Dennis Prager: Culture

The Left frequently defines ‘social justice’ differently than Judeo-Christian values do. For most on the Left, ‘social justice’ means social equality and social fairness. It is not fair that some people have more than others. This is why the Left believes that courts should be far more than umpires when adjudicating justice: they should be promoting fairness and equality. The other difference…is that leftist ideologies are so preoccupied with ‘social justice’ that they generally ignore personal character development. Judeo-Christian values believe the road to a just society is paved by individual character development; the Left believes it is paved with action on a macro level. That is one reason the Left is far more interested than the Right, i.e., religious Jews and Christians and secular conservatives, in passing laws, whether through legislation or through the actions of judges. That is how the Left believes you make a better society. There is, incidentally, a second reason the Left passes so many laws: As the Left breaks down the self-discipline of Judeo-Christian religions, more and more laws are needed simply to keep people from devouring each other.

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Not Liberating, After All: How did feminists end up in bed with Hugh Hefner?

Wall Street Journal Online WENDY SHALIT

Ariel Levy attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, and she doesn’t feel the better for it. It was a place where “group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was de rigueur.” It was a place where they had “coed showers, on principle.” When Ms. Levy suggested to a department head that it would be nice to have at least one course in the traditional literary canon, she was dismissed with icy contempt. Yet elsewhere on campus a professor of the humanities taught a course on pornography featuring, um, detailed textual analysis.

It was all supposed to be so liberating. But it wasn’t, as Ms. Levy argues forcefully in “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” It was merely the academic groundwork for what she calls “raunch culture,” now so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Young women wear shirts emblazoned with “Porn Star” across the chest. Teen stores sell “Cat in the Hat” thong underwear. Parents treat their daughters’ friends to “cardio striptease” classes for birthday parties. This is liberation?

Read more

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Stars, Stripes, Crescent: A reassuring portrait of America’s Muslims

Wall Street Journal BRET STEPHENS AND JOSEPH RAGO Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Ever since it became clear that three of the four jihadis who bombed London on July 7 were born and bred in England, the British have been taking a hard look at their Muslim neighbors: Do they share the same values? How do they fare economically? Whom do they cheer when England plays Pakistan at cricket? And how many more would-be bombers are among them?

As it happens, Her Majesty’s government was well clued on these questions before the bombers struck: A 2004 Home Office study showed, for example, that British Muslims are three times likelier to be unemployed than the wider population, that their rates of civic participation are low, and that as many as 26% do not feel loyal to Britain. By contrast, the U.S. Census Bureau is forbidden by law from keeping figures on religious identification (although it collects voluminous information on race and ethnicity), so there are no authoritative data on the size and nature of America’s Muslim population. Yet if the U.S. is ever attacked by American jihadis, we will no doubt ask the same questions about our Muslim community that Britons are now asking about theirs.
[Read more…]

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Benedict XVI: Science May Have a New Friend and Neo-Darwinism a New Foe

From The Center for Science and Culture blog:

Cardinal Ratzinger’s sermon at the Mass for the Election of a Supreme Pontiff has been trumpeted as a frontal assault against cultural relativism. This it was and, yet, digging deeper one finds reason to believe that Ratzinger, the newly elected Pope, may also have materialist interpretations of science (including Darwnism) in his
sights.

In an impassioned essay at NRO, Michael Novak writes:

What Ratzinger attacks as relativism is the regulative principle that all thought is and must remain subjective. What he defends against such relativism is the contrary regulative principle, namely, that each human subject must continue to inquire incessantly…. Ratzinger wishes to defend the imperative of seeking the truth in all things, the imperative to follow the evidence.

Neo-Darwinism has long shielded itself from scrutiny and competition by a convoluted web of definitional tactics. Those we might term militant Neo-Darwinists don’t want scientists to follow the evidence wherever it leads. They only want to follow it to material, impersonal causes.

Read more.

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Book recommendation: The Cube and the Cathedral

I’m reading George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God and want to recommend it to anyone trying to understand more deeply the religious underpinnings of culture.

Weigel posits WWI as the point where the cataclysmic dislocation from a Christian to secular atheist of European society occurred. Of course the ideas of secular atheism have antecedents in earlier epochs, but they emerged as part of Christian culture because of the great dislocation. Only when WWI ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, has it become clear how radical the secularist atheism really is.

I’m only about a third of the way through it but there are quite a few gems in the book. (Missourian, you would like the facts on the decline of European culture; one example: Sweden has a poverty class greater than the US.) One is this: the social structures of secular atheism always work towards the destruction of people. So true when you think of it: abortion, euthanasia, etc. It’s what we call the “culture of death.”

The “Cube” of the title (La Grande Arche de la Defense) serves as counterpoint to the “Cathedral” (Notre Dame) which reflect de-Christianized Europe against a formerly Christian Europe.

Take a loot at the book the next time you are at B&N. (Better yet, order it through the link above and send a couple of quarters my way to help pay for this site.) Many OT readers will like it.

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‘Good sex for teens’: The war against abstinence

TownHall.com Robert Rector

Each year, more than 3 million teenagers contract a sexually transmitted disease. In addition to the threat of disease and pregnancy, sexually active teens are three times more likely than teens who aren’t sexually active to become depressed and to attempt suicide.

Clearly, it’s in society’s interest to discourage teen sex. Teens themselves realize this: According to a Zogby poll, more than 90 percent of them say that society should teach kids to abstain from sex until they have, at least, finished high school. Parents want a stronger message: Almost nine in 10 want schools to teach youth to abstain from sex until they’re married or in an adult relationship that is close to marriage.

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The end of self-reliance?

Townhall.com George Will

WASHINGTON — It hurt her feelings, says Jane Fonda, sharing her feelings, that one of her husbands liked them to have sexual threesomes. `”It reinforced my feeling I wasn’t good enough.'”

In the Scottsdale, Ariz., Unified School District office, the receptionist used to be called a receptionist. Now she is “director of first impressions.” The happy director says, “Everyone wants to be important.”

Manufacturers of pens and markers report a surge in teachers’ demands for purple ink pens. When marked in red, corrections of students’ tests seem so awfully judgmental.

Fonda’s confession, Scottsdale’s tweaking of terminology and the recoil from red markings are manifestations of today’s therapeutic culture. The nature and menace of “therapism” is the subject of a new book, “One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance” by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, M.D., resident scholars at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Maureen Dowd: “The Cafeteria is closed”

From the Touchstone Blog:

Maureen Dowd from her column in today’s editions of The New York Times on the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI:

“For American Catholics – especially women and Democratic pro-choice Catholic pols – the cafeteria is officially closed.”

While good Christians will disagree with Ms. Dowd about the exclusion of “women” during the new papacy (do any of the women in this AP photo‹nuns, teenagers, mothers, etc.‹seem left out to you?), so far as the closing of the American Catholic Cafeteria, pan-orthodox Christians (whether Protestant, Orthodox or Catholic) can respond with a hearty “Amen.” We never liked the food from that joint anyway.

“The Cafeteria is Closed” might serve as the new motto for the Ratzinger Fan Club.

–Kenneth Tanner

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College taught her not to be a heterosexual

Townhall.com Dennis Prager April 19, 2005

Perhaps the most important argument against same-sex marriage is that once society honors same-sex sex as it does man-woman sex, there will inevitably be a major increase in same-sex sex. People do sexually (as in other areas) what society allows and especially what it honors.

One excellent example illustrating this is an article recently written in the McGill University newspaper by McGill student Anna Montrose. In it, she wrote:

It’s hard to go through four years of a Humanities B.A. reading Foucault and Butler and watching ‘The L Word’ and keep your rigid heterosexuality intact. I don’t know when it happened exactly, but it seems I no longer have the easy certainty of pinning my sexual desire to one gender and never the other.

(Michel Foucault is a major French “postmodern” philosopher; Judith Butler is a prominent “gender theorist” at UC Berkeley; and “The L-Word” is a popular TV drama about glamorous lesbians.)

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