Blaise Pascal(1623-62), the French mathematician, inventor and philosopher, said, and I paraphrase,
There are three kinds of people: Those who are found, those who are not found but seeking to be found, and those who are lost not knowing they are lost. The first are happy and rational, the second are unhappy but rational, while the third, the Lost, are unhappy and foolish.
I am writing this Letter only to the Lost.
To the Lost: America was designed to be a nation of individuals who can find their own way.
If you don’t believe this statement to be true, and these days most of you don’t, then you have not really bought into that whole “liberty” thing that supports the Constitution.
However, this letter is not designed to point out the differences between a nation of individuals and a nation of collectivists, but rather point out the complete emptiness of the notion that individual liberty can coexist with state-run tests that determine his fitness for full citizenship. It has to be one or the other.
Those of you who believe this way are lost.
You will soon have to decide whether to go all-in for the State or quietly retreat into a real world of critical thinking and inquiry. I’ve even provided a model and a path.
Inadequately educated in the laws of logic, but also deeply indoctrinated in the arts of self-gratification and entitlement, you allow yourselves to believe that you can still be a (little “d”) democrat while driving toward a tyrannical state made up, as had been the case worldwide for 5000 years, of a 10% ruling class, a 20% management class, and a 70% drone class, whose only role in life is to attend to the care and comfort of the upper 30%. America, by its very existence, had changed all that, and someone has convinced you it would be a better idea to destroy it and return us to those good old days, probably under the mistaken notion that you will be a member of management..
(Now, for the broader audience) The Lost have always been among us. In earlier essays I’ve referred to them as “don’t give a damn’s” who, until they became America’s only protected religious class, accounted for no more than perhaps 10% of the population. Now they are a growth industry, public schools and college courses dedicated to their incubation, now much larger and completely alien to America as designed, but with real political power.
In that vein, I’m not entirely speaking about “the Lost” here in the same manner Pascal was, for he was speaking of those who had not found God, while I’m describing as lost those who no longer believe in the virtue of Liberty, which is what the Constitution was all about. Freedom, not religion.
However, there is a point of interconnectedness between God and Liberty in America’s original design, and that is found in the reciprocity and common morality that existed between all free Americans so that our ship could always sail with fair winds at our back, and deep waters under our hull.
Without these winds and deep waters America is just another nation, like any other nation, and would navigate the same turbulent waters of history which always have sunk every top-down government since the Pharaohs. I have argued this with scientific certainty in the past, where ironically Darwin and God also intersected at about the same point.
Historically there have always been, from the very beginning, at home and abroad, attempts to steer America away from the fair havens of freedom and back into the storm-tossed waters of incessant war, privation, and tyranny.
Today Christianity is a prime target of those forces, in part because it is always handy, but also because the timing seems right, especially to a generation of intemperants who have been spoon-fed for years that almost every roadblock that has been laid in their path, every form of disapproval, from a solid “No” to a simple furrowed-brow look of disapproval, are all types of aggression aimed at them by invisible straw men called “Christians”. And those aggressions have at their heart only one objective; to blight the paths and darken the skies of what we are coming to know as the self-described smarter set in virtually every high school and college class, aka Modern Atheists.
Modern Atheism is a form of dressed-up academic teat-fittery.
Modern Atheism causes none of these things to happen, by the way, which is way above its pay level. Lenin had a name for the role these people play, “useful idiots”. The MA movement is simply a haven for all the graduates of their finishing schools, to give a more academic legitimacy and justification for what may some day befall Christians, much as the academic, legal and medical professions did in the Reich years, by sending Jews off to the camps in an orderly and legal process so that the rest of the nation would see these things as a natural advance of human civilization. All very scientific.
While I understand the long term plan and the nature of the Enemy who has devised this broader plan, it is at a totally different level that I am insulted by the advocates of Modern Atheism, who stand as spokespeople for an intellectual perspective more like Curly, Moe and Larry might have for fascism than Socrates and Thrasymachus might have for good government.
Fact: The waters America’s ship sails upon are not Christian. It’s the atheists who insist they are, which goes some to prove their lack of intellectual curiosity or personal knowledge about the subject from the outset. MA’s have built a philosophy around a conclusion, which is about as un-scientific and anti-intellectual as one can get…unless you are under 18 and it’s your first try.
Our Founding documents only mention “the Creator” once, and that was in the Declaration of Independence, where Jefferson affirmed Man’s natural right to “pursue life, liberty and happiness” without the permission or managerial. oversight of the state.
I wonder if MA’s have a replacement in mind about man’s natural right to liberty, without the mention of the Creator? Certainly, when in 5th Grade, or even a sophomore in college, they wouldn’t have known to ask this question. But now they have to ask it, if only to themselves, or they will have to admit that their new-found philosophy is a “religious” fraud and that the real end game to their cause is politics, in which they have chosen the anti-freedom side. In doing so they have to admit that their true enemy here isn’t religion, but freedom itself.
