The man above (standing in front of the bookcase) is Professor Peter singer, the man who preaches infanticide, who teaches that if it suits their doctors or guardians, infants can be regarded as less than animals.

When the Nazis began the large scale extermination of the Jews, Heinrich Himmler (who himself was made physically sick by the things his men did) famously gave a speech to those of his SS troops who were then tasked with those abominable deeds, telling them they must suppress their natural human responses to what they were about to do — their feelings of horror and revulsion — because Reason demanded that the Jews must be exterminated.

The Iblis Pill

Among those who died in the camps were Professor Singer’s grandparents.

And yet the lesson the Professor Singer has taken from the Nazi Holocaust is not that the post-Christian, secular, atheist, materialist West had lost its soul, but that the West was not post-Christian enough, that there was still too much human emotion ruling our affairs, indeed that it was emotion itself that caused the Holocaust.

That Reason would save us. The same Reason that had marched us through the slave trade, the French Revolution, Marxism, the Gulag, Eugenics, Nazism, the Final Solution, the Killing Fields…

We had spent our 400 years in the wilderness. This time, Reason would lead us to the promised land.

Evil begets evil, perhaps the pain of such a personal loss — and such a profound loss of power — has produced a man with the overpowering desire to possess that power.

But no, the truth is that the highly intelligent are so often the greatest fools, the most easily seduced. He’s just a stupid man, in love with his own brilliance, who’s taken the Iblis Pill.

Young Eliot, AKA ‘Claw of the Conciliator’, links to an interesting story about Russian Christian Mystical Mathematicians, with the following remark:

I’ve heard that when surveyed recently, mathematicians reported higher levels of religiosity than other scientists…

to which Jack Perry: replied:

“Physicists may describe what God has wrought, but mathematicians feel what it is to be God.”

Which led to this story:

Mystic, Martyr, Mathematician

…a number of discoveries in the late 19th century threw mathematics into a flurry of controversy. Apart from the logical paradoxes found at that time (which make for another fascinating story), the most earth-shattering claims were staked by the German mathematician Georg Cantor, who once and for all exploded our original naive intuitions of infinity.

One of the pieces of fallout from this was that the most intuitive definitions of mathematical concepts like “real number” or “function” postulated the existence of real numbers or functions that are inaccessible to our finite minds, because they aren’t the results of any formula or the limits of any intelligible process.

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[T]he philosophical presuppositions of the leading French mathematicians led them to abandon their early successes in these areas; a widespread Cartesianism and a secularist positivism made it inconceivable to these men that anything could meaningfully exist which was not intelligible.

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When the French left the field, it was the Russian mathematicians who rescued the field from the tyranny of epistemology over ontology. Egorov and Nikolai Luzin were foremost among them, and their willingness to interact with non-constructible (non-knowable) mathematical objects was not unrelated to their shared religious faith in the God who truly existed but was beyond all human understanding.

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In the end, the mathematics produced by these Russian scholars was so beautiful, so useful, so eminently true, that it triumphed over the epistemological snobbery of the French school. Today we learn about non-constructible reals, nowhere differentiable continuous functions, and non-measurable sets in undergraduate classes, and we think little of it besides a passing note of weirdness. Thanks to the Russian mystics like Egorov, we have now realized that it is simply sophomoric to deny the existence of something on the sole grounds that we cannot define or comprehend it ourselves.

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It is said that Egorov died from the effects of his hunger strike and prison treatment, in the house of the mathematician whom the Party chose to replace him at the Moscow Mathematical Society, chanting the name of Jesus.

A few nice links from one of my current favourite Blogs, Ali Eteraz, who has a nice mix of Islamic matters and politics.

He has a link to a translation of Surah Rahman from the Koran, which I think most Christians would enjoy.

He also has an interesting piece on ‘Iblis the Jinn’.

Iblis was the jinn who prior to the creation of man was a faithful and virtuous being. His piety was such that he spent an infinity of worship upon every square foot of the universe, and where he bowed he left roses blooming in the night. (more…)