religion

From The Australian - article "Most ADF soldiers ‘believe Islam promotes violence and terrorism’" (subscriber-only link, sadly), reporting Dr Charles Miller, a lecturer in Strategic and Defence Studies at the Australian National Univer­sity"

“The best estimate … for the proportion of soldiers who have received cultural sensitivity training and who believe that the Muslim religion promotes violence and terrorism is 91 per cent.

“The corresponding figure for those who have not had cultural sensitivity training is 17 per cent.”

Oh dear!

Have you ever noticed how the "sensitive elite" talk lots about "sensitivity training", "deradicalisation", and so on, whilst obviously having little clue about the core belief system that these "programs" and concerned with? Not talking about Dr Miller, but about the mindless promoters of these "fix it all" programs. In this case the "fix" made the problem over 500% worse!

Disclosure here: I believe Muhammad was a prophet, but I am not a Muslim. Likewise I believe in Jesus, but I am not a Christian; repeat for Buddha, Moses, Krishna, and others.

The relevance: Having read the Quran at least three times from cover to cover, both in the normal order and in order of revelation (as well as a lot more stuff), I know vastly more about what Muhammad taught than the administrators and politicians who think that throwing money at a problem, without understanding it, might fix it.

Have you ever tried to explain something to a politician, something that you are expert in? Here's how it usually goes: the politician smiles understandingly, but one or two sentences in, their eyes glaze over. Another few sentences and it's "Yes, well, we'll look into that... ho, hum, hah, must go."

That is why politicians are generally useless with the hardest issues. Unless you are willing to "get inside" an issue, you will never be able to make useful contributions to fixing the problems. By being generally unwilling to listen, by trying to fit everything into their political narrative instead of seeking the truth, our political masters perpetually remain nothing more than useless decorations on the national stage.

I am going now, with the above disclosure on record, to give you my personal view on whether Islam is a religion of peace.

The evidence is coming out that "climate change" is not merely a description of an ongoing process in the life of our planet, but a new religious phenomenon. In an article in New Scientist one of its "professors" comes out of the closet and tells us as much:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has constructed a powerful scientific consensus about the physical transformation of the world's climate. ... One way I [make sense of what climate change actually means] is to rethink our discourses about climate change in terms of four enduring myths. ... The value in identifying these mythical stories in our discourses about climate change is that they allow us to see climate change not as simply an environmental problem to be solved, but as an idea that is being mobilised in various ways around the world. ...

The world's climates will keep on changing, with human influences now inextricably entangled with those of nature. So too will the idea of climate change keep changing as we find new ways of using it to meet our needs. We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence.

This is from one Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The UEA clearly needs to ask itself whether it is funding a professor of science or a professor of his own non-theistic religion. There's lots of disturbing stuff in the complete article - please do read it. But let's look at the short pieces above and ponder.

Sentence one is classic PC/postmodernist/anti-science obscurantism. Leave aside the fact that science can not and should not work by consensus. For those who haven't followed this stuff, "construction of reality" is a required tenet of the false postmodernist religion: the truth is not out there; we all make up our own 'truths', no one's 'truth' is any better than anyone else's 'truth'; he who believes the Sun rises because the Earth is rotating daily is no more correct than he who believes it rises because the morning chant was correctly intoned by the priests. Harsh? I don't think so. Only space and time prevent giving any number of examples. Here's how it works: first you convince yourself that 'truth' is whatever you choose to believe; then, a sufficient number of people choose to believe the prognostications (the "truth") of the committee of high priests (in this case, the IPCC) - who were busy planning out how to deal with global warming before they had established that there was any (see Plimer's Heaven and Earth amongst many other places). There's your consensus, and it is a "scientific" consensus because we all believe that it is (it is our 'personal truth'). Sad, but that is how the widespread psychological malfunction which I call the false religion operates.