Fact: America was at one time the only country atheists could live openly without being ostracized, under the protection of the majority of disapproving Christians who also always believed to mind their own business, a tradition as American as its many religions. This protection was even extended to homosexuals, where in other places, even England, they were imprisoned, and in some other places killed, some in the most horrible of ways. That beat goes on and the irony of the massacres of the gay night club in Orlando was that those gay men were murdered by a man who was foresworn to kill them for his religion while many gays in that bar voiced antagonism against a Christianity that has always disapproved, but never once tried to kill them.
The path chosen by Modern Atheists, as a front for Statism, is one of self-destruction. America was created specifically to prevent this kind of collapse of human society, by passing the American gene of individualism from generation to generation through reciprocity, which in democracy-speak is much the same as the Christian Golden Rule, “Reciprocate with thy neighbor as you would have your neighbor reciprocate with you”. It insures survivability..
I like to go to places on the internet where Modern Atheists hang out together. Huffington Post seems to be a popular site, for HuffPo offer almost a weekly religious lesson with catchy titles aimed at Christians. And of course one wonders why would a Leftist site always seem so concerned about my soul? Its commenters are of the ordinary variety in that they enjoy sharing the mutual friendship of others on the Left who also enjoy bellyaching about how Christians have made their lives miserable. For unhappy they genuinely are. (By their words, ye shall know them.)
MA followers display a high degree of arrested development, their highest level of maturity achieved before they are 21. (You can still even see smatterings of this in Obama.) But at least they spell better. But as whiners they are a cut above the scat-mouthed foot stompers found on many of the more LGBT-oriented sites, although there is a lot of cross-over, inasmuch as this generation of gays have a very dark anger at Christianity, since it’s about a God who has been abundantly clear about what He thinks of men who lie with other men, or bite pillows, and stuff like that. They cannot foot-stomp this God out of existence, nor can they avoid a final judgment which He promises. Or so He says.
This is the point of intersection between LGBT and Modern Atheism.
My argument that Modern Atheism isn’t really about atheism isn’t difficult to make. Just see one of their pieces of art (above), a theme you get ad naseum in their on-line screeds. Modern Atheists have had to redefine atheism just in order to call themselves that, which was never a high hill for Marxists to climb. They did wonders with “love” in the 1970s, “truth” since the ’30s and “scientific fact” since the ’90s. Redefining iconic cultural terms is one of their best skills.
But it’s clear from this picture the purpose of Modern Atheism is not to announce the non-existence of God, but to declare its undying hatred of Him…and to dispense with all His symbols. Considering Marxists prior “successes” with reeducation camps, the Gulag, it’s not hard to see the outcome the movement’s handlers would like to see.
(“No, I’m an academic”)
In the 2009 film, “Angels and Demons”, a Roman church prelate ask the Tom Hanks character if he believes in God. And Hanks answers, “No, I’m an academic” only in the “as-if” tone of the smart ass leftist academicians, begging the audience conclusion that “everyone knows” religion and academicians are mutually exclusive.
This is a Bingo! moment for Modern Atheists, for it allows them to get a sense, the taste and feel, of what being a true academician is like…a man of letters and science who will nonetheless lay aside all prejudices about religion, and do the right and just thing based on an entirely secular code rooted in observable Science. Amen.
I’ve known hundreds of academician-scientists in my life, in the classroom and out, and not one has ever volunteered information that he or she was an atheist. Nor had one ever remarked unfavorably about Christianity, or advised me to drop my silly superstitions. One of my favorite academician characters in film was Monty Woolley’s character, Prof Wutheridge in the 1947 classic. “The Bishop’s Wife”, portraying an old friend of a New York Episcopalian bishop from the days when he was just a young parish vicar in the poorer sections of the city. In much of America a priest or minister was the only well read conversation an academic could get, and those relationships were hardly hostile, or confrontational.
The image of that relationship today, as offered up by Modern Atheists, and their shill apologists at Huffington Post, et al, is of strident enmity, which, if it exists today, is of relative recent origin, and largely one-sided, since Christians, at the parish level even more than the corporate, rarely behave that way, at least not since the Scopes Trial, where religion got that anti-intellectual tag for denying man’s ascent from apes….which is still not yet proven.
Actually, adult Christians debate through pastoral letters (since the Second Century), and the medium of apologetics, (I follow several on Twitter), who, unlike me, only ask for prayers for anti-Christianists who attack them.
Only the young, guided by temperament and these days, a misguided sense of importance and now, faux-academic attainment, attack, which is why I determined that the Modern Atheist movement is largely made up of the very young and immature. The MA movement provides them much needed moral support (pardon the pun).
I only do what I do, counter-attack, because the anti-intellectual shoe is now on the other foot. Modern Atheism’s cause is neither an academic nor religious cause. It is purely political, with a clear political end in mind. And this is proven by the fact that the academics are infantile phony-baloney at best, and the political aim clear enough for anyone with an ounce of critical thinking to see.
