Category Archives: Rationalism

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Divided We Stand: Area Scholar Examines How We Got This Way Patch.com ... anti-intellectualism is exceptionally strong in parts of America. This fosters anti-rationalism, skepticism of education and receptiveness to propaganda like conspiracy theories. Second, Christian fundamentalism can exacerbate certain ideological ...

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Divided We Stand: Area Scholar Examines How We Got This Way - Patch.com

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had attracted the ire of traditionalists when he wrote more than once that the cow is not a divine mother but only a useful animal. A substance is edible to the extent that it is beneficial to man. Attributing religious qualities to it gives it a godly status. Such a superstitious mindset destroys the nations intellect, he wrote in 1935.

Recent events have not been a good advertisement for the national intellect. The party that pays homage to Savarkar has never come to terms with his modernist rationalism. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Gujarat has amended a state law so that anybody found guilty of cow slaughter will be awarded a life sentence. The chief minister of Chhattisgarh has said that those who kill cows in his state will be hanged. Even acts of homicide or sexual assault do not usually result in the hanging of the guilty.

Meanwhile, there is a massive crackdown on abattoirs by the new state government in Uttar Pradesh, ostensibly targeted at illegal establishments, but clearly trying to hurt the Muslim community that dominates the meat trade. Congress leaders such as Digvijaya Singh have said his party will back a nationwide beef bana useful reason to remember that the original laws against cow slaughter were introduced in many states when the Congress was the hegemonic force in Indian politics. This also opens up the possibility of competitive cow politics. And footloose vigilantes have taken it upon themselves to attack any person they believe is harming the sanctity of the cow, even by just throwing a stone at an animal.

There have traditionally been two main arguments in favour of cow protection. First, the cow is the pivot of an agricultural economy. Second, it is central to Hindu religious beliefs. Neither of these two arguments can justify the harsh punishments that are rather casually being talked about.

The economic argument does not survive an empirical test. First, as farming in India becomes increasingly mechanized, the demand for draught cattle in the fields is falling. Second, as milk-producing cows grow old and become unproductive, they become a financial burden on farmers. If farmers cannot sell them off to slaughterhouses, they either abandon the animals or starve them to death.

Third, the rational response by farmers to the ban on cow slaughter has been to prefer buffaloes to cows, as is evident from both the official cattle census as well as price trends in cattle auctions across the country. The economics of an asset totally changes when its terminal value suddenly comes down to zero. Economists such as V.M. Dandekar and K.N. Raj showed many years ago that the factors determining cattle population are not slaughter bans or religious sentiments but the demand for livestock products such as milk and meat as well as the levels of technology used in agriculture.

Indeed, the directive principle of state policy that says cow slaughter should be prohibited is itself derived from the economic argument. Article 48 of the Indian Constitution needs to be read in full: The State shall endeavour to organise agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps for preserving and improving the breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle.

The issue of religious sentiments is a more tricky one. There is ample proof in old religious texts that beef-eating was not uncommon in ancient India. However, that does not necessarily mean that the current generation of Hindus should not worship the cow. There is also the undeniable fact that cow slaughter was one of the flashpoints in medieval India under Muslim rule. The real issue right now is that the state has no right to send someone to jail for killing an animal.

It is also important to remember that beef is one of the cheapest sources of protein. Some 80 million Indians eat either beef or buffalo meat, including 12.5 million Hindus, as shown in an article by Roshan Kishore and Ishan Anand in this newspaper in October 2015, based on their detailed analysis of sample data.

This does not mean that devout Hindus who worship the cow should not voluntarily devote themselves to its protection by setting up gaushalas, or cow shelters, though there simply arent enough of these to cater to the growing number of abandoned cattle. The problem lies elsewhere. Bans on the killing of cows are in effect a burden on farmers who own cattle. Punishment for consumption of beef is an attack on the basic Constitutional right of every citizen to live the life she wants to.

