Comments on: D’Souza’s Trojan Horse

By: Joshua Lipana

Joshua Lipana — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:00:45 +0000

Thank you for this.

By: Bosch Fawstin

Bosch Fawstin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:27:54 +0000

Mr. Journo,

It’s pretty scary that some people take D’Souza seriously, even though, as you cite, he has his critics on the right and others, even Victor Davis Hanson has been critical of D’Souza and had a pretty contentious back and forth with him about the time the book came out. Your line that ‘D’Souza needs this to be true’ regarding his agenda, really nails it, looking forward to your further thoughts on this.

Best,

Bosch

By: brad

brad — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:06:09 +0000

I guess I’ll have to re-read that book. I didn’t realize it was so evil. Its a bit peculiar tarring it now, in this fashion. How old is the book? Its not exactly new. I read it a bit after it had come out, which was quite awhile ago. I’ve always enjoyed D’Souza’s writings, even though I don’t agree with his Christian foundation — and I am not CHristian, but am not against it either. Let’s face it, in this country, you aren’t going to convince most people that the best path forward is atheism couple with reason. And how must the backwards Islamists of the Mideast view the most ostensible aspects of our society, when the most egregious and extreme perversions are what they see most? The unlimited lattitude of liberalism is shameless and other more closed societies certainly don’t want to be infected by it. D’Souza is obviously against the liberal excesses, as most reasonable people are, whether religion is at their base or not. His option is more conservativism, which in some respects is not so agreeable either, since it is a replacement of reason with faith. But I don’t see this interpretation of D’Souza as very solid. D’Souza’s thoughts are important to consider, even if one doesn’t share his remedy.

By: David Furnival

David Furnival — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 08:43:54 +0000

I have not read ‘The Enemy at Home’. I dont need to as i get a flavour of its themes from your post. I have previously agreed with and support ARC’s position on the cultural demise of reason in the West and in the proliferation of superstition religion and mysticism in main stream politics. We as a civilisation that is supposedly rational have the disease of altruism infecting our ideology and tend to want to appease and help Islamic states that want to see our destruction.
I am a 43 year old factory worker from England and reading op eds etc from ARC is helping me understand better some of the reasons for the current predicament the West finds itself in.
I look forward to further Posts and in the meantime review d’Souza’s book . thanks

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:49:11 +0000

In my opinion this is one of the most interesting posts produced by the VfR blog so far. Which is saying a lot. I look forward to reading the rest.

By: D. Jason Fleming (djasonfleming) 's status on Wednesday, 15-Jul-09 23:09:47 UTC - Identi.ca

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:10:06 +0000

[...] http://blog.aynrandcenter.org/dsouzas-trojan-horse/ [...]

By: Mel McGuire

Mel McGuire — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:18:35 +0000

Without publishing a formal review, there is another way to put your view of this book in front of the public: write a short summary review of the book at amazaon.com and link to the URLs here that contain your comments.

To find out that this can be done, I sent an e-mail to amazon.com (in March) asking about their URL policy. I received the following reply:
“As mentioned in the review guidelines, we generally inform that we do not accept any URLs. However, if the URL is for another website where a separate review is published, we will accept the review along with the URL. In this case, I understand that you want to provide a URL that links to another review submitted on a different website. You can include such URLs. Please know that we will not accept the URLs leading to irrelevant information such as any sort of promotion.”

However, I note that there are already 136 reviews at amzaon.com; about 1/3 of them are “1 star” reviews–the lowest.

Note that theocracy isn’t enough for D’Souza; he’s among those trying to bring science under the roof of Christian theology–and take credit for it. Some of D’Souza’s lines from a recent debate with Christopher Hitchens (my transcription from the video):
“I want to suggest that even modern science is rooted in–not just theist–but specifically Christian assumptions. This seems a little bit strange to some people because they say “oh, science is based on reason but religion is based on faith”. Actually, that’s not so. Science too is based on 3 faith based propositions that can in no way be derived from reason and in fact are the direct legacy of Christian theology.”
…
“No possible empirical test can resolve the question of whether there’s an afterlife. So, in the absense of evidence, I believe that there is an afterlife–on faith. In the absense of evidence, Christopher Hitchens does not believe that there is an afterlife. The difference between us is not that he knows and I don’t or that I know and he doesn’t. He is laboring under the delusion that his position is based on reason and my position is based on faith. When, the truth of it is, neither of us know, both of us are guessing, both our positions are based on faith and he would do well to have the honesty to admit that.”

Without Aristotle’s and Rand’s views on axioms, I don’t think the “New Atheism” can handle the many attacks on reason and atheism coming from the pious.