Mystic Sanity

Letter to Mary Wooldrige, Liberal for Doncaster

2006-08-08T17:52:00.001+10:00

Ms Wooldridge,

I am a 24 year old studying education at Melbourne. I have been involved in liberal politics at university, and in the 2004 Federal election I helped campaign for the Liberal party, handing out how-to-vote cards in the safe Labor seat of Wills. I feel I cannot with good conscience vote liberal in the upcoming state election.

I am a political liberal and a social conservative; it seems that the Victorian Liberal party under Ted Baillieu is neither. Socially, I seek to support candidates who oppose euthanasia and abortion on demand. I understand that the Liberal party is first and foremost a liberal party not a conservative party, however the federal party has very successfully occupied moderate-conservative ground and I cannot understand why the state party would not likewise seek to do so.

Most importantly, however, I expect the Liberal party to champion liberal politics, to which freedom of speech is fundamental. Why the Liberal party refuses to categorically reject 'religious vilification' legislation which is in effect a blasphemy law is beyond me. I would honestly vote green (who have stated that they support a repeal of the law) in this upcoming election before I would vote for such a 'liberal' party.

I sincerely hope conservatives and genuine liberals within the party reverse Baillieu's agenda so that I and many Liberal voters who share my views can resume support for the party in the future.

Sincerely, Ben Wilson, Donvale.

Mel Gibson and public furor.

2006-08-04T17:48:00.000+10:00

I can understand why Jews would be angry at Mel Gibson for his anti-semitic comments: as a celebrity he has influence and hatred should never be allowed to influence anything.

On the other hand he was raving drunk. Really too much is being made of this, and not nescessarily by people who have any personal stake in the matter.

Context of Israeli Actions in Lebanon.

2006-08-01T14:56:00.000+10:00

“Seriously, who bombs a drill truck, how can any country get away with this???”

Perhaps the most widely reported aspect of the current conflict in Lebanon is the extremely high proportion of civilian casualties; according to ‘Syria News Wire’[1] 355 Lebanese are dead; ‘Israel Body Count’[2] similarly cites approximately 355 dead Lebanese civilians and approximately 35 Israeli civilians dead. Every use of military force against a people is an evil, however, as a passionate supporter of democratic Israel against the theocracies, dictatorships, and Islamist terrorist pseudo-nations it’s important to me that the deaths of Lebanese are at least viewed in context. From the point of view of someone who doesn’t want Israel to be destroyed[3][4] it seems that the only options the Israeli government have are evil: either allow Hezbollah and other terrorist groups to target Israelis with impunity, or fight the terrorists and inevitably harm civilians.

The essential piece of context missing from straight reports of civilians casualties is that Hezbollah intentionally use the Lebanese as human shields. Consider the following letter, ostensibly from a Lebanese Muslim living in Germany to Die Tageszeitung, a German daily newspaper:

I lived until 2002 in a small southern village near Mardshajund that is inhabited by a majority of Shias like me. After Israel left Lebanon, it did not take long for Hezbollah to take have its say in other towns. Received as successful resistance fighters and armed to the teeth, they stored rockets in bunkers in our town as well. The social work of the Party of God consisted in building a school and a residence over these bunkers! A local sheikh explained to me laughing that the Jews would lose in any event because the rockets would either be fired at them or if they attacked the rockets depots, they would be condemned by world opinion on account of the dead civilians. These people do not care about the Lebanese population, they use them as shields, and, once dead, as propaganda. As long as they continue existing there, there will be no tranquility and peace.

Dr. Mounir Herzallah

Berlin-Wedding[5][6]

Can the central claim of this letter to the editor be corroborated? It very much can. Jan Egeland, the UN official responsible for coordinating international aid in Lebanon criticized Israel for its’ ‘disproportionate response’ but also blasted Hezbollah for fighting from amongst the Lebanese civilian population. From Yahoo News:

BEIRUT, Lebanon - The U.N. humanitarian chief accused Hezbollah on Monday of "cowardly blending" in among Lebanese civilians and causing the deaths of hundreds during two weeks of cross-border violence with Israel. The militant group has built bunkers and tunnels near the Israeli border to shelter weapons and fighters, and its members easily blend in among civilians… "Consistently, from the Hezbollah heartland, my message was that Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending ... among women and children," he said. "I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don't think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men."[7]

UN observers have also noted that Hezbollah use UN positions as firebases to discourage return fire. The Ottawa Citizen, a Canadian newspaper reports:

The words of a Canadian United Nations observer written just days before he was killed in an Israeli bombing of a UN post in Lebanon are evidence Hezbollah was using the post as a "shield" to fire rockets into Israel, says a former UN commander in Bosnia.

