The real cause of Muslim genital mutilation is … Christianity

According to Jimmy Carter, the reason genital mutilation, rape, and other violence against females is common throughout the world is that the Catholic Church does not allow women to be priests.

Some people call Carter crazy. I call him a consistent liberal, who follows without swerving or variance the liberal logic from its premises to its conclusions.

Here’s the article, from LifeSiteNews.com:

MELBOURNE, December 11, 2009—In an address to a gathering sponsored by the World Parliament of Religions (PWR) last Friday, former US President Jimmy Carter has once again blamed traditional religion, particularly Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics, for “creating an environment where violations against women are justified.”

It is a theme that Carter has successfully used to garner media attention for several years.

Although in a July column in The Observer Carter admits to “not having training in religion or theology,” in his address to the PWR Carter appeals to his authority as someone who has “taught Bible lessons for more than 65 years.”

In opposition to the vast majority of authentic scholars and historians, Carter asserted: “It’s clear that during the early Christian era women served as deacons, priests, bishops, apostles, teachers and prophets.” He added: “It wasn’t until the 4th century or the 3rd at the earliest that dominant Christian leaders, all men, twisted and distorted Holy Scriptures to perpetuate their ascendant position within the religious hierarchy.”

Contrary to the theorizing of Carter, Pope John Paul II taught, “The Lord Jesus chose men to form the college of the twelve apostles, and the apostles did the same when they chose collaborators to succeed them in their ministry.” He added: “the Church recognizes herself to be bound by this choice made by the Lord himself. For this reason the ordination of women is not possible.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church; 1577)

Carter singled out the Southern Baptist Convention and Roman Catholic Church, claiming that they “view that the Almighty considers women to be inferior to men.” However, both Christian faiths hold to the Scriptural truth that God created men and women equal.

Carter suggests that only in permitting women to become priests and pastors could male religious leaders choose to interpret teachings to exalt rather than subjugate women. “They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter, subjugation,” he said.

“Their continuing choice provides a foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world,” said Carter. Carter goes on to list horrific violations against women such as rape, genital mutilation, abortion of female embryos and spousal battery.

Responding to Carter’s nearly identical points in July, John Paul Meenan, Professor of Theology at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy in Barry’s Bay, Ontario characterized Carter’s points as “ridiculous,” noting that there was no evidence of the ordination of women in the early Church.

Moreover, Meenan stressed that historically Christianity ought to be credited for promoting the dignity of women. “It is the Church that invariably improved the lot of women in the lands that were converted and Christianized,” he said.

- end of initial entry -

December 15

Mitchell B. writes:

Actually Carter, like all left-wing fascists, is mentally ill and the primary manifestation of that illness is his adherence to liberalism. The most noticeable symptom of the liberal pathology is the breathtaking amount of lying that they do.

Why do left-wing fascists lie so easily and so often? And how is it that when caught in a lie they so easily excuse and “explain” it and lie again in order to tell us what they “really” meant?

We must look to the fundamental underpinnings of the leftist pathology to understand these things.

The leftist narrative, as they like to call it, is based on one huge lie. The lie is that all forms of inequality are caused by the crimes of an oppressor class and that it is possible to achieve an earthly utopian paradise by eliminating the oppressor class and by forcibly changing fundamental human nature. They call their brutal solution “progress” and that solution simply means that successful people are the evil enemy and that unsuccessful people are morally superior victims/heros. This is a surefire recipe for societal failure, but that doesn’t bother the left-wing fascist at all. When society fails, the left-wing fascist has lots of “problems” to solve and must give himself the power to do so. That this leads to even more failure is not a problem either. The left-wing fascist displays actual mental pathology in that reality is not a part of his narrative. When the narrative flows from a lie and is rationalized by a massive system of lies, reality doesn’t enter into it. In most individuals this is called mental illness. In the left-wing fascist’s world, the mentally ill are those who see his lies and call them what they are.

In order to achieve their agenda, leftists have created a system of lies in order to advance the founding lie and the false solution to the false problem. This means that even if a leftist tells the truth he is doing so because he thinks it supports a lie. But the leftist finds it easier to rely exclusively on a system of lies. A system of lies is highly flexible because it doesn’t have to rely on reality. You will notice that leftists occasionally tell the truth when they openly say things like “We got the suspects wrong, but the narrative was correct so they should have been convicted” or “we are not a reality-based community.” A leftist system of lies has to rely on a gullible population driven by hysterical emotions and one that has abandoned moral principles. That is why the leftist would have us abandon reason and knowledge as “elitist” and embrace emotionalism. The leftist also insists that morality is immorality and that cowardice is courage. That is why decadent, juvenile actors and artists are such effective high priests for the leftist religion; they are skilled at manipulating emotion through fantasy. This is a extremely effective way to propagate lies. Since the 1960s our society has become permeated by and entirely organized on the leftists’ system of lies. Since our government is now the main propagator and enforcer of this disaster, the government is now the enemy of the people and should be treated as such.