(About all that secular humanism crap)
I have yet to see a single ModAtheists preach a single virtue; love, charity, reciprocity, even equality But I have witnessed, ad museum, their display of all the vices…envy, (yes envy), arrogance, vanity, down-the-nose elitism, and a capacity to hate so large that it has to occupy the center core of their being. Whatever Modern Atheists are selling, they are not preaching to the lost, urging us to come over and be like them. They are damning us for damnation’s sake.
In that sense, Christianity defines Modern Atheists, in the same way the most wretched serf defined the French aristocracy for a thousand years.
The French defined themselves by who they were not. But unlike mere elitists or snobs, who looked down on others, or even Pharisees, who thanked God they were not like the guy standing next to them in Temple,
…the French nobility did not want to raise up their gutter trash lowlifes. They did not want to better their condition, nor teach them to be more like their betters. They wanted them to stay in their sad estate, for only by being the wretched class could they glory in their own magnificence.
This is why I introduced Blaise Pascal at the beginning, because he was French, fitting none of the criteria of French nobility, though of their class, but also none of the Modern Atheists’ ideal of an easy-to-dupe useful idiot. Also he died at the age of 39, long before he could grow to become a garrulous old fool like me. Pascal was a recognized mathematician and inventor (of a calculating machine), which means among other things that he could work with his hands at things other than picking his nose, or scrolling through Facebook. He did not have his “religious experience” and take up philosophy until he was 30, when by modern MA standards, he should have known better, since, as everyone knows, only the simple-minded choose God or have it rammed down their throats at an early age.
And what Pascal did with his new found “freedom” was what no modern youth even knows to do, it seems. He fell headlong into study and inquiry, “critical thinking” it’s called, which brought forward not a compliant echo of Church doctrine, but rather a questioning nitpicker. In doing so, he revealed that Christianity is not the monolithic body of thought or culture MA’s portray it to be. Never was, never will be.
Pascal’s line of inquiry was called Jansenism, which was strongly opposed by the Jesuits, who were sort of the soldier-priests of the Catholic Church, formed in the early days of the Reformation, having snuffed out protestant movements in Poland, the Baltics and parts of Germany. This period of activity should be interesting for new atheists in that over a million protestant Huguenots in France were killed, another half million escaping, many to various parts of America, my area of central Virginia among them, which seemed to be hospitable to virtually every religious way of thinking.
This highlights the difference between “corporate” religion and “front line” religion, a thing I’m sure atheists aren’t aware of and would have a difficult time weaving into the tapestry Modern Atheists call “Christianity” and would render MA studies seem unable to distinguish, placing them at the 5th grade level at best.
Blaise Pascal was everything Modern Atheists think they are, yet are nothing that Blaise Pascal ever was.
An observant ModernAtheist might ask, “A scientist and a Christian, and a bright young man. How can that be?”
He had an inquiring mind, digging deep in study and observation (a thing unknown to most ModernAtheists, I think) to find out the elements of a thing, whether a combination of numbers, a mechanism, or a line of thought.
Pascal accepted no one’s teaching, either in the classroom, or in a text book, at it’s face.
Pascal’s program is still the preferred methodology of all Science and Philosophy, which is why it is easy for me to confirm that most Modern Atheists aren’t atheists at all, for they know nothing of the Method. The failure of modern atheism is found in it “knowing attitude” because true Science is always carried by an inquiring attitude. True atheists, forever in search of something, some truth or fact, will say no more about God than “I can find no evidence…” which implies an intellectual search continues. To say “there is no God” is scientific blasphemy. for it confirms what Science can never know. Hubris, also common to the Left.. This is why Albert Einstein and Mortimer Adler determined only very late in life that there had to be some sort of Grand Design in the order of the universe, ergo, a Designer. Adler, considered the 20th Century’s finest philosopher, “proved” God by offering a negative argument, something to the effect that “if there is a God, then all things are possible, but if there is no God, then all things are permissible”.
May I suggest to every ModernAtheist a copy of Pascal’s “Pensees” which are little more than shorts notes he wrote to himself while thinking on deeper subjects. I read this book in study hall in high school while JFK was president, from the Harvard Classics sitting on the shelf.
It is a perfect training vehicle…I dare you to try it…for each note can launch a series of inquiries…not about God, mind you, but about the process of critical thinking, which has been denied you from the very beginning. How can a Christian use logic and reason to question his Church while I am not allowed to use the same in challenging my own atheistic creed?
So, when MA’s speak of the Christian tyranny of America, they prove their own ignorance as to where that knowledge came from. Young MA’s are taught as early as 4th grade to accept without question the received wisdom of the State, yet accuse young Christians of the same sin, only Pascal proves they are more likely to study their faith more critically.
Busted.