Those words, written in an e-mail dated just nine days ago, offer a possible explanation as to why the post -- which according to UN officials was clearly marked and known to Israeli forces -- was hit by Israel on Tuesday night, said retired Maj.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie yesterday… Just last week, Maj. Hess-von Kruedener wrote an e-mail about his experiences after nine months in the area, words Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie said are an obvious allusion to Hezbollah tactics.

"What I can tell you is this," he wrote in an e-mail to CTV dated July 18. "We have on a daily basis had numerous occasions where our position has come under direct or indirect fire from both (Israeli) artillery and aerial bombing.

"The closest artillery has landed within 2 meters (sic) of our position and the closest 1000 lb aerial bomb has landed 100 meters (sic) from our patrol base. This has not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical necessity."

Those words, particularly the last sentence, are not-so-veiled language indicating Israeli strikes were aimed at Hezbollah targets near the post, said Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie.

"What that means is, in plain English, 'We've got Hezbollah fighters running around in our positions, taking our positions here and then using us for shields and then engaging the (Israeli Defense Forces)," he said.

That would mean Hezbollah was purposely setting up near the UN post, he added. It's a tactic Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie, who was the first UN commander in Sarajevo during the Bosnia civil war, said he's seen in past international missions: Aside from UN posts, fighters would set up near hospitals, mosques and orphanages.[8]

Similarly, pictures taken in Lebanon and published in the Herald Sun back up the claim that Hezbollah intentionally blur the line between themselves and civilians: photos that clearly show armed men, dressed in civilian clothing, manning anti-aircraft weaponry and cannon-armed light vehicles in suburban areas.[9]

It’s also clear that Hezbollah are very self-conscious and intentional in the way that they use western media. CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper recounted his own experience filming in Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon:

“We'd come to get a look at the damage and had hoped to talk with a Hezbollah representative. Instead, we found ourselves with other foreign reporters taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah. Young men on motor scooters followed our every movement. They only allowed us to videotape certain streets, certain buildings… Civilian casualties are clearly what Hezbollah wants foreign reporters to focus on. It keeps the attention off them — and questions about why Hezbollah should still be allowed to have weapons when all the other militias in Lebanon have already disarmed. “After letting us take pictures of a few damaged buildings, they take us to another location, where there are ambulances waiting.

“This is a heavily orchestrated Hezbollah media event. When we got here, all the ambulances were lined up. We were allowed a few minutes to talk to the ambulance drivers. Then one by one, they've been told to turn on their sirens and zoom off so that all the photographers here can get shots of ambulances rushing off to treat civilians. That's the story that Hezbollah wants people to know about.

“These ambulances aren't responding to any new bombings. The sirens are strictly for effect.”[10][11]

The fact that Hezbollah uses ambulances for propaganda purposes leaves open the possibility that they use them, just like they use UN buildings, for other military purposes. Little Green Footballs claims to have video footage of exactly this.[12]

Consider also the Israeli’s claim that Hezbollah have been forcibly preventing Lebanese from leaving the war zone:

The IDF has found that Hezbollah is preventing civilians from leaving villages in southern Lebanon. Roadblocks have been set up outside some of the villages to prevent residents from leaving, while in other villages Hezbollah is preventing UN representatives from entering, who are trying to help residents leave. In two villages, exchanges of fire between residents and Hezbollah have broken out.[13]

The point is that Israel faces a despicable, ruthless enemy unconcerned about the lives of the people who they claim to represent. Israel is faced with the choice of doing nothing or killing Lebanese civilians; if the Israelis do not return fire, groups like Hezbollah and Hamas will continue to kill Israelis with impunity, if they do return fire, they will inevitably cause a high number of casualties on the populations these terrorist pseudo-states use as human shields.

