Puppets of Satan?

 

Re:Norway's war on religious liberty.

 Diplomat magazine

By Willy Fautré, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers

HRWF (08.01.2024) – From 8 to 19 January 2024, the District Court of Oslo will examine the de-registration case of Jehovah’s Witnesses on the grounds of their exclusion policy of members, also named disfellowshipping.

The case follows the government’s denial of the Witnesses’ application for state grants in 2021, which they had received for 30 years. These subsidies are not “gifts” but allocations provided for by the Norwegian Constitution and laws to respect the principle of equality between religious communities, whatever their size, since the Church of Norway (Lutheran) is supported by taxpayers’ money.

A timeline in short

On 27 January 2022, the County Governor (Statsforvalteren) for Oslo and Viken, Ms. Valgerd Svarstad-Haugland, issued an administrative decision denying the state subsidy for the year 2021 to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The starting point of the legal saga was a report addressed to the Ministry of Children and Family Affairs by Prof. Furuli, a professor emeritus of Semitic languages at the University of Oslo and a disfellowshipped Jehovah’s Witness himself, in connection with the exclusion and expulsion policy of members. The question was raised about how the report should be assessed with regard to the registration of and state subsidies to the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Noteworthy is that Prof. Furuli supported a first decision in August 2021 by a Norwegian court “annulling” an ecclesiastical decision where the Jehovah’s Witnesses disfellowshipped one of their female members, Gry Helen Nygård. However, this decision was reversed on 9 July 2021 by the Borgarting Court of Appeal and on 3 May 2022 by the Supreme Court of Norway with a unanimous decision (5-0). Nygård then took her case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which rejected her complaint without giving any further reason, which is common when the ECHR regards complaints as clearly unfounded.

Nygård has also taken her case to a different court, the media, and has found a sympathetic ear from people hostile to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

On 25 October 2022, the County Governor of Oslo and Viken, Ms. Valgerd Svarstad-Haugland, demanded via letter that Jehovah’s Witnesses change their religious beliefs and practices, otherwise they would lose their registration. In her letter, she did not refer to any court decisions or complaints to the police, child welfare authorities, or other relevant authorities. The Witnesses proposed to meet her but she declined their request.

On 22 December 2022, the County Governor revoked their registration as a religious community.

On 30 December 2022, Oslo District Court granted Jehovah’s Witnesses a temporary injunction suspending the County Governor’s decision and pending litigation.

On 26 April 2023, the District Court lifted the injunction in response to a request by the Ministry of Children and Families. The decision was appealed.

On 30 June 2023, the Borgarting Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal on technical grounds.

What are and can be the consequences of the de-registration?

News reports about the State revoking the Witnesses’ registration stigmatize the nearly 12,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses of Norway.

The negative media coverage has led to considerable increase in verbal abuse, physical assaults, as well as vandalism of places of worship (e.g., offensive graffiti, arson).

The community is losing the State’s recognition of their religious marriages as well as some $1.6 million (USD) in government grants.

The State intrusion into the beliefs and practices of Jehovah’s Witnesses that is being examined in Norway can have a very negative impact on other religious communities in Norway and other countries.

The ruling against that religious community “can have consequences for a whole range of other faiths,” stated Dag Øistein Endsjø, professor of Religious studies at the University of Oslo, in an interview published in the newspaper Vårt Land .

In an editorial, Vebjørn Selbekk (editor-in-chief of the respected Norwegian Christian newspaper, Dagen) expressed fear that the County Governor may go on and sanction other religious groups whose beliefs and practices she happens to disagree with. He regarded the decision as anti-democratic, and expressed the hope that the Jehovah’s Witnesses will “emerge victorious from the upcoming court process.” Noteworthy is that Mr. Selbekk is not a Jehovah’s Witness and is critical of their theology.

Monsignor Torbjørn Olsen, the Secretary of the Catholic Norwegian Bishops’ Conference, wrote in a Norwegian media: “If the denial of registration stands, it may soon only be a matter of time before a number of other communities with ‘incorrect’ positions will be deregistered.”

