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Last updated: 12/1/08






The Pragmatist's Creed: 'Put your trust in the Lord enemy of your enemy'



Apparently Secularism, which only (to date) targets the vulnerable1, and arrests and imprisons their defenders, should be cultivated as an ally in opposing Mohammedan jihadism, which takes aim at everybody (19/5/06). This is a classic false dichotomy. (Those who disagree with it, however, are dismissed as a “tiny and every-dwindling number”.) On the same day in July 2005, when jihadists murdered fifty people in London, five hundred unborn children were also murdered with the blessing of the British Secularist State. That is five hundred and fifty murders that should never have happened2. Those searching for allies should also note that even some American conservatives, although sharing the Church's opposition to the culture of death, are not averse to maligning the Church3 by apparently attributing to it every wrong that was committed on the continent of Europe between the fifth and sixteenth centuries (25/5/06). This is to ignore the fact that such wrongs were committed by people – by sinners who are ancestors of all Europeans, Catholic and Protestant (as well as Secularist). Nor is a relationship established between such wrongs and Catholic doctrine merely by pointing to an eighteenth-century papal encyclical entitled, “On Jews and Christians Living in the Same Place”. Furthermore, while Benedict XIV is certainly guilty of a fallacy of confusion in this encyclical, in the absence of a general refutation of its underlying assertions of fact4, outright condemnation of it would appear to be an example of special pleading. This can be demonstrated by considering the reasonableness in our own times of a title such as, “On Mohammedans and Feminists Living in the Same Place”, as well as the likelihood that the authoress of such a treatise might have some strong words to say on the subject. For “Jews and Christians” readers might also substitute “British and Indians”, and substitute a papal encyclical with the campaigning of Mohandas Gandhi.



Channel 5 recently broadcast a programme entitled, “No Excuses for Terror” (26/9/06), in which the Liberal presenter excoriates those Socialists who seem, at the very least, to be unconcerned by the murder of Israelis. Plaudits from some Conservative bloggers include the following comment: “Nobody can bash the lefties like a fellow leftie”. Yet in one brief assertion at the very end of the broadcast the presenter makes the kind of unchristian claim that illustrates the very anti-social hatred that he is apparently trying to oppose. He remarks,: “It's the equivalent of saying . . . that the husband who beats his wife into a pulp is somehow the inevitable victim of our modern sexual mores. How dare anyone blame those who suffer for what's done to them.” Thus the cuckold, as if he has not suffered enough already, is here demonised by being associated with acts of domestic violence. It is as if the presenter is crowing over the humiliation of the betrayed and dishonoured husband and taunting him with the force of the law which, since the decriminalisation of adultery, now favours the contemptuous. How difficult a step is it, in fact, to proceed from willingness to deliberately crush a person's spirit to indifference towards the destruction of bodies, at least of persons (also demonised) who live thousands of miles away? The concept of the unprincipled Liberal exception has been discussed elsewhere on this Web site, and it is suggested that it applies again here.



Addendum: How should we fear Mohammedanism (and support Pluralism)? Let us count the ways . . .



Expert online jihad watchers regularly warn us of the perils facing the West if we lose the “holy war” that is being waged against us. Truly horrifying reasons such as those listed in the left column of the table below are invoked in cries designed to rally us against this threat and behind the “saving” cause of . . . Pluralism(!). For those who believe that one ought to make a pact with the Devil in order to defeat Hitler, the right column below demonstrates how, for each type of reported danger that Sharia law holds in store for us in the West, Pluralism has already got there first.







Mohammedanism (Sharia state)

Pluralism (UK)







Men oppress women

Women have power of life and death over unborn children



Non-believers have to pay the jizyah (poll tax)

Catholics and others have to pay for NHS abortions with their taxes



Non-believers are an oppressed underclass







  • A nominee was hounded out of the European Commission for being a Catholic







  • The European Court of Human Rights, which has jurisdiction over Britain, has recently enforced a Nazi law banning home schooling (in Germany) by parents who wish to protect their children from corrupt state sex education programmes



Non-believers are economically disadvantaged

Scottish Catholic firemen have their pay docked for refusing to participate in a rally that promotes sexual abuse



Women have to cover their bodies – a statement of their social inferiority

Everyone of all ages and both sexes is forced to put up with pornography everywhere6 – a statement of social domination by anti-social forces



No-one can form a political party to advocate change

No-one in a position of power will let such a thing happen, regardless of what it appears to say on the constitutional tin (see above regarding Mr. Buttiglione et al.)



