Bartholomew's Notes

Good grief  – this is getting out of hand. During the week I wrote a couple of blog posts (here and here) about Robert Spencer’s recent trip to the UK; certain details were then used by Charles Johnson to goad him, leading to a new spat between the two enemies.

My posts have also now generated a dispute in the UK; Harry’s Place reports:

A couple of days ago, Sunny [Hundal] wrote a piece on Pickled Politics which in turn repeated a story on Barth’s Notes relating to a rather farcical dinner at which Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, somebody from a group called the Christian Action Network, and Douglas Murray attended. The CAN bloke invited somebody from the football-hooliganish “English Defence League”, whereupon Douglas Murray quite rightly left the meeting.

 When I looked again yesterday, the piece had changed…It transpires that Sunny received some sort of legal threat from Douglas Murray.

It seems that Murray is of the opinion that Sunny’s version incorrectly suggested that Murray had not left the meeting, although Sunny denies this was his intent.

However, the Harry’s Place article in turn has angered Robert Spencer, who has left comment demanding to know:

…So why does Harry’s Place say that Murray alone left without meeting the EDL, while Bartholomew correctly notes that I did not meet with them either?

Are you even interested in telling the truth, or just interesting in perpetuating a smear?

David T responds:

I’m interested in talking about the wrongness of using libel threats against bloggers. I don’t really mind who meets with who, and the purpose of the article wasn’t to comment on whether or not you had met with the EDL.

I am very happy to accept that you didn’t meet with the EDL – however, the subject of this post is not whether you met with them, but whether Douglas Murray did, as I believe Sunny originally reported.

In other words: this is not all about you – it isn’t even about Sunny or Douglas. It is about the propriety of threatening legal threats against bloggers. As the recipient of lawyers letters from Hamas members and racists, I feel pretty strongly about this.

However, I don’t get off lightly from Spencer, either: he refers to “Bartholomew, who is playing a rather determined guilt-by-association game in association with libel master Charles Johnson”, and complains that

I am fighting for my reputation against the libels of Johnson and Bartholomew, and I know to what use your half-truth will be put.

This is rich coming from a creature like Spencer. It is also bizarre; Spencer concedes that I had the “honesty” to note he didn’t meet the EDL – so presumably he’s upset that I noted that he did “hang out” with CAN in London , and perhaps also because, as an aside, I made fun of his endorsement of a book which claims the Bible predicts the rise of a Muslim anti-Christ. I noted CAN’s extreme homophobia, but I never suggested Spencer shares such views and I was more than happy to note his explanation that

As for the CAN, I am working with them because of their excellent work on the documentary Homegrown Jihad. I do not feel myself bound to endorse every one of their other positions, or consider that I have done so, by working with them.

People can make their own judgements about that.

And as for Johnson – I never thought I’d see the day I’d be accused of doing something “in association” with him. We’ve never communicated, and I doubt very much we’d get along very well if we did.

UPDATE: But it’s not all rancour; an alluring email has arrived from “Wanita”:

Hello My Dear, My name is wanita i saw your profile here (www.pickledpolitics.com) today and became intrested in you,i will also like to know you more,and i want you to send a mail to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom l am. i believe we can move from here.I am waiting for your mail to my email address above.miss wanita(Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life) Please reply me , i will like to be your friend i know you will alos like to become my friend have a nice day and god bless you

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The Evening Standard reports:

A former cleric dubbed the “Bonking Bishop of Brentwood” has been quizzed by detectives on suspicion of rape.

Michael Reid, 66, set up the Peniel Church, but was forced out after his wife discovered he had been having an eight-year affair with a woman in the congregation.

…A spokesman for Essex Police said: “A 66-year-old man from Brentwood was arrested on 27 August on suspicion of historical rape. He has been bailed until November.”

I last blogged on Reid – the former head of the Christian Congress for Traditional Values – here. His ordination as a Bishop was through the International Communion of Charismatic Churches, headed by the late Bishop Earl Paulk of the Chapel Hill Harvester Church in Atlanta, although at some point after 1998 Reid withdrew from this grouping. He also has links with Richard Roberts, son of Oral Roberts.

Paulk died in March engulfed in sex scandals; according to CNN:

One allegation ended in a civil suit that was settled out of court in 2003. The accuser said Paulk molested her when she was a child.

