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Melanie Phillips

The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power Hardcover – April 20, 2010

by Melanie Phillips (Author)

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In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving increasingly irrationally. An astonishing number of people subscribe to celebrity endorsed cults, Mayan armageddon prophecies, scientism, and other varieties of new age, anti-enlightenment philosophies. Millions more advance popular conspiracy theories: AIDS was created in a CIA laboratory, Princess Diana was assassinated, and the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.

In The World Turned Upside Down, Melanie Phillips explains that the basic cause of this explosion of irrationality is the slow but steady marginalization of religion. We tell ourselves that faith and reason are incompatible, but the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible, Phillips asserts, that gave us our concepts of reason, progress, and an orderly world on which science and modernity are based.

Without its religious traditions, the West has drifted into mass derangement where truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. Scientists skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts, Israel is demonized, and the US is vilified over the war on terror—all on the basis of blatant falsehoods and obscene propaganda.

Worst of all, asserts Phillips, this abandonment of rationality leaves the West vulnerable to its legitimate threats. Faced with the very real challenges of spiraling demographics and violent, confrontational Islamism, the West is no longer willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it once brought into being.

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280 pages
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English
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Encounter Books
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April 20, 2010
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6.25 x 1.5 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

1594033757
ISBN-13

978-1594033759
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Melanie Phillips is an award-winning columnist for London’s Daily Mail. Educated at Oxford, she won the Orwell Prize for journalism in 1996. She is the author of Londonistan, All Must Have Prizes, and other books. Her regular blog appears on the Spectator website.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Encounter Books (April 20, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 280 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594033757
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594033759
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.88 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.5 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #346,150 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #251 in History of Religion & Politics
- #319 in Church & State Religious Studies
- #1,795 in Political Ideologies & Doctrines (Books)

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Melanie Phillips

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Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author. Her weekly column, which currently appears in The Times of London, has been published over the years in the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times and Daily Mail. She writes for the Jerusalem Post and Jewish Chronicle, is a regular panellist on BBC Radio's The Moral Maze and speaks on public platforms throughout the English-speaking world.

Her best-selling book Londonistan, about the British establishment's capitulation to Islamist aggression, was published in 2006 by Encounter, New York. She followed this in 2010 with The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, with a foreword by David Mamet and also published by Encounter. The updated edition of Guardian Angel, her memoir, was published in August 2016.

You can follow Melanie’s work at www.facebook.com/MelanieLatest or on Twitter at @melanieLatest.

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Clay GarnerTop Contributor: Philosophy

"Science without Religion is Lame, Religion without Science is Blind" - Einstein (76)

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 23, 2015

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Phillips' premise is that deductive reason starts with undeducibile beliefs. Aristotle, Euclid understood this. Mathematics starts with unproven axioms - and then - produces volumes of geometry. Science must assume order before finding it, which is what Einstein indicated;

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind". (76)

Chapter 13 is "How Enlightenment Unraveled". Notes that Newton, Locke and Priestley were devout Christians. They used religion to start and develop the enlightenment in England. France was different. Voltaire wanted to destroy not only the catholic church, but Christianity itself. Reason in England served to support religion, in France to replace it. From Condorcet to Saint-Simon to Comte produced the terror and then dogmatic positivism with today's scientific "priesthood". (263)

The worship of human reason attacks freedom. What! Phillips sources this from Diderot's writing in the Encyclopedia. Whoever refuse reason "should be treated by the rest of his species as a wild beast. . .either insane or wicked and morally evil." (264)

Think the terror, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. The terror had the official title "Republic of Virtue". This is the false identification of reason with virtue. (265)

The German reaction against French rationality was romanticism. This elevated emotions to the sacred. It led to nationalism and fascism. This was explicit attack on reason, science, modernity and universal values. (268)

Isaiah Berlin noted the German poet Heine wrote in 1832 that the Germans would destroy Western civilization. - "Implacable Kantians with axe and sword will uproot the soil of our European life to tear out the roots of the past. Armed Fichteans will appear restrained neither by fear or greed. . .and most terrible of all would be Schelling's disciples, the Philosophers of Nature who, isolated and unapproachable beyond the barriers of their own obsessive ideas, will identify themselves with the elemental forces of the demonic powers of ancient german pantheism." (269)

Fascinating.

