Culte de l'Etre Supreme

I must first apologise for the lack of posts as of late, but there has been much to do. I arrived home this weekend rather sick, but I am feeling a bit better.
Secondly, I must commend the 72% voter turnout in Iraq, despite the constant threat of violence against voters. It's a shame we can't get that in this country. Perhaps what makes democracy dear is that it isn't taken for granted.
With these taken care of, I shall move on to to-day's subject. It is best filed under "oddball religions," in which my friends and family know I have a peculiar and studious interest. Some religions that pique my interest are ones that were essentially thought up by a group with no divine inspiration or supernatural ends in mind. These sorts of religion Voltaire termed "civic religions," which would be used to keep society in line. Voltaire proposed such a system, as did Auguste Compte, founder of Sociology. They felt that the uneducated classes needed a check on their behaviour, and a religion that espoused the values of the regime would be the best solution.
Naturally, they did not believe that religion had any fundamental truth to it, and such a faith was an instrument for social control, not an actual belief system. It therefore had to be mandatory in nature, else it would have little effect.
The best example of this is the Cult of the Supreme Being in Revolutionary France, founded by Maximilien Robespierre. He cobbled together this revolutionary cult as a result of infighting between atheist and deist factions in the Revolutionary era. The result was a mandatory religious faith that was about as exciting as a trans-pacific airline flight in coach. On certain days of celebration, the entire population had to turn out wearing silly costumes and carrying branches in peculiar ways that were enforced by law.
Naturally, the cult was not very popular. L'Incorruptible apparently over-estimated his own abilities as a charismatic spiritual leader. The speech he gave establishing the religion has to be read to be believed- "It is He who bathes with delicious tears the eyes of the son pressed to the bosom of his mother" and the like. If you're really feeling upbeat, read the text of his speech here, and prepare to be taken down a notch or two. You'll get a good understanding of why Robespierre was beheaded two months later in the Coup of Thermidor and replaced by the Directory, a group of losers and oddballs that began to restore stability to the French State. In turn were replaced by Bonaparte, who quite sensibly got rid of the last trappings of this odd-ball religion.
A rather amusing review of this rather unique faith can be found here. Yes, I know it's a rotten.com address, but there are no corpses on the page, I promise.
On a side-note, apparently the modernists have yet to learn that civic religions don't jibe well with populations (nobody likes to be treated like a sheep). Some of the political philosophers at the UN are attempting to codify environmentalist beliefs into a sort of mystical religious covenant called the Earth Charter. In a mock Ark of the Covenant, there are several tablets with sixteen "commandments" for a "just and sustainable society."
Another example of a less beneficent "civic religion" is extant in Turkmenistan, and it's the cult around its president, known as Turkmenbashi. It's a personality cult reinforced by Turkmenbashi's wacky book, the Ruhnama. If you're feeling really brave, or have a death wish like Charles Bronson, you can actually read the tome here. Apparently Civic Religions are making a comeback.

In Memoriam

Sir Winston Churchill, whose singular courage inspired a nation to resist Nazi tyranny and therefore preserved the western democratic tradition, died forty years ago to-day at the age of ninety.
For those of you who don't know me, my group of mischievous associates is known as "The Churchill Society, Wheeling." We chose this name to recognise the singular achievements of this one man, to draw inspiration from his undaunted courage, and perhaps touch his deep reserve of resolution that kept him going in the face of adversity.
Though Churchill was once vaunted and honoured throughout the world, nowadays his memory is being dragged through the muck by his ideological opponents. During his lifetime, he was humiliated by being tossed out of office in the 1945 general election because of his thought stance against Stalin. In his place was elected the Labour government of Clement Attlee, whose horrific mis-management of the economy kept the UK under a system of rationing for many years, while the US prospered under Truman. When Churchill was re-elected in 1951, he worked to avert the threat of nuclear war between the US and USSR. He also won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1953.
At the time of his death in 1965, Churchill's star had again risen. He was buried as one of the greatest heroes of the United kingdom. Since then, ideologoues have denigrated his memory. They have used his belief in the the British Empire to denigrate him as a racist and imperialist lout. They use his conflicts with Ghandi over India's independence to label him a racist.
Such base abuse of a great man is purely partisan. Churchill represents everything that the Bureaucrats who run the UK and most trans-national organisations despise- individual resolution, holding on against all odds, and a single man playing such a great role in reversing the course of history. Bureaucrats, by nature, are reactive. They go with the flow rather than re-directing it. They would have given in to a settled peace with Hitler during World War II, because his victory was "inevitable," and a settled peace would save later blood-shed.
Churchill taught us that one man can change things, even in an age when millions fought millions. It would serve us well to remember this, and follow his example.