Last but not least, a collateral damage is also the reaction of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs whose spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, decried the hypocrisy of Norway which deregistered Jehovah’s Witnesses, while criticizing Moscow at international forums for banning that same religious community. She also added that Russia’s nationwide ban is hereby legitimized by the decision in Norway.

Wikipedia has become the borg?

 

Yet more science based morality.

 In Prestigious Journal, Bioethicist Pushes Human Extinction

Wesley J Smith

The fear of suffering (or deprivation of personal desires) is causing untold moral harm in the West — from ever-expanding euthanasia laws to the march of increasingly radical reproductive technologies, to transitioning children with gender dysphoria with harmful puberty blockers and mastectomies on teenage girls, to transhumanistic advocacy that threatens to unleash new eugenics, etc.

For some, it even conjures a desire to see the human race go extinct to prevent the suffering of those who would otherwise be born in the future.

Yes, Serious Advocacy for Human Extinction

The human-extinction movement used to be pretty fringy but it may be gaining traction within bioethics and philosophy. For example, Peter Singer has questioned whether it is “justifiable” to continue our species. Now, a very long piece advocating the end of future humanity — and, incongruously, doing away with raising animals — was just published in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, which is not in the least “fringe.”

From “Confessions of an Antinatalist Philosopher”:

I would be pleased to see no one to have children, because that would be a rational thing to do. Reproduction carries risks to the possible future individuals. All lives are occasionally miserable, some lives are predominantly miserable, and individuals may think, justifiably, that their lives have no meaning. My reason suggests that it would be unwise and unkind to bring new people into existence and thereby expose them to these risks.

The piece is very long and arcane. Finnish bioethicist Matti Häyry parses several different philosophical approaches to human extinction — such as paradoxically combining it with transhumanist immortality (!) — of little interest outside of this corner of philosophy. And he insultingly calls people who have children “breeders.”

Out of the Blue

Then, Häyry brings up animal production and factory farming:

I am an anti-pronatalist, or strict antinatalist and I support stopping human reproduction and animal production, including but not limited to factory farming. I would be pleased to see no more suffering-prone beings created by people. Voluntary human extinction and factory animal extinction would follow from these and I would have no qualms about them. If Homo sapiens can find the kindness and the courage to break the cycle of sentience that currently holds the species in its grip, excellent. And even barring that, or if a palatably phased human demise takes its time, liberating factory animals from their suffering would be a welcome advance action. Copathy [sic, I think he means “compathy,” or shared feelings) would motivate these developments.

I certainly understand the argument against factory farms, but I rarely see utilitarian types reference the great benefit that inexpensive, nutritious food brings to people of limited means. But it seems to me these are two separate topics.

If human and food animal suffering must be eliminated, does Häyry also advocate making all sentient life on the planet extinct?

No, He Does Not

He writes:

I do not advocate involuntary human or wild animal extinction. I would not mourn the loss of any or all species as such, but I do not want to impose my own will upon a self-conscious collective that wants to live (humans) or groups of self-directing, possibly sentient, beings whose drive for survival is beyond my comprehension (nonhumans in the wild).

Wait a minute! Animals in the wild suffer far more than most humans and many domesticated animals — “red in tooth and claw,” and all that — so why not eliminate all organisms capable of feeling pain if the point is to end the evil of suffering? I guess we shouldn’t expect logic from nihilistic philosophers.

But I do think we should expect more from prestigious bioethics journals. Surely, there are more important actual healthcare concerns that should occupy the storied pages of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics.

On making learning appealing.

 

Realism vs. Idealism?

 

Peace on earth : the real final frontier?

 William Shatner and Our Privileged Planet

Gunter Bechly

William Shatner wrote about the experience of space flight, back in December in The Guardian:

Last year, at the age of 90, I had a life-changing experience. I went to space, after decades of playing a science-fiction character who was exploring the universe and building connections with many diverse life forms and cultures. I thought I would experience a similar feeling: a feeling of deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration. A call to indeed boldly go where no one had gone before.