"The First World War did not merely remake the map of the world and alter the course of global politics, but within Europe delivered a body blow to religious belief along with trust in authority and faith in human progress." (273)

This also demolished belief in the power of reason. Nihilism was here, along with nazism, Marxism and the Frankfurt school.

The "post modernism" of Foucault and Derrida is a "egregious example of academic narcissism, but it's impact has been huge and profound, and its effects are all around us. Putting it simply, it's "deconstruction" of the idea of truth has produced a public discourse built upon a repudiation of objective knowledge and a concomitant openness to the falsehoods of ideology or propaganda." (276)

"The substitution of lies for objective information in the service of the "greater truth" of prior conclusions has taken deep root in those areas of the academy where ideology rules. This is true even in the case scientific fields such as climate change." (277)

Quotes Mike Hulme, leading professor on climate change: "Scientists - and politicians - must trade (normal) truth for influence. . . Climate change is too important to be left to scientists - least of all normal ones." (278)

Disturbing.

Chapter 14 is "The Attack on Western Civilization". When morality is privatized "Love was emptied of alturism, sentimentaliy replaced genuine emotion, and a culture of narcissism took up residence in serial relationships of mutual self-regard. The sense of the sacred and the concept of intrinsic worth were all but destroyed by the prevailing utilitarianism." (283)

"As George Steiner has observed, the concept of the Mosaic God is a unique development in human experience. There has been no genuinely comparable notion at any other time or place. It makes "unspeakable demands" of the mind: brain and conscience demanded to invest belief, obedience and love in an "abstraction more inaccessible than mathematics." (315)

Chapter 15 is "Reason and the Bible". Presents that prominent scientists such as Dawkins and Weinberg believe their calling is to destroy faith in religion. Francis Bacon, key father of the scientific enlightenment, wrote that scientists will become the new priesthood. Comte continued this with the materialist dictatorship of Positivism. "Comte posited instead that knowledge had to be based on experience, but this led straight into a trap, since human experience is intrinsically subjective." (319)

Thus rational science plunged into the deepest irrationality.

"Darwinism, meanwhile, is not so much science as materialism applied to biology. The belief that Creation is false did not derive from Darwinism. Darwinism derived derived from the belief that Creation was false." (320)

Other scholars have concluded that Darwinsim is philopsophy - not biology. Karl Popper is one noteable example. (321)

Physics is driving science closer to religion. Think quantum theory. The Big Bang evidence. Arno Penzias, nobel prize for background radiation, observed: "The best data we have concerning the Big Bang are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five Books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole." (322)

Phillips explains that Judaism is rational, providing logical reasons for human existence and clear foundation for morality. Christianity incorporated this but then took "a step backward from the worldly grounding of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinical Judaism because of the notions of the Incarnation and the Trinity." (335)

This is pagan Greek philosophy - not Bible truth. This weakened Christianity's connection to evidence and reason.

Notes the conversion of Andrew Flew, world famous atheist. He writes: "It's simply inconceivable that any material matrix can generate agents who think and act. Matter cannot produce conceptions and perceptions. A force field does plan or think. So at the level of reason and everyday experience, we become immediately aware that the world of living, conscious, thinking beings has to originate in a living Source, a Mind." (336)

"The result has been the tyrannical ideologies of the modern age, which has forgotten that the reason upon which it prides itself and the science that flows from that reason owe their existence to religion." (337)

(This theme is also covered in "Embattled Reason" by Reinhard Bendix.)

