Dr David Berlinski: the mathematician who exposes the flaws in the dogmas of Darwinism and Evolutionism

David Berlinski was brought up in New York City, educated at Columbia College and gained a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. He later became a Fellow of the Faculty in Mathematics and a Post Doctoral Fellow in molecular biology at Columbia University. He has taught philosophy, mathematics, and English at Stanford, Rutgers, Columbia, the Universite de Paris at Jussieu, the University of Puget Sound, the University of Santa Clara, San Jose State University and San Francisco State University.

He has been a fellow at both the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. He is the author of works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as the author of "A Tour of the Calculus", "The Advent of the Algorithm", and "Newton's Gift". Berlinski is currently a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute.

The producers of the critically acclaimed documentary "Icons of Evolution" recently sat down for an interview with Dr. Berlinski. The interview was a lucid and entertaining critique of Darwinian evolution.

Here is a clip of Berlinski in action:



Recently, Ben Stein, scholar, economist, writer and now Hollywood producer, has made a film about the exclusion from US schools and colleges of any critique of the dogmas of Darwinism and Evolutionism.

This film is called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.


The film is an expose of the way in which criticism of the dogmas of Darwinism and Evolutionism is ruthlessly excluded and expelled from colleges, schools and academies across the USA.

It features interviews with David Berlinski and ends with Richard Dawkins admitting that aliens, intelligent designers, from another planet may have been responsible for human life.

Berlinski is the most impressive of the interviewees and calmly demolishes the manner in which thin-skinned and intellectually unimpressive Evolutionists are simply unable to respond to his simple questions and rebuttals of standard dogmas of evolution that are taught in schools and colleges and are not allowed to be challenged.

Berlinski is neither a Christian nor a Fundamentalist but is a sceptical, secular Jew. But he is also a formidable mathematician. He accepts those forms of evolution which may be called "micro-evolution" i.e. changes within various biological groupings but he challenges the evidence for what has been called "macro-evolution" i.e. the kinds of changes that are now regarded as "proven" by "science" and which therefore cannot be challenged.

He makes it clear that this is not science but dogma and says why - eloquently, engagingly, calmly and rationally.

No wonder the dogmatic Evolutionists are calling him "incorrigible".

They simply cannot answer him and are terrified even to try.

Go to Youtube and see some of the childish and deeply pathetic attempts to mock and deride Berlinski.

This says more about the paucity of intellectual integrity of some Evolutionists than any opponent could ever say.

More from the devastatingly lucid David Berlinski:



Or try this:



This is a powerful thinker and hugely more interesting, persuasive and powerful than ever Dawkins could dream of.

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White Rose Day - 10 June: the Royal Stuarts and St Margaret of Scotland

In the late Seventeenth Century the Jacobites took up the White Rose of York as their emblem, celebrating "White Rose Day" on 10 June, the anniversary of the birth of James III and VIII in 1688.

Traditionally the origins of the emblem are said to go back to Edmund of Langley in the 14th century, the first Duke of York and the founder of the House of York as a Cadet branch of the then ruling House of Plantagenet.

The actual symbolism behind the rose has religious connotations as it represents the Virgin Mary, who was often called the Mystical Rose of Heaven. The Yorkist rose is white in colour, because in Christian liturgical symbolism, white is the symbol of light, typifing innocence and purity, joy and glory.

During the civil wars of the 15th century, the White Rose was the symbol of Yorkist forces opposed to the rival House of Lancaster, whose symbol was the Red Rose of Lancaster. The opposition of the two roses gave the wars their name: the Wars of the Roses.

The conflict was ended by King Henry VII of England, who symbolically united the White and Red Roses to create the Tudor Rose, symbol of the Tudor dynasty.

Today is also, fittingly, the Feast Day of St Margaret, Queen of Scotland.

St Margaret, Queen of Scotland, watches as her husband, King Malcolm Canmore kisses her books of religion out of respect for her virtue and learning

Born a Saxon circa 1046 (d. November 16, 1093) and raised in Hungary, Margaret was daughter of the English prince Edward the Exile or 'Edward Outremer', and granddaughter of King Edmund Ironside of England.

She was great-niece of Saint Stephen of Hungary. When her uncle, King Edward the Confessor, died in 1066, she was living in England where her brother, Edgar Ætheling, had decided to make a claim to the vacant throne.

After the conquest of England by the Normans, the widowed Agatha decided to leave Northumberland with her children and return to the Continent, but a storm drove their ship to Scotland where her daughter, the beautiful and learned Margaret married Malcolm Canmore (King Malcolm III of Scotland – son of “the gracious Duncan”, whom Shakespeare's Macbeth murdered in his own castle).

Legend has it that, although he could not read, he would turn the leaves of her books, and kiss those which she liked best. He gave her jewel-encrusted books as presents, one of which, a book of the Gospels, richly adorned with jewels, one day dropped into a river and was according to legend miraculously recovered, and is now in the Bodleian library at Oxford.