A second woman claimed the bishop forced her into a 14-year affair.

…During a deposition in the case, the bishop said under oath the woman was the only one he slept with outside of marriage. But a court-ordered paternity test showed that he also fathered a child with his sister-in-law.

Roberts, meanwhile, has been embroiled in allegations of financial mismanagement (as Max Blumenthal puts it in a Nation article based on his new book, he “allegedly looted university coffers to pay for his daughter’s junkets to the Bahamas and bankroll his wife’s shopping sprees”).

Back in 2001, the Peniel Church was accused of engaging in an attempted take-over over a local Conservative Party branch; this led to Martin Bell standing unsuccessfully against the local MP, Eric Pickles.

(Note to commentators: please be sensible when leaving comments. A police investigation is a serious matter, and I will not allow any comments making assertions or speculations about it.)

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Douglas Murray: Left dinner as soon as he learned EDL had been invited; didn’t know who CAN were

I recently posted a couple of blog entries (here and here) about what happened when members of the English Defence League showed up at a restaurant in London where Robert Spencer was preparing to dine with some British conservative “anti-Jihadi” types, in particular Adrian Morgan and Douglas Murray. Spencer was in town with a couple of members of the Virginia-based Christian Action Network; the day before, CAN director Michael Mawyer had conducted an interview with three balaclava-wearing EDL leaders, and his associate Jason Campbell (with whom Spencer had taken “strolls into a few mosques”) decided to invite them along.

However, Spencer’s British contacts were not pleased to discover at the restaurant that they were about to share a table with the EDL, and, as Adrian Morgan delicately put it, “Tensions between some of the anti-jihadist factions who had all been kindly invited by Jason to a meal caused splitting of the groups and confusion”. Extrication was eased, though, because, according to Spencer, the restaurant management had asked the party to leave anyway just before the EDL showed up , on account of the subject matter of their conversation.

Spencer’s near-encounter with the EDL and his association with Mawyer have since become a source of goading from Charles Johnson; Spencer retorts that that Johnson is a “libelblogger”, and adds that

I did not go to England planning to meet with the EDL, I did not make such plans there, and I did not meet with them…I will not work with racists, fascists, neo-Nazis, etc. Those who are inclined to buy Johnson’s guilt-by-association smears are invited to prove that I actually believe the things he is trying to pin on me… 

And now, Douglas Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion has sent me a message asking me to publicise the following:

CAN asked Douglas to do an interview with them – upon seeing the presence of the EDL at the CAN discussion he refused to deal with them and left the venue. He did however give an interview to CAN at another location on the water front. He didn’t actually know who the CAN were, and always says yes to interviews, hence his appearances on other dubious channels such as the Islam Channel.  

He also did have dinner only with Spencer in a personal capacity later that evening.

Morgan, meanwhile, explains that

I…did talk briefly with the EDL members, to try to find out what sort of people they were (rather than believing the hype put about on internet weblogs).

My conversation took place on a walkway beside one of the docks, with neither Robert Spencer nor Douglas Murray present.

…I do not collude with or condone the EDL’s tactics of physical confrontation. I see such tactics as damaging – violence begets violence and benefits no-one, no matter how personally frustrated these EDL members may feel.

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A strange bit of writing from Julia Duin, religion blogger at the Washington Times:

On Sept. 25, Dar ul Islam, a mosque in Elizabeth, N.J., is slating a massive Friday “jummah” prayer event at the west front of the U.S. Capitol; on the very site that President Obama gave his inauguration speech not so long ago. This is not a joke.

Why would it be “a joke”?

She observes:

Well, I guess if Louis Farrakhan could preach from the same spot during the Million Man March nearly 14 years ago, so can these folks.

Erm…there’s a  more recent example of preaching there by someone from a minority religious group: just last year, the spot was taken by the son of Washington Times owner Sun Myung Moon, as part of one of Moon’s Universal Peace Federation’s Global Peace Festivals (slogan: “One Family Under God”). As was reported at the time:

The festival, held on the West Lawn of the Capitol, represents the launch of a long-term initiative by more than 150 faith- and community-based organizations to advocate for peace and unity worldwide.

