BOGUS LEFTIST "SCIENCE"

As regular readers of this blog will be well aware, I am one of the very small band of atheists who takes a considerable and sympathetic interest in Christianity. Like the Devil, I even quote scripture for my purposes sometimes. And I did for a while do a regular scripture blog devoted to recovering via New Testament exegesis what first century Christians believed -- before the paganizing influences of later centuries had set in. If you are an orthodox Christian, don't read it. You may find it disturbing.

And I have written at some length on what history shows us about the common Christian claim that Christianity is an essential foundation for a moral society and individual liberty. I could find little support for that claim. But I see no evidence for the opposite claim, either: That Christianity is bad for you.

So when I saw a report of the negative garbage written about Christianity by "humanist" Gregory Paul in the Journal of Religion and Society, I gave him a pretty good blast (yesterday) over his apparently clueless "research" methods -- without bothering to check on what others had written before me . One of my readers, however, has pointed me to a very comprehensive article by Statguy -- who has taken the trouble to look in more detail at the "research" concerned. And it is, as I thought, incompetent to the point of fraud. Paul apparently carried out no appropriate statistical analysis of any kind. No reputable academic journal in the social sciences would have accepted such clueless garbage -- and I say that from the viewpoint of someone who has had many critiques of academic journal articles published. So I think that identifies without need for further enquiry what the Journal of Religion and Society is: a Leftist rant and nothing more is my guess.

It might be of interest for me to pass on something else that my reader emailed me about Gregory Paul: "I heard him defend his study on a national talk show here in the States. The reason he gave for including Black violence was that Blacks were mainly influenced by "Southern Redneck" culture which came from Protestant Southern English culture and therefore Christian religion is the reason for Black violence. This Leftist's logic is so bad I really don't know what to say".

Amen to that. For more on the "troubled" relationship Leftists have with science, see GREENIE WATCH. The fourth post down that I put up there yesterday is very much to the point. And genetic science is very inconvenient for Leftists too. See, for example here

Before I leave the subject of dodgy Leftist science, have a look at this report: "In a Cornell University study [of Cornell Sociology students], men who perceived their masculinity to be maligned displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq war more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle. In other words, men overcompensate when they feel their masculinity is threatened".

I get a bit tired of pointing out the holes in this sort of study so I will simply note that there was NO sampling done for the "research" so NO generalizations from the study are possible -- not even generalizations about all Cornell students, let alone about men in general. And students do of course become expert at telling their teachers what their teachers want to hear. A university education in the "Humanities" seems to consist of little else these days. And having taught sociology students for 12 years at a major university, I know what a wacko lot they can be. I remember one student who seemed to think that the idea of negative numbers was some sort of CIA plot. And I am pretty sure he ended up graduating!

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ELSEWHERE

The always well-informed Keith Windschuttle has weighed in on the Andrew Fraser controversy -- where Fraser's academic journal article on Australian immigration policy was suppressed from publication in an Australian law journal. I was the one who first put the article online so have some interest in the matter. Windschuttle points out something I have been pointing out for a long time -- that the old "White Australia" policy (originally designed to exclude the Chinese from Australia) always had its principal support from the Left. It was news to me that Fraser too has extensive Leftist affiliations but Windschuttle's conclusion that Fraser is in fact an old-fashioned Leftist rather than any type of conservative should come as no surprise to anyone who knows history. Leftist histrionics have been amazingly successful in suppressing all memory of how openly racist Leftists were up until about 1950 to 1960 but the facts are there for anyone who wants to check (See here and here). And I thoroughly agree with Windschuttle in seeing no problem with Australia's intake of Asians. I made my disagreement with Fraser about that clear from the outset. Windschuttle avoids mentioning the other leg of Fraser's paper, however: The serious doubts Fraser has raised about the wisdom of Australia's intake of African refugees. I think Fraser is well justified in those doubts -- as I have pointed out at length elsewhere.

Australian attitudes to immigration: "More than half of Australians would like to see fewer migrants from the Middle East, despite a decade-long softening in opposition to immigration, new research shows. The study also found British migrants here want more of their own kind to come here. Overall, despite the divisive debate about boat people, refugees and the Federal Government's mandatory detention policy, Australians appear to be becoming more tolerant, with overall opposition to immigration dropping greatly in recent years. But 53 per cent would like to see fewer migrants from the Middle East, according to the research, to be published in Monash University's People and Place this month. There is opposition, too, to more Asian migrants, with 36.7 per cent of Australian-born people wanting to see fewer Asians coming to this country. But opposition to further migration was much more moderate in relation to migrants from southern Europe or Britain. Only 15.4 per cent of the overall population thought fewer southern Europeans should come here, and only 13.9 per cent thought fewer Britons should come"

There is a very good cartoon here about use of the word "niggardly". See here and here for examples of the uproar that use of the word "niggardly" has produced in the past. Despite appearances, "niggardly" has nothing whatever to do with the famous "N word".

I liked this comment: "An eye-witness account of the talks between EU Commissioner Peter Mandleson and his Chinese counterpart, held in Beijing at the height of the textiles trade dispute: "One of them was an unaccountable, unelected politician from a sprawling bureaucracy who was promoting protectionism," says the Confederation of British Industry Director, Sir Digby Jones. "And the other was Chinese.""

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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