St Margaret helped the church in Scotland and was noted for her piety and learning. She founded Dunfermline Abbey as the new burial place for Scottish kings; it was also built to enshrine her greatest treasure, a relic of the True Cross.

It is customary for Jacobites to wear the White Rose on this day in memory of the Jacobite cause, the cause of legitimate, historic, just, Christian government under the ancient Stuart dynasty, illegally ousted by treachery, revolution and a Dutch invasion.

James Stuart, de jure King James III and VIII of England, Scotland, Ireland and France, kept out of his throne after the treacherous Whig revolution and Dutch invasion that illegally cast his father, King James II, from the throne.

Prince James, the true King, was offered the throne by the revolutionary Protestants if he would abjure the Roman Catholic religion and embrace Anglicanism. "Sir", the true King replied boldly, "Nothing would induce me to abandon my religion for it is the true one".

Let his cause for sainthood be introduced!

"Bonnie Prince Charlie", Prince Charles Stuart, son of King James III and VIII

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St Andrew Kim Taegon and the glorious, immortal martyrs of Korea

The practice of Christianity in Korea has a relatively short history, but after a difficult beginning it has seen significant growth and success.

The deeply-rooted traditional religions of Buddhism, Shamanism and Confucianism held strong for many centuries and have been challenged by Christianity in a meaningful way only since 1784 when the first Catholic prayer-house was established in Korea.

Prior to the Korean War of 1950–1953, two-thirds of Korean Christians lived in the North, but most subsequently fled to the South.

Around 10% of the population of South Korea now describe themselves as Roman Catholics, one of the highest in Asia.

The first known Christian in Korea was Konishi Yukinaga, who was one of the commanders of the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s. He took a Korean girl later known as Julia Ota-a back to Japan with him and she later became one of the first Korean Christians.

Father Gregorious de Cespedes, a Jesuit priest, visited Konishi in Korea in 1593 to work among Japanese expatriates, but he was not permitted to proselytize Koreans.

A decade later, however, the Korean diplomat Yi Gwang-Jeong returned from Beijing carrying a world atlas and several theological books written by Father Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit missionary to China.

He began disseminating the information in his books and from these beginnings the first real seeds of Christianity were sown. Over the next two centuries these ideas remained in circulation without taking deep root but the Church was finally able to gain a foothold in 1784.

The Korean Martyrs were the victims of the religious persecution against the Church that followed in the 19th century, after Catholicism had gained strength. At least 8,000 adherents to the faith were known to have been killed during this persecution, many of whom were canonized en masse in 1984.

The faith came to Korea at the end of the 18th century, purely through the laity who had been reading the Catholic books written in Chinese which had been in circulation since the time of Matteo Ricci.

These lay scholars, mostly Confucianists, founded the Hermitage of Heavenly Truth which laid the foundations for, and became the intellectual dayspring of, Korean Christianity in due course.

It is a remarkable fact that they were all laymen and there was not a single priest among them at the start.

Strong and dynamic Catholic communities soon enough arose but were led almost entirely by lay people until the arrival of the first French missionaries in 1836. The Catholic community suffered major persecutions in the years 1839, 1846 and 1866, producing at least 8,000 known martyrs, executed in a variety ways including torture and beheading.

The vast majority of the martyrs were lay people, including men and women, married and single, old and young. 79 martyrs of Korea were beatified in 1925 and 24 more were beatified in 1968 and the combined 103 martyrs were canonized as saints, in 1984, with a feast day on 20 September. Currently, Korea has the 4th largest number of canonized saints of any country in the Catholic world.

Ricci’s books provoked immediate academic controversy when Yi Gwang-Jeong brought them into Korea, and academics remained critical for many years. Early in the seventeenth century, Yi Su-gwang, a court scholar, and Yu Mong-in, a cabinet minister, wrote highly critical commentaries on Ricci’s works, and over the next two centuries academic criticism of Christian beliefs continued unabated.

Some scholars, however, were more sympathetic to Christianity. Members of the Silhak (“practical learning”) school were heavily influenced by the Catholic Chinese writings they had read and promoted them in Korea but they were often bitterly opposed by the mainstream Korean academic establishment.

Thus, when Christianity was established in Korea, there was already a substantial body of educated opinion sympathetic to it, which was crucial to the spread of the Catholic faith.

The first Catholic prayer-house was founded in 1784 at Pyongyang by Yi Sung-Hun, a diplomat who had been baptised in Beijing. In 1786, Yi proceeded to establish a hierarchy of lay-priests. These were later disbanded when it was realised that Catholic priests had to be ordained by valid bishops with true Apostolic succession.

Nevertheless, Christianity was introduced into Korea by indigenous lay-workers, not by clergy. Thus Christianity began as largely a lay “grass-roots” movement in Korea.