Speakers included D.C. civil rights activist and former D.C. Delegate Walter E. Fauntroy and GPF Chairman Hyun Jin Moon, son of Unification Church founder the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

There was also one in London.

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The latest spat between Robert Spencer and Charles Johnson continues (see my previous blog entry here); Johnson had mocked Spencer for associating with the Christian Action Network while on a visit to the UK, and for a near-encounter with the English Defence League:

Spencer claims he never met with the English Defense League (although he obviously can’t deny meeting with the extremists of the Christian Action Network), and it’s actually true — as far as it goes. But in reality, the only reason he didn’t meet with them is because he and the leaders of CAN were thrown out of the restaurant before the meeting could occur.

Spencer again retorts:

I did not go to England planning to meet with the EDL, I did not make such plans there, and I did not meet with them…As for the CAN, I am working with them because of their excellent work on the documentary Homegrown Jihad. I do not feel myself bound to endorse every one of their other positions, or consider that I have done so, by working with them. In reality, I don’t make public statements on issues that are not jihad-related. In reality, I will not work with racists, fascists, neo-Nazis, etc. Those who are inclined to buy Johnson’s guilt-by-association smears are invited to prove that I actually believe the things he is trying to pin on me from what I have actually written, not from the words or deeds (actual or fabricated in Johnson’s defamation and lie factory) of others.

It will of course be dismaying for the EDL to see Spencer repudiate any association in such terms. And as for CAN, its director Martin Mawyer is certaimly not racist, but his homophobia is intense and vicious: he has promoted the rumour that Hilary Clinton is a lesbian and rails against “one-world government extremists … radical, disease-carrying homosexuals … anti-family lesbian feminists…”

Spencer has an ongoing relationship to Christian fundamentalism, and he has endorsed a book which claims that the Bible predicts the rise of a Muslim anti-Christ. The book is entitled The Islamic Antichrist, by Joel Richardson, and it was previously packaged as Antichrist: Islam’s Awaited Messiah. The book is being heavily promoted by WorldNetDaily; I blogged it here and Richardson (who is personable) has left some comments here and there. The book’s thesis, of course, is a farrago of nonsense, in which Biblical texts are ripped from their historical context and a new meaning imposed based on what Richardson wants them to contain. Christian fundamentalists have been doing this kind of thing for a long time.

Spencer’s endorsement of this piffle appears on the book’s cover, and inside he enthuses thus:

A fascinating and provovative work. Joel has broken fresh ground in the ongoing exploration of the relationship between Islam and the rest of the world. A must-read for priests and pastors, students and lay readers everywhere. Bravo!

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Little Green Footballs picked up on my recent blog entry about the Christian Action Network’s recent visit to the UK with Robert Spencer, during which the CAN met up with the English Defence League:

And look who’s hanging out with the English Defense League now, on a tour of Britain with wacko fundamentalist nutbag Martin Mawyer and his “Christian Action Network” — none other than Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.

Robert Spencer responds:

Charles Johnson is lying — again. During my recent trip to the U.K., I did not “hang out” with members of the English Defense League. I did not meet with them, then or at any other time. What’s more, the link Johnson provides [that’s me! -RB] to establish this “hanging out” doesn’t even say I did meet with them.

What happened was that during August CAN director Martin Mawyer conducted an interview with some balaclava-wearing EDL leaders somewhere outside London, who were then were invited by CAN’s Jason Campbell to a meal at a restaurant in London the next night, at which Spencer would be dining with Douglas Murray, Adrian Morgan, and some other British conservative “anti-Jihadi” types. The original plan was for dinner at a restaurant called the George, but Spencer writes in another blog entry that due to the nature of the discussion they were asked to leave by the management (his entry includes the venue’s phone number, so that his minions can cause some vengeful annoyance).

Spencer’s rebuttal to Johnson highlights a comment by Morgan suggesting that the EDL showed up as the main party was leaving, and that the EDL did not come on to wherever the group adjourned:

Robert is right. He did not meet with the EDL members – their arrival at the George coincided with the exodus of those who had been there earlier.

The EDL members did not attend the meal and left the vicinity of Crossharbour early and, like myself, they did not attend the dinner.