highlights -
Chapter 2 -THE MYTH OF ENVIRONMENTAL ARMAGEDDON
- SCIENCE IS REPLACED BY THE MANUFACTURE OF MYTHS

Chapter 5 -SCIENTIFIC TRIUMPHALISM
SCIENTISM, OR SCIENTIFIC TRIUMPHALISM
ROOTS OF SCIENTISM DO NOT ACTUALLY LIE IN SCIENCE AT ALL
HOW MATERIALISM LEADS TO UNREASONABLE ASSERTIONS
THE FALSE POLARITY BETWEEN SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS
THE TERROR OF GOING WHERE THE EVIDENCE LEADS
THE CREATION MYTH OF SCIENTIFIC NATURALISM

Chapter 6 -THE SECULAR INQUISITION
CULTURAL TOTALITARIANISM
THE “STUPIDITY OF HUMAN DIGNITY”
THE UNINTELLIGENT ATTACK ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN
THE PERSECUTION OF GLOBAL WARMING SKEPTICS

Chapter 11 -THE RED-BLACK-GREEN-ISLAMIC AXIS
EVOLUTION FED INTO BOTH PROGRESSIVE AND FASCIST THINKING
THE CONTINUUM OF FASCISM AND ENVIRONMENTALISM
THE NEW AGE REPACKAGED FASCIST PAGANISM AS PROGRESSIVE
WHY THE MOST HIGH-MINDED TURN INTO BIGOTED TOTALITARIANS

Chapter 12 -THE QUEST FOR REDEMPTION
SECULAR WESTERN MILLENARIAN FANTASIES
THE PURSUIT OF UTOPIAS IN THE CONTEMPORARY WEST
THE QUASI-RELIGIOUS IMPERATIVE OF MODERN MASS SECULAR MOVEMENTS

Chapter 13 -HOW ENLIGHTENMENT UNRAVELED
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN REASON AND LIBERTY
THE BACKLASH AGAINST REASON IN GERMAN ROMANTICISM
HOW PROGRESSIVE THINKING DESTROYED MAN AS A FREE AND RATIONAL BEING
A DEMORALIZED INTELLIGENTSIA TURNS AGAINST REASON AND MODERNITY POSTMODERNISM AND A CULTURE OF MANDATED MENDACITY

Chapter 14 -THE ATTACK ON WESTERN CIVILIZATION
THE NEGATION OF MORAL AGENCY
HUMAN RACE BECOMES ENEMY NUMBER ONE
THE SANCTIFICATION OF SELF-REGARD
SOFT-CORE ATHEISM

Chapter 15 -REASON AND THE BIBLE
THE FALSE POLARITY BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE
WHY THE WEST PURSUED SCIENCE WHILE THE REST DID NOT
THE MARRIAGE OF RELIGION AND REASON IN JUDAISM
THE DEEP UNREASONABLENESS OF ABOLISHING GOD

Chapter 18 -THE DISENCHANTMENT OF REASON
THE TOTALITARIANISM OF VIRTUE
THE SOFT BIGOTRY OF THE ENLIGHTENED

This book is written as a series of essays. Each reader will find favorites. Phillips uses a lot of sources. Not a superficial read. Interesting.

10 people found this helpful

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Geoff Puterbaugh

Scary reading

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 14, 2010

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Melanie Phillips is doing her best to understand the modern world. I guess many of us are, but she is really giving it the old college try.

She joins R. Emmett Tyrrell (see After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery for his latest) in a new and laudable effort: nailing down elements of what Tyrrell calls the Kultursmog, a term which I will now steal and English as: Cultural Smog. James Piereson has defined this Strange Smog as: "the Liberal understanding of events ratified as a matter of morals and etiquette within the media and academe." This Cultural Smog is so pervasive that you cannot escape it: it pollutes everything.

Phillips devotes four chapters to four different elements of this Cultural Smog. They are (1) Environmental Armageddon (2) the Iraq War (3) Misrepresentation of Israel (4) Scientific Triumphalism. And each of these subjects could be treated in a book!