Statue, in St Peter's Basilica, of Pope Gregory XVI who authorised the first Korean Diocese

The Korean lay catechist and martyr, St Paul Chŏng Hasang, was himself the son of a martyr, Augustine Chŏng Yakjong, one of the first converts of Korea, who wrote the first catechism for the Korean Church entitled “Joo Gyo Yo Ji.”

When Yakjong was martyred with Hasang’s older brother, Yakjong’s wife and the other children were spared and went into a rural place.

When he grew up, Hasang became a servant of a government interpreter which enabled him to travel to Beijing many times, where he entreated the Bishop of Beijing to send some priests to Korea. He wrote to Pope Gregory XVI via the bishop of Beijing, requesting the establishment of a Diocese of Korea, independent from that of Beijing. That zealous and apostolic pope, Gregory XVI, established that See in 1825.

Some years later, Bishop Saint Laurent-Marie-Joseph Imbert and two other French priests were sent to the Korean mission. The bishop found Hasang to be talented, zealous, and virtuous. He taught him Latin and theology, when a persecution broke out.

Bishop St Laurent-Marie-Joseph Imbert

Hasang was captured and gave the judge a written thesis defending Catholicism. The judge, after reading it, said, “You are right in what you have written; but the king forbids this religion, it is your duty to renounce it.”

Hasang replied, “I have told you that I am a Christian, and will be one until my death.”

After this Hasang endured a series of tortures but with remarkable serenity. He was thereafter bound to a cross on a cart and went to his death, at the age of 45, with extraordinary good cheer.

St Andrew Kim Taegŏn was Korea’s first Roman Catholic priest.

Born of Korean nobility, Kim Taegŏn’s parents were converts of St Francis Xavier and his father was subsequently martyred for practising Christianity.

Kim studied at a seminary in Macau and was ordained a priest in Shanghai six years later. He then returned to Korea to preach and evangelize. It was then, during the Joseon Dynasty, that Catholics were persecuted and executed. Kim was one of several thousands of Christians who were executed during this time. In 1846, at the age of 25, he was tortured and beheaded. His last words were:

“This is my last hour of life, listen to me attentively: if I have held communication with foreigners, it has been for my religion and for my God. It is for Him that I die. My immortal life is on the point of beginning. Become Christians if you wish to be happy after death, because God has eternal chastisements in store for those who have refused to know Him.”

On May 6, 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized Andrew Kim Taegŏn along with 102 other martyrs, including Paul Chŏng Hasang, the layman who had done so much to spread early Catholicism in Korea.

This marked the first canonization ceremony to be held outside of Rome and the largest number of saints ever to be canonized at one time.

From the last letter of St Andrew Kim Taegŏn to his parish as he awaited martyrdom with a group of twenty persons, the Korean Church was bequeathed these noble words:

“My dear brothers and sisters, know this: Our Lord Jesus Christ upon descending into the world took innumerable pains upon and constituted the Holy Church through his own passion and increases it through the passion of its faithful....

Now, however, some fifty or sixty years since Holy Church entered into our Korea, the faithful suffer persecutions again. Even today persecution rages, so that many of our friends of the same faith, among whom am I myself, have been thrown into prison. just as you also remain in the midst of persecution. Since we have formed one body, how can we not be saddened in our innermost hearts? How can we not experience the pain of separation in our human faculties?

However, as Scripture says, God cares for the least hair of our heads, and indeed he cares with his omniscience; therefore, how can persecution be considered as anything other than the command of God, or his prize, or precisely his punishment?...

We are twenty here, and thanks be to God all are still well. If anyone is killed, I beg you not to forget his family. I have many more things to say, but how can I express them with pen and paper? I make an end to this letter. Since we are now close to the struggle, I pray you to walk in faith, so that when you have finally entered into Heaven, we may greet one another. I leave you my kiss of love.”

St Andrew Kim Taegŏn

St Andrew Kim Taegŏn, pray for us!
St Paul Chŏng Hasang, pray for us!
Saint Laurent-Marie-Joseph Imbert, pray for us!
The 8,000 Korean martyrs, pray for us!

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Catholic martyr of Japan: St Magdalene of Nagasaki

St Magdalene of Nagasaki (died 1634), an Augustinian Tertiary in Japan, in spite of great danger and difficulty, remained faithful to Jesus Christ until her martyrdom.

Born in the early seventeenth century, Magdalene belonged to a devout Christian family. Her parents were martyred around 1620, when Magdalene was in her teens.

It was around this time that the first Augustinians arrived in Japan. As a committed Catholic Christian, Magdalene made herself known to them. She served as a catechist and interpreter for the early Augustinian missionaries.

She found their Augustinian spirituality appealing, with its emphasis on the search for God, interior life, and community. She asked to be accepted into the Order of Saint Augustine, and in 1625 was formally received into the Augustinian Third Order.

Being a Christian in Japan became more and more difficult, and with the growth of Christianity persecution became stronger. Magdalene fled to the hills, where she worked at bringing the Word of God to those who did not know Jesus, and strengthening the faith of those who did.

