Comment on the Belmont Club "Starting the New Year with a Bang"

Nihilism.
Among the many kind tributes to our hairy partners that were posted the other day mac noted that one of the problems he had with muslims is that they hate dogs. It is a pattern among Islamists to assert the supremacy of a Creator but to deny the worth of the Creation. How do we know of God but through his acts? Those include the gifts of nature, the oceans, the clouds, the forests, the flowers, the birds and the beasts. They also include the gifts planted in the heart, the capacity to give, elicit and receive joy. Jews and Buddhists share a suspicion of ascetics. They are to concerned with their own purity and status and that makes them deny the beauty before them. The dog exists to be petted, the child to be encouraged, the girl to be smiled at. If you do that and work to make the world a better place, safer for the gifts that have been entrusted to our care, then you are doing good works.

The Taliban do not attack a volleyball game because it is a convenient place to destroy their sworn enemies. They attack the game itself because the very idea that humans can spontaneously and naturally act as they are intended to by their nature is anathema to them. They are like the wraiths, and Frodo as he neared the edge, in LoTR, naked in the dark with nothing between them and a wheel of fire.

It amazes me that the easy going English who love dogs and nature more than their own children put up with it. A strange alliance with the Gaiia cult.