The first item of the Cultural Smog, which pervades all media and academic jabberwocky, is the Myth of Environmental Armageddon. In the year 2010, this has its own particular annoying particulates, such as totally ignoring Climategate, the resignation of Phil Jones in disgrace, and Jones' subsequent confession that he had lost his data. For more detail, you want to read this book! :-)

The second item in the Cultural Smog, the Iraq War, needs to be described carefully and precisely. We are NOT talking about principled, reasoned difference of opinion: we are talking about Code Pink and the New York Times perpetrating the obvious fiction that "Bush lied, thousands died." As Phillips memorably and accurately states, "a glance at what was said at the time...shows that this was not so." At least for those who still have enough command of English to distinguish between a "lie" and a "mistake." Most of those emitting Cultural Smog pretend to be incapable of such subtle distinctions ("It doesn't MATTER whether Bush believed what he said or not," as someone memorably put it). Further elements in the Grand Irrationality about the Iraq War include "Bush-Hitler," and other items detailed by Phillips.

The third item, Misrepresentation of Israel, deserves volumes in itself. One such volume is: Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left . I would be wasting your time and mine if I went into more detail. I recommend reading this book instead.

The fourth item, Scientific Triumphalism, may be the most important on the current list. Triumphalists such as Richard Dawkins imagine that science has disproved religion, and is here to explain everything to a waiting humanity. The most interesting volume taking these self-important blowhards to pieces is: The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions . How did this become such an important part of the Cultural Smog? I am not sure, but I can tell you a definite symptom: when I was young, it was literally unheard of for an atheist to run for President. It was considered important that JFK won as a Catholic. Nelson Rockefeller could not run because he was a divorced man. By the year 2010, anyone running for political office had to be defensive about his religion, and the sort of "religion" preached by Jeremiah Wright was regarded as "better" than the mainstream Protestantism of such "yokels" as Sarah Palin.

All of this deserves a good challenge, and Melanie Phillips does yeoman work outlining that challenge.

I have glanced ahead at her proposed solution, and I find that a little problematic. She claims that reason developed from Jewish monotheism, and says we need to get back to that. What I found problematic was her way-too-casual dismissal of Greek and Roman philosophy. From my own study of history, it seems clear to me that pagan philosophy played an extremely important role in the development of Catholic theology --- that the dynamic European civilization which gave birth to the Renaissance and then to science was a result of Judaeo-Christian beliefs working together with Graeco-Roman systems of thought. Melanie Phillips seems to think that Rabbinical Judaism alone could have accomplished this. We will never know, of course, but I doubt it.

All of which is another reason to recommend that you get this book and read it. I would also recommend taking a good long look at The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist .

131 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Paul

My world is now the right way up!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 6, 2018

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A very interesting read and a little mind altering, but in a good way!

Unfortunately, it's now turned my world upside down or should I say the right way up.

If like me you've always been baffled why the left loves Islam, this will provide a thorough and rather surprising answer.

Melanie provides clarity for a lot of long held myths and provides a very thorough defence of Israel.

It's a deep read but well worth the effort!

15 people found this helpful

doctor in the house

prepare to be brainwashed by repetition, certainty and conviction

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 9, 2020

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The author appears to be one of the increasing multitude of ‘opinion’ journalists rather than factual reporters, despite her mission of truth funding. Complete ignorance of modern genetics does not deter her from pontificating on evolution. The same old tired clichés of Darwinism and Dawkins are dragged out for a crowd calling for blood. She is entirely immune of the unforgivable offence directed at humanists, whose lives are deemed worthless and meaningless because they have no god. Her ignorance of climate change is pathetic as the primary data is freely available online.

But the worst aspect of this repetitive vomit, is the ignorance of Jewish history, and the assertion that Israel has a right to occupy lands named in the Bible. This is like saying that the people now living in central Europe (who have few links to people who lived there in the Bronze Age) have territorial rights over lands occupied by Beaker people in Britain in the Bronze Age.

