have no need for the political organisation of religion or the professional parasites we know as clergy. They are the only people in any way threatened by secularism, and that's why they're the ones who are always bleating about it.

Peace.

They don't seem to care that, in misrepresenting secularism for their own selfish ends, they're aiding and abetting the most virulent and dangerous form of religion on the planet, political Islam. Unlike the fantasy sin of denying the holy spirit, that's a sin that really is unforgivable, because Islam has only been a prominent feature of western life for a couple of decades or so, yet in that short time it has managed to eat into our basic civil liberties with constant demands for special treatment always backed by the implicit threat of violence. As a consequence, our diet has been adulterated with the barbarism of halal, we have sharia courts here in the UK where women are treated as less than human, and all over the western world we've been saddled with repressive hate speech laws that are more dangerous than the opinions they criminalise, all in the name of not offending Islam. Wherever this religion goes in the world, there's intolerance and there's conflict, and people become less free. The evidence is right there for us. We have no excuse. It's happening before our very eyes in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring. Surely it's obvious that only a rigorously secular society is capable of keeping Islam at bay.

Pat is a lovely example of thinking with blinders on.

He seems to hate bigots that are not the same type of bigot as himself.

how clever.

I consider him straight talking and rather witty. He and I share a common enemies-list.

ruveyn

There you go. The idea that Islam is the major problem facing the world today is a bit of a stretch.
I accept without argument that it is wacky and regressive (you know, like a religion should be.)
I use the heuristic that the people in power in a broken system are more likely the cause of the dysfunction than those out of power.

What happened in New York City just before 9:00 AM on Sept 11, 2001?

Islam, the Religion of Peace (hah!) revealed itself for what it was and is.

ruveyn

I see 911 as an outlier.
there where 19 guys most of them Saudi. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world.
1.1875 x 10^-8 of the Muslim people did 911.

I try not to use bad stats to make decisions

Similarly, there was a thread on here where someone claimed there was an army of 30 million Muslims in Europe systematically raping "our" children, blowing up public transport, changing the law, and rioting (or something like that). An army of 30 million that carries out about 100 rapes and detonates 10 bombs (both generous estimations IMO) is not doing its job properly. A political force with 30 million backers that barely affects legislature is not doing its job properly.

Shall we wait until the Muslims become "more effective"?

I have a principle: If thine enemy smite thee on thy cheek, rip his arm off and beat him to death with it.

ruveyn

Pat is a lovely example of thinking with blinders on.

He seems to hate bigots that are not the same type of bigot as himself.

how clever.

"The Muslims" will not become significantly more effective. Most of them will remain regular people. Maybe we will see more terrorism in the future, in fact I think that is inevitable because of all the lengths we've gone to to f**k up the Middle East, but it will probably be people who haved moved here from Iraq, Afghanistan and so forth with the sole aim of committing terrorism.

The best way to increase Islamic extremism in the west is to demonise the majority of law-abiding Muslims.