Do you think governments are justified in banning cow slaughter? Tell us at views@livemint.com

First Published: Thu, Apr 06 2017. 12 32 AM IST

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Going overboard with cow protection - Livemint

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Counter-terrorism has been a pop field for some decades. As vague as what it purports to counter, it has generated a pundocracy of sorts, guns and mouths for hire across the US imperium and its associate powers.

Much of this resembles the various fictions common during the Cold War: the notion that insurgencies could be defeated from the outside; the teeth chattering idea of a global Communist threat directed with intellectual clarity from Moscow or Beijing. Human minds were, like puttee, pliable before the doctrinaires and ideologues. If you were told how to think, you would behave accordingly.

False rationalism pervades this entire field. And there are few in this area more misguided on this point than Sebastian Gorka, President Donald Trumps deputy assistant, former Breitbart editor and member of the White House Strategic Initiatives Group created by Stephen Bannon and the presidents son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

The Gorka recipe for defence, spiked with anti-Islam fervour and dislike for misguided eggheads, neatly fits the Trump view of the world, though he remains, unlike his boss, a true ideologue. Fake news, not to mention old-fashioned bias, is repeatedly alleged, and on that score, he is not always wrong. (The assertion that networks can be pristinely objective is a fantastic one that needs debunking.)

Where the world of make-believe impresses itself upon Gorka is any rational assessment of the presidency and its meagre achievements so far. Calling them fabulous, Gorka repeatedly makes remarks to the extent that reporting on the inner workings of the Trump world bear almost no resemblance to reality.[1]

This enables us to then assess what resemblance to reality Gorka assesses when it comes to his pet subject: the Global Jihadi scourge. On several fronts, Gorka fails to supply his audience with any explanation as to whether there is such a global jihadi problem, let alone what form it is meant to take. To do so would naturally entail having to describe a fantasy, even a conceit.

A spate of murderous drive-down spectaculars in European cities instigated by assailants either inspired by Islamic State or some other group with apocalyptic credentials is hardly evidence of a globally coherent world strategy. Had there been a unified leader of Islam, a fact hardly tenable given its various sects and internal contradictions, then assertions of a global jihadi front might hold some water.

Gorkas Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War reads much like the screeds on modernisation theory churned out during the initial stages of postcolonialism. As long as money, bubble gum and US ideas of liberal capital were filling the nationalist void in the Third World, favour towards communism would be stemmed. Such an argument ignored the obvious point that nationalism was the driving force to begin with, with communism being conscripted to that end.

Similar errors in analysis are made in dealing with the Global Jihadi problem. Categories are conflated; entities reduced to a common denominator of world revolution. The attacks of 9/11 were acts of jihadi terrorism but, more importantly, that event was linked to communism. It was linked to fascism.[2]

This stunningly hollow reasoning would tend to neglect that US involvement in funding the mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets, not to mention propping regimes of such brutish reputation as Mubaraks in Egypt, might also have had their share. Ideology, as ever, provides refined blinkers.

In Defeating Jihad, Gorka claims that the United States was caught unawares, and as chief defender of Freedoms lands,

It is time for the America that vanquished the Third Reich and the Soviet Union to rise from its slumber.

Tiresome moral references aspiring to clarity are made. It is time for us to speak truthfully about those who wish to kill us or enslave us. It is time again to speak the words evil and enemy. The next error on equating threats follows. And it is time to draw a plan for victory, calling on strategies that have proved themselves against other totalitarian foes.

Fictional formulas sell well in this field. Jihadists are rendered monolithic miscreants of the global order, requiring expunging. They are like Soviet-styled politburos, posing existential threats to the American way of life. For Gorka, with his revamped neoconservative slant shaped by his own taste of Hungarian communism, it is all painfully clear. If only people were willing to listen to his revelation that Islam has a central motor, a vehicle for world domination that needs to be stopped in its tracks.

Essential, then, is a similar Long Telegram in the mould of former Soviet scholar, US diplomat and author of the doctrine of containment, George Kennan. If George Kennan had been a senior diplomat in the US embassy in Baghdad during the rise of ISIS in 2013 and had been asked to explain what was happening in the Middle East, his reply would have been practically the same as the Long Telegram. Or perhaps not, as Kennan subsequently saw his analysis hijacked, condensed and ironed out for ideological purposes during the Truman administration.

