© Roger M Tagg 2009 - 2011
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
These highlights are arranged in three separate lists, namely Villains, Heroes and Best Quotes. I have, as will be obvious, made my own selection and my best interpretation of Wheen's thinking.
In this first list, the entries are instances where Wheen felt that the person (or group) named had indulged in Mumbo-jumbo (for whatever purposes, political or personal). "BS" here stands for Bullshit".
| Wheen Villain | Page | Fallacy/BS Category | Wheen's Accusation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coalition Against Civilisation | 8 | Turning clock back | Even the rise of agriculture has distanced us from nature, and creates differences that enable some people to impose their way on others |
| Jeane Kirkpatrick | 12 | Double standards | Justified Reagan in supporting right-wing totalitarian regimes, but not left-wing regimes, totalitarian or otherwise |
| Arthur Laffer | 18 | Pseudo science / rationalism | Claimed reducing tax rates would inevitably lead to more government revenue |
| Ronald Reagan | 20 | Confused fact with fantasy | Said he'd been present at the liberation of Nazi death camps |
| Ronald Reagan | 123 | Confused fact with fantasy | Checked every major decision with a Californian astrologer (Joan Quigley) |
| Margaret Thatcher | 25 | Double standards | Claimed the credit for defeating the miners' strike, while at the same time advocating government non-interference, saying it was all up to Coal Board management |
| Margaret Thatcher | 182 | Double standards | Encouraged Afghan resistance fighter Abdul Haq despite his confession to not caring about killing women and children, at the same time as castigating Irish terrorists |
| Margaret Thatcher | 208 | Selective blindness | Said there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families, not considering the good that people do for each other |
| Margaret Thatcher | 234 | Double standards | Supported Pinochet, despite his brutal military dictatorship - and his regime proving that a market economy doesn't mean no government intervention |
| Tom Peters | 62 | Guru's hubris | Claimed to understand "excellence" but the companies he thought abysmal did better than those he thought excellent |
| Francis Fukuyama | 67 | Selective blindness | Claimed the end of history, i.e. the end of mankind's ideological evolution, ignoring Naziism, Communism and two world wars as insignificant |
| Samuel Huntington | 73 | Selective blindness | Clash of civilisations, with arbitrary boundaries, ignoring clashes within nations |
| Michel Foucault | 84 | Double standards | Despite deploring grand narratives, and supporting relativism, admired Khomeini's Iranian theocracy, despite its suppression of all dissent |
| Gilles Deleuze | 87 | Pseudo science / rationalism | Incomprehensible pseudo-logical argument |
| Luce Irigaray | 88 | Pseudo science / rationalism | Denounced Einstein's e=mc2 as a "sexed equation" |
| Jacques Lacan | 88 | Pseudo science / rationalism | Proposed nonsense mathematics to justify deconstructionism |
| Julia Kristeva | 94 | Pseudo science / rationalism | Referred erroneously to mathematics which she did not understand |
| Paul de Man | 96 | Pseudo science / rationalism | Having previously written anti-semitic material, tried to exonerate himself and other anti-semites by saying we can't judge whether past events were fact or fiction |
| David Irving | 97 | Selective blindness | Claimed "No Jews were gassed in Auschwitz" - despite lots of evidence |
| Paul Feyerabend | 102 | Selective blindness | Claimed that science and reason were just as much a matter of choice as myth and religion - again regarding evidence as unimportant |
| George W Bush | 104 | Double standards | Attacked relativists for saying nothing is right or wrong, true or false, but said the jury is still out on Darwinian evolution |
| Al Gore | 194-5 | Confused fact with fantasy | Made up heart-rending but untrue personal emotional experiences |
| Al Gore | 197 | Double standards | Accepted campaign money from the tobacco lobby, but peddled sob stories about suffering caused by tobacco-based lung cancer |
| Wm Jennings Bryan | 109 | Sidestep to emotion issue | Depicted the defence in the Scopes trial as wanting to "try revealed religion" |
| HL Mencken | 111 | Selective blindness | Claimed popularity of bunkum was only to be expected of the lower orders - despite the evidence that many in the higher orders were just as susceptible |
| Tony Blair | 114 | Double standards | Warned against a "retreat into a culture of unreason", at the same time advocating creationism as an alternative to Darwinian evolution as "good for choice" |
| Tony Blair | 165 | Selective blindness | After 9-11 claimed that religion was the solution, not the problem, as Jews, Christians and Muslims are all "children of Abraham" |