In 1632 the Augustinians Francis of Jesus Terrero and Vincent of Saint Anthony Simoens, who had been her first counsellors, were burned to death by the pagan Japanese government because of their Christian faith. This only served to make Magdalene's faith and commitment to Christ even stronger. She located two other Augustinian Friars, Martin of Saint Nicholas Lumbreras and Melchior of Saint Augustine Sánchez. They mutually encouraged each other in persevering in the faith..

Eventually these two Friars were also martyred. Magdalene then took as her spiritual guide Jordan of Saint Stephen, a Dominican. Dominicans also follow a variant of the Rule of St Augustine.

She considered becoming a full-fledged Dominican sister, but continued religious persecution kept her from doing so.

Moved by her strong Christian conviction, and when she could hide no more, Magdalene voluntarily declared herself a follower of Jesus. She was arrested, threatened, ridiculed and tortured, but her Christian witness was strong and unfailing.

After 13 days of torture, wearing her Augustinian habit, Magdalene was suspended upside down in a pit of garbage and eventually died of her tortures. Then her body was burned and her ashes scattered.

Pope John Paul II beatified her in 1981 and canonized her in 1987.

St Magdalene of Nagasaki, pray for us sinners!

...

The Day of the Bomb on Nagasaki's Christians

As I suspected some did not like me telling home-truths about American history. One correspondent even described what happened as a "mote" compared with the "beam" of British anti-Catholicism.

Mass murder of innocent Catholic women, children and elderly?

Is that a "mote"?

Well, I doubt he/she can really mean that. It was too awful for that.

The mushroom cloud over Nagasaki

Here is what one American writer forcefully and dramatically says of the day the bomb fell on Nagasaki:

"62 years ago, on 9 August 1945, the second of the only two atomic bombs (a plutonium bomb) ever used as instruments of aggressive war (against essentially defenceless civilian populations) was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, by an all-Christian bomb crew. The well-trained American soldiers were only 'doing their job' and they did it efficiently.

It had been only 3 days since the first bomb had decimated Hiroshima on 6 August with chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military government and the Emperor had been searching for months for a way to an honourable end of the war which had exhausted the Japanese to virtually moribund status. (The only obstacle to surrender had been the Truman administration’s insistence on unconditional surrender, which meant that the Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese regarded as a deity, would be removed from his figurehead position in Japan – an intolerable demand for the Japanese.)

The Russian army was advancing across Manchuria with the stated aim of entering the war against Japan on 8 August, so there was an extra incentive to end the war quickly: the US military command did not want to divide any spoils or share power after Japan sued for peace.

The US bomber command had spared Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Kokura from the conventional bombing that had burned to the ground 60+ other major Japanese cities during the first half of 1945. One of the reasons for targeting relatively undamaged cities with these new weapons of mass destruction was scientific: to see what would happen to intact buildings – and their living inhabitants – when atomic weapons were exploded overhead.

Early in the morning of August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress called Bock’s Car, took off from Tinian Island, with the prayers and blessings of its Lutheran and Catholic chaplains, and headed for Kokura, the primary target. (Its bomb was code-named “Fat Man,” after Winston Churchill.)

The only field test of a nuclear weapon, blasphemously named “Trinity,” had occurred just three weeks earlier, on 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The molten lava-rock that resulted, still found at the site today, is called trinitite.

With instructions to drop the bomb only on visual sighting, Bock’s Car arrived at Kokura, which was clouded over. So after circling three times, looking for a break in the clouds, and using up a tremendous amount of valuable fuel in the process, it headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.

Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. Not only was it the site of the largest Christian church in the Orient, St. Mary’s Cathedral, but it also had the largest concentration of baptised Christians in all of Japan. It was the city where the legendary Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, established a mission church in 1549, a Christian community which survived and prospered for several generations.

However, soon after Xavier’s planting of Christianity in Japan, Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests began to be accurately perceived by the Japanese rulers as exploitive, and therefore the religion of the Europeans (Christianity) and their new Japanese converts became the target of brutal persecutions.

Within 60 years of the start of Xavier’s mission church, it was a capital crime to be a Christian. The Japanese Christians who refused to recant of their beliefs suffered ostracism, torture and even crucifixions similar to the Roman persecutions in the first three centuries of Christianity. After the reign of terror was over, it appeared to all observers that Japanese Christianity had been stamped out.

However, 250 years later, in the 1850s, after the coercive gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were thousands of baptised Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in a catacomb existence, completely unknown to the government – which immediately started another purge. But because of international pressure, the persecutions were soon stopped, and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground. And by 1917, with no help from the government, the Japanese Christian community built the massive St. Mary’s Cathedral, in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki.

Now it turned out, in the mystery of good and evil, that St. Mary’s Cathedral was one of the landmarks that the Bock’s Car bombardier had been briefed on, and looking through his bomb site over Nagasaki that day, he identified the cathedral and ordered the drop.