Gorka finds it easy to plot a timeline of Islamic violence, claiming that the Jihadism of the last 30 years can be squarely rooted in the anti-modernism of various writers that gained traction in the nineteenth century. But this is hardly remarkable. What is unfortunate is Gorkas reading of history as having meaningful signs and parallels, showing the way for those bedazzled by faith. Having gazed at its movement, he finds true meaning. It is precisely why such zeal is not merely dangerous, but ultimately worn.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge and lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [emailprotected]

NOTES

[1] http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/319343-trump-aide-says-leaked-stories-bear-almost-no-resemblance-to-reality [2] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/sebastian-gorka-donald-trump-white-house

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Dreams of Fighting Jihad, The Evil Enemy: Trump's Counter-terrorism Adviser Sebastian Gorka - Center for Research on Globalization

Time for a history lesson. The history of our world and our time. And perhaps the future history of our souls.

In his speech last Monday to Washingtons Cosmos Club, Italian historian Roberto de Mattei expounded on the march of todays liberal ideas and values from their beginnings in Protestant Europe half a millennium ago to their global dominance today. Plus their seeming victory against their main opponent through the centuries: the Catholic Church < http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2017/03/de-mattei-shedding-light-on-todays.html >.

He first cited major anniversaries this year. Half a millennium ago, on the last of October 1517, the Christian priest Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses about abuses in the Catholic Church, on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in present-day Germany. That, said Mattei, would set in motion the so-called Protestant Revolution and mark the end of Medieval Christendom.

Two centuries later, the Grand Lodge of London was founded on June 29, 1717. That, said Mattei, gave birth to modern freemasonry, whose liberal ideas and activist leaders directly spurred the French Revolution. The 1789 upheaval, in turn, spawned the democratic liberalism and scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment, which spread in the West and eventually the world.

Two more jubilee events cited by Mattei, both in 1917. On October 28 a century ago, Lenins communist Bolshevik Party occupied the Winter Palace, the Czars home in St. Petersburg. Thus began the Russian Revolution, which brought atheistic communism across the planet.

Fatima vs Luther, Descartes and Lenin The tradionalist Pope Pius XII, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, summed up the three revolutions in a speech to the Catholic Action movement on October 12, 1952, one day before the 35th anniversary of the last apparition of Our Lady of Fatima:

Christ yes, Church no [the Protestant Revolution against the Church, as Mattei annotated]; then: God yes, Christ no [the Masonic Revolution against the central mysteries of Christianity]; finally the impious cry: God is dead; rather: God has never existed [the atheistic Communist Revolution]. And here is the attempt to build the structure of the world upon foundations that We do not hesitate in pointing out as the principals responsible for the danger that threatens mankind.

For Protestants, freemasons, communists and atheists, of course, their ways of thinking, living and ruling are anything but dangerous to humanity.

Indeed, they have argued through the centuries that their principles, practices, and policies spell advancement and upliftment through liberalism and democracy, science and technology, and acceptance of all lifestyles. And judging from history, the world has largely agreed.

In place of the Ten Commandments containing Gods will for man, the world has instituted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Against the Lords forbidding, governments have allowed or even promoted and funded abortion, contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia. And from Christian nations ruled according to the teachings of Christ, we now have the separation of Church and State.

In the Philippines, perhaps the only major Christian nation still enforcing Church family morals, secular liberalism is also eroding religious taboos, as seen in open violations of the Fifth Commandment by law enforcers, and of the Sixth Commandment by the leaders of the land.

Plus direct and vulgar affronts to the Church and its prelates by no less than the President. And with contraception, including abortive devices, enshrined in law, liberal legislators will push divorce and same-sex unions.

I am of heaven In this liberalizing and secularizing age, the fourth jubilee event happened 100 years ago next month. On May 13, 1917, the Blessed Virgin Mary made the first of her six apparitions to three shepherd children in the rural Portugal town of Fatima, Lucia Dos Santos, then 9, and her Marto cousins Francisco, 8, and Jacintha, 6.