I was absolutely wrong. As I explained in my latest book, what I felt was totally different. I knew that many before me had experienced a greater sense of care while contemplating our planet from above, because they were struck by the apparent fragility of this suspended blue marble. I felt that too. But the strongest feeling, dominating everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

While I was looking away from Earth, and turned towards the rest of the universe, I didn’t feel connection; I didn’t feel attraction. What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

I worry about the world my grandchildren will be living in when they are my age

This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I played my part in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is, and will remain, our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.

Shatner‘s surprising revelation may be interpreted by some as an environmentalist creed, but I rather see it as a poetical formulation of the fine-tuning of Earth for life. It shows that atheists like Bill Nye are wrong when they say we are just an insignificant speck of dust in an average galaxy. We clearly are special and significant and certainly not an accident.

On a related subject, I was asked recently, “Why would a God create such an enormous universe and only give life to one tiny speck of dust?” Well, imagine you would like to teach two important lessons to your creatures: 1) you are very special; 2) but don‘t become a megalomaniac because God is infinitely greater than you. The universe would get both points across pretty well.

Eliminating poverty by eliminating the poor?

 

A Pax Americana? Pros and cons.

 

Still the next big thing?

 

Commonsense gets a jab in?

 England’s National Health Service Bans Most Puberty-Blocking

Wesley J Smith

Following up on an earlier advisory recommending against providing puberty blockers to adolescents who feel they are a different sex, the National Health Service in England has now banned their administration except in the context of a formally approved clinical trial. Moreover, social gender-affirmation will not be the automatic approach taken for children presenting with “gender incongruence.” From the NHS England advisory :

The clinical management approach should be open to exploring all developmentally and psychosocially appropriate options for children and young people who are experiencing gender incongruence. The clinical approach should be mindful that this may be a transient phase, particularly for pre-pubertal children, and that there will be a range of pathways to support these children and young people and a range of outcomes . . . .

A significant proportion of children and young people who are concerned about, or distressed by, issues of gender incongruence experience co-existing mental health, neuro-developmental and/or personal, family or social complexities in their lives. The relationship between these presentations and gender incongruence may not be readily apparent and will often require careful exploration.

Treating each patient as an individual instead of a category to be checked off, one approach fits all: what a concept!

Non-scientific and Ideologically Driven

Please note that this guidance is the precise opposite of immediate gender-affirmation in all cases regardless of the particular circumstances of the patient — a non-scientific, ideologically driven policy pushed by woke medical associations, and the laws and pending legislative proposals in our most progressive states (such as California’s A.B. 957).

The new approach will ban puberty-blocking except in the structured circumstance of a clinical trial. From another NHS England advisory:

The new approach will ban puberty-blocking except in the structured circumstance of a clinical trial. From another NHS England advisory:

We have previously made clear, including the draft interim service specification we consulted on, the intention that the NHS will only commission puberty suppressing hormones as part of clinical research. This approach follows advice from Dr Hilary Cass’ Independent Review highlighting the significant uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments.

We are now going out to targeted stakeholder testing on an interim clinical commissioning policy proposing that, outside of a research setting, puberty suppressing hormones should not be routinely commissioned for children and adolescents who have gender incongruence/dysphoria.

Let us not forget that Norway, France, Sweden, and Finland — not exactly part of the Bible Belt — are also pursuing this more rational approach to gender incongruence. The approach, it is worth noting, is far more similar to the laws of Florida, Tennessee, and some other states than to those of California, Washington, and the rest of the gender-affirmation cartel.

The science is not settled. Gender-affirming care is not necessarily in the best interests of children presenting with gender incongruence. The time is long past for the American media and policymakers to recognize this fact, so that a truly science-based discourse can be launched about how best to care for these children.

Will it be the noble savage or savage noble who saves civilization?

