Transgenderism and Philosophy

by Roy Wiebe

    What is implied when someone claims that he is biologically male but identifies as female? The self is being distinguished from the body, and the self, not the body, determines identity. Hence, if the self feels female, identifies as female, the biological male with such a self is female.

     Given this perspective, what is the self and how does it relate to body?  Clearly the self is not the body, not something material but immaterial that is contained in the body. An immaterial something in which the psyche, emotions, thoughts are grounded. Or to use old terminology – the human soul. And this “soul” resides in the body like a driver in a car. Just as the car doesn’t define the driver, so the body doesn’t define the self. And just as a driver can change cars, so can the self, or soul, change bodies.

     But is the human soul’s relation to the body like that of a driver to a car? Plato thought so, Aristotle disagreed. Both thought there was a soul and that it could survive the death of the body. But Plato also believed the self, or person with his unique identity, survived the separation of soul from body at death. And this unique identity did not require a body. The self and the soul were one. Hence he believed in the transmigration of souls in the sense that when YOU die YOU could occupy another body. 

     Why did Plato believe in the transmigration of souls? After death we survive as complete immaterial beings with the identity we had before death. We do not need another body. We are spiritual beings and can enjoy the bliss of heaven. Except if we are still attached to the material world, in which case we are drawn back into another body. Thus for Plato the body was something inferior to the soul, something that degraded the soul, that prevented us for attaining our highest, true destiny. Thus for Plato not only did the soul not need a body but a body united to a soul was bad for the soul. 

     Aristotle disagreed. He thought it possible that the human soul could survive physical death since it was immaterial. Nonetheless, it was of such a nature that it needed to be united to a body. It cannot stand alone and be complete. So does the soul really survive death even in this incomplete way? This ties our self identity to our bodies before and after death. Maybe after death WE don’t survive but only an impersonal, radically incomplete soul? 

     He was left with a mystery reason alone could not solve. He needed Christian revelation: the resurrection of our particular body. God designed our souls such that our self identity is maintained after death when our resurrected body is united with our soul. This is our highest destiny, our perfection as human beings, our supreme good. The doctrine of the resurrection is thus profoundly incompatible with Plato’s understanding of the soul-body relationship. Likewise since our bodies are intrinsically either male or female, the doctrine of the resurrection is incompatible with trans ideology. 

    But to get back to philosophy, the conflict between Aristotle’s and Plato’s views of the soul is related to Plato’s theory of forms, which Aristotle rejected. Both Plato and Aristotle believed material things were a combination of matter and “form.” By form they did not mean the shape of a thing but the attributes that determine it to be what it is. Matter in itself is pure potential, form is the activation of this potential. But for Plato these forms did not exist only in things but in a reality separate from the material world,  in some transcendent realm of Forms. The forms in things were a reflection of these transcendent Forms. Different individual trees were reflections or projections the the transcendent Tree.

     Aristotle disagreed. For him the forms really existed only in things and not as things in themselves, or substances, to use his terminology. A bit of clarification is needed here. The forms united with matter can exist only in material things, he reasoned, but with one exception: the form united to the human body which Aristotle called the rational soul. This had the possibility of surviving the death of the body because of its ability to think about universals, to abstract from particulars, to self reflect, to think about thinking and so on which indicated it somehow transcended the material world. These abilities indicated the human, or rational, soul is an immaterial substance that might survive separation from the body at death. A body it nonetheless needs with the ensuing philosophical complications mentioned above. 

     In sum Platonic forms are compatible with transgenderism and Aristotelian forms are not. Furthermore, the Aristotelian view of forms is compatible with the doctrine of the resurrection and Platonic forms are not. Which theory is true? Aristotle has the Ockham razor advantage: no need to posit a transcendent realm of Forms. Aristotle’s theory of knowledge posits that the mind, which is an aspect of the rational soul, is a tabla rasa which receives knowledge by reflecting on sensory information. This is modern, well established epistemology which has been proven to work. Plato posits a mind already full of forms which just need to be remembered. A theory that cannot account for empirical knowledge including modern science. 

      A recent article in Public Discourse (August) by Abigail Favale, “Our Bodies, Our Selves,” supports my analysis. Favale states that transgender ideology is dependent on a dualistic model of personhood in which the body is seen, “as an inert object, upon which an idealized sense of self is projected.” She asks what it would look like to see the body as integral to the self, “rather than pretending that matter does not matter.” She endorses the sacramental principle: “The body reveals the person. The body I am is always already revealing my personhood.” 

Why We Fight the Church Lockdown

The other day a small (but photogenic) band of protesters gathered in front of our church –St. Andrew’s Cathedral in downtown Victoria—calling for the reopening of church services by the public health authorities, and asserting our rights to worship, assemble and speak. These are all recognized by our Charter of Rights as “fundamental freedoms,” which I take to mean, they are rights fundamental to human nature, which the charter, as I said, recognizes, rather  than grants.

DIDN’T i SAY WE WERE PHOTOGENIC?

A young, intense woman striding by muttered, then repeated more loudly, that she also recognized our right to worship, three times in all before facing us fully and delivering her punchline.

“You have a right to worship, BUT—not a right to endanger the health of others.”  (You’ve all  heard it in the more truncated version from “woke” advocates: “I believe in free speech BUT—not hate speech.”

To which we replied that Walmart, Costco, lounges and restaurants, gyms and yoga clubs, dance classes, and, in the selfsame churches closed to services, 12-step groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, are all open and operating, subject to the distancing, masking and sanitizing requirements forced on us by the Wuhan Virus, aka Covid 19.

“But they pay taxes,” was her unexpected, smug reply. “Churches don’t pay taxes.” I managed to blurt out, “What about Alcoholics Anonymous?” before she left angrily, cursing us as she departed.

Whimsically, I wonder, and I wonder why the Legislative Press Gallery to which I once belonged hasn’t asked, how many members of the NDP cabinet, plus St. Bonnie Henry our public health officer, attend church weekly, and how many attend 12-step groups, and how many eat out at lounges and restaurants on a weekly basis?