Says Mattei: The Fatima message is not only an anti-Communist message; it is also an anti-liberal and anti-Lutheran message as the errors of Russia descend from the errors of the French Revolution and Protestantism. They are the errors of the anti-Christian Revolution, which the Catholic Counter-Revolution opposes. As [French monarchist and traditionalist] Count de Maistre states, this is not a Revolution in the opposite way, but is the opposite of the Revolution in all its political, cultural and religious aspects.

Fatima directly opposes 1917, 1717 and 1517, Mattei summed up. In fact, apart from our Ladys message, her very apparitions themselves refute Protestantism, the Enlightenment and communism.

For those who do not reject outright the accounts of innocent children, as well as stories of countless eyewitnesses in the last apparition on October 13, 1917, Marys presence showed that God exists, that Jesus Christ wields His power, sending His mother to earth; and the Catholic Church preaches the truth in giving honor to the Blessed Virgin, whom many Protestant sects reject and even desecrate.

Gods supernatural power and paramount regard for Mary is manifest in her very first appearance. Recounts Lucia of what they saw going down a slope with their sheep: there before us on a small holm oak, we beheld a lady all dressed in white. She was more brilliant than the sun, and radiated a light clearer and more intense than a crystal glass filled with sparkling water, when the rays of the sun shine through it.

Lucia continued: We stopped, astounded, before the apparition. We were so close, just a few feet from her, that we were bathed in the light that surrounded her, or rather, which radiated from her.

The girl asked where the woman was from.

Eu sou do cu, our Lady replied in the childrens native Portuguese, meaning, I am from or of heaven.

So, in the face of ideologies that set human reason in place of divine inspiration as the measure of what is true, right and just I think, therefore I am, as the Enlightenment philosopher Ren Descartes said Our Lady of Fatima delivered Gods word, reprising her role 2,017 years ago as bearer of the Eternal Word of God.

Whom you believe will determine the future of your soul.

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Four anniversaries, three children and a Lady - The Manila Times

17th-century philosophy in the Western world is generally regarded as being the start of modern philosophy, and a departure from the medieval approach, especially Scholasticism.

Early 17th-century philosophy is often called the Age of Reason or Age of Rationalism and is considered to succeed the Renaissance philosophy era and precede the Age of Enlightenment.

In the West, 17th-century philosophy is usually taken to start with the work of Ren Descartes, who set much of the agenda as well as much of the methodology for those who came after him. The period is typified in Europe by the great system-builders philosophers who present unified systems of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and ethics, and often politics and the physical sciences too. Immanuel Kant classified his predecessors into two schools: the rationalists and the empiricists,[1] and Early Modern Philosophy (as 17th- and 18th-century philosophy is known) is sometimes characterized in terms of a supposed conflict between these schools. The three main rationalists are normally taken to have been Ren Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. Building upon their English predecessor Francis Bacon, the two main empiricists of the 17th-century were Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The former were distinguished by the belief that, in principle (though not in practice), all knowledge can be gained by the power of our reason alone; the latter rejected this, believing that all knowledge has to come through the senses, from experience. Thus the rationalists took mathematics as their model for knowledge, and the empiricists took the physical sciences. This emphasis on epistemology is at the root of Kant's distinction; looking at the various philosophers in terms of their metaphysical, moral, or linguistic theories, they divide up very differently. Even sticking to epistemology, though, the distinction is shaky: for example, most of the rationalists accepted that in practice we had to rely on the sciences for knowledge of the external world, and many of them were involved in scientific research; the empiricists, on the other hand, generally accepted that a priori knowledge was possible in the fields of mathematics and logic.

This period also saw the birth of some of the classics of political thought, especially Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government.

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17th-century philosophy - Wikipedia

During judicial confirmation hearingson Tuesday, the Senators questions about Gorsuchs judicial philosophy centered on whether he is an originalist. This comes as no surprise, since, thanks to Justice Thomas and the late Justice Scalia, originalism is now the litmus test for conservative judges. Voters and pundits on the Right now ask judges whether they are activist or originalist, whether they legislate from the bench or interpret the law as its writers meant.