…The EDL had been invited to the George pub (unbeknownst to Robert Spencer and other invitees) because Martin Mawyer had – the day before Robert Spencer arrived in Britain – been interviewing these individuals for a documentary.

Morgan also wrote earlier that “Tensions between some of the anti-jihadist factions who had all been kindly invited by Jason to a meal caused splitting of the groups and confusion”, which together with the above is strongly suggestive that there was a deliberable wish by some who were there to avoid association with the EDL.

Morgan also makes some general observations:

This “guilt by association” tactic, made by people who were not at the event, is insidious. I – on the other hand – did talk briefly with the EDL members, to try to find out what sort of people they were (rather than believing the hype put about on internet weblogs).

My conversation took place on a walkway beside one of the docks, with neither Robert Spencer nor Douglas Murray present. Does my talking to them make me a member of their group, in league with “forces of Evil”?

…I do not collude with or condone the EDL’s tactics of physical confrontation. I see such tactics as damaging – violence begets violence and benefits no-one, no matter how personally frustrated these EDL members may feel.

…The British blog that Johnson quotes attacks the “association” of Martin Mawyer and the EDL…If interviewing people is a crime, (it is a crime for those on the left, it seems) then journalism itself might as well be outlawed.

Of course, I never suggested it is a “crime” to “interview people”, but the cosy manner of the interview combined with Mawyer’s well-known views on Islam and the invitation to dinner suggest a commonality of interest that is worth taking note of; I admit I couldn’t resist adding a critical coda of my own, but other people are welcome to make their own judgements. Further, “forces of Evil” is not the kind of rhetoric I use.

UPDATE: Douglas Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion has sent me a message asking me to publicise the following:

CAN asked Douglas to do an interview with them – upon seeing the presence of the EDL at the CAN discussion he refused to deal with them and left the venue. He did however give an interview to CAN at another location on the water front. He didn’t actually know who the CAN were, and always says yes to interviews, hence his appearances on other dubious channels such as the Islam Channel.

He also did have dinner only with Spencer in a personal capacity later that evening.

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Private Eye magazine (1244 p. 28) has an interesting account of how the industry treating supposed survivors of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” with repressed memories continues unabated:

They are promoting a whole new field of “trauma” therapy in how to treat  survivors of ritual abuse, who are diagnosed as suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Victims are said to develop a number of “alters” or other personalities, to whom they switch to help them bury the memories…

The latest fashionable theory is in this pyshcobabble psychotherapy is that these survivors are victims of “mind control” exerted by the perpetrators using the “alters” to control the victim to make them suppress or disbelieve the memories of the abuse.

According to a book entitled Ritual Abuse in the Twenty First Century,

In a “typical group…by the age of six months the child has a minimum of 18 to 20 alters.”

The idea of secret Satanic conspiracies and covens was a significant feature of conservative evangelical culture in the 1970s and 1980s, during which period a number of bogus memoirs by supposed former Satanists were published: Mike Warnke’s The Satan Seller (ghosted by David Balsiger) and Lauren Stratford’s Satan’s Underground (promoted by Hal Lindsey) are two notorious examples from the USA; in the UK we had Audrey Harper’s Dance with the Devil (with a foreward by the late Geoffrey Dickens MP). These stories have been debunked; the Fortean Times has a nice bit on Harper:

In 1988, [she] told the Sunday Sport how, before her salvation, she had been initiated into Devil-worship at a ceremony in which the throat of a cockerel was slit and its blood smeared all over her body. Two years later, her story appeared in a book, Dance with the Devil, in which she claimed that it was a baby whose throat was slit and whose blood was smeared on her. Either Harper could not tell the difference between a cockerel and a baby, or she had decided that her original story was not sensational enough.

However, another strand stressed the idea that victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse needed therapists who would uncover “repressed memories” of abuse – an idea popularised in Michelle Remembers, by Lawrence Pazder (who eventually married his patient). This launched an industry that has apparently continued to grow despite the lack of any evidence unearthed by supposed “recovered” memories, and despite the fiascos of the 1980s and 1990s, when unabused children were taken into care by over-zealous social workers (blogged here).