At 11:02 am, Nagasaki Christianity was boiled, evaporated and carbonized in a scorching, radioactive fireball. The persecuted, vibrant, faithful, surviving centre of Japanese Christianity had become ground zero.

And what the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of persecution, American Christians did in 9 seconds. The entire worshipping community of Nagasaki was wiped out."

[From The Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945: The Untold Story by Gary G. Kohls]

The aftermath...

Horrible and horrifying. What real man or woman can excuse it? It is just too disgusting.

And yet it happened!

However, God was able to draw good out of evil as He often does. Here is a wonderful story by way of example.

'Here is Dr. Takenaka’s story.

It all began only hours after the atom bomb mushroomed over Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. Dr. Takenaka was working as a surgeon in a military hospital just outside the city of Nagasaki. Almost half of the medical personnel in the city died in the first seconds of the blast.

Nagasaki is shaped something like a salad bowl with mountains on three sides. The open side makes Nagasaki one of Japan’s great seaports. When the atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, fire and radiation splashed up the sides of this salad bowl-like city. It is estimated that about 60,000 people died in the blast.

The American bomber, nicknamed Bock’s Car, had the city of Kokura, not Nagasaki, as its primary target. However, the clouds were so thick over the primary target, that the bombardier could not pick up his aiming point. As fuel was running low, the pilot had to go to Nagasaki, which was his secondary target.

Although there were clouds over Nagasaki, too, the oval stadium, near two Mitsubishi war-goods plants, was visible. The bomb, called the Fat Man, was released by parachute to explode at an altitude of 1600 feet. This was a plutonium bomb, even more devastating than Hiroshima’s uranium bomb. Because the bomb was dropped off target and the wind took it even more off course, Madame Butterfly’s house was saved, but “ground zero”, the epicentre of the blast, was right over the Catholic Cathedral of the Assumption in the Urakami district of Nagasaki.

The only things found in the ashes of the 2000-seat Cathedral were the charred buttons from the cassocks of the Japanese priests hearing confessions during the High Mass going on at the time. Not deliberately, of course, but Christian America had just destroyed the largest Christian church in the Orient, and snuffed out about 75 percent of the Christians who lived in and around Nagasaki.

Dr. Takenaka went on to describe the scene shortly after the A-bomb exploded. He said, “Being only a few miles away, we knew something dreadful had happened to the city. But when we arrived on the scene itself, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Blazing rubble, littered with bodies burned beyond recognition; incredible heat, and the stench of scorched flesh made us nauseous. Horribly burned people, screaming hysterically, twisted and squirmed uncontrollably in pain, terror and panic -- pleading pitifully for help. Many of the irradiated victims were faceless, with only indentations where eyes, nose and ears had once been, their skin hanging in folds from their arms and legs. Among the ashes were both the living and the dead. Even though we were experienced medical personnel, the scale of devastation shocked us, to the point that we were temporarily immobilized”.

This man with bushy eyebrows and greying temples continued, “I thought to myself, if there’s a hell, this is what it must be like. Many of the survivors were burned so badly that even under the best circumstances, nothing could be done to save them. Supplies were short; needs were enormous. Vehicles were stalled in the rubble, so the wounded had to be carried by hand to whatever clearing could be found.”

Dr. Takenaka said that glazed-eyed survivors, screaming in agony, pulled frantically at his white coat, begging him to do something for them.

“I did what I could,” he said dejectedly.

Because everything had been levelled, there were no shelters where the victims could be taken to protect them from the 100-degree heat of the scorching August sun. Many simply expired in the ashes of their own homes and places of business.

In a voice filled with sadness, Dr. Takenaka went on, “The heat from the fires, plus the heat from the very hot sun exhausted us quickly, but we knew we must try to keep going for the sake of the victims. Most of us worked without rest for over 48 hours. Food and water were simply non-existent at that point. Radiation and epidemic loomed as our greatest fears. So many dead, unburied bodies made the danger of plague positively frightening”.

Dr. Takenaka continued: “We were working in the Urakami Cathedral section of the burned-out city. As I made my way slowly through piles of human bodies, I heard what I thought was the sound of singing. I couldn’t believe my ears”.

Dr. Takenaka’s tone softened and quickened. “Frankly, because I was on the verge of exhaustion, I wondered if I was beginning to hallucinate, the horrors of this hell being too much for a human being to bear. Suddenly, I saw them, 20 or 30 people, some critically burned, sitting in a kind of circle singing and apparently praying. They had beads in their hands which reminded me of the Buddhist jus beads. On a closer look, as I made my way over to this little group, I discovered the beads had crosses on one end. They seemed like a tiny island of composure and serenity in what I would forever remember as a nightmarish sea of horror, destruction and panic.”

'Who are you?', I asked, still not sure that I wasn’t going out of my mind.

The noise of screaming and crying around us was so loud, I could hardly hear their reply.

'Who are you?' I shouted again at the top of my voice.

The reply came back, 'We are Christians, and we are praying to our God.'

