If you are standing in the room, you cannot also be not standing in the room at the same time. If you are going up the escalator, you cannot at the same time be going down the escalator. These are examples of what logicians like to call the
Logical Principle of Non-Contradiction.Wiki:
In logic, a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when the propositions, taken together, yield two conclusions which form the logical inversions of each other. Illustrating a general tendency in applied logic, Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction states that “One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time.”
It is the foundation of all rational thought. Without it, no sense can be made of anything and nothing can be discovered, grasped, taught, conveyed or decided. Without this principle, all science, engineering and economics would halt. Without it, only irrationality and chaos could result in human endeavour.
Yes, I know, there are lots of philosophers, mostly recent ones, who refuse to accept this.
And we have the results before us every day in the papers. And in Parliament.
The ignorance of and refusal to accept the L.P. of Non C. results in statements like this:
My starting point is that I have always felt that where the science
is essentially persuasive, as I believe it to be, we should have a model of
facilitation. We should go with embryo research because of the tremendous human
opportunities that it offers. That is to say, I take an empiricist, pragmatic,
instrumental view, rather than the view that some abstract principle should inveigh
against the possibility that such research should be allowed or
extended.
and in politicians being elected to Parliament who think they've said something profound and clever because they have used the word "inveigh".
Well, I was taking my late morning bath this morning after tea n' toast and reading the Spectator in the bath, as I often do, when I became very excited.
Theo Hobson met Gene Robinson. Yes,
that Gene Robinson. He's in the Old Country for Lambeth, even though he hasn't been invited. In fact, he was specifically dis-invited, nevertheless, he's here.
Mr. Robinson told a group of admirers that his purpose in life is to create a new Christianity. Specifically Gay Christianity, for want of a better euphemism. The Church of Holy Gayness. He says that the Anglican Church is just the place for it.
Why?
Because it is the only one in the world that makes no bones, and never has made any bones, about accepting logical contradictions over tea and biscuits.
Apparently, in the Anglican Communion, water flows uphill and one can indeed be both in the room and not in the room at the same time.
Specifically:
"The Anglican tradition is uniquely capable of holding two seemingly contradictory ideas together. It's position on abortion, for example is that all human life is sacred. And, that no one has the right to tell a woman what to do with her body.
Both are true."
I have to say, when I saw this statement I was filled with joy.
AT LAST! I had found someone who can say plainly what Anglicanism is all about. Sodomy, infanticide and fundamental irrationality. Chaos, depravity and murder.
I believe this explains very well what has happened in this country.
Anglicanism invented political correctness.
Here's how it happened.
The nation's leaders abandoned the Faith when they repudiated the Church. (Maybe they didn't think they were doing this, but we have since learned that you can't separate the Faith from the Church any more than you can separate the soul from the body.)
The nation, after a period of rebellion, realizing they lived in an island and there was nowhere else to go, found they had no choice but to go along with it and followed suit, albeit more slowly and less enthusiastically. Thus the Anglican solution was born: let's just not talk about the fact that the entire nation has apostatized and abandoned God and in doing so, also abandoned its own identity. As long as we don't talk about it, things can just carry on and nothing bad will happen.
And nothing bad did, with a few exceptions. What is happening now, with the broad secularization of the whole world, happened then too. It seemed OK to go along with the Protestant revolution because nearly everyone else was doing it. Eventually, it was the Catholics who were seen as foreign and strange. The True Faith had been turned into an interloper and alien in its own land.
The bits and pieces of Catholicism that were allowed to survive in this newly manufactured "religion", were the carefully sanitized bits that fit into the political expediency of the day. But Christianity is politically inconvenient and one by one, they have had to be jettisoned as well.
Having been torn from its foundations, the Faith slowly leaked away until it died out completely.
But nature abhors a vacuum and the devil can't resist an empty house, and moved right on in, animating the corpse which, somewhat gruesomely, continues to wear the ecclesiastical clothes and occupy the buildings, gambolling lewdly around, flopping its limp and rotting appendages in a grotesque parody of Christian worship.
The vestiges of Christianity had all but seeped out of the "national church" by the end of the 18th century and we got Rationalism and the Enlightenment. But man cannot live on this high falutin' brainy stuff alone, and needs spirituality, even if it is counterfeit, so the ordinary folk clung to the bits and pieces of genuine, that is Catholic, Christianity as long as they continued to float whilst doing what the English do and refusing to talk about it.