But I am being whimsical. Surely these inconsistent regulations are not based on petty personal habits. No, I think our caustic passerby was not far from the mark. The reason for the inconsistent lockdown is that bars, lounges, gyms and supermarkets employ young people with lower incomes. In two words: NDP voters. Whereas churches, which also employ people, but usually older ones, are free assemblies of those who are older, own property, have higher incomes and so on: not NDP voters.

There is a deeper and more sinister reason for NDP hostility to churchgoers. Churches are independent generators of values, and values often in opposition  to the NDP’s, and nationally, if not provincially,  to the Liberals.’

Look at other values generators in our society, the universities, the media, the arts community, and you will find institutions totally enslaved to wokeness, political correctness, the LGBTQIA etc juggernaut that has deranged and bedevilled us. Only churches now mount a semi-organized resistance, while families and ethnic groups offer what support they can.

As for the courts, they use the Charter not to protect our fundamental freedoms but to attack them. The focus of their campaign has been the anti-discrimination clause that prohibits discrimination based on ethnicity, sexuality, age, race, religion and so on. Religion, thus reduced from a fundamental to an also-ran, is often the identified discriminator in cases involving sexual minorities. The judiciary’s way of deciding whether to protect the religious minority or the sexual minority is to weigh the injury done to one versus that done the other. Whichever suffers most if denied is the winner.

This totally subjective standard allows for the travesty that was the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Trinity Western University case. There the court reversed its ruling of 20 years earlier and decreed the legal profession could refuse graduates from TWU’s proposed law school on the grounds that TWU required students to conform to Christian morality—no sex outside heterosexual marriage. It was thus discriminating against homosexuals.

The absurdity is clear; the sinister intent is less so. TWU’s law school would have opened up more law school seats nation-wide, thus more seats for homosexual students. Now there will be fewer for all, but especially fewer for believers seeking a Christian perspective on law. Fewer as in : zero.

Here is the sinister part: the law schools of Canada are uniformly woke, monolithic, politically correct, and uncompromisingly hostile to Christian values. The legal professions have cemented in place that monopoly by rejecting TWU law grads before the school ever opened and the Supreme Court bolted steel clamps onto it.

Cathedral members who died defending freedom (of religion, assembly, speech, thought).

Christian and Jewish and Muslim faiths provide what ought to be treasured in a pluralistic, liberal democracy: independently sourced values. But they are not treasured. Instead, religious faith is looked upon as a harmless if eccentric pastime at best, and at worst, a baneful influence connected to residential schools and discriminatory practices.

Returning to the young woman who attacked out freedom to worship while pretending to support it, what I might have said, should have said to her taxpaying comment, is that churches have never paid taxes because they have always been recognized as beneficial to society for their good deeds, for the soup kitchens, the hospitals, the schools, and the hospices they build and support, and which anyone can use, regardless of race, religion or sexual preference.

Moreover, in less obvious ways, churches benefit their individual members and through them, society. I commend to our readers the website of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute, or MARRI,  which collects and generates social science research on just these subjects. This link will take you to an excellent compilation of the benefits: church attenders earn more, live longer, commit less crime, volunteer more,  and donate more to secular charities, for example. By the same token their children do better in school and also commit less crime.

Please note, these are the benefits of frequent physical church attendance, not zoom attendance or television viewing. Nor of  some vague“spirituality” expressed by standing in a quiet grove in an old growth forest, contemplating one’s navel while holding the tiger pose, or earnestly holding theist  beliefs. Church attendance.

This week a BC judge is hearing arguments against the church lockdown in BC. The argument for the lockdown will be based on public safety. Against the lockdown, it will be contended that it violates the Charter, which recognizes limitations on the fundamental freedom of worship only to the degree they are reasonable. If you can sit in a restaurant, attend a fitness or dance class, work out in a gym close to other people, and cannot attend a service, it seems on the face of it to be unreasonable. But who expects the courts to be reasonable anymore? Not me. Sorry. And I mean, I am very, very sorry for Canada.

Individualism,Collectivism and their pitfalls

Here’s a letter I wrote in response to a columnn by Trevor Hancock, a retired UVic prof.

Trevor Hancock’s Sunday column, “The cult of individualism is toxic,” takes a very selective view of individualism’s negative consequences, and of the needed antidote.

He blames rampant globalization of capital as the chief toxic result, causing, he claims, impoverishment in Western societies, near-enslavement in underdeveloped ones, and environmental destruction. This is very debatable, given that collectivized states such as Red China are leaders in environmental destruction and enslavement.

But my chief problem with Hancock’s column is his obliviousness to individualism’s dangerous direction here in Canada and the Western World. Here individualism is expressed in the excessive attention paid by political leaders and parties to individual angst over sexual preferences and the new cult of gender identity. The state, as well as powerful institutions such as banks and universities, have become the champion of the tiny minority belonging to this cult. The losers when individualism is championed by the state are the other social collectives Hancock has totally disregarded: faith groups and other private organizations, for example, but especially the family. A homeowner cannot cut down a tree in Victoria due to laws intended to protect the environment, but the same homeowners as parents can be kept in the dark when their minor daughter seeks an abortion or she or their minor son seeks chemical castration because of a (usually temporary) conviction their “gender” is different from their sex “assigned” at birth.

The public schools and the public school curriculum, along with the public university, and under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the organs of state themselves, have become purveyors of this harmful dismissal of the family, the church and of the ethnic culture. This is where individualism leads: the weakening of any sources of values distinct from, and often opposed to, the statist, politically correct values of the moment. Pluralism, freedom of speech, thought and religion are the losers. So are the individuals who lose the protection of their families

Should Churches be taxed –and what does it have to do with Covid 19, anyway

Here’s a letter from Gwynn Evans to the Times Colonist that leapfrogs from the complaints of churchgoers about worship lockdowns (but not restaurant lockdowns) to his own complaint that churches get special tax exemptions. Following it is my rebuttal to the TC, which they probably won’t run.