Any-way, we honoured him with a proper supper, and some time in reflection of his career and contributions to Western Civilisation.

Regular contributions will resume shortly, with an entry out-lining my failure to convert to the Roman Catholic Faith, despite Tom's +5 Force Persuade bonus.

What you say?

It may not be gramatically correct, but this spontaneous expression used by Ray Charles and the Captain in Zero Wing is the best attempt I can make at transmitting my surprise at reading an article about another bit of nonsense from Tony Blair's "Cool Britain"-
BBC News-Education Head Scraps Homework "Dinosaur"
Now, I am not so far from my primary school to remember my vast hatred for homework, so this is not a troublesome development. However, when one examines the article, one finds a very worrisome quote-

"Dr Hazlewood's radical approach is based on a scheme devised by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), which rejects the notion that a teacher's job is to transmit a body of knowledge to pupils."

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought the entire point of education was to transmit a body of knowledge- history, mathematics, philosophy, science, &c. - to the youth of society. In the place of the standard educational mission, we find no replacement philosophy, just some garbage about the "Educational Journey" being made "more exciting." If you're going to abandon the point of education, you should at least have an alternate ready to take its place. Apparently not in England.
Perhaps this might explain the lovely mass of vomit that was left in the communal sink in the central area of our building by Friday-night revellers. Disgraceful.
Thanks to Ken Frost's "Nanny Knows Best" and An Englishman's Castle

EU Warmongering?

There are a number of pervasive myths out there that are not congruent with fact, but nevertheless seem to live on. For example, the idea that the assault weapons ban banned automatic weapons (the National Firearms Act did so in 1934). Another is the idea that Communism is an ideal system that merely has difficulties in the application. Another of these myths is that the EU is some sort of progressive utopia that is an oasis of social justice, peace, and liberty.
Refuting this myth is a particular fetish of mine, as my class-mates and my browser history will readily attest. Though the military forces of EU member nations are a mere fraction of the other major powers, the EU can still greatly contribute to global instability. In fact, recently the "progressive" Union is planning to end the moratorium on arms sales to the People's Republic of China. The EU, though lacking in strength of numbers, has been developing its defence technology. Their new ASRAAM is competitive with the latest generation of US air-to-air missiles, and the prototypeBVRAAM has superior range to any US missile. Other systems are worth mentioning, such as the ship-based PAAMS air-defence system, and especially the new Galileo Global Positioning System. The case of the Galileo system is especially problematic, as China is a "partner" in its development programme. The Galileo GPS is touted as an alternative to the US Navstar GPS system, which is currently denied to China so that China cannot develop precision GPS-based weapons systems like the US JDAM.
Of course, with free access to the Galileo GPS, developing a GPS-guided weapon is simply a matter of fitting a receiver to the weapon and developing a system to steer the weapon to its target. Making this worse is the EU's admission that they could not deny use of the system in case of conflict. The US Military, who would most likely end up fighting the Chinese in a war situation, has announced that it would attack the EU Satellite Constellation with new anti-satellite weapons. With advanced weapons programmes like these, the technology advantage the US has over China is diminished, and China's manpower can be brought to bear more effectively.
In addition, the North Atlantic Alliance is going to suffer, as the US is going to be understandably reluctant to grant military technology. Plus, it adds to the trans-Atlantic distrust, which is at record levels as it is.
Any-way, it is not only military intervention which leads to global destalibilisation. It seems that the world is getting drawn closer and closer to conflict through blindness. Recommended reading: The Guns of August.

Introitus

Greetings to all, and welcome to my very own weblog, wherein I shall shortly pursue my purpose of self-expression and general spleen-venting about various topics which catch my fancy.

As for my person, I shall reveal little except that I am known as "the Admiral", and have a wide-ranging set of interests. Said range includes politics (especially British, European, and American), philosophy and theology, technology, military affairs (especially naval affairs), firearms, and metaphysics. I'm also interested in "alternative" thought, though my interest does not equate to belief in some of the sillier extensions (i.e. hollow earth theories, Nazi hollow earth theories, 9/11 conspiracy theories, crystal medicine, and the like). But, we do live in a realm that we possess little understanding of, and because of this one must keep an open mind towards credible reports of phenomena that are beyond our daily experience.

Regarding personal events, little shall be set down, as little is worth noting. From time to time, there might be a significant entry regarding personal issues, though I shall endeavour to keep such entries to a respective proportion of the over-all content. This is no LiveJournal or E/N site, and I for one avoid personal drama.