Bartholomew's Notes

News of last month’s articles by AN Wilson (in the Daily Mail and in the New Statesman here and here), in which he explains his gradual re-conversion to Christianity from atheism, have crossed the Atlantic; Charles Colson in particular exults:

Again, the question is “why?” Part of the reason was that atheism and atheists in his words, ” [miss] out on some very basic experiences of life.” He described listening to Bach or reading the works of Christian authors and realizing that their “perception of life was deeper, wiser, more rounded than [his] own.” seeing the world through the eyes of faith is “much more interesting” he said, than the alternatives.

Then there was the low esteem in which Darwinism holds man. The people who insist that we are “simply anthropoid apes” can’t account for something as basic as language. The “existence of language,” love and music, to name but a few, convinced Wilson that we are “spiritual beings.” For Wilson, they prove that “the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true.”

Then there’s what he regards the “an even stronger argument”: “the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives.” From “Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged” to the person next to you at church, Christians bear witness to the truth of Christianity and that as a “working blueprint for life” and “template against which to measure experience, it fits.”

I couldn’t put it any better. Welcome home, Mr. Wilson. It’s great to have you back.

Of course, as with Antony Flew’s (temporary) turn to deism, the story of an intellectual atheist who rejects disbelief is invariably trumpeted; but I can’t imagine the fundamentalist Colson and the mainline Wilson having much to say to each other.

I wrote about Wilson for a student newspaper some years ago, when I was an undergraduate (see below) – it was a report on a talk he had given about why we are better off not believing in an afterlife. Certainly, he critiqued Christianity, but his discourse fell very short of Dawkinesque “railing”; then as now, his views seem to have been largely grounded in personal introspection rather than rationalistic deconstruction. I saw him again a few years later discussing his Jesus book, and he was quite irritated by a questioner who conflated critical historical Jesus research with atheism.

In his New Statesman essay Wilson writes that

My doubting temperament, however, made me a very unconvincing atheist. And unconvinced. My hilarious Camden Town neighbour Colin Haycraft, the boss of Duckworth and husband of Alice Thomas Ellis, used to say, “I do wish Freddie [Ayer] wouldn’t go round calling himself an atheist. It implies he takes religion seriously.”

It seems to me that would also apply to someone who went round calling then-Archbishop George Carey “Mr Blobby“. In contrast to his tirades against Carey, Wilson praised Rowan Williams’ qualities on his election to Archbishop, noting his “cleverness and originality and subtlety” in matters of public debate; but those are the very things which have made Williams a hate-figure for many conservatives of the Colson variety, who want black-and-white attacks on Islam and a re-affirmation of Biblical fundamentalism.

Wilson also wrote positively about Christianity a few years ago in a (must-read) piece about the gay men he knew at theological college. After meeting one former fellow-student in a bookshop,

I went out, and like Peter in the Gospels, I wept bitterly…I have lost my religion – their religion – but I do not feel that this is a good thing. I am aware that the spiritual life of England is most alive in its national church…These are men who have been prepared to devote their whole lives to working in poor parishes, visiting the sick, the housebound, the lonely, the prisoners and the captives. They believe in, and live, the Gospel of Christ.

Wilson’s latest New Statesman piece includes the reminiscence that he once denounced

[C.S.] Lewis’s muscular defence of religious belief. Much more to my taste, I said, had been the approach of the late Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, whose biography I had just read.

A young priest had been to see him in great distress, saying that he had lost his faith in God. Ramsey’s reply was a long silence followed by a repetition of the mantra “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter”. He told the priest to continue to worship Jesus in the Sacraments and that faith would return…I can remember almost yelling that reading C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity made me a non-believer…

There’s no indication that he has revised his view of Lewis (I must say I found Mere Christianity insufferably smug), although it’s strange he is now affirming a duff argument from personal incredulity about the origins of language. Wilson also tentatively commends James LeFanu’s book Why Us?, which has drawn fire for its anti-Darwinist views.

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…but it’s probably just an oversight

WorldNetDaily reports on today’s announcement that Michael Savage is now banned from the UK:

Talk radio host Michael Savage is considering legal action against Britain’s top homeland security official after she released today a list grouping him with terrorists and neo-Nazi murderers banned from entry because the government believes their views might provoke violence.

…The others on the list are Jewish extremist Mike Guzovsky…

Guzovsky’s name has appeared on WorldNetDaily previously, in a 2004 article by Aaron Klein which suggested the extremist label was unfair; subsequent puff-pieces by Klein have preferred to use his Israeli name, Yekutel Ben Yaacov. Today’s article (not by Klein) is the first WND piece to describe Guzovsky as an “extremist”. Doubtless Klein – recent author of The Late Great State of Israel: How Enemies Within and Without Threaten the Jewish Nation’s Survival – will explain it all to us in due course.