There might be better ways to gather

A while back, we heard people claiming a lack of consistency in the rules in B.C. imposed on church assembly restrictions versus those for bars and restaurants, claiming churches were short-changed.

On the other hand, I am not aware of any churches having volunteered to forgo their extra tax breaks.

Give all the non-religious service clubs, charities, and secular interest groups, doing charitable work or not, equal treatment with churches, whether in taxation or COVID regulations, with no exceptions.

It is just as bad that in the secular sphere some think tanks are supported by large corporations using their strength in the economy to pass on money attracting tax breaks. This is taken in the course of business from unwitting ordinary citizens to advance already powerful corporate interests.

The lobbying and one-sided “education” serves to block out alternative paths of thinking that might indicate better ways.

Glynne Evans
Saanich

Glynne Evans thinks that if churchgoers want to complain about being “shortchanged” over Covid restrictions that shut down services that leave restaurants open, then other charities and non-profits benefitting society should be given the same tax exemptions as churches. Yes, it looks like a non sequitur to me too, and one based on a false premise.

Hello! Charities and non-profits do get the same income and property tax exemptions as churches. Donors to churches and charities get the same tax deductions.

And for good reason: they benefit society. Church attendance correlates so strongly with family stability,longevity, lawful behavior, charitable and community activity, higher grades and educational attainment as to approach causation. I refer doubters to this summary of research on the social and psychological benefits of church attendance https://marri.us/research/research-papers/95-social-science-reasons-for-religious-worship-and-practice/.

As a board member of the Victoria Humanist Society, which is a chronic foe of church tax exemptions, Evans should know this.

That’s where my letter ends. You should know that every year or two , city councils all over BC ponder who gets property tax exemptions—the Oddfellows, the Scouts, the churches and so on. Churches are exempted on the property their church itself sits, but the municipalities decide on the exemption over the rest of their property (the parking lot, the hall if free standing, etc.) Humanists regularly attend and argue against exemptions for churches.

The premise behind the church exemption is that churches do a public service, care for the poor for example, and relieve a burden on the city. Please pay attention to what councils are up to—and secular .humanists.

How Dolly Parton Just Got ‘Faithwashed’

My wife and I are not fans of Dolly Parton, the amazing country rock singer of diminutive stature but huge wig, huge voice and so on. Only the wigs are fake, we learned from a fascinating documentary we just saw on Netflix, which other reviewers are describing as routine in format, but interesting, nonetheless, because Parton is herself such a sympathetic figure:  shrewd, warmhearted and scandal free.

Her Christian faith did not make the final cut

We thoroughly enjoyed Dolly Parton: Here I Am and recommend it for its revealing interviews with the performer herself and professional associates, but with one caveat. There is absolutely no (zero, zip , nada) reference to Parton’s faith life. How huge an omission this is I leave to those more expert in her life story than me, but I knew she had one without ever having cared much for her music. A cursory search revealed that she claims to be a strong Christian but a private one. It also reveals in recent years she put out several faith-based albums, which led to several interviews on her faith. It isn’t something she pushes on anyone, she explains in these. Rather, in her songs she just describes what she believes. Her audience can take it or leave it.

Though her public persona has always been, in part, a parody of the dumb blond, her Christian faith has led her to a thoughtful and extensive commitment to literacy, especially among children, through her charity, “The Imagination Library.” Not so dumb, then.

The documentary takes us through Parton’s many genre shifts without even mentioning her latest one to religious songs. Almost hilariously, but also sadly, the filmmaker actually shows her singing lyrics from one of her religious hits “The Seeker.”

We hear her warble “I am the seeker/ You are the teacher” but not any of the other words indicating the song expresses a sinner’s yearning for God’s help. Instead, the script makes this about her early professional relationship with mentor and collaborator  Country Western star Porter Wagoner. (He sued for millions when she quit his show, but this is left out of the movie too).

The inside journalism site GetReligion.org calls these omissions of  significant religious content from the lives of sports and political personalities “religious ghosts.” I’m thinking “faithwashing.”

Is the motive antipathy to faith, or concern the topic will turn off the general audience? Willful blindness?

Predictions of the Anglican Church’s Demise Are Far From Exaggerated

A wakeup call?

What with the wounded, and what with the dead, and what with the lads that are swinging the lead, if there aren’t some changes round here and pretty damn soon, there won’t be anyone left in this old platoon.–Canadian soldier’s poetic lament in WW2

“Projections from our data indicate that there will be no members, attenders or givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by approximately 2040,” said the Rev. Neil Elliot, an Anglican priest in Trail, British Columbia, who authored a report to the church’snational leadership recently.

(First, as a words nerd, my hat is off to Elliot for using the word “attender” and not the abominable “attendee” which means someone who is “attended,” and so is meaningless)

ACC membership has fallen from a peak of 1.3 million in 1961 to 357,000 two years ago. At this rate “there won’t be anyone left in this old platoon” by 2040.

The head of the ACC , Archbishop Nicholls called the report a”wakeup call” but in the same breath  warned against being drawn into a vortex of negativity,” and instead should continue to be a witness of Canada and the world (presumably about the environment, minority rights and Palestine). So, not a wakeup call.

It’s not the first time the Anglican Church has received death notices. I remember reporting on one at least 20 years ago. The United Church of Canada has got them also, quite recently. A UCC member versed in numbers, David S. Ewart, put the UCC’s data together to show that , if trends from 2003 to 2013 continued, membership in Canada’s largest Protestant church would drop by 43 % by 2025. Sunday service attendance would fall by an astonishing 77 % from 150,000 to 43,000.