 The Barbarian Within: Darwinism and the Secular Script for Masculinity

Nancy Pearcy

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a preview adapted from Nancy Pearcey’s forthcoming book The Toxic War on Masculinity. The book will be published on June 27, but you can pre-order now!

Civilization has degenerated into a “mawkish sentimentality,” complained a writer in 1888. “In Heaven’s name, leave us a saving touch of honest, old-fashioned barbarism!” 

How did barbarism come to be seen as a positive trait for men — “a saving touch,” a remedy for Victorian sentimentality?…

A new concept of masculinity took hold after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859). His evolutionary theory inspired the idea that, at the core, men are animals — and that to recover their authentic masculinity, men need to reconnect with their inner beast. For example, Zane Grey said that in his Westerns he was trying to recapture the experience of our evolutionary ancestors. “Nature developed man according to the biological facts of evolution,” he wrote. “Something of the wild and primitive should forever remain instinctive in the human race.” 

Male writers began to claim that civilization was merely a thin veneer over our animal nature. A book titled Savage Survivals (1916) said, “Civilization is only a skin. The great core of human nature is barbaric.” A book titled The Caveman Within Us (1922) argued that the human organism has only “a slight coat of cultural whitewash, which may be called the veneer of civilization.” 

In fact, any man not primitive or barbarian enough risked being judged as a failure as a man. The most prominent psychologist of the age, G. Stanley Hall, remarked that “a teenage boy who is a perfect gentleman has something the matter with him.” 

In this chapter, we will investigate the application of Darwinism to human behavior, which is called Social Darwinism. How has it shaped the public discourse on masculinity right up to our own day? How has it contributed to the secular script for the “Real” Man.

The “Blessings” of War

In the nineteenth century, due to industrialization and urbanization, a new word entered the English language: overcivilized. People began to worry that city boys were becoming soft and emasculated. They were no longer the strapping young men produced by harsh pioneer days or rugged farm life. The three principal institutions that dominate early childhood socialization — family, religion, and education — were increasingly staffed and run by women. Men began to cast about for ways to retrieve a sense of robust manhood.

Social Darwinism came in handy in several ways. Take militarism: If life evolved through the struggle for survival, then applying that principle to nations suggests that the way to produce strong, vigorous manhood is through warfare. 

“War is a blessing for humanity,” wrote a German anthropologist, “since it offers the only means to measure the strengths of one nation to another and to grant the victory to the fittest. War is the highest and most majestic form of the struggle for existence.” A biologist agreed: 

According to Darwin’s theory, war has constantly been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human race, in that the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally inferior or morally degenerate peoples must clear out and make room for the stronger and better developed. 

Theodore Roosevelt was a Social Darwinist and famously said in 1895, “The country needs a war.” He argued that the current generation of young men needed to test their mettle in battle: 

No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war. The courage of the soldier, the courage of the statesman who has to meet storms which can only be quelled by soldierly virtue — this stands higher than any qualities called out merely in times of peace. 

G. Stanley Hall even cast militarism as a “manly protest” against the influence of women: “War is, in a sense, the acme of what some now call the manly protest. In peace, women have invaded nearly all the occupations of man, but in war, male virtues come to the fore, for woman cannot go ‘over the top.’” War was depicted not as a necessary evil but as a positive strategy for restoring virile manhood. 

Your Inner Barbarian 

Social Darwinism was also used to support a sports and fitness craze that swept over the nation toward the end of the nineteenth century. As middle-class Americans left behind the rigorous life on the farm to become a nation of sedentary office workers, they began to turn to sports and exercise to rebuild their physical health. The first tennis court in the United States was built in 1876, the first basketball court in 1891. 

Sports were touted not only as a way to get physically fit but also as a way for boys to reconnect with their evolutionary origins. In 1866, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, a devotee of Darwin, proposed a theory called recapitulation, claiming that each human embryo replays the entire history of evolution (from one-celled organism, to fish, to amphibian, to mammal, to human). Social Darwinists concluded that boys continue the process of evolution by “recapitulating” the history of the human race as they pass from childhood to adulthood. 

