Something my Brother and I (more or less) Agreed About - but see how different the reception is

Many of my enemies love to tell me how vilely inferior I am to my late brother. In fact  about 20% of the messages I receive on Twitter, the well-known left-wing electronic mob, are based on this position. I must admit that when I first encountered this I was a bit distressed, but now view it much as I view delayed trains, or the slowness of computers – a dreary but unavoidable part of life.

 

Sometimes I wonder why they go to such lengths to be publicly unpleasant to a complete stranger. I should have thought it was quite enough to tell me that I am vile, without making this comparison as well. I tend to suspect that these are virulent atheist fanboys and fangirls of my sibling, who are secretly enraged that a) I knew him far better than they can ever hope to and that b) I disagreed with him .

 

The reason for their worship is not hard to workout. Half-educated college students, freed for the first time from the direct influence of their parents and religious pastors, were overjoyed to find that their instinctive hatred for God and Christianity was being expressed so eloquently and combatively by an obviously intelligent, witty and educated person.

 

This is usually why we admire certain people in public life, because they tell us what we think we know already, or what we think we believe, but put it better than we can.

 

 

The instinctive hatred arose from a simple conflict, imbued in most young western people, but especially strong among Americans, because of the lingering power of Christianity in their world. All westerners are brought up with some sort of generally altruistic belief, though only in the USA is it so specifically religious.

 

But they are also brought up with strong examples, in their own lives, those of their parents and teachers,  and the lives of prominent rock and showbiz personalities, of powerful , successful and enjoyable selfishness, often righteously justified by the almost universal belief that we own our own bodies and nobody else has any right to tell us what to do with them.

 

Against the nagging of conscience, they feel the need to shout and sneer, and love to see it done.

 

I don’t think these people would hate me half as much if I too were a selfist atheist. It’s a good rule that you generally hate in other people what you dislike most in yourself, and these people, still troubled by the increasingly feeble whisperings of a half-developed conscience, loathe me for expressing openly a doubt they wish to suppress.

 

That’s why, at my famous debate with my brother at Grand Rapids, Michigan, the fact that I opposed the Iraq War and he supported it did not cause any of the audience to love me. My belief in God was the bit that mattered.

 

The left wear various fashionable causes, opposition to wars being one of them. But these are not real passions, mere declarations of faith for the sake of form. I say ‘wear’ because these are superficial things, easily cast off. The real passion is self-love.

 

But the short film I append below shows just how problematic this can be.  In it, my brother says much that I would agree with about women.

 

Had I said this in a public forum (and in fact I wouldn’t use terms such as ‘the gentle sex’ or ‘I’m not having any woman of mine going to work’. But ‘they can if they like, but they don’t have to’ pretty much sums up my view), I would have been subjected to cold fury, severe heckling, repeated angry interruption and hostile derision.  If you doubt this look at what happened on ABC’s ‘Q&A’ when I said that women were better than men at bringing up small children). No doubt, as I kept my temper and stayed calm during this storm of hatred, I would have been accused of being ‘charmless’ and ‘having no sense of humour’. All I can say is that it’s easy being charming in response to friendly, admiring questioning, not so easy with the other thing.

 

But my brother’s interviewer ( I don’t know who she is, but the encounter seems to be in the Antipodes) simply refuses to believe that this is what he actually thinks, and tries repeatedly to get him to say what she thinks that he must really think, suggesting that he is being ‘ironic’ or joking or teasing so many times that it becomes embarrassing.  I can promise her, being intimately familiar with his facial expressions and use of tones of voice, that he absolutely meant what he said.

 

But in the end, she forgives him the heresy even though, in her eloquent and carefully reasoned critique of his position (she declares ’It’s wrong!’), she makes it plain she deeply disapproves. And that, I submit, is because his opinions on God versus the Self override any failures to conform to the standard left-wing opinion on anything else.  Please watch

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpA7pfR0FIc&app=desktop