[1] http://saroujah.blogspot.com/2006/07/lebanon-body-count_22.html

[2] http://israel.bodycount.googlepages.com/

[3] http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/2170.cfm

[4] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/etc/textbooks.html

[5] http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/archiv/30.07.2006/2660279.asp

[6] English translation: http://judeoscope.ca/article.php3?id_article=0429

[7] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060724/ap_on_re_mi_ea/mideast_fighting_aid_4;_ylt=Alv7OTk3Cm.IEikUqLZehCAUvioA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

[8] http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=37278180-a261-421d-84a9-7f94d5fc6d50

[9] http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,,19955774-5007220,00.html

[10] http://newsbusters.org/node/6574

[11] http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2006/07/our-very-strange-day-with-hezbollah.html

[12] http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21813_Palestinian_Terrorists_in_UN_Ambulances&only

[13] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3278026,00.html

Originally posted as a comment on eteraz.wordpress.com

2006-08-01T14:54:00.000+10:00

The following was posted to eteraz.wordpress.com, a Muslim blog I recommend.

Eteraz,

Mark Steyn said of Palestinian nationalism that:

“The West Bank, by the standards of these things, is comparatively civilized. Gaza, which has been left to the Palestinians, as you say, the mask is off. You suddenly realize they’ve got no interest in nation building, no interest in state building. There is no Palestinian nationalist movement. The salient fact about Gaza is that the average age in Gaza, the median age is 15.6 years. You’re dealing with a population of unemployed teenage boys, raised in a death cult, and encouraged to think that Jew killing is the highest fulfillment of life…the people in Gaza are people who…they’re mothers who are proud of the fact. This one woman was elected to the legislature in this Hamas landslide. She’s proud of the fact that she’s a mother of six, down to a mother of three right now, because three of them blew themselves up trying to kill Israelis, and she wants the other three to follow in their footsteps.”

It is hard for an outsider to obtain a clear picture of these things, but Steyn’s sketch of the situation is far too easy to believe: Palestine has, in fact, elected a government of terrorists, and nothing ever reported about the actions of Muslim Arabs in palestine even vaguely suggests that they prefer peace to the continued struggle to destroy the Israeli state.

Moreover, if all the Palestinians wanted was a peaceful state of their own, it seems like they would be an exception in the muslim middle east. Which Muslim nation would they be seeking to emulate? Iran? Saudi Arabia? If more Muslims in the middle east have died at the hands of Muslims, how can we believe that the problem is the Jews?

Just because two things are different doesn't nesccesarily mean that they're the same.

2006-02-08T09:22:00.000+11:00

Okay, this is really starting to bug me.

Religion and Race are two fundamentally different things. Different categories of thing, in fact. And while most educated people recognize that race is essentially superficial and therefore hatred of or prejudice against people of a particular race is irrational, it is simple nonsense to apply the same thinking to religion. Religion is anything but superficial; incorporated in a religion are a body of ideas about fundamental questions of 'life, the universe, and everything', as well as codes of ethics and customs and practices. It is absolutely appropriate to cricitcise people's beliefs and practices if we disagree with them.

So comparisons between 'Islamophobia' and anti-semitism are nonsense. Anti-semitism is traditionally hatred of Jews as a race, not criticism of Judaism as a religion. 'Islamaphobia' means hatred of Islam as a religion. And, aside from the question of whether or not Islam as a religion actually deserves hatred, it is simple to conceive of religions that do; hatred of a religion is not inherently irrational.

2006-01-08T20:31:00.000+11:00

Gaa. Meant to post tonight but everything I write is coming out drivel. In the meantime, this guy is a genius. Check out the whole blog.

2005-12-27T00:05:00.000+11:00

Away from internet for a week and a half! Expect a new post on the seventh or the eight. Until then, happy new year!

Off Topic: Mark Steyn on Sydney riots.

2005-12-21T01:06:00.000+11:00

Check out this article at the telegraph.

The Myth of Non-Religion

2005-12-20T15:12:00.000+11:00

I was going to post an essay in response to this article about gay marriage, but considering the arguments presented I realised I needed to argue something a little more fundamental.

