Leadingchurch.com

London Review of Books HT the Dish

If the meat industry looks ugly now, it is nothing to what it might be like if and when India and China catch up with the levels of meat consumption in the West. One of the major consequences of an expanding middle class in Asia has been a huge rise in meat-eating. By 2022, China will be importing more soya for chickenfeed than the whole of Brazil currently produces: 102 million tonnes. One of the surest signs of affluence is and always has been eating more meat. It’s the way you celebrate having risen above the carbohydrate-eating peasant classes. In A Vindication of Natural Diet in 1813, the vegetarian Shelley noted that ‘it is only the wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesh, and they pay for the greater license of the privilege, by subjection of supernumerary diseases.’ The difference today is that cheap meat means you don’t have to be quite so wealthy to tip over into the carnivorous demographic. Currently, the whole of Asia gets through around 18 billion chickens a year. If consumption continues to rise at current levels, by 2050 this figure will have increased more than tenfold to 200 billion chickens. But China and India will never be able to live like this – ‘simply because there isn’t enough to go around’. Lymbery appears to hope that higher meat prices will force consumption down, but since meat-eating is a consequence of wealth, prices would need to rise astronomically to have an impact. It would be as easy to persuade Americans to take their turn at eating dal and rice for a few centuries – it’s only fair – as it would to tell the new Asian middle classes not to buy meat for their families.

 

Was Nietzsche Right about Religion?

Awkwardly, Nietzsche pointed out that liberal values derive from Jewish and Christian monotheism, and rejected these values for that very reason. There is no basis – whether in logic or history – for the prevailing notion that atheism and liberalism go together.

Was Nietzsche right in thinking that God is dead? Is it truly the case that – as the German sociologist Max Weber, who was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, believed – the modern world has lost the capacity for myth and mystery as a result of the rise of capitalism and secularisation? Or is it only the forms of enchantment that have changed? Importantly, it wasn’t only the Christian God that Nietzsche was talking about. He meant any kind of transcendence, in whatever form it might appear. In this sense, Nietzsche was simply wrong. The era of “the death of God” was a search for transcendence outside religion. Myths of world revolution and salvation through science continued the meaning-giving role of transcendental religion, as did Nietzsche’s own myth of the Superman.

Reared on a Christian hope of redemption (he was, after all, the son of a Lutheran minister), Nietzsche was unable, finally, to accept a tragic sense of life of the kind he tried to retrieve in his early work. Yet his critique of liberal rationalism remains as forceful as ever. As he argued with masterful irony, the belief that the world can be made fully intelligible is an article of faith: a metaphysical wager, rather than a premise of rational inquiry. It is a thought our pious unbelievers are unwilling to allow. The pivotal modern critic of religion, Friedrich Nietzsche will continue to be the ghost at the atheist feast.

Link following Christian Smith too.

A Bang-Up Job, Ctd http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/HsDLJhAjF90/

Reformation 21

Marsden ends The Twilight of the American Enlightenment with reflections on the dead-end to which we have come. Consensus liberalism suffers from a fatal dishonesty. Because it claims to serve the common good and at the same time sustain authenticity with what it regards as exemplary non-judgmentalism, liberalism cannot recognize itself as merely one view among others. It must see itself as transcending the worldviews competing for control over American society (and, increasingly, over world culture). It is this conceit that supports the tyrannies of liberalism, which range from full blown political correctness and the politics of denunciation (accusations of homophobia, bigotry, and sexism) to various forms of social exclusion of the kind so blatantly expressed by Richard Rorty (“that’s not the way we talk about things”).

• WSJ Review of the book
• Chicago Trib
• Marsden does an interview with Al Mohler

In the interview at 35:22

The two ideals: “Trust yourself” and “trust the experts on natural science”. There was a lack of real coherence in this and that splits apart in the 1960s with radical individualism.

HT The Dish Pacific Standard

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/03/immigration_my.html

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/your-questions-my-answers-ii/

Some interesting ones here on Obama and a gay man.

And round 3 on climate change and Christianity

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/your-questions-my-answers-iii/

The ghost at the atheist feast

The Confidence of Jerry Coyne

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/whos-more-famous-than-jesus.html

There are many varieties of fame. Jesus Christ was the first person to achieve it globally, Clive James wrote, “without conquering the world by violence.” The best kind for a poet to earn, W. H. Auden said, is like some valley cheese — “local, but prized elsewhere.” Yet if all fame, like all politics, is to some degree local, how thoroughly it has been transmitted across the planet and through the centuries has been difficult, if not impossible, to quantify.

The Website http://pantheon.media.mit.edu/