Jeo, yes ISIS is a example, so were Buddhist suicide bombers in Sri Lanka. Just about anywhere where nationalism and religion get mixed up ie Hindi nationalist, Christian identity movement.

And neither side of the political divide has a morgue on it. Wherever a group believes it has a divine right to discriminate against others or have special privileges, you will have trouble.

Hi Cobber,

Mortgage.

It's true what you say but a bit irrelevant.

Currently, in many, many parts of the world, from Nigeria to France to Turkey to Indonesia, ISIS is the fascist movement which exemplifies your comment, that " .... Wherever a group believes it has a divine right to discriminate against others or have special privileges, you will have trouble."

When Hindu terrorists or Buddhists terrorists carry out atrocities on the scale which ISIS and its affiliates are currently, then we can prattle on about equivalence. Until then, we focus on ISIS, isn't that right ?

Joe

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Dear Pete,

.

You published another article on your blog (http://petermulherin.net/?p=311#more-311) entitled “Evolution, Galileo & God”. The article begins as follows :

« Something that should have been mentioned in the first post in this series on atheism and Christianity is that I don’t think rational arguments … are in themselves enough to lead one to a Christian faith »

Another student, like yourself, posted a comment on this, asking why “you think that rational arguments are not sufficient to establish the truth of Christianity ?”

To which you replied :

« I believe this because I think it takes the heart as well as mind to have complete faith in the gospel. I think loving God with ‘heart, soul, and mind’ is needed. But maybe you’re right to an extent if we make a difference between saying ‘Christianity is true’, and ‘I’m a Christian’ »
.

I mention this because it places your second article (published here on OLO under the title “Western civilization is adrift in the world of ideas”, as well as in Quadrant Online and on your blog under the title “Thinking About the West”) in perspective.

In this latest article, you write :

« Uncoupled from religion for over a century, the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition which endured - albeit, once it had been absorbed into a secular, modernist rationale-is under existential threat from within »
.

There has probably been more change over the past century than there has been over the previous millennium. We changed from a chiefly rural-based to a chiefly urban-based social order. We emerged from illiteracy. The horses were replaced by automobiles and tractors. The aeroplane was invented. Radar was developed. The atomic bomb, transistor radios, computers, television, mobile telephones, the internet were all invented.

Women were granted the right to have a personal bank account without having to obtain prior authorisation from their husbands. They were granted the right to vote. Children were no longer considered the legal property of their father, and so on …

.

(Continued …)

.

.

(Continued …)

.

Today we have 4 times more students attending a state school than we did 100 years ago. Back in 1915, 593,059 students attended a state school compared to 2,406,495 today.

There are also a lot more students attending private or catholic schools then there were 100 years ago, eight times more in fact. Back in 1915 only 156,106 attended a private or Catholic school, compared to 1,287,606 today.

100 years on, due to increased migration capacity, less residents of our population are Australian born than they were a century ago. Back in 1915 more than four in five (82 per cent) people were Australian-born. Over the century this figure has decreased to 71 per cent of the population.

Australia’s European-born population has also decreased from 15 per cent of the total population in 1915 to 10 per cent 100 years later.

University students in Australia increased from 2,465 to 1.2 million.

Consequently :

In 1915, the vast majority of the population (96 per cent) associated themselves with the Christian faith. In 2015 this has dropped to 61.1 per cent.

While all the mainstream religions other than Christianity have increased their share of the population, the option with the biggest increase has been “no religion” and “agnostic” having gone from 0.6 per cent a century ago to 22.5 per cent currently, an increase of more than 37 times.

The fastest growing religion in Australia today is Hinduism, followed by Islam and Buddhism. By 2070, Islam will have replaced Christianity as the largest religion in the world.

Christianity is fast losing ground in Australia and around the world.

Instead of bemoaning the waning of the “Judeo-Christian ethical tradition” you observe in “Western civilisation”, perhaps it’s time the “Judeo-Christians” took a hard look at what a culturally more developed and far more highly educated public is no longer willing to believe in this day and age.

That rules out most of the fairy tales in the bible. Plus much of what is not in the bible – such as the famous controversial doctrine of the Trinity, for example.

.

Never mind that Quadrant promotes and is itself the home of a very hide-bound Western group-think.
Interesting start to the essay in its claim that we in the West are somehow "drifting in the world of ideas". This seems to suggest that the world-view promoted by Peter and his group-thinking fellow travellers is somehow ideology free - perhaps indicating that there is some kind of pre-existing "objectively" existed world "out there".

Strangely enough (but not really) such an unexamined presumption is entirely nihilistic, because it denies any kind of psychic depth or free open-ended psychic participation in the World-Process. What is "out there" is thus proposed as the measure of what is True or Real - meaning implying that the universe IS just a collection of dead rocks and dust. Simultaneously everything to do with the free soul or the human PSYCHE is crushed or reduced to dust too.

Peter also suggests that Christian-ISM is somehow ideology free too. Or not based on a set of now-archaic IDEAS about what we are as human beings, and of the nature of Reality altogether. Ideas which were formulated long ago in the childhood of humankind. Ideas which almost express a very materialist Victorian-era world-view too. Ideas that should have become obsolete when the archetypal equation E=MC2 first appeared. Even more so via the theory and findings of quantum physics.

Never mind too that there now more Christians in the world than ever before, both in total numbers and as a percentage of the total human population. And yet the humanly created world-mummery is becoming more and more insane every day. Furthermore most/all of the leading vectors of this now universal insanity are right-wing so called "conservative" Christians.
Indeed most of the worlds problems are now being caused by the back-to-the-past "traditionalists" of the three major Middle-Eastern so called "great" religions.

Christophobes still pouring out their anger and rants on the God they say they don't believe in. Oh well!