The standard discourse assumes that there is a normal everyday core of truths that all people (who are our sort of people, at least) hold to, and then there is a variety of optional add-on beliefs which some people hold to. The ‘normal’ truths are labelled ‘secular’, and the optional add-ons ‘religious’. This model informs just about every discussion of the role of religion and politics in the world, particularly in the United States. It informs the demand for separation of church and state; in this case state stands for the normal truth and church for the optional add-ons. It informs the ideal of multiculturalism; we all share the same normal truths (which are, frankly, the important ones) so we should be all free to pursue our optional add-ons (which are trivial little cultural hang-overs) in private. It informs the demand that religion play no part in public discourse; add-on beliefs are intended for the private sphere only (and besides, they aren’t terribly fasionable). The assumption of this ‘obvious truth’/‘optional add on’ or ‘secular belief’/’religious belief’ dichotomy is an a-priori ground rule for the discussion of just about everything in the public sphere.

It should be a matter of some concern then that this model is philosophically empty and fundamentally false; it persists only because the fact that it is a particular model and not a self-evident truth remains unrecognized.

The word religion is somewhat misleading. Religions are multifaceted: a religion typically involves community, institution, and tradition. Clearly there are many people who don’t own membership in a self-consciously religious community, or participate in a religious institution, or own a religious tradition. In that sense people are non-religious. But the aspect of religion most relevant to the practice of public discourse is the ideological aspect; religion typically involves a commitment to a particular worldview or ideology. And in this sense, religion is inescapable.

All propositions are ideological; every argument commits itself to an interpretation of the universe, a philosophical theory of everything. All conclusions are derived from presuppositions and all inferences are made in the context of a network of pre-existing beliefs. Moreover every experience or new idea we encounter is interpreted within that network; we try to accommodate new experiences in ways that are compatible with our existing beliefs and we view a new idea as credible or incredible depending on how well it fits in with the beliefs we already hold (consider the increasing popularity of Bayesian approaches to philosophy of science; I would argue that the same model applies to every sort of factual inquiry).

This is not to say that every person has a conscious commitment to a coherent ideology. Indeed, all of us to some degree operate from the gut rather than from the head, from beliefs and assumptions that we have not articulated and generally don’t even recognize as beliefs or assumptions. But every statement we make is nevertheless tied to a raft of presuppositions. For instance, though many people support gay marriage as a simple outworking of equal rights, the question of gay marriage is inextricably tied to other, larger questions: what is the nature of marriage itself, and what is the state’s interest in it? What is the nature of gender and sexuality? And these questions lead to greater questions still; what is the nature of humanity?

It is therefore meaningless to label some beliefs ‘religious’ and other beliefs ‘secular’, except as a rhetorical tool atheists can use to dominate the public sphere. All beliefs are grounded in an ideology. A person will label particular beliefs reasonable or unreasonable depending on their existing ideology; this is true regardless of whether or not they associate their ideology with a particular religious tradition.

It will not help to define ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in terms of the natural and the supernatural either. The categories ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ are themselves ideologically constructed; moreover the issues which confront public discourse are, for a purely materialistic interpretation, problematic to say the least (it may be possible to speak of justice and value in purely materialistic terms but such a radical interpretation could hardly be said to be mainstream).

Simply put: a belief is a belief. There is no ‘non-religious’ middle ground between ideologies; there is no normal self-evident truth outside the beliefs people hold. It may be strategically advantageous for atheists to impose an arbitrary exclusion of some beliefs from public discourse, but there is no reason anyone else should capitulate to this imposition.

2005-12-15T19:06:00.000+11:00

Quick Link: An article well worth reading about the 'Leb' problem in Sydney.

2005-12-15T13:57:00.000+11:00

Jeremy comments on my post about this blog:

Oh come on, picking the ignorant outburst of some random idiot on the internet and then trying to make a wider point about it is pointless. There are random idiots on all sides of politics, particularly on the internet, and it's best to just ignore them. To extrapolate from these sorts of comments some deeper understanding about what's going on on university campuses or "the left" (not in this post, but it's common in this sort of post) is silly in the extreme. I'm sorry, but this is something lazy bloggers (once again, on all sides of politics) do far too often and it really wears me down.

Granted, quote mining proves nothing. But I chose to quote Derek Saphire because he typifies my own experience of certain student political movements, movements which dominate the discourse at melbourne, littering the visual landscape of melbourne with their propaganda ('Why the revolution must be millitant' etc.) and Melbourne's student institutions. Furthermore they are generally involved in Greens and even Labor Left politics. So I don't believe this person is just a random angry person, but is in fact representative of a small, but disproportionately influential minority.