| Jodi Dean | 116 | Selective blindness | "Argument, thought by some to be an important part of the process of democracy, is futile, perhaps because democracy can bring about Holocaust" |
| Cherie Blair | 129-30 | Double standards | Professed devout Catholicism, at the same time dabbling in multiple New Age cults and practices |
| Samuel Hahnemann | 134 | Pseudo science / rationalism | Advocated the "law of infinitesimals" - despite no evidence and failure in all tests |
| Joachim of Fiore | 150 | Pseudo science / rationalism | Found a concealed message in the Book of Revelation, claiming the culmination of history would happen between 1200 and 1260 - of course it didn't |
| Michael Drosnin | 152 | Pseudo science / rationalism | Said that a hidden code in the Bible predicted every event in history - The UK's Daily Mail ran a series on it - but it failed to predict the death of Princess Diana, and quickly pulled the series afterwards |
| Christopher Hill | 155 | Selective blindness | Praised English 1650s extreme cults advocating violence to achieve the millennium; deplored them being referred to as a "lunatic fringe" as they may be saner than society |
| Eric Hobsbawm | 155 | Confused fact with fantasy | Thought that the modern version of millenarian sects could be justified as helping the path to communism, but most were ultra conservative |
| Joan W Anderson | 156 | Confused fact with fantasy | Brought angels into explanations of real-life events, but claimed that they would only help those who obeyed the law (presumably US law) |
| HC Moolenburgh | 157 | Confused fact with fantasy | Welfare state takes away our incentive to pray; if we prayed, God would send his servants to supply our needs |
| Pat Robertson | 161 | Double standards | TV evangelist who funded corrupt and totalitarian dictators if they happened to profess an approved Christian sect |
| Pat Buchanan | 162 | Selective blindness | Named Kissinger and others as Jews acting in US as Israel's agents in encouraging support for the Gulf War, but omitted to name any non-Jewish hawks |
| Pat Buchanan | 163 | Double standards | Strongly supported Ayatollah's fatwa against Salman Rushdie rather than freedom of expression - justifying murder in the name of fundamentalism |
| James Bucher | 170 | Scapegoat / bogeyman tactic | Tried to work up emotional antipathy to Japan after the fall of the Iron Curtain |
| Douglas Hurd | 177 | Double standards | Preferred an uneven killing field in Bosnia in which one side would get slaughtered, rather than a balance of arms that might have brought a stand-off |
| Jerry Falwell | 161 | Confused fact with fantasy | "Whoever stands against Israel stands against God" - justified by predicting that at the millennium all Jews would convert to Christianity |
| Jerry Falwell | 183 | Selective blindness | Said that carnage on 9-11 was God's wrath at pagans, abortionists, lesbians, secularisers - Pat Robertson agreed |
| Alasdair Macintyre | 186 | Selective blindness | Thinks the Enlightenment has been a catastrophe, and we would be better off going back to Middle Ages style monaticism |
| John Gray | 187 | Selective blindness | Thinks the Enlightenment has been a catastrophe, and we would be better off going for oriental mysticism (but he keeps changing his mind) |
| Theodor Adorno & Mark Horkheimer | 191 | Selective blindness | Claimed that the Enlightenment was the cause of genocidal tyranny, based on many false premises |
| Ali McGraw | 199 | Confused fact with fantasy | Claimed to be a recovering alcoholic but was probably just angling for publicity to raise her flagging profile |
| Rupert Murdoch | 231 | Double standards | Described his media empire as freedom's greatest messenger, but kowtowed to Chinese censorship, including ditching Chris Patten's memoirs |
| William Rees Mogg | 232-3 | Double standards | Eulogised Jiang Zemin's humanity and respect for religious beliefs, despite a recent report on severe Chinese violations of religious freedom, not to mention Falun Gong |
| Thomas L Friedman | 240-1 | Selective blindness | Only rule is "one dollar one vote" and US should use the military to support the "hidden hand" of the global market |
| John Pilger | 249 | Selective blindness | Condemned UN peacekeepers in East Timor as villainous imperialists despite Jose Ramos Horta winning a Nobel peace prize |
| Kirkpatrick Sale | 249 | Selective blindness ++ | Uses IT to air his view that computers bring unmitigated disaster, because they enable things to be done faster |
| Henry Blodget | 269 | Double standards | In 1999 wrote "the Internet bubble is riding on rock-solid fundamentals", exhorting clients to buy shares while privately describing them as rubbish |