But this distinction, posited by originalists, between the acts of moral judgment and legal interpretation rests on shaky ground as legal philosophy and sits on equally questionable terms with conservative tradition.Originalism technically refers to a whole family of jurisprudential thought, but the brand of originalism advanced by Justices Scalia and Thomas, called original intent, is the one most conservatives in America mean when they talk about originalism. Original intent dictates that cases must be decided based exclusively upon the Constitution and the laws of the United States as their authors meant for them to be read. Following this approach, a judge is nothing more than one who knows the law very well and can quote the laws pertinent to a certain case in court. Court should, therefore, be a straightforward and technical matter, and a good judge is simply one who can remember and quote the laws exceptionally well. This approach appeals to the denizens of an era defined by the rationalistic extraction of normative claims from public discourse.

But the law is not as uniform as originalism suggests. Legislators and judges alike are in constant disagreement with one another over what is legal and what is constitutional. Likewise, the Constitution itself is the epitome of compromise, a document that espouses not one pure political philosophy, but all the conflicting ideologies of its squabbling framers.

Understanding the essential contradictions of the law, the role of a judge cannot be, as original intent would have it, that of a mere reader of the law. Because the written law does not express a uniform set of ideals, the judge must infer one from the laws abundant agreements and contentions.

In short, judges must engage in both analysis of the law and moral judgment of it, since it falls to them to determine the meaning of laws contradictory points and develop from it overarching principles for human conduct and the state. The difference between the originalist approach and other approaches to jurisprudence turns on the originalists insistence on the separation of the technical and moral acts of legal interpretation.

To understand this distinction between technical and moral activities, think about the difference between the construction worker and the architect: where the construction worker follows the instructions already laid out in the blueprints, the architect must design something that does not exist yet based on already existing principles, but these principles (e.g. the laws of physics and the buildings purpose) have determined ahead of time the building he will design. At times, the principles by which the architect designs may be in conflict; for instance, if it would be useful for him to build 6 feet wide and 90 feet tall, the laws of physics would necessitate he design the building otherwise. The construction worker never runs into those contradictions. He simply follows the blueprints. In the same way, where an originalist reading a passage of law claims she is engaging in a technical activity, like the construction worker. Another jurist might be more open to the fact that in deriving a unified understanding of the whole body of written laws meaning he is engaging in a moral activity, like the architect.

To be clear, the problem with originalism isnt that understanding the original meaning of the law is impossible. Indeed, such understanding is both possible and essential in many cases, where due process, for instance, has a clear and well-established meaning in English law. But difficult cases cannot be solved this way because their difficulty arises precisely from their lack of clarity. As Judge Gorsuch aptly observed, When a lawyer claims Absolute Metaphysical Certainty about the meaning of some chain of ungrammatical prepositional phrases tacked onto the end of a run-on sentence buried in some sprawling statutory subsection, I start worrying.So in deciding cases where the law is not clear, the only difference between an originalist and another jurist is the originalists lack of clarity when it comes towhat kindof moral reasoning he is using to arrive at his conclusion, not whether he is using any at all. So originalisms problem is an epistemological one, rooted in the hubris of rationalism, that rejects the moral responsibility of interpreting the law.

Many others have better criticized this insufficiency in originalism, but to me, originalisms most striking contradiction is that American conservatives wholeheartedly embrace it. On the surface, originalism may appear conservative because of the outcomes it has produced on the Supreme Court. But at its core, originalism is a legal philosophy, not a political agenda. As such, it should not be understood in terms of its congruence with conservative policy objectives, but in terms of its concert or discord with conservatism as a way of thinking about politics broadly.

By attempting to reduce legal proceedings to a merely technical activity, originalists buy into the rationalist idea that politics, like everything else, is a scientific business and not a moral one. Conservatisms greatest minds from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott have argued against that very position. The entire point of conservative political philosophy pushes against the prevailing rationalist bent that attempts to separate tradition and moral activity from politics and all areas of life.