LA replies:

Agreed on all points. And, as you have shown, all this leftist madness and evil flows from the original leftist lie, that the inequality that is part of the normal order of the world is the result of oppression.

Mitchell B. replies:

I wasn’t disagreeing with you really. I was merely elaborating. It’s so odd to observe what passes for public discourse in the West and hear nothing but lies and see nothing but denial of reality. I can’t decide whether it’s a stroke of luck or a curse that I am able to see the nakedness of the emperor. But it’s too late for me to undo my political and social epiphany. At this point if something is part of the left-wing narrative, I KNOW it is a lie.

I see the denial in people I know in my daily life too. Most people simply repeat leftist phrases with a smug air of certainty. Obama does this too. Obama is probably one of the true believers that has been tapped by the Leninists to be their front. He has been handed everything because he is black and like Biden famously said, he is “clean”. It’s interesting to see how Obama has changed his public face as he experiences open mass hostility for the first time. He reminds me of a spoiled adolescent who insists on being taken seriously and has his little feelers hurt when the adulation he is used to isn’t unanimous. That was true of the Clintons also although they were quite a bit tougher than Obama. It seems that to be a really effective leftist, one must also be a total sociopath.

Obama also reminds me of certain half-bright human resources directors I have encountered over the years. They earnestly repeat the leftist narrative and are horribly offended when it isn’t gratefully accepted at face value. And if they have to depart from the narrative at all, they become flustered, bumbling idiots. I can barely stand to hear Obama speak. He sounds like a bad Dan Ackroyd character and the stilted way he chops off words and phrases seems like ebonics straining at the leash. Obama is a corrupt, deeply-stupid, affirmative- action parasite and he isn’t prepared to to be anything else. But Ayers and company know he’ll be forgiven by the mainstream cowards simply because he is black. It’s been stunning to see how so many antiwar leftists have embraced war now that Obama has told them it’s OK. Look for Obama to declare war on his domestic opponents in the near future. We’ve already been defined as “potential” terrorists.

One thing is for sure, the leftists will have no problem forcing us to accept their insane, criminal agenda regardless of how it is revealed as a naked power grab supported by a system of lies. They will defend their transparent lies and eventually, like the soviet-style tyrants they are, they will simply make it a crime to contradict them. At this point you just know they are yearning for an excuse to declare a state of emergency. It won’t be long in my opinion.

LA replies:

You write: “I can barely stand to hear Obama speak. He sounds like a bad Dan Ackroyd character and the stilted way he chops off words and phrases seems like ebonics straining at the leash.”

I have so far been unable to find words to convey Obama’s palpably fake speaking style which I also can’t stand. This gets close to it. The funny thing is, early in his candidacy I very much liked his speaking voice.

Kristor writes:

Eureka. For the last six months I have been groping for the right way to understand the analogy between the ancient Gnostic heresies of Judaism and Christianity, and the modern liberal gnostic heresy. It has been staring me in the face the whole time, brutally obvious, and I have missed it. Reading Mitchell’s comment, and your response, has at last made it clear. Perhaps I’m the only one who’s missed it, but perhaps not.

The ancient Gnostics hated matter, hated the world, because of its evil. Their theodicy postulated that the High God of the ancient religion of Israel, El Elyon—whom we could understand as the God of the Philosophers, absolute in His transcendence and perfect in His omnipotence and goodness—could not possibly be the creator of this defective world. They blamed the messed up creation on one of his distant relations (emanations, technically); often the goddess Sophia, but more often the demi-urge, the YHWH of the Old Testament. The creator of a defective world must itself be defective, they reasoned; YHWH must be evil. Salvation then is hopeless in this world. It can be attained only by an absolute transcendence of this world. This, according to the Gnostics, is the Gospel that Jesus, sent by his Father El Elyon, came to teach: the repudiation of YHWH and of all his works. The Gnostics rejected their patrimony, root and branch.