| Charles Leadbeater | 271-2 | Confused fact with fantasy | Wrote 'Living on Thin Air' extolling the "weightless economy" (i.e. nothing physical supporting share prices) - not long before the dotcom crash |
| Robert Merton | 273 | Confused fact with fantasy | Insisted that speculative markets were not too volatile, won a Nobel prize for a method of valuing derivatives, but his hedge fund was nearly ruined by speculative instability |
| Kenneth Lay | 282 | Selective blindness | Admired discredited "innovative and aggressive" derivatives traders and bought politicians who would support the deregulation that allowed Enron to make its ill gotten gains |
| Jeffrey Skilling | 283 | Selective blindness | Would go on selling a product even after he knew it had fatal side-effects |
| Gary Hamel | 282 | Confused fact with fantasy | Thought Enron had "institutionalised a capacity for perpetual innovation", rather than, as it turned out, bribing politicians and bending the rules |
| Antonio Negri | 288 | Double standards | Denied that "terrorism" existed, as it was a "crude conception and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality" - preferred Soviets and Nazis |
| Thierry Meyssan | 299 | Confused fact with fantasy | Claimed 9-11 was orchestrated by US right-wingers to persuade Bush to increase defence spending |
| Noam Chomsky | 300-3 | Selective blindness ++ | Frequently uses the tactic of not answering the question and finding some other issue, usually barely comparable, to throw the question back on the questioner |
| Abu Musab | 304-5 | Selective blindness | Western leaders who claim they want to defend reason, democracy and tolerance are in effect anti-Islam, because good Muslims don't believe in these things |
| Edward Heath | 306 | Selective blindness | Used "Chinese people have different religious beliefs" to justify not allowing them democratic voting |
| Abu al-A'la al Mawdudi | 308 | Selective blindness | Said "there can be no reconciliation between Islam and democracy, even on minor issues" |
| Sayyid Qutb and Yusuf al Qaradawi | 309 | Double standards | Equate "God's rule" with authoritarian obedience to self-perpetuating oligarchy of human vested interests, therefore democracy is anathema |
The second table lists people who, in Wheen's opinion, made a good effort in exposing and countering Mumbo-jumbo.
| Wheen Hero | Page | The BS in question | What they did or said to debunk it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roger Scruton | 7 | The vogue for "counter-Enlightenment" | The counter-revolution puts our entire tradition of learning into question. But this guy is no saint - see this news article. |
| Jimmy Carter | 11 | US support for totalitarian right-wing regimes | Made future US aid dependent on a country's human rights record |
| Ryszard Kupuscinski | 10 | That Iranian citizens really wanted Islamic fundamentalism | Iranian revolution was due to confusion and degradation, and offered a return to an earlier paradise |
| Gita Mehta | 48 | Glib self-absorbed self-improvement mantras | Technique for defeating irony is to reduce everything to the banal |
| Roger Kimball | 68 | "End of history" claims, particularly Fukuyama's | Any theory which regards World War II as a momentary wrinkle on the path of freedom needs serious re-thinking |
| Amartya Sen | 75 | The myth that international problems are just a "clash of cultures" | Amplification of one distinctive identity can convert one of many co-existing dividing lines into an explosive and confrontational division |
| Barbara Ehrenreich | 82 | The PoMo view that one interpretation is just as good as any another | Her own school-age children were marked down for not enclosing the word reality in quotes |
| Barbara Ehrenreich | 95 | Many people who prefer the simple but untrue story | Observed that many people do subscribe to socially constructed realities which are observably not true |
| Terry Eagleton | 83 | The idea that PoMo was a constructive advance | Suggested that PoMo's subverting the structure of language arose from failure of the 1968 uprisings to dislodge traditional structures |
| Terry Eagleton | 86 | The idea that PoMo is any better or more enduring | In pulling the rug from under traditional cultures, it pulls the rug from its own tenets |
| Andrew Bulhak | 86 | PoMo was much more than atonal noise | Developed a computerised PoMo essay generator |
| Peter Medawar | 87 | PoMo was much more than atonal noise | Debunked a writer who said that PoMo ideas are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear |
| Alan Sokal | 90 | PoMo was much more than atonal noise | Had a spoof paper accepted and published in 'Social Text' magazine |
| Richard Evans | 97-8 | Whether Auschwitz happened or not is just a matter of opinion | There is much more evidence that Auschwitz did happen than it didn't |