Freedom of speech is not tolerated

  • Christians are harassed by the State on the basis that expression of their religion violates others' “human rights” (i.e., crosses the Liberal establishment's own ideology)









Non-believers face potentially violent deaths

The triumph of Pluralist Relativistic rhetoric has left us with a homicide rate of 513 a day



Non-believers might be brutally slain

Tell that to Stevens Nyembo-Ya-Muteba (and his orphan daughters)



Slaying is justified in the Koran

Abortion is justified as a political and “human right”



No new churches can be built

Britain's second largest teaching union has voted to oppose the creation of new Catholic schools



You can pray to your God in secret

Ditto



Non-believers can either convert or die

Most Catholics have already converted to (à la carte) Liberalism, while the rest suffer a social and political death, after which may come euthanatic homicide



Society is generally poor

Yes, for the moment we have the wages of sin, if we convert, and before the abortion-induced demographic time-bomb takes its toll on our economy



An additional point to note is how the language used by pro-Pluralist polemicists against Sharia law, while admirable, seems uncommonly candid, referring as it does, for example, to the “stoning of adulterous women and cutting off thieves' hands”. Less emotive terms such as “lapidation” and “amputation” are eschewed. Have such “fearless truth-tellers”, however, considered also writing about the tearing apart of unborn children limb from limb?



Although Liberal propaganda has succeeded in widely disseminating the false notion that the term “Catholic” (lit. “universal”) denotes exclusivity or elitism, none of the deliberately deceptive terms that denote Liberalism itself has been completely exposed to all people of good will:



  • The freedom implied by the term “Liberalism” is only the freedom to commit sin and crime. That there remain some moral crimes in common law or on the statute book is merely a legacy of the incremental steps by which Liberalism has sought, “progressively”, to take over our Christian country. (The gradual repeal of the prohibition against murder is perhaps the most dramatic example of this process.) Genuine moral freedom is something completely anathema to Liberal ideology, which conveniently forgets its own slogan that “the deterrent theory of punishment does not work”7 when it comes to devising ever more oppressive penalties for failing to submit;



  • The term “Pluralism” denotes the “outflanking manoeuvre”, outlined in point 10 below;



  • “Relativism” states that “There is no such thing as objectivity”. This is yet another self-contradictory Liberal proposition. It is tantamount to saying, “This statement is false”. The related concept of “Nihilism” is equally self-ccontradictory. To claim that “Everything is meaningless” is itself an attempt at a meaningful sentence. The nihilistic fraud is very often expressed through the medium of Liberal (not “modern”) art;



  • “Socialism” is patently anti-social, as is explained in the first few footnotes to this page;



  • “Humanism” is merely the projection of the speaker's own egoism onto the rest of mankind (which is ironic if the Humanist is also a Relativist/Pluralist).



One thing that these virtually interchangeable ideologies most certainly are not, is pacifist. Liberal opposition to corporal and capital punishment, as well as to just war, is clearly intended to make violence the prerogative of the violent. This intention is as readily inferrable as the existence of human free-will: if man is capable of choosing violence (as he must be if he is to be able to abolish the death penalty), then a neutered government can only sit back and watch when the lawless run riot. The trial and error approach to Liberals' rhetoric can lead to their momentary denial of free-will in an effort to sustain the pretence that these political positions represent a superior morality; however, the disingenuousness of this denial is immediately exposed the next time the same Liberal asserts a woman's political right to choose whether her unborn child shall live or be killed. (One cannot propose a right to choose if one has denied the existence of free-will.) Furthermore, Our Lord's injunction to “turn the other cheek” is rooted in a call to humbly recognise our own sinfulness when faced with those who trespass against us: it does not give licence to injustice. A society that fails to punish crime – such as Liberals desire – is a society in which injustice reigns.8



(Return to category headings)



1Even Amnesty International seems to have jumped on this bandwagon (27/5/06).

2See also this example of how the Government apparently intends to counter the long-term threat of jihadism by the usual Liberal method of suppressing popular resistance – breaking up close-knit families and separating mothers from their children (11/9/06).

3The conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute currently has in its employ an enemy of Mohammedanism who is also, from this interview, clearly an enemy of Catholicism (5/2/07). The reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions on what this tells us about (American) conservatism.

4This is not to say that, for example, Catholic newspapers are incapable of leaping to conclusions when evaluating political news reports (14/8/06). Compare, for example, this information, which conflicts with the preceding article, but which is not addressed in that article.