One is left with a nasty taste in the mouth, that this awful garbage gets published, but such is the right to free speech. Except it’s not free speech because people outside of London, with very different perceptions do not get published. One star for making me so irritated and angry I was forced to reread the entire history of the middle east from the Palaeolithic, and which I understand so much more now. The world turned upside down by Christopher Hill is a much finer book.

One person found this helpful

PatrickHGormley

A deep analysis and gives direction on exploring anti semitism

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 9, 2020

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REVIEW: THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN BY MELANIE PHILLIPS

The book by Melanie Phillips The World Turned Upside Down, The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power is a criticism of myths and fallacies that she feels society has embraced and even turned into part of its identity. She writes that it appears to her that public discourse has significantly departed from reality and self-evident commonsense has been turned on its head. (Also she is the author of Londonistan.)

Here are my favourite quotes from this book which gives us a lot to think about. I respond to the quotes accordingly.

I asked [Richard] Dawkins whether he believed that the origin of all matter was most likely to have been an entirely spontaneous event. He agreed that he did think so. I put it to him that he seemed therefore to be arguing that something could be created out of nothing—which surely runs counter to the scientific principles of verifiable evidence that he tells us should govern all our thinking.

COMMENT: The notion that something made all things out of nothing spontaneously and without being aware of it is a denial that there is anything like a personal or real God there. As the bottom line is that atheism and Dawkins are saying the universe is purposeless that takes us to our next quote.

Without purposefulness, then, there can be no rationality. And that is the consequence of Dawkin's proposition, as John Polkinghorne summed it up: "Thought is replaced by electro-chemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right or wrong. They just happen."

COMMENT: Feelings just happen. Most thoughts just happen. If you can add up two numbers and take a block and get no answer that shows that thoughts just happen and we are lucky enough that they happen enough. These things are facts whether there is a purpose or not. The purpose would pale into something rather unimportant. So the problem Polkinghorne, "I want us to be more than natural events", has is nothing in comparison to how our feelings and thoughts don't act as if they care about that anyway. He worries too much! In fact his overreaction only adds fuel to the problem. It makes people think they should not be rational. Christianity agrees with him so it is an outrage.

------

God by definition does not belong to the natural world because he is said to have created it.

COMMENT: She is telling God not to find a way to belong to it at all so that she can say science cannot find God. I do not belong to Australia for I am in Europe but that does not mean I cannot find a way to connect to Australia and cross the barrier. Maybe I can send my DNA there? God being different to the universe does not amount to God making himself undetectable. God is not necessarily just a philosophical question.

-----------

She says that to say that science might understand the origin of the universe problematic for you cannot really stop learning - it should go on and on with no stopping. She thinks this shows that materialism or naturalism is wrong for it says you can stop learning.

COMMENT: That does not follow for each person is only a tiny part of the universe so materialistic or naturalistic understandings of the universe do fit the idea of learning being infinite in its potential. Later on she quotes with approval, Swinburne, who says that instead of assuming that the problems of physics, the problems with understanding our universe, can be solved by saying there are "a trillion" universes we should assume one God to do the job. So the assumption that God has not made a multiverse is sneaked in to get rid of the idea of a multiverse!

-------

To the Western mind, the individual has free will and power over his or her own actions. As far as the Islamists are concerned, the individual has no status except as a vehicle for God’s will. That means there can be no place for temporal governance. Since Islam holds that submission to God means “freedom,” the democratic systems that actually give rise to freedom are considered a form of subjugation. Thus, language is turned inside out.

COMMENT: Islam is merely saying that if God creates all and all depends on him 100% then there is no such thing as being independent of him - ie exercising free will against the will of God. The doctrine of God says that we are free because of God which means he creates our choices not us. His power and will are like the substance our will is made out of so it is not really our will. So when we go against God we only think we are doing it and even the idea that we are doing it is created by him. So the degradation of human nature comes from God belief of which Islam is just one example.