| Jean Bricmont | 101 | Facts are facts for all time | Fact actually means 'accepted fact' - a fact can always be questioned, and maybe replaced, as the consensus of observers evolves |
| Salman Rushdie | 105 | The "jury is out" on modern interpretations of our environment | In one pan of the scales is all the painstakingly accumulated learning of the human race; in the other, the Book of Genesis |
| HL Mencken | 105 | The "jury is out" on modern interpretations of our environment | The Tennesseans who opposed the teaching of Darwinism were not more stupid, they were just less well informed |
| Bill Graves (Kansas Governor, Rep) | 112 | The "jury is out" on modern interpretations of our environment | The Kansas government's decision to give equal weight to teaching creationism minimized the credibility of the education board |
| Richard Dawkins | 140 | Fiction where superstition or bias is favoured is only entertainment | Repetition of fiction with a certain bias is not neutral in its effect on what readers and viewers come to think |
| Andy Price Watts et al | 146 | Fiction where superstition or bias is favoured is only entertainment | Produced a widely-believed spoof film purporting to show US medics anatomizing extra-terrestrials from 1947 Roswell incident |
| Richard Hofstadter | 150 | Fiction where superstition or bias is favoured is only entertainment | Artists and authors appeal to peoples' natural paranoia, i.e. that there is some secret agency or conspiracy against their well-being |
| Dwight D Eisenhower | 172 | It's OK to leave everything to market forces | Warned US to guard against acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex |
| Wendy Kaminer | 185 | Anything is OK as long as one is passionate and single-minded | The only proof offered for a fantastic belief is the passion it inspires |
| Robert Darnton | 191-2 | Human rights considerations owe nothing to the enlightenment | Enlightenment is to adopt an intellectual position that will serve when lines are drawn and one's back is to the wall |
| Mark Steyn | 197-8 | It's honest to bypass thought and appeal to emotion only | Debunked Al Gore's deliberate cringe-making stories and homesy delivery |
| Edgar A Levenson | 203 | There can be one correct form of emotional reaction to things | Asked if people grieving "as if it were their own life" over the death of Diana was really the only allowable reaction |
| David Hume | 207 | Mass pouring of emotion doesn't happen; it's private | The passions are so contagious that they pass with the greatest facility from one person to another |
| Euan Ferguson | 208 | Showing emotion is a private matter | Said it was an "orgy of narcissistic emoting" - people do it to show off |
| Elizabeth Wilson | 209 | An orgy of emotion can only be a good thing | Said that it privileged the value of feelings (good) over reason, justice and equality (bad); and gets used as a diversion from other problems |
| Benjamin Barber | 231 | Globalization is consistent with democracy | The two dominant forces in the modern world are tribalism and globalism. Neither needs (or promotes) democracy |
| Harvey Cox | 235 | The Global Market is the ultimate reality - because we (the authorities) say so | To question the omniscience of The Market is to question the inscrutable wisdom of Providence (said ironically) |
| Mark Weisbrot | 244 | Free market fundamentalism is the only way | Derided tycoons who praise the beauty of competition but work tirelessly for a monopoly or, failing that, a cartel |
| Mark Weisbrot | 261 | Two decades of liberalization brought great benefits to the world | It didn’t bring growth; and anyhow, growth isn't everything, but that's all the IMF etc promised to deliver |
| Joseph Stiglitz | 246 | The US economy thrives because it has the least state intervention | In fact, the US government laid the economic foundations for growth, and still intervenes to prop things up |
| Martin Wolf | 258 | Economic progress is limited by barriers | Markets are not as integrated as they were in some previous stages of history. Globalization is not predestined, but chosen |
| Charles Mackay | 262 | Nations and governments behave rationally | Men … think in herds; they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one |
| Robert Shiller | 273 | Efficient markets theory and Leadbeater's weightless economy | The validity of efficient markets theory was undermined by the volatility of share prices, which bore no relation to actual dividends |
| Paul Krugman | 277 | Passion for markets - people who "don't get it" are useless | Circular logic - if you don't believe, there's something wrong with you - typical of extreme religious and political sects |
| Jonathan Weil | 284 | One can fool all the people all of the time, as Enron hoped to do | Enron announced gains, but close analysis didn't support it; the accounting was simply fraudulent |
