He
is on stormingly good form against
the ridiculous practice of referring to this year's Eurovision Song Contest
winner, whose beard accurately bespeaks both a Y chromosome and a penis, as
"she". He concludes:
I am well aware that
there is a large component of social construction to the idea of gender.
The old notion that all women are soft and caring and all blokes are manly and gruff came more from society, and what it needed men and women to do, than it did from nature or biology.
But gender is not entirely a social construct. We can surely agree that it has a pretty big basis in biology, in facts, appendages, things.
To accept the idea that a man can become a “she” overnight, simply through demanding it, does more than flatter the pretensions of one individual – it also undermines the ability of all of us to approach the world objectively, to use a common language to describe people and objects that have particular attributes.
It obliterates the very Enlightenment ideal of using reason and measurement to describe the physical world, in favour of allowing individuals to impose their own personal, petty, pretentious imagining of the world on to us all.
It is unreason dolled up as a radical stance.
The old notion that all women are soft and caring and all blokes are manly and gruff came more from society, and what it needed men and women to do, than it did from nature or biology.
But gender is not entirely a social construct. We can surely agree that it has a pretty big basis in biology, in facts, appendages, things.
To accept the idea that a man can become a “she” overnight, simply through demanding it, does more than flatter the pretensions of one individual – it also undermines the ability of all of us to approach the world objectively, to use a common language to describe people and objects that have particular attributes.
It obliterates the very Enlightenment ideal of using reason and measurement to describe the physical world, in favour of allowing individuals to impose their own personal, petty, pretentious imagining of the world on to us all.
It is unreason dolled up as a radical stance.
It was only from Christianity in general, and from
Catholicism in particular, that science acquired the idea that some
propositions were just plain true, so that others were just plain false.
And it was only from Christianity in general, and from
Catholicism in particular, that science acquired the idea that
there was an investigable order in the universe; even if that order is a law of
chaos, then the point still stands.
Faced with a changed intellectual environment which
denies those foundations rather than simply presupposing them, science must
return to the system that first asserted them in the midst of a former such
environment.
That system is Christianity in general, and Catholicism
in particular.
Thus, for example, while and by affirming the objective
existence of the substance distinct from the accidents, transubstantiation also
affirms the objective existence of the accidents, which are the objects of
scientific investigation.
One such accident being Conchita's wurst.
One such accident being Conchita's wurst.
Transubstantiation is the bulwark against the Postmodern
assault on science.
Nothing else is.
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