5It is noteworthy to compare the Liberal Democrat spokesman's accusation that the Church “harasses” persons who commit sodomy with the Burmese dictatorship's depiction of the Christian religion as “very gentle” – see footnote 37 below. Two diametrically opposed characterisations with one common aim.

6It is suggested here that the traditional arguments offered in defence of pornography (and sadistic films) give a microscopic insight into the broader workings (and goals) of Liberal rhetoric and agitation. One such argument offered is that censorship of these materials would have to be applied to any literature or other works that contain references to fornication or violence. This would include, for example, the Bible. What is deliberately omitted from this red herring is the fact that it is not references per se that are objectionable, but rather the apparent condonation of this behaviour in pornographic and sadistic material. A second argument is that such condonation is irrelevant since it “cannot be shown to influence behaviour”. This is a patently self-defeating argument – with a longevity that can probably only be explained on the basis of wilful Liberal repetition – since it suggests that (persuasion through) argument itself (of which condonation is an implicit form) is not possible. (See also footnote 31 on this point.) A third argument (and another red herring) attempts to raise the spectre of the (Socialist!) police state by inextricably associating censorship of films with the arrest of their producers. No such link can be proven (to use a favoured Liberal turn of phrase), nor was there one during the period of moral censorship of cinema in Britain in the early-to-mid-twentieth century.

7The absurdity of this Liberal slogan can be seen more clearly if one abstracts the general proposition from the particular assertion. To suggest that any (e.g., moral) effort is “futile” because the problem (e.g., of crime) will continue is the equivalent, for example, of falling into despair because one's hunger continues to return in spite of all effort to relieve it.

8One of the most successful rhetorical tactics employed by Liberals in their attempt to abolish moral punishment is to focus attention on the fact that a crime, such as murder, was committed in the past. “No use crying over spilt blood”, is effectively the refrain. The reality, however, is that what is being dealt with by judicial punishment is a manifest present threat. Most threats to life, whether they be from inanimate objects or from animals, are dealt with pre-emptively, wherever possible. Vaccination is an example of pre-emptively dealing with an animal threat. Because we are aware that man is capable of exercising an intelligent choice between good and evil, we make an exception within civilised society in that we do not strike our fellow man unless the threat is immediate and obvious (such as pointing a gun at a person's head). This restraint in our behaviour towards each other, based as it is on the presumption of innocence, ceases to apply when it has been proven beyond reasonable doubt that a person did have the guilty mind to commit a criminal act (such as murder). At this point the general threat (abstracted from the particular case) must be dealt with, through the process of judicial sentencing, taking into account what the evidence has established regarding both the circumstances of the crime and the moral state of the convicted person's mind. While rehabilitation and redemption may be possible, it is potentially an act of collusion in crime to fail to properly take into account the circumstances of the case when attempting to infer whether rehabilitation and redemption are likely to occur. This is important because, for example, if permanent incarceration is chosen in preference to capital punishment, the convicted person remains a threat to the prison governor, the wardens, other prisoners and any person on the outside that he or she may come into contact with should he or she escape (or be released). Does this analysis reject the concept of retribution? No. The retributive dimension of punishment reflects the fact that the crime was committed by an intelligent person who is responsible for the particular criminal choice that he made.

Deterrence is certainly also a dimension in punishment even though other factors may override a particular person's receptiveness to a particular deterrent. Deliberately ignoring these other factors is another fundamental trick of Liberalism. This trick attempts to paralyse opponents' action by persistently asking the question, “But how do you know?”. (Of course, the Liberal will never accept this type of questioning being thrown back at him or her.) On the subject of epistemology, Thomas Reid demonstrates that to request proof that we can rely on the information provided by our senses presumes the reliability of our senses in being able to accept the proof; in other words, it is a self-contradictory request. So likewise can it be said that when a Liberal denies the existence of free-will or the possibility of one person influencing another, this very argument presumes the existence of both, since it constitutes an attempt to influence another person into freely choosing to alter his beliefs in accordance with the Liberal's own assertion. Furthemore, the co-existence of free-will and the ability to be influenced by others contradicts the implicit Liberal claim that deterrence, if it is to work at all, must operate on a person in the same way as a mathematical function operates on its input, i.e. with consistently predictable output. (In other words, the fundamental Liberal trick implicitly states that it is not possible to influence another person unless all persons would be influenced in the same way.)