Psychologists tell us we are rarely as free as we want to think for there is so much influence and error and subtle pressure around us. If that makes free will virtually inactive imagine what the God creator straitjacket can do to it! You will lose the feeling of being free when you become aware of all the pressures and when you hold a strong belief in God. The feeling free illusion will diminish and maybe go altogether.

---------

Many non-Muslims claim that any aggressiveness in the Qur’an is no big deal. After all, they say, isn’t the Old Testament also full of blood-curdling calls to wipe out whole populations? And doesn’t the New Testament contain the denunciations of the Jews that caused centuries of anti-Jewish persecution? Well, the latter is certainly true, because the New Testament accuses the Jews of deicide and curses them for all time—a particular extremity that cannot be laid at the door of the Qur’an. But the New Testament does not contain, as the Qur’an does, a purportedly divine injunction to kill Jews and other “unbelievers.” As for the Hebrew Bible, its wars are merely a historical record and its injunctions to smite the foes of the Jews are specific and confined to the participants in those historic events. There are no divine injunctions in the Hebrew Bible to kill unbelievers.

COMMENT: This shows how parents putting children into religions with violent scriptures is so terrible. It leads to Christians enabling the promotion of other religions with violent scriptures. It leads to excusing. The logic is that if your religion does not obey the bad bits the other religion will not either. That is nonsense and the presence of the texts shows the religion was violent one day and thus can be again. The Bible God does command the killing of unbelievers for it defines adulterers and other sinners as unbelievers. Bible belief is linked to acting on that belief. You are punished for a thought crime in action.

We have to be careful when a religion says violence in its name is wrong. We need to be told how wrong for if they see it as akin to stubbing a toe that is alarming.

------

Richard Dawkins ... doesn’t only dismiss opponents’ arguments: he maintains that such opponents could not possibly have meant what they said. His own gnostic infallibility apparently means that he alone knows what was really in someone’s mind.

COMMENT: Christians do that too especially liberals. Everybody sincere including an atheist is regarded as servant of God and a Christian who does not realise it. It is just liberal intolerance to do that. We do not accept you unless we find a way to imagine you are one of us.

----------

Darwinism reduced human reason to a mere mechanism for survival, since genetic determinism left no basis for humans to have a disinterested impulse to discover the truth for its own sake. Marxism said that humans were prisoners not of their genes but of society.

COMMENT: But reason is a tool for survival! Many simply use reason to survive in a world where everybody else talks rubbish! You need truth so you can protect yourself and others. Lining up to truth is the only way to protect yourself from the truth for the truth does not care what you want or think and will hurt you if you defy it. Better not antagonise or defy that enemy!

Survival does not have to mean something savage and animalistic like wolves fighting each other. That is the strawman of survival that she has created in that statement. That kind of survival and the more softer kind are both about trying to live in reality.

------

Foucault taught that truth was not disinterested or neutral, but rather an instrument of power, an attempt to conceal biases under a mask of objectivity. In his view, “all knowledge rests upon injustice”; and further, “there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth; and the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind).”34 The idea that objectivity is dishonest and malicious found its way into British journalism during the 1980s.

COMMENT: He mixes up the abuse of truth with truth. If you falsely claim what you say is true then you indeed are trying to do what Focault said.

---------

The belief central to environmentalism that mankind must no longer be allowed to dominate the planet has had further inevitable consequences. As the value of human beings has gone down, that of animals has gone up. Prioritizing humans over animals has been labeled “speciesism,” which according to the prominent anti-speciesist and bioethicist Professor Peter Singer is as bad as sexism or racism. From this moral equivalence between animals and humans, it follows that if animals can be killed for reasons of utility, so too can human beings.

COMMENT: It is complex. Believers in God who think an unborn baby 9 weeks in the womb has more value than a fully grown chimp are not making sense. They are indeed unfair.