In this way, the American Rights acceptance of originalism indicates a shift away from conservatism in favor of rationalisms enticing straightforwardness. But by forgoing the essential process of moral judgment over the body of written law, we are actually participating in the removal of moral complexity and insight from political discourse. Simply put, originalism accepts law as amoral, and the Rights adoption of originalism as their preferred legal philosophy only serves to propel American politics and culture further down the straightforward, common sense road without morality.

As a natural law theorist, Neil Gorsuch avoids the rationalist pitfalls of common sense originalism. Unfortunately, his fellow conservatives obsession with originalism has made it difficult for him to avoid using the language of an originalist during his hearings. Still, conservatives have reason to be optimistic, since a Justice Gorsuch would be freer to express his commitment to jurisprudence as a moral activity. By championing moral reasoning as the basis for the law, Gorsuch offers the Right a chance to return real, epistemologically rigorous conservatism to the high court.

Albert Gustafson is a junior at Indiana Wesleyan University.

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Originalism and the Death of Conservatism | The Harvard Law Record - Harvard Law Record

On Friday noon, July the 20th, 1714, begins the small, perfect 20th-century novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below. In the coincidence of crossing the bridge at the same time, explains the writer, Thornton Wilder, these five seemed to have been assembled by pure chance.

Or had they? He entitles this first chapter Perhaps An Accident. He spends the rest of his book tracing the lives of each until the moment when, in a twang of rope, fate hurled all together into the abyss. Thus is the readers interest engaged for the human histories that unfold. But Wilder, an American Christian humanist, falters in his rationalism. His concluding chapter is entitled Perhaps An Intention.

In fact no evidence of an intention, let alone an Intention, is adduced, and the novel stands as a gem of modern literature without need of any twist of divine intervention. But Wilder just couldnt help speculating, and the reader cannot help searching.

Searching for a hidden meaning comes so naturally to us. Its one of the hardest things in life, but especially a journalists life, to accept that some big stories may have no meaning. Tremendous events may carry no tremendous implications, but man is an intelligent animal who must always seek to make sense of lifes mess. We forever strain to join the dots; and often they do join; and sometimes joining them early proves a lifesaver.

But sometimes they are just dots. What happened at the Palace of Westminster last week may prove to be of this kind. The knife-wielding Khalid Masood may prove to have been part of no great plan, the agent of no malign external power, a pawn in nobodys game. Perhaps he was only a wretched, demented fool with a crazy idea of Gods will. He may just in his twisted way have been trying to make sense of life. If so, we pile error upon error by trying to make sense of him.

But bad things can be hard to bear when we cannot make sense of them. We search for clues as though every strange event were a riddle with the answer written upside down at the bottom of the page. We lionise, sometimes to our ruin, individuals who offer overarching explanations.

Or else, despairing of cracking the code, we resign ourselves to the supposition that theres surely an answer but we are just not clever enough to know it. There can hardly be a village graveyard in England without a headstone etched with a bewildered Thy Will be Done. God has moved in a mysterious way, but undoubtedly He has moved.

In 2013, when in Woolwich two men, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, hacked to death the blameless Fusilier Lee Rigby, there was much overheated talk about possible links with possible Islamic fundamentalist movements or websites. I, however, was not alone in expressing scepticism that these two evidently unhinged individuals could be operating under any kind of direction. And so it seems to have turned out. There was no serious network or plan.

Last year, when the MP Jo Cox was murdered by a loner who was linked to extremist right-wing thinking and haters of the European Union, an appetite flickered among some Remain campaigners to link her death to the animosities stirred by the Leave campaign. Again, I differed, warning against linking deranged minds to whatever cause they settle on. Like those little squares of treated fabric you can place with your non-colourfast wash (I said), unstable personalities will tend to blot up whatever extreme passions are doing the rounds. An unbalanced mind keeps open house for radicalisation, the radicalisation being more consequence than cause of the imbalance.

