Edward Norman on modern religion

Time to repost some wonderfully good quotations from the great Edward Norman, my favourite living historian and religious commentator. I wish I had met him for more than a quarter of an hour.

"The age is described by welfare: it occupies the space for sacral values once filled by the churches. Indeed the neo-Puritanism of the times promotes welfare considerations as exclusively important."

"Extraordinarily enough, the leaders of the Church manage to identify the present welfare idealism - which is based in Humanist materialism - as fundamental Christianity, an application of the love of neighbour enjoined by Christ. But preoccupation with material welfare, whatever higher considerations may become attached to it, cultivates worldliness, and is an enemy of authentic faith."

"The Churches themselves, in fact, have rushed to acclaim the new humanism - the `caring society - as the very essence of Christianity. But it is actually quite pagan, concentrating as it does on the merely worldly needs of people in a way which is plainly contrary to the renunciations indicated in the teachings of Christ. This is not an academic matter. For when Christians identify the present secular enthusiasm for humanity as basic Christianity - the love of neighbour - they are in reality acclaiming and legitimising their own replacement."

"Through contact with liberal and Christian values the other world religions were sanitised and made acceptable to Western sensibilities: widows were no longer incinerated alive on their husbands funeral pyres, and the way was opened for that late-20th-century phenomenon, the Western idealising of Oriental religiosity, beads and mantras in Californian condominiums."

Divine retribution in the blogosphere

Is Hurricane Sandy 'God's revenge for the refusal of the US government to take action on the climate crisis'? Or because Mitt and Obama are 'a pro-homosexual Mormon and a pro-abortion/homosexual Muslim'? Hard to call.

Actually, I do not think it has anything to do with any of these things or any kind of punishment but I do not see why people should not think so, as they always did in the past. Dryden, for example, wrote his wonderful Annus Mirabilis to refute the idea that the Great Plague and Great Fire of London were God's judgment on Londoners and by implication on the reign of King Charles II. 

Of course, it is far-fetched and richly comic to say that God permitted the September 11th outrages because of widespread homosexuality in the USA, as Jerry Falwell did, but I was shocked that the hellfire preacher aroused such anger for saying so - everyone in America seemed furious with him and he apologised. Though, of course, why single out homosexuality not divorce or materialism or violence or a thousand other possible reasons? Mr Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, thought September 11th was a punishment for racism. And so it goes. 

By contrast, in England, acts of God somehow seem to be considered, even by devout Christians, purely a term of art from the insurance industry. English Christians sometimes even refuse to believe that God causes natural disasters or illnesses, which goes along with what Jonathan Meades meant when, speaking of modern British church architecture, he referred to 'the idea of God, the awfully nice bloke.' Romanians have a much clearer idea that God is very immanent and to be feared as well as loved.

If hundreds of people die in the hurricane, presumably this might will help Mr. Romney. I suspect that some people, including American defence and tobacco company executives, who stand to gain from a Romney victory, are calculating that it might be the October surprise that decides the election.

Charles Moore is one of the greatest living Englishmen

Charles Moore today in the Daily Telegraph:

The concept of life itself has warped. People who go white with rage at the idea of any restriction on the abortion of human foetuses get even more beside themselves at any killing of wild animals by human beings.

In last Saturday's paper:

On Thursday, I listened to the BBC News at seven in the morning after the first of the Obama/Romney US presidential debates three hours earlier. The report of the debate was only the third item on the news. So I knew, without having to hear any more, that Mitt Romney must have won. If Mr Obama had come out on top, the BBC would have led with the story.

Charles Moore is my favourite journalist, now that Frank Johnson and Alan Watkins are dead. I love him even more then Rod Liddle, Michael White, Peter York  and Matthew Parris. I loved him too in the 1980s, when I shared his Tory premises but passionately disagreed with the Thatcherite conclusions he drew from them. Then I thought he was the Thatcherite zeitgeist but someone truly said of him that all the causes he has associated himself with have lost: the union with Northern Ireland; Euroscepticism; free market economics; hunting.

His best and saddest article is this one, from last year, entitled 

Will there always be an England, whatever the origin of its people?

America is no longer a Protestant country

Two enormously significant milestones in 24 hours for the U.S.A. 

First, America is no longer a Protestant country. The end of an old song. 




I am a Catholic, yet am sad, though I was expecting America, the only industrial country which is intensely religious, to become slowly secular. She will thereby be gravely weakened. The future for America looks European and this means wisdom, sophistication and decline. I am much more saddened by this than by the economic statistics showing America losing ground to China. Economics is in itself unimportant - economics reflects culture which reflects, in the broadest sense of the idea, religion (and genetics). In no country have religion, self-belief and sense of purpose always been as closely linked as in America, founded though she was by Deists, with church and state strictly separated. 

