atheism, Rod Fleming's World

27/03/2024

Reims Bikini Attack: Suspects named

Originally posted 2015-07-27 23:18:43.

The broader media gave the story of how a young woman was set upon by five other women for sunbathing in a bikini in a park in Reims, France, some attention today and a few new titbits have come out. (I covered this yesterday.)

According to the national newspaper Le Monde, under the headline ‘Emotions and hasty conclusions’ the woman who was attacked is Angélique Slosse. Three of her alleged attackers have been named, Inès Nouri, Zohra Karim and Hadoune Tadjouri. The other two are minors and their names have not been released. All five are Muslim.

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27/03/2024

Fear of Islam is common sense in 2020

Originally posted 2015-01-31 03:17:47.

This article was originally published in 2015. If I thought then that things might be better by now, five years later, I was deluding myself. Today we see an upsurge, again, of Islamist violence and hatred. All of our appeasement has failed; the war intensifies. Fear of Islam is just the common-sense position to take, in 2020.

France and the world have been shocked by a brutal and vicious massacre of journalists at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. This atrocity was perpetrated by Islamists with the specific aim of preventing criticism of their ideology. In the aftermath, unprecedented levels of public outrage and grief were displayed all over France.

Just this week, 44 men of the Philippines Special Action Force were murdered by Islamists in southern Mindanao. The officers had their throats cut. This atrocity was carried out by the Islamist group the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which has made a career out of the usual stock-in-trades of the Islamist – murder, kidnapping, torture and extortion. Here too, there has been a massive outpouring of public emotion.

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27/03/2024

The ‘Ontological Argument’= busted

Originally posted 2014-01-17 01:32:12.

This is sometimes called the attempt to define god into existence, and was first proposed by Anselm of Canterbury (1033—1109). This original version was busted by Kant and Hume amongst others, but lo and behold, it resurfaced after several reworkings. While modern apologists are mightily proud of the shiny new gloss this has given the argument, it still devolves to the same thing:

A thing that can be imagined to exist, must exist, if it is imagined to have certain properties.

Clearly this is nonsense. However the dense fug of philosophical obscurantism is, as usual, used to hide the central argument, so let me expand what it says:

God is a being greater than which none can be conceived (unsubstantiated premise.)

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14/02/2024

Identity Politics — the secret oppression

Originally posted 2018-09-17 09:30:59.

Identity Politics (IP) is a product of Postmodernism, the corrupted thinking that gave us Political Correctness (PC). This operates by denying an opponent the language needed to present a case, and thus preventing that person from doing so. It is intellectually lazy and morally bankrupt, because it is directly contradictory to free speech. You cannot speak freely if the language you must use has been censored so that you cannot express yourself. However, the Regressive Postmodernist Left has never been very keen on free speech. It prefers that people toe the party line.

IP ‘identifies’ a hierarchy in society, which it defines as ‘relative privilege’. It suggests that there is such a thing as ‘the patriarchy’, which apportions ‘privilege’ to individuals according to their identities — white men, black women, and so on. It proposes to counter this by establishing a hierarchy based on ‘oppression’. It says that those who are awarded most patriarchal privilege should not be allowed to speak about matters that affect the less privileged. This applies even if the person speaking is a recognised expert quoting the best science.

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13/12/2023

The New Atheists, New Age woo & Cultural Marxism

Originally posted 2017-08-01 19:48:42.

The New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens and many others, purported to offer a sane, secular attempt to roll back religiosity for the betterment of society. Instead, their efforts have begat the mother of all calamities.

How did this come to pass?

Scientific atheism, as promoted by the New Atheists, lacks any unifying central structure or code. Essentially it is based on a negative — not believing in God. So it can’t have a defining structure. Richard Dawkins, one of the most prominent New Atheists, tried to answer this with his ‘brights’ — which was an embarrassment. (Since at least 2014, Dawkins has self-identified as a ‘secular Christian’ anyway.)

After the Enlightenment and especially the French Revolution, European secularism based itself around Reason as the core methodology that would replace, in the minds of those who were atheist, religious belief. This reflected a rejection of hierarchical religious authority, which had begun in the Reformation. The works of philosophers like Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant and Paine promoted the idea of the free-thinking individual whose intellectual scalpel was Reason.

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05/12/2023

Witch-burning is Back: as the Left wants it

Originally posted 2013-11-02 17:21:47.

Witch-burning is out of fashion in the West these days. Fortunately. But the intolerance that caused it is still with us, and it’s getting more strident. The Internet has given voice to some whose opinions, frankly, are odious, and ‘multiculturalism’ that shameful abrogation of the moral values of our secular society, makes it increasingly difficult for anyone to express legitimate criticism of some of the nastiest ideas put forward by what is, frankly, a thoroughly poisonous group of people.

Today, the victims of the intolerance are not witches or pagans or dissident Protestants, Catholics or Jews. They are ordinary decent people who have been brought up to believe that they have a right to speak freely. After all, the US has a Constitution that enshrines it, and through all those long years of the Cold War, the one thing we in Europe held most dear was that in our culture, freedom of speech was assured, for without it, there would be no freedom at all. If we were to be ‘better dead than Red’ and we would have been, it was in the name of Freedom of Speech that we should have faced our nuclear Calvary.

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05/12/2023

YouTube Posts: 23-30 July 2017

Originally posted 2017-07-30 19:44:24.

29 July 2017

Abandoning Atheism 2: More thoughts

In my last video I discussed why I no longer feel comfortable calling myself an atheist. This is only partly because it’s an unscientific position. It is, more importantly, a political position that plays into the hands of those who wish to destroy Western civilisation, the finest on the planet.

05/12/2023

Time has run out: War has begun

Originally posted 2017-02-03 07:34:03.

We have no time left to deliberate, now. Appeasement has failed, just as it did in 1939. The enemy is among us. He is far more cruel and vicious than Adolf Hitler and more totalitarian than the Nazis. He uses any weapon he can to kill us, while we have allowed our governments to take from us our own, with which we might, perhaps, have defended ourselves. His name is Islam and he has declared war.

Our cultural values of freedom and toleration we must now put aside, because our continent is sick. The dream of a free, peaceful Europe that we have been building for seven decades is dead. We must, now, fight to preserve what is left, the essential core of our cultural values. To do that we must accept that many of our privileges, afforded by the system we live under, must be suspended. We are at war and that is one consequence.

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05/12/2023

Socially aware, libertarian, scientific, secularist

Originally posted 2016-09-16 14:13:30.

I was asked today if I was a ‘liberal’. Now in all honesty, until quite recently, I would just have said ‘yes’ and moved on. Simple, easy, checks the right boxes. But the world is not as it was; liberalism has become infected with some appallingly bad ideas that we have to stand up to and defeat. So when I analysed ‘what I am’ I came up with this: a socially aware, libertarian, scientific, secularist.

So, for this week’s Friday Politics, what does being a socially aware, libertarian, scientific, secularist, mean and why is it not the same as being a ‘liberal’?