As a result of today’s announcement, I’ve received a bump in hits to my 2006 piece on Klein and Guzovsky; this can be seen here, and a more developed piece by Terry Krepel here.

Variants of Guzovsky’s names in English include: Yekutel Ben Yaacov; Yekutiel Ben Yacov; Yekutiel Ben Yaacov; Mike Guzofsky; Yekutiel Ben Yaacov; Yekutiel Ben Yaakov; Yekutiel Ben Ya’acov; Yekutiel Ben Ya’akov; Yekutiel Ben Yakov; Yekutiel Ben Yacov; Yekutiel Guzofsky; Yekutiel Guzovsky; Mike Guzofsky; Mike Guzovsky; Michael Guzofsky. One website calls him “Mike Rosowski”; this is an error. A New Yorker article also clarifies that Ya’akov is Guzofsky.

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Oh dear – a British “psychedelic rock” musician named Joe Chapman (of “Spiral 25”, apparently) had better watch out:

mississippimud2007 said…Tell that bum joe chapman i’m after him and will destroy him. He’s pissed off the wrong American. I want the bastard on video if he has the testicles to do so. If the bastard wants war with me, he gets it. I don’t back down.

“Mississippimud2007” has featured on this blog previously; he is Jeff Davis, an American accountant who considers himself to be some kind of “counter-jihad” warrior. A few months ago he took aim at me for dissing Walid Shoebat and Pastor J. Grant Swank; the Swanksta’s sermons are reposted on Davis’s Mosquewatch website along with contributions from Shoebat’s son and others. He also uses the pseudonym “AmericanBNP”, expressing his support for the anti-Muslim views of the British far-right.

Davis’s wrath has been provoked by Mosquewatch‘s inclusion on a list of far-right websites on Chapman’s own site which have been labelled thus:

Fascist/Nazi/White Nationalist/”Patriot” web sites:
WARNING! – Most of these web sites contain some extremely offensive, racist or just plain nasty language and views. I recommend taking a long bath after visiting them because they tend to leave anyone who has the most basic of human qualities feeling dirty and not in a good way!

Davis complains:

British psychedelic rock musician, Joe Chapman on his site puts my site in with storm front ( A white racist group ) I’m not pleased. Joe Chapman, stand up and show me your face.

A short video follows, in which he denies having any racial prejudice (he “hates” Stormfront) and – as ever – he challenges his opponent to continue the argument by making a video himself; failure to do so will of course be an admission that Davis has won!

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More dimness from apocalyptic anti-Muslim Christian Joel Richardson:

Islamic Scholars Wrestle With Death-For-Apostasy Issue

If they decide in Death for Apostasy, there will no longer be a debate among liberals as to whether or not Islam conflicts with basic human rights. However, if they go the other way, it will open the door for further whitewashing of the reality on the ground in much of the Muslim world.

In other words, Muslim scholars can be divided into those who admit they want the infidels to be killed, and those who pretend they don’t. Presumably there can’t be a strand of serious Muslim discussion which is truly moderate and seeks an accommodation with civil society, because that would upset the “Muslim anti-Christ” fantasy which Richardson reads into the Bible and which is a central tenet of his militarised Christian fundamentalism.

Amusingly, this comes just days after WorldNetDaily, which has published and heavily promoted Richardson’s book on ex-Muslims, ran a column which argues that the biblical Book of Deuteronomy is “the key to saving of America”; Deuteronomy, of course, has no concept of religious freedom and it demands sanguinary penalties for those whose conduct (particularly in sexual matters) is deemed unacceptable.

This enthusiasm for the laws and penalties of Deuteronomy is shared by Christian Reconstructionists and by the Jewish far-right in Israel, but most believers would reject such extremism; mainstream Judaism and Christianity derive ethical guidance from other parts of the Bible using a great variety of interpretative methods, and the religions can adapt to – and help to develop – more humane perspectives on personal freedom and human rights. There is no reason to suppose that a religion as complex and diverse as Islam does not contain similar potential, or that Muslims are of necessity insensible to the advantages offered by a free society. Certain trends in Islamic thought have rejected “death for apostasy” for a long time; the scholars now discussing the issue will hopefully lend support for this view and so improve “the reality on the ground”. On the other hand, they may not, which will indeed be a blow for freedom and civil society in the Muslim world – but it would hardly prove that tolerant Islam does not exist.

Once again, Richardson offers up a conspiracy theory rather than a considered evaluation, calculated to whip up fear and apocalyptic fatalism. But I suppose that’s what the churches which invite him to speak want to hear.