This carried on until, about the beginning of the 20th century, that colossal slap-in-the-face epoch in which no one could maintain any delusions any more. Life without religion was tried, but found impossible, and we have ended up with what we have now, sex and personal gratification, nihilism and crushing indifference and the sudden exponential growth of the occult.
Oh, and pretty big rates of suicide, divorce, abortion, crime and spiritual emptiness.
That's because of what the headshrinkers like to call "cognitive dissonance".
Wiki:
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological state that describes the uncomfortable feeling when a person begins to understand that something the person believes to be true is, in fact, not true. Similar to ambivalence, the term cognitive dissonance describes conflicting thoughts or beliefs (cognitions) that occur at the same time, or when engaged in behaviors that conflict with one's beliefs. In academic literature, the term refers to attempts to reduce the discomfort of conflicting thoughts, by performing actions that are opposite to one's beliefs.
Taken as a lifestyle choice, the refutation of the L. P. of Non C., makes you go crazy. The dissonance builds up in the mind and the soul until it becomes like being permanently locked in a noisy room. You can't escape it and you can't shut it off. It's what happened to
Friedrich Nietzsche and Winston Smith.
The one thing Anglicans do that has become a British national trait, perhaps
the defining British national trait, is to not talk about what we're talking about. The trouble is that this causes massive, nation wide cognitive dissonance, which is what we see in the papers every day.
We've gone from not wanting to talk about the Papacy or the nature of the Church, to not talking about anything that might be upsetting. The let's-not-talk-about-it default position of the English was, I submit, created by the Anglican schism and has since spread into every aspect of British life, and has ultimately put the nation into its current parlous and perilous condition.
Our desire not to talk about Islam. About abortion. About Multiculturalism. About the EU. About the loss of British sovereignty. About the 200,000 children getting flushed into the sewer every year. About the absurdities of expecting the abortion and teenage pregnancy rate to fall whilst bombarding the kids with sex talks and condoms in schools. About the fact that "Asian" immigrants and blacks are statistically responsible for the vast majority of violent crime in this country. About the fact that the British, once a free people have abandoned their integrity and freedom and are being ruled by a toxic combination of Islamic terrorists, Brussels marxists, and gross salivatory appetite.
In all of this, we continue not to talk about what we are talking about. It's the Anglican way. Well, I've always wanted to know where it comes from, and now I know.
Thanks Gene.
Anglicanism. The one creed in the world that requires its adherents to accept logical contradictions by the simple method of not talking about anything but the weather.
At least with Islam, adherents are given something to do to work off the rage created by being forced to accept things that are patently untrue and wicked.
I used to try desperately to get Anglicans to tell me what they thought they meant by the word "catholic" in the creed at their service. I was puzzled by the fact that none of them could speak in plain sensible English about the origins of their church, or about their notions of ecclesiology.
I had yet to learn that when people are forced to accept things they know are not true, as an obvious logical contradiction, they can do one of two things: go mad and become violent (what I like to call the Islamic solution) or apply the Anglican principle. The latter is a kind of glaze, like aspic, that is poured over the logical rift to try to fill in the gap. It holds the whole thing together, in a fragile sort of way. But it requires one thing to keep it going: the pledge of everyone in the room, never ever to talk about it. Never ever to disturb the "consensus" that holds the jelly together. The first person to dig their spoon in it and try to find out how it's made, destroys it for everyone.
Anglicanism was held together for five hundred years by this massive agreement never ever to talk about the big questions. What sort of church are we? What do we believe? I think Druid Rowan said something like it recently, as he huffed and shuffled over the Shariah law debacle. I paraphrase from memory, "Anglicanism holds together by means of deciding not to decide on things."
Well, Gene has gone and blown it. He has forced it all out into the open. As long as we didn't say
out loud that we like sodomy and abortion, the Christians could maintain their denial and wouldn't have to go off on their own or join the papists.
But Gene has dug his spoon into the jelly to get the shrimps out and the whole thing has fallen down.
Gene talks about the future of the Christian world, and it is gay. Perhaps not particularly happy, but certainly gay.
Actually, I have to say that Gene showing up and telling everyone what he thinks while the Anglicans talk about the weather in Lambeth palace, is exactly what is needed. The attempt to stick the jelly back together by not inviting him is a perfect example of what I mean.
But Gene, you go girl, you keep sticking your spoon in and you GET that shrimp.