Like al-Qaeda before it, so-called Islamic State does exist and is extremely dangerous. Thus far the damage and the death toll have been overwhelmingly in the Middle East; and Isiss most realistic targets must be distant from our own shores. But thats probably partly due to the work of our own intelligence services. We should not cite their success as a reason for thinking the threat of major disruption isnt there.

Minor disruption, though, is different. No surveillance can eliminate the threat from the rogue individual who goes berserk. Islamist terrorist organisations will always be quick to claim any solo operator as their own and there will often be evidence he was inspired by or even (through electronic media) linked to the fundamentalist cause. Yes, he was one of ours, they cry. Journalists and politicians play straight into their hands if we take up that cry.

Organisations like Islamic State or al-Qaeda do have a strategy that goes beyond territorial gains in the Middle East: to shake western societies to their foundations by polarising the large groups of Muslims who live here, cleaving their allegiance away from the western societies of which they are a part, and (as the fundamentalist would see it) bringing home to them that they do not belong in tolerant, permissive, liberal cultures like our own.

Again, we play straight into the hands of the extremist strategy if we respond to atrocities like that at Westminster by associating one demented knifeman with a whole section of our population. Ive been dismayed to see the barrage of immediate reaction on Twitter, and beneath online reports and commentary, perpetuating an idea that Muslims all Muslims do not belong here. British Muslims will be viewing the murderers actions with just the same bewildered horror as the rest of us. They do belong here. Masood, like Jo Coxs murderer, does not.

Its a pity an old second world war mantra has been cheapened by its modern popularisation in a range of humorous cards, because there can be no better advice now, at Westminster and beyond, than that we should keep calm and carry on.

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Some atrocities make no sense: the Westminster attack may be one - Spectator.co.uk

By: Editorial | Published:March 28, 2017 12:05 am

Despite legal protection accorded to the freedom of religion, the assault on rationalism in general and atheism in particular continues. H. Farook has joined Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and M.M. Kalburgi in the ranks of the martyrs to no god. The only difference between them is that he was not a prominent rationalist, but a Coimbatore scrap dealer with a strong sense of identity. Farooks father has offered the finest tribute to his sons memory. Disappointed by an orthodoxy which will not brook dissent, he has decided to become an atheist himself. Thus, he has expanded a question pertaining to the freedom of religion into an issue of the freedom of speech. It is not enough to be an atheist; one must also have the freedom to proclaim it without fear.

While this instance involves Muslims, it is not a Muslim issue. When political events turn religion into a focus of identity, atheism and agnosticism threaten orthodoxies across religious divides, ignoring legal precedents which safeguard religious freedoms. The most significant precedent is a 2014 judgment of the Bombay High Court, which held that the government cannot force anyone to declare their religion in an official document. It also observed that citizens have the right to declare that they do not belong to any religion. This is really not unusual, in a region where numerous schools of atheism have flourished from antiquity. While Buddhism and Jainism are commonly understood to be heterodox, the Carvaka and Ajivika schools of Hinduism are unfortunately known only to scholars. This is apart from the numerous atheist and agnostic groups that have flourished in modern times, often as part of reform movements.

In modern times, of course, the right to be guided by the senses and the intelligence rather than scripture is a given. So is the importance of tolerance, without which the ideal of a borderless, globalised world would be unattainable. The intolerant persecution of the atheist is a special case, along with honour killings and caste abuse, since victims are attacked by the very community they were born into. Religious identity is only one of the many personas which are assigned to us, and which we should be free to change or discard. At a time when identity is central to politics, this freedom is as fundamental as the right to change party allegiances, and those who would constrain it are enemies of democracy.

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Martyr to no god - The Indian Express

FrontPage Magazine

The Dems Aren't Brights FrontPage Magazine Brights was the term popularized by evangelical atheists Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to describe people who think like them: materialist determinists who scoff at faith and traditional wisdom, and proclaim their devotion to rationalism ...