A few years ago, in response to its own decline, the Vancouver Island Anglican diocese commissioned a study,which was done by a minister named Nicholosi. His conclusion amounts to an application of Ockam’s Razor ( the simplest explanation is the likeliest). If the Anglicans want to grow, he said, they have to hire new pastors trained in how to recruit new members. As it stood, the church’s grassroots clerical leadership stressed ministering to their current parishioners. Not finding new ones. Nothing was done, and Nicholosi moved to London, Ont. to a church that emphasized recruitment.

In Canada many individual Evangelical churches continue to grow and some mainline churches too, but no mainline denominations. Skeptical scholars attribute growth to high birth rates, high retention and, yes, recruitment. But recruitment is just sceptical scholar talk for evangelization. The churches who believe that evangelization is not just important, but of the ultimate importance, as in achieving eternal salvation for the evangelizer and the evangelized , are the likeliest to attract new members. Ockam’s Razor again.

In 2016 a team of scholars at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario put two and two together with a survey study of members in 22 mainline Ontario Protestant congregations, some growing, some shrinking. Their finding: the more likely the members believed that Christianity was the one, true faith and that salvation came only through it, the more likely they were to be growing.
The more relativistic the church’s members were in their personal religious beliefs (I’m looking at you, United and Anglican types), the more likely it is to be shrinking. No churches the scholars classified as liberal were growing in their sample.

I quote from my own story published in Lifesite News: “
While members of shrinking congregations tended to relativistic positions such as seeing Christ as a worthy teacher like Buddha and believing there are many roads to the good life and salvation, those attending growing fellowships agreed much more strongly with such statements ‘It is very important to encourage non-Christians to become Christians,’ ‘’Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God provided a way for the forgiveness of my sins,’ and ‘Those who die face a divine judgement where some will be punished eternally.’”

I believe there are other findings that emphasize theology less. Canada’s renowned sociologist of religion Reginald Bibby thinks people are hungry spiritually and emotionally and recruitable on those grounds, but maybe not so much by absolutist appeals based on exclusive truths promising eternal salvation versus damnation. Instead, he would urge reaching out to people where they are at emotionally and spiritually.

A few years ago I did a story on a conservative Anglican church planter who reached out by holding weekly dinners where people were invited to share about their feelings and beliefs. His group was called “the Table.”The goal was to “bring them to Christ” in the conventional meaning of the phrase, not to start there. This guy was definitely low church. He didn’t care,he said, if his recruits ever attended a traditional Anglican communion service or even his own group’s rock band event. Their relationship with Christ was what mattered. Traditional church services, he believed, would just weird out most young Canadians.

There is a danger in being too open. The aforementioned Nicholosi recommended open communion for example: everyone welcome to take communion whatever they believe about its meaning. Make newcomers welcome; don’t begin their experience by excluding them.

Pope Francis appears to be moving the Catholic church in this direction, by apparently encoyuraging communion for divorced and remarried Cathol,ics and active homosexuals.

I get it, but i believe it is wrong. I prefer “the Table” approach. Communion has many levels of meaning, but the highest one is that it is the Body and Blood of Christ. Only those who believe this is true and, indeed all crucial Catholic teachings, should be sharing in it. So it has been for 2000 years. For the new recruits not yet admitted fully into the body of believers, let them have dinner with the pastor and other believers.

Nicholosi believed the church has to emphasize reaching out. But mainline Protestant churches, and the Catholic church too, I fear, in general don’t have the motivation to reach out. Evangelizing requires deep, deep commitment. If you think that all religions are equally worthy, that Amazonian paganism is as good as Christianity, that you will respond to dismal trends with ironic shrugs and inaction, as will the Anglican, United and Catholic churches.

If you click on the link below in exactly the right way you will be led to the study of Ontario congregations

view of Religious Research

December 2016, Volume 58, Issue 4, pp 515–541| Cite as

Theology Matters: Comparing the Traits of Growing and Declining Mainline Protestant Church Attendees and Clergy by David Millard Haskell and Kevin N. Flatt

A Hidden Life: Must see movie about an anti-Nazi Martyr

Coming soon, as they say, to a theatre near you, but maybe not for long, is A Hidden Life, the latest work of American filmmaker Terry Malick. Not for long, despite positive reviews from Cannes and Toronto film festivals because it is so long like, Malick’s previous works such as A Thin Red Line, Tree of Life, and Badlands, only longer: three hours plus.

It’s about Hanz Jagerstatter, lately, the Blessed Hanz Jagerstatter, a Catholic conscientious objector in Nazi Germany beheaded in 1943 by the German Army for refusing to serve, and beatified in 2007. It’s also likely to be a frank exposure of how little support the Catholic Church gave him in his resistance.

Peace activist Jim Forest, calls him “one of the least likely persons to question” service to his country, but though I recommend Forest’s free and excellent biography on jimandnancyforest.com, I think he overstates his case. My other readings on those who opposed the Nazis suggests they were oppositional types from the get go. Jagerstatter was always a standout:  the illegitimate son of a farm labourer and servant too poor to marry;  as a young man he fathered an illegitimate daughter of his own (but always maintained a connection with her and the mother).

All this in the mountain village of Saint Radegund, in Austria hard by its border with Germany. Though a Sunday massgoer, he liked to drink, led a small gang of village youths into fights in area taverns. He went off to make some money in the mines, did so but had a crisis of faith and started sleeping in Sunday mornings.  This didn’t last. Jaggermaster returned to his village—on the community’s first motorcycle, met the love of his life, Franziska Schwaninger, and underwent a transformation. His mother had married a successful local farmer who had adopted him, then died, leaving  him the farm.

His new wife, as of 1936,  was a devout girl from a devout family who soon had Franz reading the Bible daily with her. Villagers later credited( or blamed) her for his devotion and, later, war resistance. But biographer Forest notes that Jaggermaster was earlier contemplating joining a monastery, just as she considered becoming a nun. Given that he had his mother to support, his stepfather’s prosperous farm seemed his destiny, however, not a monk’s habit. He became a daily massgoer and sacristan at the village church. Village opinion seemed to be that Franz became too Catholic, to a degree unseemly in a man. By all reports, they were deeply in love

Though the 100 per cent Catholic village was far off the beaten path, it staged Easter pageants akin to Oberammergau’s drawing pilgrims from Germany. Jagerstatter played a Roman soldier in one in 1933, the last on record.

