It's always a pleasure to hear from a true Christian, who has embraced the fundamental values of Christianity, such as loving one's enemies, and turning the other cheek...

Glorfindel,
>> Communism ... has a parallel with Islam today in Europe. ... I feel exactly the same about Islam, especially if it means that the priceless centres of western civilization... disappear down the toilet.<<

I think one should be more carefull with these parallels: The Communist ideology represented the extreme wing of the Marxist political movements and parties (this includes also the social democrats), and though I still feel uneasy when I hear the word “comrades” I am quite aware of this distinction. And you will agree that an anti-Communist aversion should not be carried over to an anti-Russian aversion. I think the same distinction should be made between fanatical and violent islamists (some use the term jihadists) and Islam that is the religion giving meaning to the lives of over a billion, mostly decent, people.

For the last ten years I have been living in Cologne, where people of Turkish (hence Muslim) descent form about 10% of the population (in Berlin the situation is more complicated). It is true that they are culturally more “visible” here than the 10% in Melbourne of people of Geek descent, and I agree that this is mostly because of their Muslim religion which differs more from our Western tradition than the Orthodox religion of the Greeks. However, they are here to stay, whether we like it or not, mainly for demographic reason. The half-empty churches, reflecting a cultural/religious vacuum into which Islam can move, are not their fault, and it is certainly not them who e.g. supported and pushed through the removal of any reference to God in the preamble to EU’s proposed constitution.

During frequent TV discussions educated Muslims - imams, laymen, young women with or without a scarf - speak German and are familiar with German culture and history to an extent I can only envy, without hiding their Turkish ethnic, and Muslim religious, identity, their faith. Yes, they are aware that time is on their side, but as I said, it is not their fault that Europe created for them this demographic as well as religious vacuum. (ctd)

(ctd) So I think that rather than lament about our “priceless centres of western civilisation“, we should do all we can to make sure that decent Muslims - and not fanatical, even violent, islamists - as well as tolerant secular humanists - and not anti-religion, even arrogant, secularists - will co-inherit with us these “priceless centres” while moving into the vacuum that we had created for them. Of course, the same tolerance and fairness (as well as firmness when requests go beyond fair play) will be expected from us, Christians. I think something similar applies also to the Australian scene.

Oliver,
>>... scientific abstraction is analogous to their belief in an abstract god ... To do so is to confuse the abstract with the transcendental.<<

I can see your point, though I am not sure what you mean by “abstract god”. What is e.g. an abstract electron in distinction to a non-abstract one?

Christians believe in God as they believe in electrons: In both cases the less educated have a naive picture of what they believe in, whereas those who are more knowledgeable have a more sophisticated idea of the concepts involved. In case of electrons it is science whose authority you accept, even if you might not be a nuclear physicist and expert on QM, whereas in case of (the Abrahamic idea of) God the authority is more complicated (and dependent on your personal and cultural point of view) because in religion the subject is more intrinsically related to the object of the belief/knowledge than in physics. (You yourself used to refer to Polanyi’s indwelling.)

Richard Dawkins said that after Darwin it is easier to be an atheist, whereas I think that after relativity, QM, superstring theory, multiverses etc it is intellectually easier to be a believer into a Reality that is outside the reach of scientific investigations.

Apologies for drifting this far away from the topic of the article.

Glorfindel:

<< ("Islamization") means that the priceless centres of western civilization (France, Britain, the Netherlands and others) disappear down the toilet. >>

<< ...the determination of CANAILLE (Sarkozy's word: RABBLE) to destroy Western civilization. >>

James von Brunn, the 88-year-old American white supremacist charged with killing a security guard at Washington DC's US Holocaust Museum:

<< Europe, former fortress of the West, is now overrun by hordes of non-Whites and mongrels.

The same is true of Australia and Canada. >>

http://www.smh.com.au/world/overrun-by-hordes-of-nonwhites-and-mongrels-20090612-c5e6.html

Is the similarity just a coincidence?

While von Brunn is a homicidal, Antisemitic, racist nutter, Glorfindel is an Islamophobic Christian who claims not to be Antisemitic.

From where I stand, the distinction appears to be one of degree rather than substance.

CJ Morgan and Pericles.

Criminals eat breakfast. You eat breakfast. So you’re a criminal? I read Robert Thouless's "Straight and crooked thinking" back in the 1960s. You are using some of the techniques he unmasks.

Equating me with the nutter who shot a guard in the Holocaust Museum in the US impugns my sanity and the intelligence of all who read OLO. I loathe antisemitism and racism which judges only whole classes and not individuals. I have consistently talked about the "shopfront" of Islam, and defined what I mean by that.

I talked about the generally disgraceful British National Party not in approval but in sorrow that virtually *only* they had belled the cat of Islamization in the UK.

Hitler and Mussolini doubtless thought it was a good thing for the trains to run on time. I imagine you do too. Does that mean ... ? So stop being puerile.

I’m not a cultural relativist. I believe in UNIVERSAL human rights. That’s a key reason I am “Islamophobic”.

Nick Cohen's "What's left? How liberals lost their way" (Fourth Estate, 2007) documents well the selective pleading and dishonesty of the hard Left. He writes:

"The single standard that most on the liberal-left and moderate right said they accepted was universal human rights. But in the rubble of the far left … a rival standard developed that was anything but a principled call for universal freedom....

"Its adherents used the end of the Cold War to embrace a kind of nihilism. They could … endorse or excuse any foreign force as long as it was the enemy of Western democracy. … Many of those enemies were in the Middle East whose power structures were unaltered by the collapse of Soviet power and the Gulf War of 1991....

[continued]

[continuation of quotes from Nick Cohen]

"The contempt for universal standards of judgment suited the liberalism of the late twentieth century which placed an inordinate emphasis on respecting cultural difference and opposing integration even if the culture in question was anti-liberal and integration would bring new freedoms and prosperity. It fitted neatly with a form of postcolonial guilt that held that not only we ‘wrong to force western rationality of western science down other people’s throats, but that their rationality or their science was every bit as good as ours.’...

"The Islamist dream of a Caliphate [is of a] sexist, homophobic, racist, imperialist theocracy that would oppress about a billion Muslims…

“In How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the World, his dissection of modern delusions, Francis Wheen said that the claims of a portion of the Left to possess a sceptical intelligence had been destroyed by its inability to look squarely at a cult of death.

“Human rights are universal or they are nothing. Relativists have to diminish their importance and say they apply only to favoured groups, races or classes. …

“If the liberals and leftists are wrong, and there are good grounds for thinking that they are horribly wrong, history will judge them harshly. For they will have gazed on the face of a global fascist movement and shrugged and turned away, not only from an enemy that would happily have killed them but from an enemy which was already killing those who had every reason to expect their support.”