Gnostics appeared in bewildering variety, each sect with its own bewildering theogony. All preached that salvation lies in escape from the world. Some preached and practiced a fantastic and heroic asceticism as the path to Heaven. But most preached that the Powers of this world—not just angelic powers, but rulers of all kinds, together with their pesky oppressive rules—are all in thrall to the evil YHWH. The Gnostic initiate, who is governed by a higher law that only he is able to comprehend, is therefore free to disregard their wicked dictates, including the traditional mores that constrain the unwashed. So many Gnostic sects practiced sexual deviancy to a degree abhorrent even to the pagans of the day.

The orthodox Christians and Jews were appalled at all this. They saw the world, and matter, and the body, as basically and originally good, albeit polluted by creaturely sin. So they understood YHWH as good. Orthodoxy sees YHWH as being in perfect harmony with El Elyon, the Father; indeed, he is of the same substance as El Elyon (the technical term they used for this was that El Elyon and YHWH are each hypostases of God). The Christians believed in addition that Jesus is not some esoteric ambassador of YHWH, but YHWH himself. So Christians, and devout Jews, supported traditional morality, and indeed were known for their unusual virtue.

Modern liberal gnostics, like their ancient forebears, hate and revile the God of their traditional cultures, and all those who believe in Him. They view that God as a mistake (in the case of theist liberals who are skeptical that we can apprehend transcendent truths) or non-existent (in the case of atheist liberals), or both, and the traditions and institutions that derive their authority from his ukases as evil oppressors. They ascribe all the evil in the world to the traditional theistic culture and its oppression, and seek to overthrow its authority and pervert its teachings. They hate matter, hate concrete being in all its instantiations, hate all the irksome particularities of their disparate natures. A few—maybe three or so—practice heroic asceticism. Most practice sexual deviancy of one sort or another, or at least preach the tolerance and encouragement thereof.

It all comes back to Alan Roebuck’s central insight that the origin of liberalism lies in the rejection of the Creator God of the Bible. So did the origin of ancient heretical Gnosticism. The only difference is that the modern gnostic liberals, unlike their ancient ilk, reject also El Elyon, the God of the Philosophers. In doing so, they implicitly reject the possibility of knowledge, admitting only opinions and idiosyncratic narratives as legitimate to social discourse. In their rejection of the transcendent, they out-gnostic the Gnostics.

Eureka.

Paul K. writes:

I have to correct Mitchell B. when he writes: “You will notice that leftists occasionally tell the truth when they openly say things like … we are not a reality-based community.” In fact, liberals say they ARE the reality-based community. The expression came from a 2004 New York Times article in which reporter Ron Suskind quotes a Bush aide:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The Bush administration’s neocon worldview created such chaos that an opening was created for Obama. If the right can’t purge itself of this element, it will have very little to offer in the way of solutions.

LA replies:

I’ve seen that quotation before, and it’s hard to believe it’s all genuine. Would any Bush aide real;y have expressed himself in such a way—and to a New York Times reporter no less? If it is genuine, it’s amazingly damning.

Ferg writes:

I cannot remember who it was now, but early on in the Clinton administration one of their spokesmen was on TV and actually bragging about how well Bill Clinton could lie. He was proud of it.

A. Zarkov writes:

Mitchell B. writes, “The most noticeable symptom of the liberal pathology is the breathtaking amount of lying that they do.” That certainly describes Jimmy Carter. In his autobiography, Robert Novak refers to Carter as “a liar and charlatan.” Jimmy Carter, he writes on page 287, “was a habitual liar who modified the truth to suit his purposes.” In this interview Novak elaborates on Carter’s chronic mendacity. In this Washington Post column, George Will refers to Carter as a “recidivist fibber” because Carter said flat out that Will had delivered Carter’s stolen briefing book to Ronald Reagan, and helped him prepare for debate. Later Carter claimed that Will asked him for forgiveness in a letter. According to Will, that’s a real whopper. I wonder if Will ever asked Carter to produce the letter. Alan Dershowitz also calls Carter a liar here. David Horowitz chimes in with an article called “Jimmy Carter: Jew-Hater, Genocide-Enabler, Liar.” Uncovering Carter’s lies is almost a cottage industry. He really got slammed by a C-SPAN caller here.

I agree with Mr. Auster. Carter is not mentally ill, he’s just following his liberal proclivities. In their world lying is justified in the service of a greater good. They share this philosophy with Communists and Muslims. To call such people mentally ill only serves to absolve them of their moral culpability. Evil is simply evil, not sick.

December 16

Gintas writes:

Voegelin in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism described “pneumopathology”, by which man “in [his] revolt against the world as it has been created by God, arbitrarily omits an element of reality in order to create the fantasy of a new world.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 14, 2009 02:53 PM | Send