Nor were villagers oblivious to the rise of Adolf Hitler (born not too far away) and his ambition to annex Austria to Germany, which lay just across the river. In 1933 their bishop, Johannes Gfollner, issued a frank letter read aloud in every church in the diocese. It stated in party, “Nazism is spiritually sick with materialistic racial delusions, un-Christian nationalism, a nationalistic view of religion, with what is quite simply sham Christianity.” Hitler’s obsession with Aryan racial purity, the bishop described as “backsliding into an abhorrent heathenism.”

Prescient but as it turned out, an exception among Austrian bishops.

Other church leaders approved as did many if not most Austrians when Hitler’s German army swiftly occupied their country in 1938. When Hitler ordered a vote to ratify it, everyone in St. Radegund voted for it, except Jagerstatter. But either to protect him or themselves, the village contrived to lose his negative vote. By now the father of three daughters, Jagerstatter had a powerful dream of a glittering train carrying countless multitudes of happy people, especially children, away. Perhaps triggered by reports of hundreds of thousands of Austrian boys lining up for the Hitler Jugend corps, the dream spoke to Jagerstatter of these multitudes: “These people are going to hell.”

He made no secret of his opposition to the Nazis, to Hitler and to the war, when it began. If anyone greeted him with a “Heil Hitler” he would respond with “Phooey Hitler.”

His village protected the dissident at first When the local public health nurse was asked by the Nazi Party organizer in a nearby town to make a list of anti-Nazis, Jagerstatter’s name was on it. Happily for him, the local mail lady opened the health nurse’s outgoing letter and took it to the mayor who destroyed it. When Jagerstatter was ordered to report for military training, and he grudgingly departed, the major got him back by declaring his farm work an essential service.

But this could only work so long. Other men, at first single, but then married, fathers, brothers, sons, were being conscripted. Why not Jagerstatter? He, meanwhile, was hardening in his resolve to resist, boosted by reading between the lines of news reports and by his experience with military training and reports from friends and cousins on the Eastern Front. Special units were rounding up exterminating Jews and gentile villagers.The war was clearly unjust to him: he would not be fighting in defence of the fatherland, clearly, but to conquer other fatherlands, killing other farmers’ sons defending them.

His mother, his new parish priest, and ultimately his bishop (Gfollner had retired), all advised him to join the army, which he might survive, rather than refuse service, bringing certain death. His bishop told him it was not his job to decide on the sinfulness of lawfully-given orders. If the orders forced him to commit a mortal sin, it would damn the officers issuing the order, not him. This Jagerstatter did not accept. Giving his bishop the benefit of the doubt, he told his wife the cleric was probably hiding his real opinion for fear Jagerstatter was a Nazi provocateur. (The Nazis did use agents to extract incriminating statements).

Jagerstatter even tracked down his former parish priest, Father Kartobath,who had been imprisoned for a while for anti-Nazi statements and exiled from the parish when freed.  He too told him to accept military service in order to protect his family and ultimately return to them. But the priest later said, “He defeated me again and again with words from the scriptures.”

Franziska supported him. She too, she later admitted, preferred he join up, but believed she owed him her complete support, knowing how seriously he had considered the issue.

A cousin who was a Jehovah Witness also supported Jagerstatter. Several hundred Witnesses would ultimately be executed for refusing military service.

Finally, the stubborn farmer was called up again. After a tearful farewell to his wife and family, he reported for duty, but only to state his refusal to serve. A lengthy imprisonment followed and more attempts to dissuade him. Finally his lawyer persuaded him to offer to serve as a medic. This was a compromise extended to conscientious objectors on the Allied side, but the army rejected the offer. A prison chaplain who had also tried to get him to serve, at last told Jagerstatter of a priest who had been executed for refusing military service. This, the chaplain later recounted, was a big encouragement to the dissenter: virtually the sole encouragement he received from the Church.

Ultimately he was guillotined. And rightly so, was the thinking in his village and newly recreated , postwar Austria.

Jagerstatter’s story remained something of a secret until an American sociologist, writer and pacifist named Gordon Zahn learned of him while researching a controversial book titled German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control, published in 1962 It was condemned by the German and Austrian Churches even before its release. Zahn discovered that after Hitler’s rise to power and crackdown on Catholic dissent, there was virtually no Church opposition to Nazi militarism and to Hitler’s foreign wars.

Individual Catholics and the Church hierarchy ignored the Church’s just war teaching requiring Catholics to oppose unjust wars. The Church did oppose Hitler’s shutting down of Catholic institutions such as seminaries and schools, and its policy of euthanizing the unfit, but faced with war, the Church urged loyalty and patriotism first. In 1962, the Church was making much of what opposition it did show to Hitler, and did not welcome Zahn’s exposure.

However, when Zahn decided to devote his next book to the exception that did not prove the rule, Jagerstatter, the Church was at least open to it. Jagerstatter’s example became an inspiration at the Second Vatican Council to a much stronger support for conscientious objection. Zahn’s book, pointedly titled In Solitary Witness, was published in 1967. Public opinion, even in his village, softened towards him enough to add his name to the cenotaph. His diocese eventually began examining him as a candidate for beatification.

The story raises the question, What if the Church had told all Catholics to resist? The answer seems clear: the German Church was incapable of such an instruction, so thoroughly was patriotism engrained in the German and Austrian psyches. The people in the pew would have simply thought the Church was deranged.

More power, more praise to Blessed Hanz Jagerstatter and his supportive wife, and to other Austrians like Sophie and Hans Scholl, who worked out their moral duty with God’s help only.

