RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/democrats-find-religion/

Now for some bracing honesty from the Democratic National Committee. In a new, unanimously adopted resolution, Democrats have declared that ‘the religiously unaffiliated demographic represents the largest religious group within the Democratic party, growing from 19 percent in 2007 to one in three today’ (emphasis added). Advocates for truth in political advertising should rejoice. The so-called ‘secular’ left has finally abandoned the canard that its views and policies are purely ‘neutral,’ or the products of inarguable empiricism. According to the resolution, the religiously unaffiliated and the nonreligious (labels used interchangeably) are, instead, members of a new faith community. This may be the first time that the Democratic party, or any official organ of the American left, has forthrightly declared the true objective of its modern politics: the promotion and enshrinement of a new religion.

With this declaration, Democrats are taking seriously their current, favorite term, ‘wokeness’ – the religious resonance of which is unavoidable. For them, to be woke is to be awakened to new knowledge, to be freed from one’s old, ignorant ways and to share in life-changing revelation. Thus, the Democrats’ woke resolution – a concise, one-page distillation of the modern, American left worldview – reads as a confessional, creedal document. It speaks of ‘values’: ‘religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly share the Democratic party’s values.’ It speaks of ostracism and suffering for beliefs: ‘the nonreligious have often been subjected to unfair bias and exclusion in American society.’ And, it articulates the essential, core aims of the creed by praising the religiously unaffiliated as ‘advocates for rational public policy based on sound social science and universal humanistic values.’

The resolution embodies what Charles Taylor, a scholar of secularism, terms ‘the independent ethic.’ According to Taylor, in establishing an independent ethic, a group will ‘deduce certain exceptionless norms’ and ‘abstract from…deeper or higher beliefs altogether for purposes of a political morality.’ And, as Taylor explains, when there ‘are real live atheists in the society…they will live an independent ethic not as some thought experiment, but as the basis of their moral lives.’ In this way, an apparently nonreligious or even overtly anti-religious creed can assume the character of what is actually religious fundamentalism.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-9-4-the-competition-over-how-to

It was back on June 4 that I posed the eternal question, “Will The Democratic Candidates Ever Notice That The Climate Change Thing Is Over?” That post noted that the Democratic candidates for President had begun a kind of bidding war over who could put forth the most extreme proposal to shackle the American economy in the name of climate salvatio n, while at the same time “out in the rest of the world” they were “laugh[ing] at this spectacle.” Among the data points cited in that post were that China was seeking reductions in the price of coal in order to spur consumption of electricity, and that in Australia a national election had just been lost by the party that made a principal issue out of its opposition to a huge new coal mine in Queensland.

In the three months since early June, things have only gotten sillier.

The Statistical Review of World Energy 2019 from the BP oil company came out. A summary of it in Forbes on June 28 noted: “Coal consumption in most of the developing world continues to grow. Asia Pacific increased consumption [in 2018] by the most overall, but its 2.5% growth rate lagged Africa’s (+3.9%) and Central and South America (+3.7%).”

The annual Google billionaires’ climate summit was held in Sicily at the beginning of August. From euronews: “114 private jets flew into the Italian Verdura Resort, according to the Italian press, and many of the elite guest list arrived in multi-million pound yachts. With stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama and Prince Harry in attendance, reports Jim Dobson at Forbes, they were hardly going to be hitch-hiking. . . .”

With the Australian election won by pro-development forces, the giant ($16.5 billion) Carmichael/Adani coal mine project in Queensland resumed its march toward final regulatory approval.

In late August former President Barack Obama plunked down just under $15 million for a beachfront mansion in Martha’s Vineyard, maybe 10 feet above mean high tide, revealing just what the ex-Pres really thinks of his own rhetoric about impending climate-induced sea-level rise.