Scriptorium Daily
...it is a general law of history that there is no theistic mess so bad that secularism cannot make it worse.
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Christians may do badly, but let the secularists have power and history says an age of terror follows. Bluntly, the experience of the last two centuries is that traditional Christianity may make a frightful mess, but secularism fixes it through applied fright.
A Christian who does evil faces the command of Jesus to “love his neighbor as himself.”
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If you are a secularist, what is your bottom line? What is the command that you might rationalize or try to fudge but cannot escape? What do secularists all have in common?
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Secularism cheats by claiming numbers it does not have. There is no “secularism” only a group of people united by the denial of theism or supernaturalism. Each individual secularist is his own pope, Bible, or creed . . . which sounds attractive unless your neighbor is bigger, stronger, and his creed is meaner.
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I can condemn Christians who kill the innocent on the basis of their own Christian faith. What is a secularist to do? Bad Christian states are full of bad Christians, but bad secular states are full of good secularists.
Almost every piece of tangible progress in the West traces back to Islamic, Christian, or Jewish thought. Even the best Greek thought (Plato and Aristotle) was theistic and not atheistic. In fact, the very existence of the tiny community of “secularists” (really only united by having nothing to unite them, the party of Zero) in modern times is due to the love and tolerance of religious believers.
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There have been good scientists, citizens, scholars, logicians and thinkers who were secularists, but they worked in a university, political, and ethical system constructed by theists (especially Christians). The good news for the rest of us that most secularists in the United States and Western Europe are just Christians trying to get along without Christ. It does not work for long, but it beats where such secularism will head over time.
On what basis does the secularist condemn his fellow secularist in the old Soviet Union or modern China?
He can only sputter that he does not like what they do or “reason” is against their action (another way of saying he does not like it). The Soviet will reply (as he did reply) with learned books justifying his actions on “scientific” and rational grounds.
I am confident that the nice secular folk in the United States who object to the comparison are sincere. They would never put women in mental hospitals for belief in God as secularists did in the Soviet Union (where 22 million died) or make them work in concentration camps as secularists still do in China.
Well and good, but on what grounds do they say so? On what moral basis? Where does it come from?
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The secular European culture seems intent on committing demographic suicide (a kind of self-genocide) by not making enough babies (”No babies please, I am a secularist!”) to sustain the population. If Darwinism is true, safe to say it is selecting against European secularists.
A Christian who kills the innocent is breaking God’s law. Have “Christian” states been inconsistent with Christian teachings? Of course. It is easy to judge them (as secularists do using our standards!). But on what basis does the secularist judge his co-secularists in China who are presently running slave labor camps full of religious believers in the name of anti-religion?
Our critics can accuse us of hypocrisy, because our principles are well known.
But how can you accuse an atheist of hypocrisy? They may not like the form secularism is taking in China with its slave labor camps, but on what basis are they condemning it? Are they using ethics borrowed from us without attribution? How can one be “bad” in an ethic people make up for themselves?
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Too often they replace faith in God with some man-made ideology of the moment. (In West Europe that seems to be hedonism at the moment.) That’s when the killings start with none of that “love thy neighbor” stuff getting in the way. If baby gets in the way in Western Europe or secular America, too bad for baby. (more)