 

As Rainbow Gang Chants Outside, Speaker Debunks Pro-Castration Curriculum

By Steve Weatherbe

VICTORIA, B.C. , June 6, 2019 – B.C. education critic Jenn Smith finally got his say in British Columbia’s capital, delivering a devastating critique of the NDP government’s radical Sexual Orientation Gender Identity 123 curriculum supplement.

Several weeks ago he was prevented from delivering the same lecture by a mostly chanting and shouting crowd of several hundred strong SOGI 123 supporters  led in by provincial NDP vice-president Morgane Oger, outside the Oak Bay lecture venue. Police did nothing. Inside a smaller, fractious mob,  beribboned in the colours of the LGBTQ spectrum, simply yelled Smith down from a few feet away.

But this week the rebooted lecture went ahead in the City Light Church, where an audience of about 100 were protected  from several dozen yelling pro-SOGI-ites by a cordon of a  dozen Saanich police. The Oak Bay News immediately questioned the church’s tax-exempt status.

The fight is over the new ideology of Inclusion as promoted by the NDP government’s SOGI 123 public school maerial. It holds, first, that the sexes and genders are interchangeable, second, that any parent, school or church that argues otherwise is a “hater” and , third, that to oppose a child changing from male to female and vice versa is an act of “family violence” and will lead to suicide.

Smith condemned SOGI material as a propaganda effort to undermine the traditional family and worse.

“SOGI 123 is not Orwellian, it is post-Orwellian,” he told this reporter. As in George Orwell’s novel 1984, “where the State insisted that ‘peace is war,’ we are being told that male is female. And we are being required to say it and not to deny it.”

During the lengthy talk, Smith unleashed an avalanche of scholarly studies and forensic evidence to reveal the dangers of  SOGI 123 and of the push by legal, medical and school leaders to persuade BC children that biological males who identify as females can actually change into the other sex, and vice versa.

Ostensibly SOGI 123 is designed to prevent bullying of children with gender dysphoria This is the technical term for the psychological illness of believing oneself to belong to the opposite sex. Opposing SOGI 123 , its defenders claim, will lead to young gender dysphorics committing suicide.

To rebut this, Smith cited studies showing that across Canada in recent years after public schools have established  Gay Straight Alliances and other programs to promote tolerance of homosexuals and transgenders, nonetheless “suicide rates in school age youth have not gone down. They have gone up slightly.”

He showed video of parents who supported their childs’ transgendered desires, saying, “I’d rather have a live daughter, than a dead son.” Smith agreed that transgender youth have a suicide problem. However, it is not caused by their being bullied or thwarted in their desire to change sexes, he argued. According to Smith and the data he presented, gender dysphoria is frequently associated in psychological literature with other “co-morbid” psychological illnesses such as depression and, especially, autism.

Children with such illnesses are likely to be marginalized by their behaviour in school, leading to bullying on the one hand, and a resort to escapist behaviours such as gender dysphoria, and a vulnerability to confusing ideas such as gender fluidity—that changing one’s sex and gender is possible, even laudable.

Smith also noted that transgender youth may self-report suicide attempts at a much higher rate than non tg youth because they are hoping thereby to extract support from their parents to getting hormone blockers and cross sex hormones. He cited a Vancouver psychologist, Wallace Wong, who said publicly that tg youth pulled such “stunts” to get the drugs they wanted.

What’s more, Smith cited a long-term Swedish study of post operative male to female transgenders that shows they have a far higher suicide rate than the rest of the population, despite Swedish society being one of the most accepting societies in the world in terms of transgenders.  The implication is that getting their way does not solve the transgenders’ suicide problem because it does not address their underlying psychological issues, be they autism, depression, anxiety or schizophrenia.

Smith likened gender dysphoria to anorexia and displayed a picture of an anorexic girl’s midsection. Children with gender dysphoria are deluded just as anorexic children are, he said. They deserve treatment, not encouragement.

Anorexics could die of starvation, said Smith, but gender dysphorics could be rendered impotent by hormone blockers and cross-sex hormones, or their normal growth permanently impaired. Sometimes Male-to-Female transgenders are, in the case of males, castrated, and in the case of females willingly have their breasts removed. Later, if they have regrets, they cannot recover their sex-appropriate physical features.

Smith argued at the beginning of his lecture that propaganda consists not only of falsehoods that are told the public, but truths that are concealed from them. One such truths concealed is that most MtF transgenders retain their male genitals. This means that the MtF transgenders who the SOGI program says should be allowed in girls’ washrooms and change rooms will have their male genitals and sexual interest in females intact.

“Who is in the washroom with your six-year-old daughter?” he asked.

He cited two well-publicized cases of  two MtF sex offenders, one in the United Kingdom, named Karen White,  who recently sexually attacked fellow inmates in a women’s prison, and an earlier one in Toronto of sex offender Christopher Hambrook, who  molested women he was sharing a bedroom with in a women’s shelter.

The truth is not only being withheld, it is being suppressed, he said. He cited the case of a British feminist Posey Parker, whose billboard carrying the dictionary definition of “woman” was condemned as a hate crime and removed.

He also described the celebrated, recent case of the BC man who opposed his  13-year-old daughter’s being administered testosterone by the BC Children’s Hospital. When he took the hospital to court, he not only lost, but was ordered by the judge never to speak to his daughter, or to anyone else about his her, except as the boy she insisted she was. To use even female pronouns in reference to his daughter would be an act of “family violence” potentially leading to charges.

Smith also recounted how Christian crusader Bill Whatcott was fined $55,000 by the BC Human Rights Commission for describing NDP Vice President and candidate Morgane Oger as a “biological male and transvestite,” during the last provincial election.

Furthermore, Smith himself lost his Twitter account for campaigning about transgender issues and SOGI 123.