There are at least two extraordinarily different stories being told by westerners about the west, and one of those stories informs views such as Derek Saphire's. In the context of that story, the actions and views 'hard left', and the actions and views of conservatives are culpably sinful. I'm not attempting to show whether Derek's story or any other is true or false at this stage (although I'm sure it's clear what I think) but I do want to make clear just how powerfully different the stories are.

2005-12-15T01:39:00.000+11:00

The Australian Ideal and the Sydney Riots

One of G.K. Chesterton's main themes was the importance of the ideal for practical politics; in simple terms it means that unless we know where we want to go we can't know how to get there. I think that so much of the tension and miscommunication evident in public discourse stems from either a disagreement about or even a lack of clarity among either party on exactly what this ideal should be.

I read around the web, particularly from conservative-leaning commentators that the riots in Sydney are the latest in a series of events which prove the failure of the 'multiculturalism' ideal that has hitherto dominated the discourse. I think there's something too this. Currently Wikipedia defines multiculturalism as the view that 'that immigrants, and others, should preserve their cultures with the different cultures interacting peacefully within one nation.' It further defines culture as 'values, norms, and artifacts'. At a glance, the idea of a single nation combining different people groups who hold different norms and values seems highly problematic to say the least.

For the practice of democracy relies on the possibility of consensus; no one could accept the rule of a law they thought blatantly unjust The rule of law is not simply a matter of obeying the law for the sake of convenience or fear, but of obeying the law because one values an orderly society and one free from tyranny; if one thought the law itself tyrannical one could not accept its rule. But laws are based on a community’s values and norms; if (for instance) we make it illegal to marry a child it is because we perceive this as a cruelty and a perversion. If, however, someone regarded the marriage of children as normal and, say, an important aid to chastity, that person would regard such a law as bureaucratic meddling at best. So a society, at least a society governed by rule of law, must be based upon a common set of values; for unless a law is grounded in a common value it will be indistinguishable from the imposition of a tyrant’s whim.

And I suspect it is the loss of the possibility of such common value that makes the ideal of multiculturalism so appealing. The Intelligentsia of the west have suffered a horrible loss of faith, a loss of faith in God when they rejected Christianity for humanism and rationalism, and then a loss of a loss of faith in reason at the hands of Foucault and the post-modern humanists and a loss of faith in humanity in the horrific battlefields of the twentieth century and the collapse of atheistic communism into the unimaginable barbarism of Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. In light of this loss of faith all that western scholars can do is express the bitterness of doubt and rejection, deconstructing this and that but never offering anything positive that might hold water for more than a moment. Consequently, a pseudo ideal like multiculturalism becomes very attractive; it requires no affirmation of anything in particular because one has affirmed everything in general.

However, in rejecting multiculturalism for something real it will be important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is right to live and let live. It is right to respect that honest, intelligent people think and act differently to they way I think and act. It is wrong to write a person off because they appear to fit a preconceived stereotype. If we learn one thing from our national experience with multiculturalism it is that people are people, and that people qua people matter and should be treated accordingly.

What the new ideal will look like is anyone’s guess; It may look something like a negotiation between Christianity and the sort of humanitarian semispiritual agnosticism I think of as ‘Socraticism’ (more on which later). For the time being I propose the following three values as mandatory for all Australian citizens:

Obedience to our laws and democratic institutions.
The treatment of all fellow citizens with courtesy and respect as human beings.
Honouring the freedoms that we take for granted: the freedom to think, the freedom to discuss ideas, and the freedom to worship or not as one believes is best.

2005-12-14T18:21:00.000+11:00

Thanks to ProudtobeRight for the link!

2005-12-14T18:17:00.000+11:00

Off Topic: Dispatches Response

Jeremy has more faith than I do, and asks 'As for Ben who advocates vigilantism as a necessary response to police action… seriously, how on earth do you think that you're going to combat a problem of gang violence by forming a gang and getting violent?'

I was advocating vigilantism as a response to police inaction, not police action. But the question is pertinent. It'll probably be worth reading discussion on the Dispatches blog for the next little while.