| Michael Walzer | 287 | Liberals and leftists didn't understand why people hated the US | We can make do with a little humility, an openness to heterodox ideas … and ...attend to moral as well as materialist arguments |
| Michael Walzer | 293 | Leftists should support whoever is against the US government, regardless | Any overlap of interests is circumstantial and convenient, nothing more. Al Qaeda is certainly not an egalitarian movement |
| Ziauddin Sardar | 291 | The left's view that humane representations of Islam will ease the threat of Islamic fundamentalism | The problems are within Islam itself; as it is practised today; it has lost its humanity … nasty and intolerant individuals … mediaeval barbarity …women inferior |
| Paul Berman | 296 | Barbaric, totalitarian regimes do it for a good reason, if on our side | People believe the propaganda they are fed and dismiss evidence to the contrary as opposition-motivated |
| Paul Berman | 305 | The old idea that democracy is only suitable for some nations | People used to believe it wasn't true for Catholic nations, or India |
| Susan Sonntag | 297-8 | Any one source of news can give an objective view of things | Depending on which media we read or listen to, we don't hear some of the evidence. So we develop fixed ideas of who our enemy is |
| Hamid Enayat | 309 | Islam is not about human rights or democracy | It is neither inordinately difficult nor illegitimate to derive a list of democratic rights and liberties … from respected Islamic sources |
| George Santayana | 311 | History is just a matter of opinion | Those who cannot remember the past are destined to repeat it |
The third table is a list of my favourite quotations from the book.
| Page | Thought or Quote (from Wheen himself if not otherwise indicated) |
|---|---|
| ? | "It's getting easier to fool most of the people most of the time" |
| 6 | "Knowledge is Power" - so the choice is, spread it or limit it? |
| 7 | Leaders of the counter-enlightenment - "an incongruous coalition - post-modernists and primitivists, New Age and Old Testament" |
| 7 | "The sleep of reason brings forth monsters" |
| 7 | "Proliferation of obscurantist bunkum" |
| 10 | (The Iranian 1979 revolution) "goes back to a past that seems a lost paradise" |
| 18 | Trickle down theory is old and discredited; supply side economics is really just the same thing |
| 21 | "Social Darwinism" - natural selection in economic market |
| 22 | Conservatives don't put the clock back - Reagan and Thatcher were neo-liberals (laissez-faire) |
| 26 | True conservatism "defends traditional values against the raw, atomising effects of the market economy" |
| 32 | "We were undone by our own folly, and our delusions of grandeur. The gods were waiting to destroy us, and first they infected us with a peculiar and virulent form of madness" - a reflection on the 1929 crash, could have been 1987 too |
| 33 | "Leverage works just as powerfully in reverse" - as happened in in 1987 and 1929 |
| 34 | " … familiar portents of disaster, swaggering hubris, speculative dementia, unsupportable debt … and compelling vested interest in prolonging financial insanity" - mostly JK Galbraith, on 1987 |
| 35 | "Against the madness of crowds, the very gods themselves contend in vain" - F von Schiller |
| 53 | "The ultimate benchmarking exercise is war" - Pentagon official |
| 56 | " … internal markets, which in turn created blizzards of paperwork and extra layers of bureaucracy" - 1980s and 1990s management consultancy mania in Britain |
| 60-2 | British resistance to tycoons - "we suspect they wear their socks in bed and snore" - examples Slater, Ronson, Maxwell, Ratner, Smurfit, Ashcroft, Gunn |
| 67 | " But he (Fukuyama) understood what was needed to titillate the jaded palate of the chattering classes: simplify, then exaggerate" |
| 81 | "Deconstruction, which began as a heresy, soon turned into a dogma, and hardened into a theology, sustained by a network of evangelists and high priests and inquisitors" - an academic sympathetic to Derrida |
| 83 | "Meaning was neither a private experience nor a divinely ordained occurrence: it was the product of certain shared systems of signification" - Eagleton |
| 83 | "Reality was not reflected by language but produced by it: it was a particular way of carving up the world which was deeply dependent on the sign-systems we had at our command, or more precisely which had us at theirs" - Eagleton |
| 84 | (PoMo's) "refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of value-judgements led to a free-floating relativism that could celebrate both American pop culture and medieval superstition without a qualm" |
| 98 | "Such criticisms (about lack of evidence, sources overlooked etc) cannot demonstrate the superiority of one interpretation or story-type over another. … These debates over evidence are largely diversionary" - PoMo journal article |
