Early Church Fathers.Appendix. Plates 1.This is a listing of the major religions of the world, ranked by number of adherents.Islam s l m is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion teaching that there is only one incomparable God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God.The Second Plane Martin Amis Book Review.While the subjugation of women in Islam has been abundantly documented and deplored, it should also be pointed out but not to weaken our will Islamic law and morality do not differ significantly from the exceedingly unvoluptuary codes of other religions, and that many millions of Muslim men have not become mass murderers as a result of the traditional restrictions on tomcatting.The masculinist account of terrorism brings to mind the feminist account of nuclear weapons, according to which all you need to know about the origin of the danger is the shape of the missile.The genital theory of history may be novelistically useful, but it is analytically silly.In this case, it reduces decades and centuries of philosophies and cultures and religions and tribes and classes and nations and movements and states and empires to the Levantine crotch.Surely we must be able to imagine, not only for the sake of our literature but also for the sake of our security, that there are sexually satisfied enemies of decency and modernity.And enough about those patient virgins in the sky the threat from suicide bombing, and from the political cultures that prize it, is founded on deformations more worldly and more substantial than a harem fantasy.Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer.What we have here is a hormonal unbeliever.Amiss antipathy to Islamism is based upon a more comprehensive antipathy to religion.In Amiss universe, you are either religious or you are rational.Or to put it in the bracingly original terms of The Second Plane, it is misology that is the cause of thanatism.Amis calls himself not an atheist but an agnostic, but still he is catching a wave to Dover Beach.A New Introduction To Islam Second Edition' title='A New Introduction To Islam Second Edition' />Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses, whereas in the East, well, you know.All religions, Amis rules, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists.Since George W. Bush was more religious than Saddam Hussein, of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive.And most ringingly When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the heads of hostages, they shout God is great When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout Well, it depends on whether they spoke French or German or Russian or Chinese or Khmer or Serbian or Kinyarwanda.The historical innocence of secularism is a myth.And if the secular butchers worked in silence, what of it The crime was the same.There is always too little reason on earth.But does Amis really think that reason has no blood on its hands I do not say this to extenuate holy murder, obviously.All murder is unholy.Early Church Fathers Additional Texts.Edited by Roger Pearse.These English translations are all out of copyright, but were not included in the 38 volume.I wish only to suggest that the simpletons view of the world that Amis is angrily promoting contributes not very much to the study of the passions that are scalding the planet.There are religious people opposing the terrorists and secular people supporting the terrorists.After the 2. 0th century, the question of which worldview kills more, the godful one or the godless one, was made infernally moot.Anyway, the safety of the West cannot wait upon the progress of enlightenment in Waziristan.The results of Amiss clumsily mixed cocktail of rhetoric and rage can be eccentric, or worse.In a commemorative piece published last September, he plays a little game with the expression 91.He cleverly hits upon a perplexity that has nagged at every thinking person for seven years that in Europe the numerical shorthand for the calendar is the other way around and then he resourcefully proposes that the attacks in London on July 7, 2.Jan. 1 or Feb. 2 or March 3 or April 4 and so on.Even Amiss commemorations are performances.But this performance ends without charm.Protesting that numbers are a paltry way of remembering the dead, Amis gets to his Limbaugh like point, which is that the only imaginable rationale for the use of numbers to this end is that these numerals, after all, are Arabic.I cannot be sure, but I think he is serious.Or consider another crudity, a review entitled Demographics, in which Amis is rattled by, of all things, a book by Mark Steyn, from which he is distressed to learn that the West is in demographic decline.We are not making children at the replacement rate of 2.The birth rate in Somalia, by contrast, is 6.Afghanistan it is 6.Yemen it is 6. 5. Astrology Software For 64 Bit Os . There are ways of evaluating such an anxiety intelligently, but this is Amiss evaluation Will the culture of choice be obliged to give ground to the culture of lifeItself profoundly retrograde, Islamism may force retrogression upon us all.While were at it, we could take a leaf out of the book of revolutionary Communism.After the startling census of 1.Stalin immediately abandoned the progressivist social agenda.His new measures included mass kindergartenization, the introduction of maternity medals, the legalization of inheritance, the solemnization of the marriage ceremony, the prolongation and complication of the divorce process and the recriminalization of abortion.It worked for a while.In the 2. 1st century, deprived of totalitarian invigilation, Russia is losing Russians at the rate of about a million a year.In the deathless words of Dick Cheney so Perhaps there is an irony in Amiss homily, but I have had no luck in locating it.Anyway, the passage is not designed to persuade, it is designed to surprise.You get the feeling, reading these pages, that for his side Amis will say almost anything, because being noticed is as important to him as being right.The complication is that there is considerable justice on Amiss side.He is correct in insisting upon the moral and historical primacy of the battle against theocracy and terror.He is correct that the West possesses the moral advantage in this battle, and that the defense of Western conceptions of freedom and equality is not an exercise in ethnocentrism.He is correct that the skeptical discussion of religious ideas and practices must not be abrogated by the skinlessness of multiculturalism, or by its cunning.He is correct that opinions that seem not only spectacularly false, but also lethally false, do not have to be intellectually respected even if they have to be politically tolerated.He is correct that in Islamism the many doctrines of antimodernism, anti Americanism and anti Semitism are one doctrine.I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful.But the vacant intensity that has characterized so much of Amiss work flourishes here too.Is it a coincidence that The Second Plane is appearing in the same season as Human Smoke, or is it a malign providence Nicholson Bakers popular book I tremble for my country when I regard the best seller list is a pacifist repudiation of World War II, and I have no doubt that Martin Amis would despise it in this cause, too, I would march with him.And Amis clamors whereas Baker whispers.Yet the two books are peculiarly alike.They are both productions of misplaced literariness.They treat the most fundamental matters of politics and philosophy what individuals and societies should live for and what they should die for as occasions for the display of artifice and the exhibition of temperament.The consideration of their arguments is regularly diverted by the consideration of their effects.For this reason, such writings will have more impact than influence.The criticism of language may be required for the criticism of politics, but politics is not mainly language.History may be generously lighted by the bright beams of the imagination, but the student of history is not primarily an artist.And the great campaign against the medievals of our time will be dreary and long and homely.THE SECOND PLANE.September 1. 1 Terror and boredom.By Martin Amis. 2.Alfred A. Knopf. 2.Continue reading the main story.
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