While defenders of SOGI claim its goal is to prevent bullying, Smith counter-claimed that its real purpose is to actively promote gender fluidity upon confused and vulnerable children. He cited SOGI classroom materials that require students to go to the front of their classroom and in front of their classmates place themselves on a `gender line`between two boxes chalked on the board, one reading “I am male” and the other, “I am female.” He added, “They aren’t allowed to put their names in the boxes,only between them.”

Another SOGI-recommended material for SOGI is the book, “I am Jazz,” about and ostensibly co-written by celebrated MtF transgender Jazz Jennings. In it Jazz claims, “I have a female brain” inside a “male body.”

This is intended to “confuse and indoctrinate” school children into believing they can choose to be the opposite sex. People born with male biology have unmistakably male chromosones throughout their body, Smith insisted. Nobody can have female brains and male bodies.

Smith also showed slides showing various medical specialists supporting so-called sex change therapy to make the case they get financial support from major hormone makers such as Abbvie. One Powerpoint slide showed Abbvie making $1.3 billion each year  from two drugs used for so-called sex-change therapy.

Smith told this reporter, “we are setting a precedent here if the state can force us to say that a man is a woman.” Soon Christian parents will face children sent home with sexual doctrines they oppose, with the potential of dividing families. “It’s not Orwellian. It’s post-Orwellian.”

Comment:

 Post Orwellian indeed. We all know Orwell coined the term “newspeak” to cover how the government of England  described in 1984,  would generate lies and claim them to be true. Thenn it would say the opposite and claim that was the truth. But his England of 1984 was based on the Soviet Union of the mid-century. There yesterday`s heroes were erased from Communist Party histories by diligent librarians and children were indeed encouraged at school to inform on their parents when the uttered anti-regime comments

The totalitarian state cannot tolerate independent thinking. Today`s Communist China is jailing Muslims and Falun Gong believers and extracting organs for transplant from prisoners facing death sentences. Christian churches are being bulldozed.

In Greater Victoria, advocates for the state religion of Inclusion are urging Saanich municipal council to removal the tax exemption on church property if the church can`t pass an inclusion test. Federal summer intern grants for charities to employ students in their work are already tied to inclusion tests that bans Christian organizations opposed to abortion or other aspects of “the spirit of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

This use of the property tax exemption, which is at the discretion of municipalities only for property upon which the church does not sit, to frighten churches into silence, will surely be expanded. Next will be the tax on property under the church itself—this is now automatically granted by provincial law. As such, it would  only take an amendment by the legislature controlled by the New Democrats to remove this exemption.

After that, there is the income tax exemption under federal law. It extends to churches and charities, but only if they stay clear of politics. Prolife groups which campaign for restrictions on abortion cannot get this exemption, for example. How long will it be before a Liberal or NDP or Green government/ coalition decides the test for this exemption should be inclusivity “under the spirit of the Charter.” This would mean that a church or non-profit that did not endorse abortion, gender fluidity or homosexuality would be taxed. At the same time, donors to these churches or parachurch organizations would lose the tax deduction on their gifts.

All in the name of Inclusion, the new state religion. (see a previous blog to read about the old state religion, which is the Compact Theory of Confederation.)

Against the totalitarian premise behind Inclusion, is a fundamental premise of pluralism, which ought to be the guiding principle of our Canadian democracy but isn’t. It holds that  having different independent sources of ideas about the public interest is itself in the public interest. The content of their ideas doesn’t matter so much as the existence of different generators of content. The free press and news media that are independent of government and each other, independent churches, independent judiciary, independent universities, discrete federal states within a nation, competing political parties, private and public schools, and the principle that parents are the first educators of their own children—these are all building blocks of pluralism.

In the case of Jenn Smith’s lecture, and by implication, the case of the BC father forbidden to talk of his daughter as a female, we have seen freedom of religion threatened by a newspaper and a mob, both doing the government’s bidding; we have seen the government using emotional blackmail with the suicide card to silence its critics, we have seen the “hate card” played again and again by local politicians. We have seen Orwellian newspeak enforced by courts. We have seen the primacy of the nuclear family undermined by medical, educational and legal elites.

Why has the legal profession become the leading advocate for inclusion– hat they would call human rights? It is a blatant example of corruption. Lawyers, law professors and the judges they become have been seduced by power. Formerly the protectors and administrators of the law, they have become its masters. Because every law passed legislators is now subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—as arbitrated subjectively by judges—the legal profession has supplanted Parliament. Only a handful of lawyers, professors and judges now believes that our Charter and our Constitution mean what they say. Under the self-serving doctrine of “the living tree” our judges now decide for themselves—and for all of us—what these fundamental documents mean.

But the creepiest part of the inclusion push is that, while it is the NDP government promoting it, any opposition to it is being suppressed by the lawless rabbles who crashed Jenn Smith`s first lecture attempt in Oak Bay, led by an NDP vice president. And that boutique community`s leadership supported the state religion of inclusion by simply ordering its police force to stand by and let the lecture crashers have their way.

So hats off to Saanich and its police force, with an assist, we hear, from the Victoria force, for defending our hard-earned civil rights. And hats off to the City of Light Church for the courage it showed and to the Canadian Christian Lobby for championing Smith and the safety of children.  As for Oak Bay, its council and its pretend police force,  and as for the Fernwood Community Centre, which signed a contract to host Smith and reneged at the first sign of criticism, I shake off my sandals.

 

 

Irony, Bullying and a Do-Nothing Oak Bay ‘Police Force’

The Jenn Smith Debacle

Irony and Bullying were the themes on display at the lecture that never happened in Oak Bay last week, due to the negligence of the police force that so daintily serves the boutique citylette on Victoria’s doorstep. “No call is too small” is its motto. It ought to go on, “But some are way,way too big.”

The bullies were a yelling, screaming and intimidating gaggle of young ruffians of all genders and their target was small group of mostly senior citizens who had come to hear a lecture by Jenn Smith on SOGI. SOGI stands for the Sexual Orientation Gender Identity component being inserted into public school programs.