Of course, I had heard of Jesus Christ, but this was the first time in my life that I had ever spoken to Christians. For people to have such inner composure at a time like this jolted me way down deep inside with a strange mixture of fear and awe. I said to them, ‘Some of you are badly burned. Let me do what I can for you.’"

As the doctor prepared to give these hapless victims medical attention, he was stunned to hear them say, “Thank you for coming to us, doctor, but God is with us and will take care of us. Please go and help those who need you more. We will be all right.”

This soft-spoken, ingenuous man paused reflectively, his eyes misty, and then went on, “Everyone around me was reaching out desperately, begging me to come and give them medical attention. I just could not believe my ears when this group of Christians calmly asked that I go to the others who needed me more. I honestly never dreamed this kind of selfless concern for others really existed. Although I knew nothing about the teaching of Jesus Christ, I immediately saw the difference between a true Christian and the rest of us. In the presence of indescribable suffering, their faith in God never wavered; and they were more concerned about others than themselves.

“I have no way of knowing, but I suspect that most of that little band of Christians died before the fires went out in their incinerated city.”

Now, with a little smile, Dr. Takenaka observed, “My first contact with Christianity revealed a remarkable quality of heart, and an heroic dimension of inner strength. I said to myself, if there is a God, I hope that God will give me the faith to believe what these Christians believed.”

Fifteen years later, in Tokyo, Dr. Takenaka met the famous Paris Foreign Missionary, Fr. Candau. After a year’s instruction, Dr. Takenaka was baptized a Christian.

For this one Japanese naval doctor, the atom bombing of Nagasaki became the vehicle of his conversion from Buddhism to Christianity. Dr. Takenaka’s story and mine intersected only one time in this world, at a Tokyo Rotary luncheon. But I’ll never forget him or the fact a Rotary Club on the outskirts of Tokyo brought us together in the early 1970s.

As Dr. Takenaka and I parted that day in Tokyo, he left me with these words: “The great Jesus Christ taught that the gift you have received, you should give as a gift. I believe the seeds of my own Christian faith were sown in atom-bombed Nagasaki. My heart tells me that those dying Christians passed on to me the gift of their Christian faith. And now I try my best to share my own faith with others. I believe I am the spiritual child of those Nagasaki Christians. For them, dying was truly gain; and for me staying alive meant becoming Christian -- this was also gain. From those Christians, I learned a very important lesson: I must let God be God in my life.”'

[From Atom-bombed Nagasaki by Rev Fr Stephen Lynch OFM]

From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring...

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St Paul Miki pray! Lest we forget the Atomic bombing of the sacred site of the Nagasaki Catholic martyrs

Here below is that shocking picture of the ruins of St Mary's Cathedral in Urakami, Nagasaki, the sacred site of the Nagasaki Catholic martyrs of 1597, of their place of torture and execution, and the centre of Japanese Catholicism, deliberately targeted and bombed to bits by Irish-American pilots, among others, on the order of Democrat President of the USA, Harry S Truman, who later dishonestly pretended that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "military bases", rather than cities filled with innocent civilian women, children and elderly.


Truman used to keep a sign on his desk saying "the buck stops here".

OK, Harry, the buck stops with you, too, for the mass-murder of innocent Japanese Christians. We may doubt that God was impressed by your excuses for such an astonishingly foul deed. So you think you're better than Emperor Hirohito? At least he only attacked military targets at Pearl Harbour! Tell that to the Marines, Mr President!

The ruins of St Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Assumption, Urakami, Nagasaki, after the "Fat Man" dirty Atom Bomb exploded near it, having been dropped by Irish-American air crew

Shockingly and appallingly, the "Fat Man" A-Bomb dropped on 9 August 1945 in the Catholic district of Nagasaki, a short distance away from Urakami Cathedral, was a "dirty" bomb which was deliberately designed to maximise radiation sickness, so continuing to poison Japanese Catholics even decades after.

Also shocking is the fact that many of the US air crew were of Irish-American stock, including the commander of the B-29 Bomber, Bockscar, who was Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Charles Sweeney.

Other Irish-Americans included Capt Raymond "Kermit" Beahan, bombardier, Staff Sgt Ray Gallagher, gunner, assistant flight engineer, Staff Sgt Edward Buckley, radar operator.

2nd Lt Fred Olivi, regular co-pilot, may well have been an Italian-American.

The rest of the crew were Capt Charles Donald Albury, co-pilot, Capt James Van Pelt, navigator, Master Sgt John D. Kuharek, flight engineer, Sgt Abe Spitzer, radio operator, and Sgt Albert Dehart, tail gunner.

Ironically, some of the aircrew were Catholic and/or were raised Catholic.

The crew of Bockscar the B-29 that dropped the "Fat Man" A-Bomb on Nagasaki

As Robin Wright wrote of Pope John Paul II in The Washington Post on 4 April 2005:

"I watched him in Hiroshima lead prayers at Ground Zero, and then in Nagasaki minister to long-forgotten victims wasting away from radiation more than 30 years after two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan ended World War II. As he told us on the plane, he anguished over the fact that two Catholics had been on the planes that first unleashed the world's deadliest weapon."