2005-12-14T03:19:00.000+11:00

Off Topic: Dhimmitude or the Mob

I'm going to put this blog on my links list, not because I agree with the guy but because he seems thoughtfull and courteous. Scroll down on the link to 'Violent Idiots', it's a post about the muslim/'anti-wog' riots in Sydney. Here's the text of my reply:

I've been on the receiving end of 'middle eastern' gang violence; in my case on chapel street at the hands of self described 'afghani terrorists'. They (there were four of them in a car) were cruising the street northwards verbally abusing women as the drove past. When they shouted filth at my sister and her friends I (stupidly, in hindsight) told them to shut up (my exact words were 'why don't you shut your face') from the footpath, immediately all four jumped out of the car (leaving it blocking the traffic) and confronted me, threating among other things to slice my face with a broken bottle.

Fortunately they underestimated how many people I was walking with including a few bigish men (I'm 6'4" and reasonably heavily built myself) so in the abscence of any rise from us they backed down. We later saw them mobing another car as it tried to turn into Chapel street.

What was astonishing all along was their demeanor; the insults they directed at the girls were vicious, and three of the four of them were clearly seeking some sort of violent encounter (the fourth was much more guarded and actually tried to pacify the situation). Their rhetoric was specifically anti-white and anti Australian, as I said they described themselves as 'Afghani terrorists' and one of them in particular took offense when I told him I didn't care.

How typical my experience was is an open question, however if it was typical, if islamist gangs have been responsible for the violence, intimidation, and rape that has been claimed, and if a pseudo-religious commitment to 'political correctness' on the part of politicians and comentariat makes it impossible to address this fact, then people will simply have to take matters into their own hands. What other choice have they got?

If I have to choose between dhimmitude and the mob, I for one choose the mob.

Honestly, I'm not sure what to think. It looks for all the world like there is an aggressive Islamist movement around the world that's utterly commited to the subjugation of the non-Islamic world. And in purely natural terms (that is, ignoring the reality of divine grace and the power of the gospel), I don't see how the west can resist it; the intellectual guardians of our culture seem slavishly enmeshed in a grand narrative of the world in which the west is always the evil aggressor and the 'other' always the opressed victim; I can far to easily believe that they welcome dhimmi status as a penance for their imaginary sins. And Muslims have kids while secularists don't; combine that with the fact that muslim nations aggressively protect themselves from conversion and secular nations fling their doors wide open to muslim apologists it seems like the eventual conversion of the world to Islam or dhimmitude is inevitable as a matter of maths and generations. If these fears are groundless and my concern over Islam paranoia I honestly would be grateful to someone who could show me why. I can quite honestly say that I would enthusiasticaly embrace a more optimistic view than this if someone could convince me of it.

As it is I comfort myself with this thought: several times in history the church looked dying and gone, and each time it rose again and grew from strength to strength. Though Europe be lost for a time, China will be won. For Christ himself promised he would be with us always, to the very end of the age.

2005-12-13T14:05:00.000+11:00

If you don't believe that the Australian government is the world's most racist, fascist regime, you are a redneck philisitine.

If this assertion seems strange to you, don't think for a moment that the bloke who posted this is unusual in any way. This is basically the received wisdom being taught on university campuses around the country. For a small but extreemely influential minority, the 'truth' that Australia is evil, racist, and fascist is so obvious that anyone who cannot see it must be stupid or evil. This is the extent of the divide in the Australian psyche.

2005-12-11T02:34:00.000+11:00

Why it makes sense for Family First to support VSU

For those of you unfamilliar with VSU in Australia, click here, or when the article goes away, here.

If Family First is to be anything at all it must have some fixed vision of The Family; to put something first it must, in fact, be a something, not an amorphous feel-good term. An outline of this fixed vision is given at the Family First website:

“Family” for Family First means the relationships that bind grandparents, parents and their children, mums and dads and siblings and form the basis fo a living community. A broader experience of extended family relationships enriches family life. Family grows out of heterosexual relationships between men and women. Family life flourishes when couples strive for a stable commitment to sexual fidelity to each other.

Compare this vision of sexuality and family with this from the Melbourne University Student Union website:

There is no such thing as a heterosexual, just like there is not such thing as a bisexual or a homosexual. You can perform heterosexual acts, like female on male sex, but that doesn’t mean you are this thing called the heterosexual. And it goes for all the other names you call people too…The world that we live in makes sense of us, by putting us into these categories called binaries, like woman/man, straight/gay, large/small, white/black etc. Then it makes assumptions about our personalities on the basis of this.

