“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
So wrote 17th century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal – Quote of the Day #34 and Update.
Amongst the main annoying characteristics of religious people is their belief that they know. Not only that they know but that they know everything – the thoughts of the ‘creator’ of the universe, the meaning of life, what happens when you dies, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Whilst religious belief in the West has declined – at least so far as Christianity is concerned – the religious impulse is alive and well in politics.
“Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.”
This quote is usually attributed to US journalist H. L. Mencken. In some versions of the quote the word ‘religion’ is replaced with ‘obedience’ but you get the drift. The history of religion (and politics) is full of examples of people doing the most horrific acts imaginable because they believed they were ‘right’ to do so. In this binary view, ‘we’ are ‘good’ and ‘they’ are ‘evil’ therefore anything we do is justified and anything they do is wrong by definition.
The modern ‘Woke’ pseudo-left are rapidly becoming akin to a religious cult (see here). There is the same absolute certainty that they are right about everything and that their enemies are not just wrong or misguided but positively evil. ‘Woke’ true believers claim to be against misogyny/sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, etc, etc – you name an ‘ism’ or a ‘phobia’ then they are gainst it.
Or are they?
When the ‘Woke’ go for their opponents, they really go for their opponents. One of the stranger aspects of ‘Woke’ ideology is the Jewish people are outside the protection of identity politics, despite centuries of persecution and an attempted genocide that is still (just) within living memory. In a recent two day (!) meltdown on, where else, Twitter the grime artist Wiley (no, me neither) showed his racist contempt for Jewish people and referred to them as “snakes” and cowards.” His account has now been deleted by Twitter but there are lots of reports about his foul ravings.
Whilst there have been some half-hearted condemnations from the usual suspects, there has been little of the hysteria that ensues whenever some right-winger or even centrist tweets something the ‘Woke’ dislike. Surely they are not judging Wiley differently because he is black? Heaven forfend. Perhaps the funniest aspect of this row was when a piece by everyone’s least favourite bedwetter Owen Jones was illustrated with a picture of a different rapper. All them black folks look alike eh, Owen? But then the public school ponces have probably never seen a black person who wasn’t cleaning the toilets or serving them coffee. I hear you’re a racist now, Owen…
‘Woke’ religionists also expect everyone to fit in with their anti-scientific ideas. Judaism expects its adherents to take seriously the idea of a talking snake or the sun stopping in the sky; Christians demand belief in a virgin birth – uniquely in the 160,000,000 history of mammalian biology – and a dead body coming back to life after two days in the grave; Muslims expect you to believe that the creator of the universe (or his delegate) chatted in a cave with an illiterate desert bandit/trader and that said bandit/trader flew to the moon on a horse with a human face. Wibble. Not to be outdone, ‘Woke’ religionists demand your belief that a person with XY-chromosomes is a woman at the risk of frenzied and, frankly, unhinged denunciations of ‘transphobia.’
That transgender issues have become the political issue for the ‘Woke’ is a real mystery – the same way that abortion is such a Faultline in American politics. Gender dysphoria affects at most 0.3% of the general population and only some of these people opt for gender realignment surgery and/or hormone therapy. Yet the rage this issue creates and the coverage it gets in the media is completely disproportionate. The author J. K. Rowling has been strongly criticised and subjected to misogynistic and hateful comments on Twitter (of course) because she dares to point out that whilst transwomen may consider themselves women, biological women are a completely separate category and need their own spaces free of male-bodied transwomen.
The sheer doublethink required to believe ‘transwomen are women’ is astonishing. The most zealous of so-called trans activists think that you should be able to change your sex by declaration and that a preference for a certain type of genitals in a sexual partner is bigotry – Picture of the Day #41. Now I am all for letting people live their lives as they see fit. But your views about life have to have some kind of connection to the real world otherwise you get a situation where a man who thinks he’s a woman can accuse a lesbian of prejudice because she refuses to sleep with a ‘woman’ with a penis. I sometimes feel my mind slipping into a bottomless pit of despair and hopelessness. And aren’t feminists supposed to be against ‘mansplaining’? Isn’t this what male-bodied transwomen telling ‘cis’ (pfft) women what to think amounts to?
As I said at the start of this piece, religious people are annoying. Is this a prejudice? Almost certainly. But can you really tell me that the ‘Woke’ are not at least as annoying as Christians knocking on your door or Muslims shoving leaflets in your hand as you walk down the street?
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