It is a sobering thought, is it not? Catholics used to murder other, innocent, Catholics, blasting them to smithereens.

For what is the deliberate, foreseen, intended killing of innocent civilians in war other than murder? So are we taught by the Catholic doctrine of just war. Let us not forget it!

The smoking ruins of Nagasaki after the "Fat Man" A-Bomb was dropped

Equally shocking is the fact that Nagasaki is the sacred site of martyrdom of the Nagasaki Catholic Martyrs of 1597, St Paul Miki and his saintly companions, who were crucified for their Catholic faith by pagan Japanese.

St Paul Miki was born into a rich, military Japanese family who all later converted to Catholicism under the influence of St Francis Xavier SJ.

He was educated by Jesuit missionaries in Azuchi and Takatsuki. He joined the Society of Jesus and preached the Gospel to his fellow citizens. The Japanese government feared Jesuit influences and persecuted them. In 1588, Emperor Cambacundono claimed that he was god, and ordered all missionaries to leave Japan within six months.

Original Japanese portrait of St Paul Miki

Miki and his companions did not do so and continued to minister in secret. They were eventually arrested and jailed. He and his Christian peers were forced to walk 600 miles from Kyoto as a punishment against them and the Jesuit community.

Finally they arrived at Nagasaki, the city which had had the most conversions to Catholic Christianity. They did not lament but rejoiced, singing Te Deum to the glory of God.

There they were crucified, in mockery of Christ's own crucifixion, on February 5, 1597.

Miki preached his last sermon, Christ-like, from the cross, forgiving his executioners and calling upon them to recognise that he, too, was Japanese and no foreigner and that he had done them no evil but only worked for the good of his countrymen.

Alongside him died Juan Soan (de Gotó) and Santiago Kisai, of the Society of Jesus, in addition to twenty-three clergy and laity, all of whom were later canonized by Blessed Pope Pius IX in 1862.

As Robin Wright recalled above, Pope John Paul II visited some of the many Catholic victims of the dirty "Fat Man" bomb many years later in a Nagasaki hospital, many of them horribly crippled and wasted by radiation sickness caused by the "Fat Man" A-Bomb.

Japanese Catholic woman at prayer in the new Nagasaki Catholic Cathedral

These victims, too, were "Nagasaki martyrs", innocents caught up in a war not of their making and brutally maimed by the shockingly immoral actions of a thoughtless, sinful government.

Oh, man, what a foolish, arrogant, senseless, sinful creature you are! And even decades later you still idly and evilly defend your gross and horrifying sins. How can you be saved if you will not repent?

God forgive us all...

St Paul Miki SJ carries his cross to crucifixion

Here are the last words of St Paul Miki, crucified and lanced in the side at Nagasaki on 5 February 1597:

"The only reason for my being killed is that I have taught the doctrine of Christ. I thank God it is for this reason that I die. I believe that I am telling the truth before I die. I know you believe me and I want to say to you all once again: Ask Christ to help you become happy. I obey Christ. After Christ's example, I forgive my persecutors. I do not hate them. I ask God to have pity on all, and I hope my blood will fall on my fellow men as a fruitful rain."

St Paul Miki and companions, pray for us, for the innocent victims of the Nagasaki bomb and for the misguided men who dropped the bomb!

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I like America but...

... here are just a few examples of why there has been a lot fundamentally wrong in the 250-year history of the USA and why a lot of peoples still harbour a strong and unfortunate animus against America.

1. Jefferson enslaved his own illegitimate children by a slave


Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his black slave, Sally Hemings, keeping his offspring enslaved.

Regarding marriage between blacks and whites, Jefferson wrote that:

"[t]he amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent."

In complete contradistinction to the Spanish Catholic monarchy, church and missionaries who supported and protected the rights of men of all races, and whom, let it be said to his eternal shame, Jefferson so detested and abused, Jefferson considered blacks, hispanics and native Americans inferior. Many modern US Liberals will hotly deny this fact but it is clear and evident from his writings.

In addition, Hemings was likely the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (John Wayles had a reputation for having sexual relations with his own slaves).

The allegation that Jefferson fathered children with Hemings first gained widespread public attention in 1802, when journalist James T. Callender, wrote in a Richmond newspaper:

“...[Jefferson] keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally.”

A 1998 DNA study concluded that there was a DNA link between some of Hemings descendants and the Jefferson family. Three studies were released in the early 2000s, following the publication of the DNA evidence. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, appointed a multi-disciplinary, nine-member in-house research committee of Ph.D.s and an M.D. to study the matter of the paternity of Hemings’s children. The committee concluded:

“it is very unlikely that any Jefferson other than Thomas Jefferson was the father of [Hemings's six] children.”