---------------

REGARDING DAWKINS SAYING THE BIBLE COMMANDS RACIAL HATE, The Hebrew Bible explicitly commands the Jewish people to “love the alien as yourself for you were strangers in Egypt.” Dawkins appears to have drawn heavily for his analysis upon an article by one John Hartung, which he warmly commends. But Hartung’s twisted hatred of Judaism emerged in another article in which he expressed the view that antisemitism was merely a form of “reactive racism” in response to the (as perceived by him) genocidal behavior of the Jews. Yet Dawkins has treated Hartung, the justifier of Jew-hatred, as an authoritative source on the Bible.

COMMENT: Does not change the fact that the Bible God is telling the people to remember they were once strangers themselves so to treat the stranger well. That amounts to saying that if they were never strangers in Egypt they could abuse the alien. To treat a person according to how you would like to be treated if you were in their shoes is really just being good to yourself. You have to treat them as you for they are not enough in themselves to warrant your help. This is not love and respect but hypocrisy. It will not last.

Religion always promotes its most toxic teachings using such tactics. The nastiness is dressed up in some way to make it more lasting and influential.

-----

She opposes Comte's argument that "human experience is intrinsically subjective" for that means everything is programmed by a feeling. It means thinking and arguments are only covers for feelings:
Comte posited instead that knowledge had to be based on experience, but this led straight into a trap, since human experience is intrinsically subjective.

COMMENT: It does not need to be and is a mixture of objective and subjective.

If my experience of my dinner is too subjective then imagine how subjective it must be if I think God is in my heart communicating with me and me with him! There is no test for that at all! At least there is with the dinner!

------

Darwinism, meanwhile, is not so much science as materialism applied to biology.

COMMENT:

Materialism means there is nothing but the physical. Some belief there are non-physical realities such as spirit. Once we start talking about non-physical spirit we are talking about what cannot be detected or understood. If it cannot be detected then it could be a different kind of physical we do not detect. Using spirit to get out of the problems of materialistic views of reality does not work and shifts from one problem to a worse one. Ethically it is just cheating. We have no way of knowing if spirit could make sense. It is a mere assumption and thus is anti-science.

Even if materialism is wrong it does not mean that biology shows signs of supernatural guidance and of being helped along by an intelligent God. Believers say that God has the right to design what is in the universe and let other things just act as if they are on their own.

-----

At a deeper level still, whether or not scientists admit it, there is an impulse within science that is akin to religious faith. It is the belief that there is always more to be known about the world. Stephen Barr, a theoretical physicist at the University of Delaware, observed that the search for this knowledge involves an element of faith: The scientist has confidence in the intelligibility ofthe world. He has questions about nature. And he expects - no, more than expects, he is absolutely convinced-that these questions have intelligible answers."

COMMENT: She is telling us that a normal human feeling is a religious one? She is revealing that she clairvoyantly knows what is inside the scientist? The religious doctrine that God didn’t use anything to make all things is hardly intelligible!

-----

The idea that religious belief and reason don’t go together is contradicted by the innumerable scientists throughout history who have been staunch religious believers, and for whom science has actually served to confirm their faith.

COMMENT: Those scientists did not have today's opportunities to learn and are too far in the past to count. Plus to keep their careers they had to please the Church. The Church ruled the universities and the schools.

Contradicted is too strong of a word.

A lot of science does not overlap on religion so there is no contradiction then. It depends on the scientist's field. But to have a more complete picture of science means ruling out religion.

A scientist who is religious is not a theologian and if you are busy with science you may not spot the stupidity of your religion. Scientists being religious has nothing to do with making religion plausible or true.

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The established Church of England, which has succumbed in so many areas to the march of secularism and paganism, has sided with the forces of hatred, bigotry and unreason over Israel. Along with the Episcopalians and other liberal denominations in America, it lends its voice to the demonization of Israel and parrots the mendacious and hateful narrative propagated by the Arab and Muslim world. In the face of suicide bomb and rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, the bishops and archbishops are silent. Instead they attack Israel for the measures it takes in self-defense.