For example, William Forbush, a child development specialist, wrote a highly influential book titled The Boy Problem (1902) claiming that each boy repeats “the history of his own race-life from savagery unto civilization.” Joseph Lee, a social reformer who founded a movement to build playgrounds in cities, said play arose from an earlier stage of human evolution — from the “barbaric and predatory society to which the boy naturally belongs.” A pioneer in the Boy Scout movement said athletics were reminiscent “of the struggle for survival, of the hunt, of the chase, of war.” 

The idea was that even as boys grew up to become refined Victorian gentlemen, they should always retain a core of wildness and savagery. When Ernest Thompson Seton founded the Boy Scouts of America, he said that his goal was to rekindle in boys “the power of the savage.”

Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation was eventually discredited. (He had supported the theory with falsified sketches of embryos; already in his own day, he was accused of fraud.) Yet the idea that humans arose from animal origins and are barbarians at heart was becoming part of the socially constructed definition of manhood. 

Darwinian Stories 

Darwinism was used to bolster the philosophy of naturalism, the claim that nature is all that exists. Among writers, it inspired a new genre called literary naturalism. Novelists portrayed humans as evolved organisms, governed by the laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Émile Zola, a leading theorist of literary naturalism, said he wanted to portray characters as “human animals, nothing more.”

For example, Frank Norris wrote a short story (1893) about a bookish student named Lauth living in medieval France who gets caught up in a riot and ends up killing a man with a crossbow:

In an instant, a mighty flame of blood-lust thrilled up through Lauth’s body and mind. At the sight of blood shed by his own hands all the animal savagery latent in every human being woke within him — no more merciful scruples now. He could kill. In the twinkling of an eye the pale, highly cultivated scholar . . . sank back to the level of his savage Celtic ancestors. His eyes glittered . . . and his whole frame quivered with the eagerness and craving of a panther in sight of his prey.

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), often assigned in high school classes, is set during the Civil War. Early in the novel, the main character, Henry, flees from the field of battle. But later he “felt the daring spirit of a savage.” He redeems himself by fighting like a “barbarian, a beast,” a “war devil.” 

Jack London is best known for books like The Call of the Wild (1903). But what most people do not know is that, as a young man, London underwent what one historian calls “a conversion experience” to radical naturalism by reading books about evolution. He even memorized passages from Darwin’s books and could quote them by heart, the way Christians memorize Scripture. 

Though London wrote about dogs, he intended them as metaphors for humans. In The Call of the Wild, the main character is a dog named Buck, a house pet captured and sold to an Alaskan expedition where he is thrown into a Darwinian struggle for survival. In the Nordic cold, he quickly learns that men and dogs “were savages all of them, who knew no law but the law of the club and fang.” 

Eventually, the last tie to civilization is broken and Buck returns to a pre-civilized existence. A literary critic writes, “Ideal manliness thrives in Buck only because he becomes less and less human, more and more wild.”

Theodore Dreiser, author of American classics such as Sister Carrie, likewise underwent a naturalistic rite of passage by reading books about evolution. He wrote that Darwinism blew him “intellectually to bits,” destroying the last vestiges of his Catholic upbringing. He intended his novels to show that all human “ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows, and joys” were nothing but products of chemical reactions in the brain. He called them “chemic compulsions.” The literary naturalists used fiction to promote a Darwinian worldview that reduced humans to products of evolutionary forces. 

The Thin Veneer of Civilization 

The literary naturalists treated the wilderness as an arena where men could reaffirm their masculinity. As one historian explains, the wilderness was seen “as a source of virility, toughness, and savagery — qualities that defined fitness in Darwinian terms.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs set his immensely popular Tarzan series (1912) in the African jungle. Because of Tarzan’s wild upbringing, he avoids the debilitating forces of civilization, possessing the power and strength of primitive manhood. Even after mastering European customs and languages, he prefers to “strip off the thin veneer of civilization” (as Burroughs puts it) and dress in a loincloth of animal hide, eating raw meat that he has killed himself. In Tarzan of the Apes, he tells Jane, “I am still a wild beast at heart.” 