It also appears to have weathered the fact that there are now many more testimonies from real survivors of actual abuse – those who were abused years ago in Catholic schools or other institutionalised settings constantly remember the horror of what happened to them; there are no “repressed memories” (they probably wish they could suppress them), and no “mind control” by the abusers. See also my early blog entry here.

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Back on 22 August, a Christian Facebook page called “Voice of Truth Radio” drew attention to another Facebook page called “rifqa bary” and bearing the alarming description “why we need to kill her”. This anti-Bary page also carried a derivative (and neutral) news report which had been published in the Lanka Times the day before.

The story has now made its way to Pamela Geller, who has a couple of screenshots (here and here) showing that before it was taken down it had 123 members; however, while the eight members we can see on the screenshot include seven Muslim-origin names, they mostly belong to young Westernized-looking women, and there is also a white American conservative Christian woman. It should be remembered that people often join such groups without taking care to read exactly what they are about, or in order to monitor or argue with those they disagree with – therefore membership of the group does not in itself signify agreement with the description. Indeed, the “Wall” section below has postings denouncing “the lies” of Bary’s father. No admins are named – a notice reads that “there are no admins left”. In another screenhot, Geller shows us eight more members; here more-religious looking Muslim women predominate. Geller tells us that the page was brought to her attention by an ex-Muslim named Achmed.

A Google cache from 23 August shows that on that date there were only 11 members, and again none of them look like extremists. The death threat is still there, though, so it wasn’t added later, and we can see that the page’s creator and administrator at this point was a certain “Mohamed SahlanSuhail” (sic for lack of space between last two names). His own page has also disappeared, although MSN has a cache.

Incidentally, some have suggested that because of my distaste for the bandwagon of hucksters and demagogues who have attached themselves to this case, and because I have pointed out some problematic aspects to the story, it must therefore be the case that I wish to deny the existence of honour killing or the traditional death sentence for apostasy (two separate issues, by the way), and also that I must therefore disbelieve her account in favour of her father. Of course, that’s not my perspective at all – we all know that killings do occur,  and my view is that an allegation of this sort ought to be investigated. However, that investigation needs to focus on the particular home situation; the idea that the father must be a potential killer simply because he’s a Muslim is not a serious way of proceeding.

Name variation: Mohamed Sahlan Suhail

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More of the same in Birmingham, where another anti-Muslim protest (following the one in August) by the English Defence League has ended in disorder and violence. The Daily Mail website has the best collection of pictures – we see signs reading “More More Mosques” and “No 2 Islam”, and more bald red-faced men looking angry. There’s also a large Israeli flag in one picture – once again, vicarious identification with Israel in the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Meanwhile, after months of trying show that it has no links with the BNP (there has been some overlap of membership), the BNP has decided to return the favour, declaring the EDL to be a “proscribed organisation” which “brings nationalist and patriotic politics into disrepute”.

It appears that the protestors included the Emperor Palpatine…

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WorldNetDaily has a new Christian right rally to promote:

Founding Father John Adams once said, “The general principles upon which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity,” but an organization says now only 17 percent of Americans attend church on any given Sunday.

Can that be changed, and if so how?

One possible answer is coming up soon: A prayer outreach called Cry Out America assembled by the Awakening America Alliance that calls for Christians to meet for prayer at a time when a spokesman says the greatest need in the United States is not more money, health care or other physical conditions.

Spokesman Billy Wilson said the hope is that there is an awakening in the nation, “to issue a new spiritual wakeup call to help Americans understand the greatest need in America is … spiritual.”

…Wilson said Jonathan Edwards, a key figure from an earlier spiritual awakening in America, contended “that any true awakening starts with believers gathering together in unity … and prayer.”

“What we’re trying to do is answer the biblical injunction that when calamity surrounds the nation, financial disasters have happened, when people are confused, when crops have failed so to speak, the nation is in despair, the right response for the people of God is what Joel 1:14 says: call a sacred assembly, declare a holy fast and cry out to the Lord,” Wilson said.

…The work will being with a team prayer gathering at Ground Zero at 11 a.m. Among the participants will be Mariano Rivera from the New York Yankees; Sujo John, a 9/11 survivor and evangelist; Luis Cortes, president of Esperanza; Ron Luce, president of Teen Mania; Mark Rutland, president of Oral Roberts University and David Cerullo, president of INSP TV Network.