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The Dems Aren't Brights - FrontPage Magazine

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I am a polar bear, careening over snowy hills in continuous cartwheels. Then, I am a pack of Douglas firs, our branches undulating like snakes. Then an elk. A galaxy. A desert. A streak of light imported from deep space. In Everything, out now on PlayStation 4 (and slated for PC next month), I am the essenceof creation moving through all these things. That title isnt a feint or an oversell: In this game, you can be everything.

Everything is the brainchild of David OReilly, an artist and digital creatorwhos probably best knownfor designing the videogame interfaces used in Spike Jonzes Her. In the videogame world, though, hes celebratedas the creator of Mountain, a beguiling and confounding titleabout the life of a single mountain, suspended in space. It lived on your computer. Life grew on it. It talked to you. Eventually, it would leave. Mountain was a polarizing work, the sort of thingthat provokescritical debate about what a videogame actually is. At its heart, though,Mountain was an eccentric, playful meditation on existence from a narrow field of viewa sort of ontological toybox.

Everything takes that same sensibility and projects it to the heavens.

You begin the gameat a determined, procedurally generated pointa specific object in a specific place, at a specific time of day. In my case, I was a moose on an ice continent. How you proceed, though,is entirely up to you. You can spend the entire game as that single object, settling in to your surroundings, listening to the thoughts of fellow creatures and objects, and considering the weight of your solitary life. Or you can write your own cosmic encyclopedia, jumping from object to object using the games simple set of verbs: Press one button to look for objects larger than you; another for objects smaller. Ascend and descend by way of comparison, from galaxies to atoms to one-dimensional plasma beings.

OReillys playground is a superb adventure of intuition. I allowed myself to soar through the universe as whatever caught my fancy. Its an experience that lends itself to lists: I spent half an hour as a flower blooming at the bottom of the ocean. I spread my consciousness over so many cars that I couldnteven move them all. I wasa snowman; I gathered my family together and danced.

[Mountain and Everything] are what I think is interesting about games, OReilly told me at last months Game Developer Conference, which is the ability to describe worlds through systems. Those systems, though, are all beholden to something larger.Everything depicts a world where all objects are both combined and separated, paradoxically of the same substance yetwith unfathomable gaps between them. Scattered throughout the environment are prompts that bring up audio narration fromBritish philosopher and theologian Alan Watts, whose blend of Western rationalism with Buddhist thought made him a popular (and divisive) figure in the 50s and 60s. As you occupy the life of a family of algae or read the thoughts of a television with relationship problems, Wattstells you about the basic interconnectivity of all things, the way in which we are all a part of one grand, luminescent thing. Its symbiosis on a mass scale, writ across the innumerable bodies that populate the universe.

OReilly, sees that broad, integrative thinking as having its roots inMountain. Whats interesting about a mountain is that its not a sectioned-off thing, he said. Its earth pushed through the ground over millions of years. Theyre moving things, but we dont see that. And they have tons of life on them. Its hard to say exactly what a mountain is. Its more of a blurred thing.

Everything, then, is an exercise in blurring. Jumping fromanothervessel to anotherisnt the only thing you can do; you can also dance, via abutton that makes the objects in your control move in strange, rhythmic patterns. Its an effective metaphor for what the game itself accomplishes. Everything is a dance through objects and space, a playfuland mindfulwaltz through a simulated space. In trying to approximate something unfathomable and infinite, it conjuressomething deeply emotional, a play experience that evokes the naturalistic optimism of Waldo Ralph Emerson as much as it does the system-based entertainment of Will Wright. Its a wonderful accomplishment; the kind of videogame you want to bringhome to meet your parents.

OReilly told me that Everything is designed to run forever. He described it to me as an organism that keeps going. Left its own devices, it will, in fact, play itself, running in an autoplay mode based on settings that you can calibrateto your own whims. Strangely, this might be the most remarkable showcase of Everythings power:watching the perspective tumble through OReillys pocket dimension like a sort of high-tech nature documentary, moving from thing to thing until you discover something youve never seen, an object whose life you need to learn more about, and youre movedto pick up the controller all over again and take it for a spin.

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Everything, a Must-Play Game Like Nothing You've Seen Before - WIRED