The message of the Tarzan books, says sociologist Michael Kimmel, is that “descending the evolutionary ladder is the only mechanism to retrieve manhood.”

This is a severely stunted, shrunken, truncated view of human nature. From the time of the classical Greeks and Romans, virtue had been defined as the restraint of the “lower” passions by the “higher” faculties of reason, spirit, and moral will. But Darwinism was taken to mean that humans had triumphed over the other species not by reason and moral restraint but by the fierce, fighting urges. In a stunning reversal, the animal passions and instincts were held up as the authentic self. 

The secular script for manhood was redefined as crude and combative, governed by the biological instincts for lust and power. 

Many of the literary naturalists created rollicking adventure stories that are great fun to read. One of our sons devoured the Tarzan books. But Christians should always read with their worldview antennae poised to pick up the story’s underlying message. A Darwinian worldview furthered secular ideas of what it means to be a man. 

The earlier ideal of the Christian gentleman had urged men to live up to the image of God implanted in them. By contrast, the Darwinian worldview urged men to live down to their presumed animal nature — to compete in the ruthless struggle for dominance and power. The “Real” Man was being defined in increasingly toxic term

s. 

File under "Well said." XCIII

 "The Wiseman speaks because he has something to say;the fool because he has to say something."

Plato

Rock Bottom?

 Medically assisted deaths could save millions in health care spending: Report

CBC news 

New research suggests medically assisted dying could result in substantial savings across Canada's health-care system.

Doctor-assisted death could reduce annual health-care spending across the country by between $34.7 million and $136.8 million, according to a report published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on Monday.

The savings exceedingly outweigh the estimated $1.5 to $14.8 million in direct costs associated with implementing medically assisted dying.

"The take-away point is that there may be some upfront costs associated with offering medical assisted dying to Canadians, but there may also be a reduction in spending elsewhere in the system and therefore offering medical assistance in dying to Canadians will not cost the health care system anything extra," said Aaron Trachtenberg, an author of the report and a resident in internal medicine at the University of Calgary.

Cost has to be a part of the discussion

The researchers used numbers from the Netherlands and Belgium, where medically assisted death is legal, combined with Canadian spending data from Ontario. Trachtenberg stressed that means the work is theoretical and needs to be readdressed when Canada starts collecting large scale data at home.

After June 17, 2016 when Bill C-14 became law, provinces began rolling out their plans to deal with requests for doctor-assisted death.

Manitoba has set up a Medical Assistance in Dying team (MAID). More than 100 patients have contacted MAID, with 24 receiving medically assisted deaths as of Jan. 6.

"In a resource-limited health care system, anytime we roll out a large intervention there has to be a certain amount of planning and preparation and cost has to be a part of that discussion," Trachtenberg said, adding the provinces' differing plans could impact the cost structure of implementation.

"It's just the reality of working in a system of finite resources."

The report estimated that about one to four per cent of Canadians will die using physician-assisted death. Of those, 50 per cent will be between the ages of 60 and 80.

The report estimates a 50-50 split between men and women. 

About 80 per cent of patients will have cancer and 60 per cent will have their lives shortened by one month while 40 per cent will have their lives shortened by one week.

End-of-life care has high costs in Canada

Health-care costs increase substantially among patients nearing the end of their life, Trachtenberg said.

"Canadians die in hospitals more often than, say, our counterparts in America or Europe and … we have a lack of palliative care services even though we are trying to improve that. And therefore people end up spending their final days in the hospital," he said.

"Hospital-based care costs the health care system more than a comprehensive palliative care system where we could help people achieve their goal of dying at home."