Other events are at county courthouses from noon until 1 p.m.

The Awakening America website has further historical ruminations:

America has been and continues to be the world power of our generation. Yet, the influence of our financial, political, and moral authority is in decline as evidenced in daily news across the world and by current statistics which show that only 17% of Americans attend church on any given Sunday and America as the third largest mission field in the world.

…In the classic study The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire [sic!], Edward Gibbon gave at least five internal causes as to why Rome fell: rapid increase of divorce, spiraling taxes and government spending, a craze for pleasure and brutality, failure to see the moral erosion as an enemy and the decay of religion leaving people without guidance.

One should always be suspicious when an explanation for the Decline and Fall of Roman power is reduced to a single sentence dripping with generalisations and moralism, and presented as irrefutable due to the authority of its supposed originator. This particular vulgarized (and woefully inadequate) summary of Gibbon has been kicking around in various forms for several decades, and is usually quoted by people who have never read him and wouldn’t like him if they did (or could). Here’s another form in which it is popularly expressed, as cut-and-pasted by dozens of bloggers and religious websites under the illusion that it makes them seem deep:

1. The undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis of human society.
2. Higher and higher taxes and the spending of public monies for free bread and circuses for the populace.
3. The mad craze for pleasure, sports becoming every year more and more exciting and more brutal.
4. The building of gigantic armaments when the real enemy was within the decadence of the people.
5. The decay of religion – faith fading into mere form, losing touch with life and becoming impotent to warn and guide the people.

Note that Awakening America isn’t too keen on the first half of point four.

Clearly “Cry Out America” is not a “revival” in any sense that Jonathan Edwards would have understood it, nor is it primarily a memorial for those who were murdered on 9/11 – rather, this looks more like a political stunt by teabaggers at prayer on issues of tax and anti-healthcare reform.

Rev. Billy Wilson is a Pentecostal, and he heads the “International Center for Spiritual Renewal” in Tennessee; Cry Out America’s executive cabinet includes representatives from, among others, the Foursquare Church; Mission America Coalition; the Assemblies of God USA; Charisma magazine; AGLOW International; the Church of God; the Presidential Prayer Team; and Teen Mania Ministries.

Incidentally, the citations from Adams and Edwards are a strange religious mash-up. The quote from Adams, while not exactly bogus, is a sloppy paraphrase that perverts its original meaning. It’s derived from a letter Adams wrote to Jefferson in June 1813, recalling the Revolution:

Who composed that Army of fine young Fellows that was then before my Eyes? There were among them Roman Catholics, English Episcopalians, Scotch and American Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Anababtists, German Lutherans, German Calvinists, Universalists, Arians, Priestleyans, Socinians, Independents, Congregationalists…Deists and Atheists, and Protestants “qui ne croyent rien“. Very few however of several of these Species; nevertheless, all Educated in the general Principles of Christianity, and the general Principles of English and American Liberty.

…The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were the only principles in which that beautiful assembly of young men could unite, and these principles only could be intended by them in their address, or by me in my Answer. And what were these general principles? I answer, the general principles of Christianity, in which all those sects were united,  and the general principles of English and American Liberty, in which all those young men united, and which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her Independence.

Now I will avow, that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God…In favour of these general principles in philosophy, religion, and government, I could fill sheets of quotations from Frederick of Prussia, from Hume, Gibbon, Bolingbroke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, as well as Newton and Locke: not to mention thousands of divines and philosophers of inferior fame.”

In other words, Adams’ “general principles” of Christianity are so watered down as to include Unitarians (“Priestleyans” and “Deists”), atheists, and religious nominalists (“Protestants ‘qui ne croyent rien‘”). This would have appalled Jonathan Edwards – and I doubt that Rev. Wilson would go along with it either.

Adams’ mention of Newton is particularly amusing, as the “Cry Out America” website vilifies Isaac Newton in contrast to Edwards as having “promoted the idea that man is in charge of his own destiny and morality”; this is a bizarre interpretation of Newton (which would also have appalled Edwards) but it reinforces the idea that all that is wrong with society can be traced back to bad ideas promoted by scientist-intellectuals. As with Gibbon reduced to one sentence, this is a lazy narrative framework that appeals to people who are less clever than they think they are.

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