Red Pill Religion: The Big Picture
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Tonight, we are discussing the Big Picture: What is the role of religion in Western history?
Look at the pagan world of Greece and Rome, and compare that to Christendom, and then to the postchristian world of the postmodern post-rational post-honesty secular atheist — the basic myth of the Modern era is that this is an evolution, with each generation being wiser and more enlightened than the prior.
In reality, the Moderns and the Postmoderns are more abnormal, more irrational, less open to persuasion by evidence, and less healthy morally and mentally than our pagan ancestors.
With the loss of Christianity, our civilization loses the things that depend on Christian ideas for their basis, such as a belief in the natural rights and liberties of man and the ability of the universe to be examined by the scientific method.
Since the Victorian Age, men have sought to place the Western worldview on a nonreligious foundation, with no success, but instead resulting in hellish nightmares without precedent in history: see Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and Red China for examples.
The non religious starting point meant to serve as a foundation has either been science worship, disguised as science, or various forms of immorality and anarchy, disguised as a love of freedom and liberty. Slavery has returned, now called ‘human trafficking.’
The pagan practice of exposing infants has returned in the form of a woman’s right to choose.
Pagan excesses, which even pagans hated, of sexual deviancy are now considered rights as well, and the normal and chaste morality of decent people is considered a violation of civil rights if not a hate crime. One thing leads to another.
If sin cannot be criticized, speech cannot be free, and, without free speech, other freedoms have no voice hence no defense. The attempt to base a culture on anything other than a religious worldview is doomed to failure: the thing defeats itself.
Taking love of liberty as a starting point, with no context saying how liberty can be abused, one soon arrives at the absurdity of socialized liberty, where the collective dictates speech crimes and thought crimes, always in the name of liberty. See any modern college campus for details.
Taking science as a starting point leaves one with a nihilistic world view, where good and evil, fair and foul, right and wrong, all turn into subjective matters of opinion, and science itself turns into a plaything of politics: see, for example, the Global Warming fraud, or the allegedly scientific belief that sex is a cultural construct, not a biological reality.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
