This piece of excrement comes in a supposedly respectable (though obviously right wing) British magazine, from the ever-more unhinged Melanie Phillips:
On the Maze he said the financial crisis was not about morality but about incompetence and stupid decisions, and he did not agree with me that at root what lay behind it was, in the words of his fellow witness the Abbot of Worth, ‘militant atheism’. In direct contrast to Oliver I cannot understand how, along with every other form of human interaction, the administration of capitalism cannot have a moral dimension. It is surely important that bankers behave ethically, that politicians behave responsibly and that ordinary people behave prudently.
I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the monetary expression of the broader degradation of our values – the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as ‘rights’ and the loss of self-discipline. And the root cause of that erosion is ‘militant atheism’ which, in junking religion, has destroyed our sense of anything beyond our material selves and the here and now and, through such hyper-individualism, paved the way for the onslaught on bedrock moral values expressed through such things as family breakdown and mass fatherlessness, educational collapse, widespread incivility, unprecedented levels of near psychopathic violent crime, epidemic drunkenness and drug abuse, the repudiation of all authority, the moral inversion of victim culture, the destruction of truth and objectivity and a corresponding rise in credulousness in the face of lies and propaganda -- and intimidation and bullying to drive this agenda into public policy.
...
The link between all that and the US presidential election is – as Oliver himself acknowledges – the figure of Sarah Palin. It seems to me that the reason she has sparked such an unprecedented campaign of lies, smears, abuse and dangerously unhinged hatred (if you think that’s an exaggeration, just look at the readers’ posts on this very site) is because, as I wrote in the Mail on Monday, she stands against the tide of secular nihilism in the culture wars. Oliver and I dare say Hitchens (although I have not discussed this with him) may be shoulder to shoulder with me on foreign policy but they stand on the other side from me in the culture wars – what I see as nihilism, I suspect they view as progressive -- and it is no coincidence that they both stand also for militant (or in Oliver’s case, rather less militant) atheism which they assume (falsely, in my view) is synonymous with rationality. Palin’s evangelical Christianity, and the moral and social positions that flow from that faith, would therefore strike them as beyond appalling. That’s why Oliver sees her as embodying
anti-intellectualism, insularity, social intolerance and anti-rationalism.
For me, by contrast, although the nature of her faith and the churches with which she has been associated certainly make me uneasy, they do not alarm me. That’s because I regard evangelicals as allies in the fight to defend authentic liberal, and thus moral, values which I believe are rooted in Judeo-Christian thinking. I’m sure that, had I been around during the Victorian era, I would not have cared either for the evangelicals then trying to convert everyone to Christianity – but the fact remains that it was through their faith that they campaigned against slavery and for just about every social reform that we now think of as enlightened and progressive. For me, ‘anti-intellectualism, insularity, social intolerance and anti-rationalism’ have indeed been unleashed upon our society – not by Christian evangelicals but by the forces of secular fundamentalism and bigotry through such phenomena as scientism, political correctness and post-modernism.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/2447021/the-culture-war-for-the-white-house.thtml:banghead:
What pisses me off is that the BBC gives this woman a job pontificating on the radio programme she refers to - 'The Moral Maze'. Her own morality has practically disappeared.
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