Barrel Strength

I am bored stiff with Canadian politics and I suspect you are too. Indeed I am bored with US politics. The global warming scare is fizzling out. The outcomes on several fronts are predictable and they work,  in general, towards conservative aims and outcomes. The only uncertain issue, in the grand strategic sense, is whether we will be forcibly Islamized in 25 years, or not.

Glorious Leader Harper moves the jello which makes up this country to the right, and any change he can make below the level of public discussion he makes, and any change requiring public discussion he does not make. Thus immigration and refugee policy can get fixed by administrative action, but the Human Rights Commissions march onward until they meet their deserved fate: ignominy and dismantlement. But not now.

Obama continues to screw up at his own pace, stiffing his allies and appeasing our enemies.  He will be punished at the mid-terms in spectacular fashion, and the issue is whether he will be considered worse than Jimmy Carter, or slightly better. I already have several bets out that he is a one-term President and I see no sign that my money is at risk.

Free-speech issues, which are really substitutes for the Islamic issue, are now being engaged, and they will play out over years. Sensible people  are not always winning them, but we are engaging a larger segment of society in the necessary discussions of race, class, religion, intelligence distribution, and why they cannot be discussed in frank terms.   The free-speech issues are important because they mark the boundaries that leftists want to put on freedom of discussion in the West, which is to say: they want to end it entirely for everyone, possibly including themselves. And, just as they did in the days of Communism, there is always a large contingent of leftists who hate liberal constitutional democracy and their own culture more than they fear the outside threat.

Only in the case of Islam, the threat is now inside the house, because of senseless immigration policies.

The Muslim issue is the new Communism. The same issues ae being asked. What is communism?Are there  really such people as communists? What do they intend towards us? Have they infiltrated our governments?

Islam is resuming  a thousand three hundred year long battle with everyone else, after a pause when their political arrangements (the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary pirates) were crushed.

The same sorts of naivety, enthusiasm, folly, intimidation, appeasement, infiltration and refusal to discuss the matter are occurring in relation to Islam as occurred in relation Communism.

The collapse of Christianity is leaving a vast spiritual vacuum in the West, and the Muslims are merely filling it.

Thus it was with great pleasure I turned this past Easter weekend from secular concerns to Jesus’ really bad day upon the cross, and to a brilliant, deeply learned, and well thought out book by the San Francisco philosopher and historian of religion, Jacob Needleman, whose What is God? counts among the 30 most important books I have read.

I thought it would be one of those duty-books that I occasionally read because, like broccoli, they are good for me, though dry and distasteful. Nothing of the sort. It caught me from the opening pages of childhood recollection, and continued straight through to the end, opening larger and deeper vistas. (His description of his boundless loathing, as a young Jewish man, for Saint Augustine aroused in me nothing but sympathy, and outright laughter, as he burns every page of The City of God one evening in outrage).

Needleman’s book leads through a painless and engaged  discussion of western philosophy and religious thinking to spiritual pratices and thence to an exposition of the thought of George Gurdjieff and his followers.

I have bought two copies of “What is God?” to lend to my children and friends, and I have just ordered a dozen books on Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, John Sinclair (Lord Pentland), Jeanne de Salzman and the other disciples.

Jacob Needleman’s “What is God?” is a tonic for your soul. You have one, you know, and it needs exercise and refreshment. It is a good guide to begin thinking about the question because, as he says, the answer to “who is God?” is entirely bound up with the question “who are you?”. And I am  more concerned with those two questions than I am with any other at this time.

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An engaging on-line resource of writing by Gurdjieff’s disciples can be found at http://books.google.ca/books?id=oyZ14dBwIZMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gurdjieff&source=bl&ots=D0EsZqpKq6&sig=NqoXKG0W5l_DWFI-vw4gCghG7HE&hl=en&ei=ZlG_S42JFMH78Aai0az8CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=17&ved=0CDUQ6AEwEA#v=onepage&q&f=false