The report used Manitoba as an example, where 20 per cent of health care costs are attributable to patients within the six months before they die, despite their representing only one per cent of the population. Patients who choose medical assistance in dying may forego this resource-intensive period, the report said.

"Whenever we roll out a large-scale intervention there has to be a discussion around costs. But we do not suggest that costs should ever be considered at an individual level," Trachtenberg said.

"We are not suggesting that patients or providers consider costs when making this very personal and intimate decision to request or provide medical assistance in dying."

The report also emphasized that it is only a cost analysis and doesn't include the clinical effects on patients. Patient-level research will need to be done before true economic evaluation of medical assistance in dying in terms of cost-effectiveness and utility can be done, the report said.

Ps. I think it merits repeating that the kinds of hyper-political,lawfare type responses favoured by many can merely manage the symptoms they can never cure the disease.

On 1914 :the beginning of the fall of Christendom?

File under "well said" XCII

 "The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

G.K Chesterton.

Guilty until proven otherwise?

 

New hate speech laws kick up a storm in Ireland

Joshua Askew 

Donald Trump Jr has even taken aim at the proposed legislation labelling it "insane".

New laws aimed at curbing hate speech have sparked controversy in Ireland. 

                   The updated legislation will create landmark laws to deal with hate crimes, make it an offence to deny or trivialise genocide and expand protections to include gender identity and disability. 

Opponents of the Criminal Justice Bill have raised concerns the changes go too far and will stifle free speech. 

However, defenders say Ireland's current legislation has been outstripped by the internet and contains significant blind spots. 

Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, who first published the bill currently making its way through the country's Parliament (Oireachtas), hit back at claims speech would be restricted. 

Hate speech and freedom of speech are two separate things, with the former designed to shut people up and "make them afraid". 

“We are all horrified when we hear of homophobic, racist, and other hateful incidents in our country," she said in October. 

"While these repulsive acts of violence and abuse against innocent people have been extensively reported on, we know that some people go about their lives constantly in fear of abuse simply because of who they are."

The new law will introduce specific legislation to tackle hate crimes, which it considers intentional or reckless communication and behaviour that is likely to incite violence or hatred, establishing penalties of up to five years in prison. 

Victims of hate crimes are targeted due to prejudice against their age, ability, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or gender.

                        It will also make it much easier to secure convictions for hate crimes by allowing prosecutors to rely on the use of hostile slurs, gestures or symbols. 

Critics fear the changes could lead to politically incorrect views being censored, such as those around trans rights. 

                   Some public figures have waded into the debate with Donald Trump Jr calling the new law “insane” and Twitter boss Elon Musk branding it "a massive attack on the freedom of speech". 

The legislation is long-awaited. 

Ireland currently does not have specific laws to deal with hate crimes, while its laws on hate speech are widely seen as archaic. 

Existing hate speech laws date back to 1989, with the Prohibition of Incite to Hatred Act. 

This makes it an offence to communicate threatening, abusive or insulting material that is likely to "stir up" hatred against a group of people. 

                    However, under this law, a person can defend themselves against charges by proving they did not intend to spread hatred. 

Their defence can be based on not knowing the content of the materials or lacking a reason to suspect that it was threatening, abusive or insulting.

The new law changes this, making one liable for a hate crime even if they did claim they did not intend it. 

Others were cautious about the bill. 

"In general we support those changes as they are designed to make the law more effective and protect vulnerable groups from attack," said the Irish Council for Civil Liberties in a statement sent to Euronews.

                         "However, we have been advocating to strengthen and make more explicit freedom of expression defences in the Bill and we are advocating against the inclusion of an offence that would criminalise the possession and preparation of material that would incite hatred."

They suggested "other forms of hate speech, which might cause deep offence but do not reach a criminal threshold, should be combated by other means, including education and monitoring".

Nationalism, and evangelicalism's divided house..

 

Ps. John ch.18:36LSB"Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be delivered over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not from here.”

1Corinthians ch.2:6ESV"Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. "

On the DEI Gordian knot.

Fraternising with the enemy?