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PHIGHTING PHIL
Phillip Adams writes:
Imre Salusinszky and I have never met. It’s probably a good idea that we never do, given my longstanding desire to hit him on the nose.
Hate speech! Jew-basher! Lowerer of the public discourse!
UPDATE. Imre responds: “I stopped playing Australian football in the Newcastle league—one of the nation’s roughest—when I was 35, so I haven’t had a fistfight in a good 15 years. I’m going to have to get right back in training if I expect to handle a morbidly obese 66-year-old commie intellectual cream-puff.”
“You see? You see? I threatened him and he talked back to me! Obvious Zionist intimidation!”
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 05 13 at 08:01 PM • permalinkHi Imre, how about challenging Philip to a boxing match for charity? I’d donate for sure.
Posted by Lucky Nutsacks on 2005 05 13 at 08:51 PM • permalinkOr the worthy members of the Dutch Reformed Church who used The Bible to justify apartheid.
What about the clergy of just about every other Christian denomination who consistently opposed apartheid? Was Archbishop Tutu a pagan?
Adams also overlooks the distinction between religious and racial anti-Semitism. It’s convenient for Adams to do this - it allows him to characterise the Holocaust as the logical extension of centuries of Jewish persecution at the hands of the Catholic Church.
The fact that Nazi and apartheid racialism were based on pseudo-scientific theory (including a bastardized version of Darwinism) and advocated by largely anti-clerical political movements doesn’t deter Adams in the slightest:
A more logical view of humanity’s ethical searchings might be found between the lines in the new testament of Charles Darwin.
Admittedly a bastardized form of Calvinism was used to support apartheid. But what Adams seems to be saying is that nutters who misrepresent biblical teaching bring Christianity into disrepute but nutters who misrepresent natural selection are just plain nutters.
Michael42 — Just means the cream curdled…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 05 14 at 01:06 AM • permalinkDarwin “energetically reviled by Bush”? Just when and where did this happen, Phat Phart?
Posted by Susan Norton on 2005 05 14 at 01:09 AM • permalink‘Adams also overlooks the distinction between religious and racial anti-Semitism. It’s convenient for Adams to do this ...’
I doubt Adams is intellectually capable of understanding the difference or if he is is too lazy to research it.
Adams lives in a world of Superficial Cliches, where all is reduced to icons of perceived leftist realities.It so obvious that poor old Phil’s sunday school teacher had a serious impact on him. Like that other lefty loser, Bob Ellis, who also had a religious upbringing, I suspect he has never been able to shake of the need for the superluminous (not sure if that is the right word - I mean a yearning for something greater). Hence their infatuation for ‘isms. For Phil, even though he avows he is an atheist, there was always communism, socialism, and of course, God Whitlam to worship.
These days, both Phil and Bob are only left with their hate to nurse with the same religious fervour.A more logical view of humanity’s ethical searchings might be found between the lines in the new testament of Charles Darwin.
Apply evolutionary science to the social organisation of beehives, termite mounds or human civilisations and you’ll see ongoing experimentation and modification of behaviour in the interests of survival.
Christ said, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…’
I’m agnostic but you won’t find that in a termite mound, Phil.
Beliefs are as driven by evolution as the colours of a butterfly’s wings or the curving of a predator’s claws. And some of us have faith that religious faith, having caused more trouble than it’s worth, may be on the way out.
This is unkind and untrue. People of true faith are driven to do good deeds, and these are not usually linked to their own accumulation of survival points. Many suffer, or are actually killed as a result of their selfless pursuit of improvements to other peoples situations.
As to the proposition that Faith is on the way out: Phil is on the way out, but seems determined to make himself an even larger target at every twist and turn - and that is not a comment linked to his body image.
The future of the world is riding on the outcome of a battle of faiths - each regards the other as false. On the sidelines, the many secular humanist journos of Phil’s colouration are chattering like monkeys in the dark.Oh, for fuck’s sake Phil, Darwin himself said that evolution explains nothing of “ethical searchings” or “morals”, nor is it supposed to. It’s merely a mechanism for whereby one species might give rise to another.
It’s not a fucking RELIGION, shithead!!!
Ahem. Excuse me.
