The Orthosphere

Even though I am not a believer myself I have a tremendous respect for religions and religious people. For example, I absolutely love the spiritually themed On Being radio show.

I have noticed an upsurge in interest on the theme of the “positives” of religion, beyond those of faith and avoiding hell.

David Sloan Wilson, for example, has long argued that religion plays an important role in social organising and other eusocial matters. His book Darwin’s Cathedral was a fascinating exploration of this topic.

I recently heard an interview with Alan De Botton on the On Being radio show. He has an organisation called “school for atheists”. The idea is to take the very best of religion and make it available to the non-religious. I like this idea. I used to complain to my wife that I wished there were a secular church, somewhere I could go on a Sunday morning to sing hymns speak to like-minded people and enjoy all the benefits of a community of faith – but without the faith. My father, who was a lifelong atheist, used to regularly attend church because he loved the hymns and he loved the people who went to church, Even though he did not believe in the articles of faith or in god.

Like father like son I suppose?

Maybe this is why I don’t like the militant atheists like Richard Dawkins. They fervour is as repulsive to me as the zeal of the religious bigot. There is something frothy and unseemly about Mr Dawkins anti religious diatribes.

Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no time for religious bigotry in any form. But if you do give any year to religious folks, you will be very surprised to find that the vast majority have very well thought out positions that are consistent with having a considered life and, I suppose, faith.

There is also something refreshing about the sincerity that I so often see in the writings and speaking from religious people. They make no apology for believing what they believe. There is a quality of knowing what you’re getting. Okay this all sounds deeply patronising and in some ways obviously ludicrous. Perhaps I should modify what I’m saying to apply not to “religious people”, but to the religious people that I tend to encounter on my travels both across the Internet and in real life.

This post actually started out as an entirely different post. I was going to write about The Orthosphere, but that was sidelined by my long-winded pean for the faithful.

What is the The Orthosphere?

Who We Are and What We Believe

Ortho: Right, correct, straight. As in orthodoxy (right teaching), orthogonal (literally, right-sided; thus, right angled; so, perpendicular, independent) and orthognomon (right knowledge, right indicator (as of a carpenter’s square or a sundial)).

Sphere: A domain, especially of influence. Thus,

Orthosphere: A domain of Christian orthodoxy independent of conventional conservatism.

We are Christians: Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox. We believe our religion is true, and we take the Bible and the Church Fathers as our guides to the faith. We do not innovate religiously, for that is folly.

We affirm our respective traditions where they disagree with the other branches of Christianity, but we do so respectfully, for we have much in common (catholic or mere Christianity) and our enterprise has as much to do with society as with religion.

Socio-politically, we can be called “traditionalist conservatives” or “Christian reactionaries.” Since we agree that Modernity—the fundamental principle of contemporary Western Civilization—is radically defective, we are branded “far-right.” In truth, we affirm what was regarded as self-evident by the vast majority of mankind until well into the Twentieth Century: Religion is true, authority is valid and good, man and woman differ in essential ways, and so on. If affirming reality puts us at the rightmost end of the political spectrum, as the world construes politics, then so be it.

We recognize that the societies of the West are radically disordered, and it is our desire that they move toward a more proper order, one which acknowledges Christianity. Although we are Christians, our primary concern here is not with how individual souls are to be saved from the wrath of God, but rather with how society ought to be ordered. Therefore both Christians and friendly non-Christians are welcome at the Orthosphere.

I cannot sign up to the belief in the Bible or many of the other things that members of this sphere believe, but I do follow this blog because I do believe that there is something valuable to learn from these traditionalists. I am a classic Western liberal who has spent his life fighting for, and arguing in support of, the Western Enlightenment and all that it entails. I am a Democrat, I believe in women’s rights, I believe in gay rights, I question all authority, I am a sceptic and doubter to the point of disbelief in God. That said, I’m open to learning and challenging myself by listening to and reading what the authors here The Orthosphere has to offer.

More: The Orthosphere

The postwar European atrocity

Brilliant article at The Chronicle of Higher Education on one of the most disgraceful periods in European history: the mass explosion and mass murder of ethnic Germans after World War 2.

16,000,000 innocent civilians ethnically cleansed, 500,000 died – in peacetime!

Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in the course of the operation.

Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies’ cynical formulation, “reparations in kind”) in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe—many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. As Sir John Colville, formerly Winston Churchill’s private secretary, told his colleagues in the British Foreign Office in 1946, it was clear that “concentration camps and all they stand for did not come to an end with the defeat of Germany.” Ironically, no more than 100 or so miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of indictment that listed “deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population” under the heading of “crimes against humanity.”

By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a manmade disaster and one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Yet although they occurred within living memory, in time of peace, and in the middle of the world’s most densely populated continent, they remain all but unknown outside Germany itself. On the rare occasions that they rate more than a footnote in European-history textbooks, they are commonly depicted as justified retribution for Nazi Germany’s wartime atrocities or a painful but necessary expedient to ensure the future peace of Europe. As the historian Richard J. Evans asserted in In Hitler’s Shadow (1989) the decision to purge the continent of its German-speaking minorities remains “defensible” in light of the Holocaust and has shown itself to be a successful experiment in “defusing ethnic antagonisms through the mass transfer of populations.”

Even at the time, not everyone agreed. George Orwell, an outspoken opponent of the expulsions, pointed out in his essay “Politics and the English Language” that the expression “transfer of population” was one of a number of euphemisms whose purpose was “largely the defense of the indefensible.” The philosopher Bertrand Russell acidly inquired: “Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?” A still more uncomfortable observation was made by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, who reasoned that “if every German was indeed responsible for what happened at Belsen, then we, as members of a democratic country and not a fascist one with no free press or parliament, were responsible individually as well as collectively” for what was being done to noncombatants in the Allies’ name.

As usual, Orwell was one of the few voices of sanity.

See other posts on this theme here:

The Horror of Germany’s war – http://www.limbicnutrition.com/blog/the-horror-of-germanys-war/

Remembering Dresden – http://www.limbicnutrition.com/blog/remembering-dresden/

Light Amongst the Ruins – http://www.limbicnutrition.com/blog/lights-among-the-ruins/

The Mongol devastations – http://www.limbicnutrition.com/blog/the-mongol-devastations/