So what’s all that about? Well, Family First (without using overtly religious language) is advocating basically a Jewish/Christian view of the family, particularly the essential role of the married couple as the basic unit of family. On this view gender is real and purposeful; the differences between men and women are part of who we are and are aimed at the creation of and definition of family. The view being advocated by Melbourne University Student Union, however, is fundamentally opposed to this: for MUSU our social gender (whether we are a ‘man’ or ‘woman’ or whatever else we can dream up) is an arbitrary social construction with no purpose except the protection of the vested social power of men. On this conception of sexuality the traditional married couple ideal is nothing but a tool for men to possess women.

These two conceptions of gender and family are fundamentally opposed to one another and there is no hope of reconcilliation between them. To adopt one position, one must abandon the other. So Family First is by it’s own definition of Family fundamentally opposed to MUSU on this issue, which happens to be the core issue around which the Family First is built.

Now, as all students of Melbourne University, I was effectively forced to pay MUSU to advance its conception of sexuality against the ‘traditional’ conception that Family First upholds, indeed MUSU employs two full time ‘Queer Officers’ for this very purpose. Obviously it makes sense for FF to oppose this compulsory student payment.

2005-12-11T01:23:00.000+11:00

This is just plain wrong.

Sadly, this sort of violent behavior is typical of the tone of left v right I experienced at university. I have seen posters advertising lectures on 'why the revolution must be millitant' and 'why non-violent methods don't work'; it's clear that the hard left recognize the extent of the west's cultural division and act accordingly.

(Similarly, a recent claim that Christian fundamentalists in America attacked an anti-Christian professor, if true, should be roundly condemned by all Christians.)

2005-12-10T15:40:00.000+11:00

As always, Chesterton puts it perfectly.

2005-12-10T15:29:00.000+11:00

What would it mean to be sane?

Let me put that question in context: I am a philosophy student (very soon to be graduate), a survivor of Melbourne University, and a voracious reader of political and idea centred blogs; I am coming to know the taste and feel of our own intellectual zeitgeist (the spirit of our age).

I would call it schizophrenic, in the original meaning of the word: ‘split minded’. There are deep, irreconcilable divisions in the mind of our culture, in the body of ideas that inform our sense of national identity as Australians, and our sense of western identity as inheritors of the great Christian/Democratic tradition of Westminster. While on the surface, our astonishingly successful political system, our polished and professional mass media, and the breathtaking pace of technological advance give the illusion that everything is buisness as usual, down at the level of ideas there is a fundamental lack of consensus on the questions that really matter.

Consider the following from a Democrat Youth message board: ‘In the words of the Late, Great Bill Hicks, about the most conciliatory thing I can say for those people at this point is simply this: Kill Yourself.’ The post itself holds a lot of this sort of stuff, and is followed by hundreds of comments supporting the idea. This post is not atypical of the tone of the stuff that gets kicked around the debate between ‘left’ and ‘right’; and the frustration expressed by ‘TheWatcher’ is common; it is encapsulated in the feeling that ‘way of thinking X is so clearly wrong that anyone who thinks that way must be mad or evil, so there is no point reasoning with them.’

And in a sense this feeling is right. The divisions of thought that divide the modern west are so deep that they are beyond resolution through mere discussion. Logic, after all, is simply the method for correctly deriving conclusions from premises, and reasoning simply the art of illuminating the logical forms in an argument, scrutinizing them for consistency and identifying the underlying premises. But when people differ about these foundational premises no amount of reasoning will reconcile them; the more they clarify their positions the more defined the gulf between them will be.

But even clarity of division is better than the noise and confusion that passes for public discourse today; without a clear or clearly expressed vision of foundational truth, of universal context, ideas are meaningless, nothing more than elaborate expressions of emotion. And so we see these elaborate expressions of emotion degenerate into base experessions of emotion: abuse and suggestions of violence.

My purpose with this blog, therefore, is twofold: First, to review articles from the MSM and the blogosphere and to analyse them, as best I can, in terms of the underlying premises that they are grounded in. Secondly, I hope to explore the problem of consensus: if sweet reason alone will not (and it cannot) resolve the schizophrenia of the west, what will? What does a national sanity actually look like, and how do we get there?

2005-12-10T13:24:00.000+11:00

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.

–G.K. Chesterton, Heretics