Every time people talk about the wacky Christian fringe, I counter with the fact that I find, as an Atheist, sharing ideological ground with dickheads like Adams even more nauseating.
Posted by Quentin George on 2005 05 14 at 09:13 AM • permalinkLet’s hear a BIG round of applause, first off, for Mr. Philip Adams, who has apparently just discovered [if only in a very partial way—but there may yet be hope for the poor kid] that—once written, drawn, theorized, constructed, etc. and otherwise sent out into the world beyond the minds, hands, and lips of their creators, the works [and reputations] of human beings be they religious, scientific, philosophical, or aesthetic—immediately become subject to interpretation and espousal by absolutely anyone who cares to look at or read them [and a few who don’t] the author’s original wishes be damned. There is no movement on Earth, be it never so evil, whose proponents are so remarkably stupid that they WON’T make some attempt to piggyback off the existing social credibility of some established figure, set of beliefs, artistic creation, etc. If you want to believe that your own intellectual, moral, and artistic heroes of the past and their works have never ever been blemished by powerful men seeking to twist them to their own ends, then whether you are religious or not, you are—to put it simply—a flaming idiot. Belief, however abstractly and inchoately it hides in the corners [‘Life itself’ combined with his relish for ‘meaningless existence’ from a previous column make Mr. Adams sound rather of an existentialist—Fallico in his book on Existentialism and Art suggested that the deepest form of existentialism might eventually be found in some form of ‘existential religion’ rather than an ‘existential philosophy’; Adams also illustrates more clearly than most Hume’s point about scientific rationalism as a form of faith] is the motive force behind society but is itself amoral; it sometimes works ‘to the greater good’ and sometimes not. And we cannot escape belief simply by picking out one single belief which we do not ourselves share as the only real example of a ‘dangerous’ belief. But even if the will to believe is amoral and sometimes dangerous to ‘the greater good’, without belief we cannot even judge what ‘the greater good’ really is.
I was also amused to see Adams insist that Catholicism wants to ‘micromanage’ every aspect of the lives of its followers. Holding to a single comprehensive moral code as a universal standard is hardly ‘micromanagement’—each individual Catholic still may or may not choose to sin. This is not, again, to say that the church doctrine has not sometimes been perverted by the desire for political power, but the religious world view at its deepest level markedly contrasts with the Marxist or materialist view of personal good which fundamentally sees no difference between a person who chooses to do good and one who is compelled to.
LOOK OUT, IMRE! Phil’s been working out…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 05 14 at 11:30 AM • permalinkWhy can’t these people ever work out that evolution and religion don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Posted by Aging Gamer on 2005 05 14 at 12:34 PM • permalinkAging Gamer — Because the True Believers on both fringes of that argument are as good a refutation of evolution as you’re going to find. Let’s see… on the left, monkey shrieking in a treetop and flinging excrement; on the right, Phillip Adams…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 05 14 at 08:00 PM • permalinkI always wondered if assertive atheists realized rejecting half of Pascal’s Wager is the philosophical equivalent of trying to draw to an inside straight.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 05 15 at 12:03 AM • permalink2003- newspaper article titled “SPEAK UP- Chaney urges.”
Former Federal Minister Fred Chaney ( for many years distinctly Left orientated (my words only)-
called on Christians last night to be more active in political debate.Delivering the 2003 catherine mccauley oration (he) said clergy and christians had a responsibility to speak out on moral issues and need to counter the wedge politics he described as seeming to be ‘a rewarding political debate” in Australia.
He said his speech had been driven by Alexander Downer’s criticism of Archbishop Carnley for publically criticising Australia’s involvement on the war on Iraq.
“We should hear more from the clergy and professing christians on matters of state - not less” Mr Carnley said.
Fred Chaney - dissident lib and engineer of the welfare lifestyle for aboriginal people.
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I have no idea why he would harbour a longstanding desire to assault me when he claims to have ignored all my previous writings.
Nevertheless, this has all got me worried. I stopped playing Australian football in the Newcastle league—one of the nation’s roughest—when I was 35, so I haven’t had a fistfight in a good 15 years. I’m going to have to get right back in training if I expect to handle a morbidly obese 66-year-old commie intellectual cream-puff.