COMMENT: Good. It is proof that liberal religion is sometimes more toxic than fundamentalist religion. We should use moderate religion as a weapon against extremist religion for it is no better itself.

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The real root of the extreme hostility within the church towards Israel lies in the resurrection of the previously discredited doctrine of “replacement theology,” also known as “supersessionism,” wrapped up in politics and ideology. Replacement theology goes back to the third century CE when Origen, regarded as the father of Christian doctrine, concluded that the Jews had lost their favored position with God and that Christians were now the “New Israel.” The Jews’ divine election was revoked.

COMMENT: But the Christian doctrine that it is the true religion of God while Judaism is outdated implies that Jews and Judaism are less than Christians in terms of being accepted by God. The success of supersessionism and its endurance clearly shows it should be regarded as part of the Christian faith. Origin only took the idea from his forerunners. It is nonsense to blame him for its creation.

The word Catholic really means non-racist and meant to invite all nations and people. The use of the term by the Church is a slap against the Jewish minority. Judaism is not a universal religion and is about the chosen race - the people of Israel wherever they are.

Even the doctrine that God has given seven sacraments, seven gifts to the Church, to prepare them and grant them everlasting happiness with him in Heaven is supersessionism - the Jews have not got these sacraments or any sacraments. Supersessionism in action and supersessionism in doctrine - that is a toxic mix of two things each one of which is toxic enough itself!

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She quotes the Talmud Yerushalmi as saying that if one soul of Israel is killed then scripture regards him as having killed the whole world.

COMMENT: That shows where the Koran got the saying that whoever kills, kills all the world in the eyes of Allah.

It goes, Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land – it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one – it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors – Sura 5:32.

People love the Islamic version of the quote but it is clearly hate speech when you read it in context. It says it is okay to kill criminals. It is vague on how bad they need to be thus giving a loophole if you want to be a liberal executioner who slays those who murder along with those who steal a joint of beef.

The Koran has validated a totally racist statement as well by even daring to honour such reasoning even if it uses it in a different way. Allah says the quote is his word though it is not in the Bible but the Talmud.

SO?:

The book is quite good but picks on atheists too much! Its warnings on liberalism and Islam are timely. The role of Christianity in fuelling anti-Jew hate is clear in this book. When people who barely know who Jesus' mother was or when he supposedly lived identify as Christians thanks to parents and schools and yet miraculously have enough religion to hate the Jews we will find that disturbing. Christians do not pick on Jews over the nasty Old Testament laws for Christians went out of their way to keep these laws though obsolete enshrined in honour in the Bible. It is racism with a strong religious flavour. Some think the texts are in to make the Jews look bad. Some think the texts are in for they are seen as a burden to Jews and the Christians rub it in by validating them while they themselves are smugly exempt. Whatever the truth is, the Christians have no right to take any moral high ground.

Gazza

The World Turned Upside Down

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 3, 2019

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One of the best books I've read in ages. Highly informative, intelligent and very well written. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Highly recommended. 5 stars, easily.

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4 people found this helpful

fox

Melanie is only human!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 8, 2013

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I love Melanie Phillips' writing, and I very much enjoyed this book. It taught me a few things, certainly, although I don't find every point persuasive. Melanie trashes the evidence accepted by people on certain issues, and then goes on to produce very similar sounding evidence to support her own favoured viewpoints, and seems to expect us, this time, to rely on that evidence. It is the general unreliability of the evidence, which she proves, that makes me feel we can't be certain of the veracity of her points any more than her opponents' points. Her passion comes out in a very repetitive hectoring about certain things, which keep coming up in chapter after chapter, but overall she does succeed in giving us a fresh perspective on things and in highlighting certain ominous trends. Well worth a read, I feel.

6 people found this helpful

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The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power Hardcover – April 20, 2010

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