| 102 | "The sole purpose of rationality was 'to lend class to the general drive towards monotony', whereas relativism endorsed 'the phenomenon of cultural variety' " - quoting Feyerabend |
| 111 | "A partiality to bunkum is not confined to the lower orders" |
| 115 | "The enfeebling legacy of Postmodernism - a paralysis of reason, a refusal to observe any qualitative difference between reasonable hypothesis and swirling hogwash" |
| 120 | The reason for obsession with catastrophes in Los Angeles: "proneness to earthquakes and a proven market in sensational books" - not to mention the influence of the film industry |
| 124 | "Astrology was entirely consonant with Reaganism" |
| 128 | " … ominous and widening gap between scientists' assessment of various risks and the popular perception of those risks" - quoting John Allen Paulos, in regard to the odds of winning in a National Lottery |
| 132-4 | Unreasoning hope in alternative cures - alternative effectively means there is no evidence for its effectiveness. There's great reluctance of alternative therapies to undergoing any testing |
| 147 | Bullshitters exhort us to "keep an open mind". But "if you open your mind too much, your brain may fall out" - Daily Telegraph |
| 172 | "There are powerful interests in the US which do require a constant supply of threats and villains - sometimes real, but often exaggerated or simply invented" |
| 193 | "The new irrationalism is an expression of despair by people who feel impotent to improve their lives and who suspect that they are at the mercy of secretive impersonal forces" (+ opportunist book authors pandering to their instincts?) |
| 208 | "Keep grieving" (UK Sun, over Diana) = maybe "stop thinking"? |
| 211 | " … no spectacle as ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality - Macaulay |
| 214 | "We are all Keynsians now" - Nixon; "We are all Thatcherites now" - Peter Mandelson (UK New Labour guru) |
| 218 | Tony Blair - "intelligent blandness" |
| 221 | " … with too many freedoms and not enough responsibilities, decadent Westerners could no longer tell right from wrong and were wallowing in rampant moral confusion and social anarchy" - referring to Etzioni and Buchmanite MRA |
| 224 | "What was the Third Way? No one ever knew, but it was somewhere between the Second Coming and the Fourth Dimension" - Giddens book became a sacred text for Blairites |
| 231 | "Neither Jihad nor McWorld need democracy" - viz Singapore, Hong Kong, Chile under Pinochet |
| 238 | "Globalisation emerges from below (acc to TL Friedman) - it passes power to the consumer, not to the nation's government. It's one dollar, one vote" |
| 244 | The US, via the IMF, skews the playing field by forcing developing countries to follow US rules, e.g. on Intellectual Property, no Government intervention. Yet the US vastly subsidises its agriculture - and it built the Internet |
| 259 | "Market fundamentalism is 'a new global imperialism' " - quoting a reformed George Soros |
| 267 | "Pass the parcel" stock market culture |
| 270 | "New paradigm" (Thomas Kuhn) - applied as unanswerable puff for any mad idea, particularly in stock markets |
| 282 | "People use the word "guru" because "charlatan" is too long - Peter Drucker |
| 291 | "There is no compulsion in religion" - Prophet Mohammed |
| 291 | Absence of Koranic authority for Sharia law, or subjugation of women |
| 295 | We tend to fall back on judging everything by our own limited and traditional views - liberals are just as bad in finding excuses for tyrannical dictators who are on their side and not that of their nation's current government |
| 304 | Islam does not believe in democracy, freedom, tolerance or reason - it's all about submission to God |
| 307 | "Cross pollination of cultures is fruitful and inescapable" |
| 308 | The Enlightenment was triggered by the Arabs rescuing Aristotle's work and bringing it to Europe via Spain |
| 309 | Modern Arab philosophers claim that their views are God-given, and brand those that don't agree as heretics |
| 309 | "Subject opinion to coercion, and who will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men, men governed by bad passions. And why? To produce uniformity? Millions have been burnt, tortured … yet we have not advanced one inch" - Jefferson |
| 310 | Inserting Jesus Christ into the Virginia constitution … was rejected by a great majority … " in proof that they meant to comprehend the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination" |
| 311 | "Those that … strive to discredit the rationalism that makes such enlightenment possible, whether they be holy warriors, anti-scientific relativists, economic fundamentalists, radical PoMos, New Age mystics" etc - condemn us to a dark age |
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 13th January 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .