Mary writes of an alternative between the kind of conservatism favoured by Burke, democratic institutions with a healthy respect for traditional values, and the kind favoured by de Maistre, submission to an absolute monarch and the Pope. Tough call, but I think most people faced by such a binary choice would opt for Burke. She doesn’t seem to have much use for continental leaders like Orban in Hungary and Salvini in Italy. Other people have more time for them. Daniel Pipes, who is not a Christian, but a Jew, has argued (see “In Defense of Europe’s So-Called Far Right”, January 29, 2015, and subsequent updates) that far right parties in Europe are more appropriately labelled “civilizationist”. They stand up for the civilization they have inherited against encroaching Islamism. Mary chooses to call that civilization Christian, a lot of people would maybe prefer to define it as Judaeo-Christian. What Pipes would call civilizationist parties certainly have their authoritarian issues, but they aren’t authoritarian parties per se, and there has been a distressing tendency to authoritarian measures by parties of the so-called centre-left as well. In her own screed, Mary mentions “Islam” only once in the context of anti-Islam rallies by Pegida in Germany, where people carried crosses and sang carols. However, there is surely a much broader coalition of people than that who would be opposed to the replacement of European civil law traditions with shariah law, the expansion of Islamic finance and so forth. For that matter, it is an agenda that should appeal to many moderate Moslems. In Ontario, Moslem women were among the leaders in the fight against sharia law in our province, when Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty sought to expand their application. Mary really should give this matter some more thought.
Judy Johnson
3 years ago
The apparent conflict between religion and science is surely apparent rather than real. The former answers questions about meaning and the latter tells us how things work. A secular scientist who has an excellent understanding of this difference is the American string theorist Brian Greene. He articulates this difference and seems totally unthreatened by religion.
I am not sure why some atheists such as Polly Toynbee are angered by religious belief and seem to think it should not be a right.
Mary writes of an alternative between the kind of conservatism favoured by Burke, democratic institutions with a healthy respect for traditional values, and the kind favoured by de Maistre, submission to an absolute monarch and the Pope. Tough call, but I think most people faced by such a binary choice would opt for Burke. She doesn’t seem to have much use for continental leaders like Orban in Hungary and Salvini in Italy. Other people have more time for them. Daniel Pipes, who is not a Christian, but a Jew, has argued (see “In Defense of Europe’s So-Called Far Right”, January 29, 2015, and subsequent updates) that far right parties in Europe are more appropriately labelled “civilizationist”. They stand up for the civilization they have inherited against encroaching Islamism. Mary chooses to call that civilization Christian, a lot of people would maybe prefer to define it as Judaeo-Christian. What Pipes would call civilizationist parties certainly have their authoritarian issues, but they aren’t authoritarian parties per se, and there has been a distressing tendency to authoritarian measures by parties of the so-called centre-left as well. In her own screed, Mary mentions “Islam” only once in the context of anti-Islam rallies by Pegida in Germany, where people carried crosses and sang carols. However, there is surely a much broader coalition of people than that who would be opposed to the replacement of European civil law traditions with shariah law, the expansion of Islamic finance and so forth. For that matter, it is an agenda that should appeal to many moderate Moslems. In Ontario, Moslem women were among the leaders in the fight against sharia law in our province, when Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty sought to expand their application. Mary really should give this matter some more thought.
The apparent conflict between religion and science is surely apparent rather than real. The former answers questions about meaning and the latter tells us how things work. A secular scientist who has an excellent understanding of this difference is the American string theorist Brian Greene. He articulates this difference and seems totally unthreatened by religion.
I am not sure why some atheists such as Polly Toynbee are angered by religious belief and seem to think it should not be a right.