Some have attempted to suggest that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas's younger brother, was the father of at least one of the slave children, Eston, but the National Genealogical Society Quarterly then published articles reviewing the evidence from a genealogical perspective and concluded that the link between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was clearly credible.

In short, the alleged lover of liberty enslaved his own children.

Let us not forget that this was also the man who wrote of the brutal murder of the French Catholic king and queen and of the very young royal princes and princesses, that "the tree liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants" all the while that he was enslaving his own half-black children.

It was, among others, this man, the drafter of the American Declaration of Independence, whom Dr Samuel Johnson had in mind when he wrote:

“Why is it that the yelps for liberty come loudest from the drivers of slaves?”

And yet this is the man who is held up as the exemplar of American liberty and politics.

2. Harry S Truman lied about Hiroshima


Here is how Truman announced the Hiroshima bombing:

"The British, Chinese, and United States Governments have given the Japanese people adequate warning of what is in store for them. We have laid down the general terms on which they can surrender. Our warning went unheeded; our terms were rejected. Since then the Japanese have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can foresee what it will do in the future. The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction. I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb. Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first. That is why we felt compelled to undertake the long and uncertain and costly labour of discovery and production. We won the race of discovery against the Germans. Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbour, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretence of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us."

Used against those who attacked Pearl Harbour? Who is he kidding? How many Japanese women and children civilians attacked Pearl Harbour?

But, in any case, he is knowingly lying.

He knew - as did his generals - that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both cities and not military bases.

It was, regrettably, a base lie.

Moreover, Nagasaki was the city of the Nagasaki Catholic martyrs and the centre of Japanese Catholicism - the one place in Japan that was most likely to be the most sympathetic to the West.

Indeed, they dropped the Bomb only a short distance away from the principal Roman Catholic Cathedral of Japan - St Mary's in Urakami, Nagasaki. Moreover, they got Irish-American boys to do it and that with a dirty, high-radiation, A-Bomb that went on killing by radiation sickness for decades after; and this on the sacred site of the Nagasaki Catholic martyrs of 1597.

What astonishing stupidity and moral depravity!

The ruins of St Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral, Urakami, Nagasaki, after the "Fat Man" dirty Atom Bomb exploded near it, having been dropped by Irish-American air crew

Pope John Paul II visited some of the many Catholic victims of the dirty "Fat Man" bomb many years later in a Nagasaki hospital.

Hang your head in shame, Harry Truman and the American leaders of that time for this atrocious crime against humanity!

America - do not make excuses for this crime. Just admit it, repent and make reparation to God and man for it.

3. JFK, LBJ and the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, Catholic President of Vietnam

Here is a clip of President Lyndon Johnson admitting to Sen Eugene McCarthy that the USA orchestrated the assassination of President Diem.



In fact, it was during JFK's Presidency that the decision was made and - as documents now clearly show - with the full knowledge and approval of Catholic President John F Kennedy.


Shocking but true!

Catholic Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem at prayer, later assassinated with US connivance

I anticipate the usual weak and disgraceful apologies for this act of barbarism:

1. Diem was himself corrupt.

Where's the proof that he was any more corrupt than every other South-East Asian leader? None? Ok - then why kill him?

But even if he were corrupt, by what conceivable moral rule could the USA claim the right to aid and assist those who sought his life? By what conceivable moral rule does anyone, government or individual, have the right to kill another human person save justly in a just war or after just due process of law? NONE AT ALL. OTHERWISE IT IS CALLED, AND RIGHTLY SO, BY THE ODIOUS NAME OF MURDER. AND THE COMMANDMENT SAYS "THOU SHALT DO NO MURDER". IT COULD NOT BE CLEARER!

2. Diem was not going to unite South Vietnam against the Communist North.

So what? How does that give anyone the right to murder him?

3. Diem probably had some of his opponents murdered.

Probably!?!?

Says who? Where's the proof? Diem was a devout, traditional Catholic who came from a long line of Catholic aristocrats who had been Mandarins under the Emperor since the 17th century and earlier. Where is the evidence that he was a man who would turn to murder?

Even if it were true, how does that give anyone the right to murder him in return? The US could have called him before an International Criminal Tribunal if they had had the proof. But connive at his murder? How can that be right?

After Diem came President Nguyen Van Thieu - also a Catholic and a convert from Buddhism.

The US government soon enough dumped Thieu, too, and he had to escape his own country for fear of murder by the victorious Communists after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.

And who can forget the harrowing stories, told by US soldiers themselves at various tribunals and enquiries, of their carelessly massacring Vietnamese women and children under orders from equally careless and seemingly amoral officers.

Officers of a great nation like the USA allowing such disgusting behaviour?

How shocking is that? And yet it happened!

4. ...and have things got noticeably better under William Jefferson Clinton or since?

I have just returned from New York and these thoughts crowded into my mind along with many other examples of the insularity and false ideology that is, even today, all too dominant in the USA despite its enormous wealth and power.

There is a lot that is good in the USA but a lot that is still inexcusably not good.

Come on America. You can do better!

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