The irony is that the bullies were full of hate as they called anti-SOGI lecturer Jenn Smith a “hater” and his audience “white supremacists”. The double irony is that SOGI’s ostensible purpose is to prevent bullying. The triple irony is the pro-SOGI protesters were using violence and fear tactics to prevent the lecture. The quadruple irony is that the young screamers frequently screamed that SOGI would save the lives of children.

However, people are opposed to SOGI motivated by sincere concern for children. First, they believe that SOGI will achieve its goals by normalizing homosexual behaviour and transgenderism. Transgenderism is the conviction that a person born male physically can actually be a woman, can so declare himself or herself, and demand that the world treats her or him as if this were so. SOGI will encourage children to believe themselves transgendered.

Second, opponents of SOGI believe transgenderism is dangerous to the person with this belief, which used to be called gender dysphoria. This delusion, similar to anorexia, used to be treated with psychotherapy. Now  doctors, psychiatrists and leftwing judges scramble over each other in their rush to remove body parts and fill the child’s body with wrong-sex hormones. Gender dysphorics are akin to anorexics.  But we do not leap to encourage anorexics to starve themselves.

Gender dysphoria is similar: an underlying mental illness such as depression or severe anxiety expressing itself in self-body hatred. Critics of SOGI believe that encouraging tolerance for transgender children will also encourage their peers to interpret their own emotional distress as being born in the “wrong” body.

Male to female transgenders may opt for castration, with plastic surgery to mold the remnants into semi-functional female genitals. Female to Males will have their breasts removed and their own genital surgery to create a much less functional facsimile of the male organ.

So the final irony: what is the greater danger? Mutilation or bullying. But the bullying could lead to suicide, cry the LGBT advocates. The evidence is in from  long-term studies of Scandinavian men who have had so-called sex-change surgery to appear as women. They have far higher suicide rates than those with gender dysphoria who do not opt for surgery. An higher than the general population.

Almost certainly this is because their underlying mental condition—depression, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia—went untreated while they put their hopes for relief in changing their sex.

You can look it up at womanmeanssomething.com, a Canadian Christian clearing house for dissenters from the transgender ideology.

As a postscript some vignettes. As I took pictures of some protesters carrying signs, a little female protester imperiously screamed in my ear: “You can’t take their picture without their permission.”

So I patiently explained that a protester at a public event was fair game for a photographer. She made the “blah, blah,blah” sign by repeatedly opening her hand and closing it to indicate that my words didn’t matter. “You mean, in one ear and out the other,” I responded. She yelled, “Get the f***k out of here.” There were a dozen conversations going on around the room like this. It was like trying to explain the UN Rights of the Child to , well, a child.

SOmeone I know  in her seventies said to a young but quiet protester next to her, “I appreciate that you are keeping quiet so I can hear the speaker.” The woman responded, “F***k you.” And so it went.

 

 

Why Canada’s Civic Religion Caused the SNC Lavalin Scandal

By Steve Weatherbe

 

We all have heard of the United States’ civic or civil religion, which involves the invocation of God at public events, the use of the phrase “you are in our thoughts and prayers” in public expressions of sympathy for flood victims, the veneration of past leaders, and a vague belief that America is the Promised Land.

But what is Canada’s civil religion? It is, of course, the Compact Theory of Confederation, the higher good for which any crime can be committed. The Compact Theory is the belief, held especially strongly by the Liberal Party of Canada, that Canada came about from a compact between the  Anglo Scottish Protestant majority in the Ontario portion of what was then the British colony of Canada, and the Franco-Catholic majority in the Quebec portion of Canada.

To break free of the deadlock these “two Solitudes” found themselves in, also to resist American Manifest Destiny, the French and English Canadian politicians put down their swords and agreed to make Canada into a federation that would preserve each other’s ethnic/ religious character from interference by the other, forever. The Maritimes were drawn in to give the federation more economic clout, but the essential deal was to preserve the two cultures in two provinces.

Western Canada’s provinces are seen as the offspring of this fruitful union. Their role is to make the sacrifices necessary to preserve it, and of course, to supply raw materials (watch for my upcoming , jaw-dropping column on “the Laurentian Thesis”) The Compact is, simply, sacred, though rarely spoken of. It is the highest value for the politicians and bureaucrats—the elite—from Ontario and Quebec who run the government and the Liberal Party. It is why the Liberals alternate Francophone and Anglophone leaders. It is why the infamous CF-18  maintenance contract went to a Quebec firm and not a Manitoba one back in 1986, and probably why a big naval contract just now went to Quebec firm and not a Maritimes one.

So when Liberal politicos and hacks bombarded Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould about SNC Lavalin jobs being at risk, she missed the surtext: these were not job-jobs, these were Quebec jobs. I’m sorry, Jody, what part of  Quebec jobs don’t you get? That is, sacred jobs necessary to secure Confederation from the threat of Quebec unhappiness leading to separation.

Wilson-Raybould marches to a different drum, of course. She not only comes from the West coast, she is a Liberal party newcomer, and her civil religion is centred on the use of the law to further native rights.

I get the Compact. It is surely a good thing that two cultures that had been at war on and off for decades politically and before that militarily were, in 1867, able to agree on forming a voluntary political union. O Canada!

But do we have to sacrifice the integrity of the legal system to it? Given that those Quebec jobs secure not only the holy Compact, but ongoing Liberal control of Canada with all the perqs and quarks that this entails, shouldn’t we be just a little cautious about invoking the Compact.

Unfortunately, history teaches that pandering to Quebec is a politically profitable move. It is why the Liberal Party has governed Canada for most of our history. When the Tories have unwisely taken punitive action (hanging Louis Riel “though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour”), bringing in conscription in World War One essentially to dragoon Quebeckers into the war effort, they have swiftly been punished in the polls, and for a long time.

So while other candidates for Canada’s civil religion such as environmentalism and human rights grab headlines, the Confederation Compact runs quietly on, invisibly directing the hands of Canada’s leadership.