As Margaret Thatcher said: "Economics is just the method. I want to change people's souls."

It is a mistake, by the way, to confound American Protestants with the religious right.  There is also a smaller but still large and influential religious left and most American churchgoers are not in either camp. And religious conservatism is found in both parties. Black voters who mostly vote Democrat have voted down homosexual marriage in California. But there is an anti-religious strain in the Democrats and the American Left which is becoming more visible.

To Europeans, American religiosity seems odd. First because Americans, despite being proverbially rich and modern, take religion seriously, including those who do not believe. Second because, while few countries are more religious, none is less mystical. And few countries are more violent, more exuberantly keen on making money or more relaxed about divorce or sex generally. American Christianity is very Old Testament. Nevertheless, this very muscular, very individualistic Christianity is what gives America her self-belief. Victor Frankl learnt in Auschwitz that what gives an individual the strength to endure is the belief that his life has a meaning. This is true of societies too, which are made up of individuals.

The second milestone is a new Gallup poll today that finds that, for the first time, most Americans believe that the government should "not favor any set of values" rather than promoting traditional ones. Until 2004, a majority favoured the promotion of traditional values, and since then, the numbers have been in flux. A slim 52 percent majority now say that "the government should be values-neutral".

Most of that 52% do not in fact want government to be values-neutral. They want government to enforce all sorts of values like sexual and racial equality, just not traditional ones. I should add that I am not sure what traditional values are, and perhaps it is not important to know, though marriage between two people of the same sex is certainly not one of them.

Many of the 52% are 'Millenials'. I was interested to read an American demographer the same day saying that: 

"Millennials say the role of government is to be our parent. Parents set rules. " 

An interesting analogy that suggests that young Americans have been infantilised by the state like West Europeans.


The small-town Protestant America which elected Ronald Reagan is losing ground rather fast. This, rather than economic statistics, makes me think that America is starting to decline. It might be a nicer, fairer and more interesting place in decline, like Canada, which is in a much worse state. We shall see.

In twenty or thirty years, the USA will also no longer be a white majority country. Many Americans I learned recently, from the BBC, do not speak English. Everything flows and this tide is flowing quickly. 

'Oh, see the happy moron' and other quotations

Doubtfully attributed to, but surely not by, Dorothy Parker:

Oh, see the happy moron;

He doesn't give a damn.

I wish I were a moron.

My God, perhaps I am.

Authorship also unclear:

The rain falls on the just

And on the unjust fella,

But more upon the just because

The unjust stole the just's umbrella

1980s Romanian joke

Listener: Is it possible to foretell the future?
Radio Yerevan: Yes. We can predict the future with complete accuracy. It is only the past that keeps changing.

E.B. White

"There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something ….Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion."

Hedy Lamarr 

"American men, as a group, seem to be interested in only two things, money and breasts. It seems a very narrow outlook."

Coriolanus:

"Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy: mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men. "

Brideshead Revisited

 "We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes."

Clarke Kant

The same people that get excited by Mitt Romney also get excited by Argyle socks.

Charles Moore

On Thursday, I listened to the BBC News at seven in the morning after the first of the Obama/Romney US presidential debates three hours earlier. The report of the debate was only the third item on the news. So I knew, without having to hear any more, that Mitt Romney must have won. If Mr Obama had come out on top, the BBC would have led with the story.

 Mark Steyn

"Modern 'liberalism' is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of 'tolerance' are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to 'celebrate diversity' coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity." 

 Thomas Sowell

 "I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."  

Jerzy Kosinski

"I detest the dismissal of the true drama of our life by the emissaries of the popular culture."

The philopsophers 

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. ~ Socrates

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough. ~ Seneca

In order to improve the mind, we ought less learn than to contemplate. ~ Descartes

The superior man makes the difficulty to be overcome his first interest; success only comes later. ~ Confucius

 To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead. Bertrand Russell

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. ~ William James

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself. ~ Cicero

By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man. Immanuel Kant


What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes. ~ Cicero

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy. Immanuel Kant


I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer. ~ Nietzsche


There can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of one man should be subject to the will of another. Immanuel Kant

It is good that I did not let myself be influenced. Wittgenstein

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile. Bertrand Russell 

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Immanuel Kant

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness. ~Bertrand Russell

People are unconsciously aware that the customs of society embody more wisdom than could emerge in a single generation. Roger Scruton

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. Bertrand Russell

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness. Bertrand Russell

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. — Bertrand Russell. 

Not sure about the last one. Stupid people are more often right than the clever people and do very little harm compared with the philosophers.