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Another email arrives from the Jerusalem Connection, this time promoting a video laying out the familar story of how Muslim immigrants are going to take over the world by outbreeding everyone else:

A sobering video about Islam and how it may overwhelm Christendom unless Christians recognize the demographic realities, begin reproducing again, and share the gospel with Muslims.

The video  – entitled “Muslim Demographics” and posted by an anonymous evangelist called “FriendofMuslim” – has been circulating on the usual websites.

As expected, it’s is a farrago of piffle – we’re treated a list of dubiously sourced statistics and statements which are wielded clusmily and with no attempt at serious qualitative interpretation. For example, we’re told grimly that “a culture will decline” with a birth-rate of less than 2.1, as if “culture” can be quantified purely by counting indigenous heads in a particular country, and as if cultural ideas cannot spread by means other than from parent to child – it seems immigrants remain immune from any outside influence, although we’re also told that the situation can be saved if we “spread the Gospel” to them. There’s also of course no factoring-in of religious nominalism among immigrants.

The blog Islam in Europe debunks most of the actual figures in the video here. The blog also notes that:

[One source the video probably used] quotes Walter Rademacher of the German Federal Statistics Office who says quite clearly: “Even those people who are immigrants adopt after a couple years the lifestyle and the number of children per family. So the assumption that immigrants will stick to their habits is simply not true.” This is a point that most demographic doomsayers prefer to ignore. Second generation immigrants have fewer babies and marry at an older age, acting more and more like the native ethnic population. It is true that this is offset by the incoming immigration, but then it becomes a problem of immigration, not a ticking timebomb of the local population.

That’s a key point – the only exception to this process, it seems to me, is when an organised religious community with a strong separatist identity moves into an area wholesale, as with with the Amish or Haredi Jews, but such groups’  impact on the wider society is limited and even they have adapted and accommodated to the wider world to some extent. And despite Patrick Sookhdeo’s conspiracy theory on the subject (promoted by Charles Colson), this is not the pattern of Muslim immigration.

Of course, the above is simply an observation of what has happened – it’s not a law about must happen, and we know that extremist ideas, poor government social policies, or other factors can impede or even reverse integration. But the point is that such outcomes are far from inevitable.

We also know that some religious groups promote large families as a strategy to spread their ideology (I’m currently reading Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull, and there are doubtless Islamist equivalents of the likes of Doug Phillips), but this smacks of desperation: the same outside secularizing trends which have corroded religious commitment up until now are also going affect the next generation. Simply producing lots of children who will choose your way because they know no other is unlikely to be sustainable  in the face of the realities (both attractions and pressures) of modern society, and it offers no new intellectual content in a “war of ideas”.

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From WorldNetDaily:

Dinosaur blood extracted from bone

Collagen, hemoglobin, elastin, laminin and cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells have been found in a dinosaur bone scientists still claim is 80 million years old, according to a report in Science magazine today.

Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University first claimed to have isolated soft tissues and collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone several years ago.

…Young earth proponents see something entirely different in the findings. As one creationist noted: “There’s no way this blood could be 80 million years old. The evolutionists are just saying so because they cannot bear the thought of recent dinosaurs causing their millions of years scenario to come crashing down. Without the millions of years, Darwinism is dead, dead, dead.”

This, of course, is also WND editor Joseph Farah’s perspective: Farah rejects evolutionary biology, and he has in the past promoted a scurrilous anti-science film suggesting that evolutionary biology caused the Holocaust.

It must be annoying for scientists that whenever an advance or interesting discovery is made, opportunists who played part in the enterprise seek hijack journalistic interest with a crackpot interpretation which they then smugly suggest the scientists won’t admit simply because of ideological bias.

The paper itself – “Biomolecular Characterization and Protein Sequences of the Campanian Hadrosaur B. canadensis“, of which Schweitzer is lead author with a number of collaborators – was published in Science; the abstract and other resources can be seen on open access here. There is no evidence that Farah or his unnamed creationist have read the piece, or would even be able to comprehend it.

A serious article on the paper can be seen in Nature. It tells us:

…In 2006, Schweitzer and her colleagues found a skeleton from the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus canadensis. The next year, the team returned to the field, removed about seven metres of earth, and extracted a femur still encased in sandstone. That was important, [Phillip Lars] Manning says, because “structural proteins like collagen are locked in the mineral lattice in the bone”. This serves like “a strait-jacket for the collagen”, he says.

…Schweitzer believes the methods her team used to extract and analyse the hadrosaur under sterile conditions may help to usher in a new era of paleontological field work — one where specimen scrutiny uses sterile techniques like a crime scene investigation.

One Creationist who claims to have some “recent” dinosaur bones is Buddy Davis. Rather than subject his findings to the kind of complex scientific tests that Schweitzer and her colleagues undertook, Davis has been content merely to write a popular paperback and to hawk his paradigm-shattering discovery around church meetings.

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