As we write this the Western world is agog with disgust at the brutality of an insurrection unfolding in Iraq. People are being lined up and mown down. Others are subjected to public beheadings because they don't believe in the peculiar doctrines of the Islamic Sunni sect. The West decries such behaviour as medieval by which it means, primitive--that is, ibehaviours that belong to an age which has not benefited from the Enlightenment.
The West, in its preening desire to be inclusive and tolerant towards all has conveniently forgotten that the historical symbol of Islam is the scimitar. The ardent Islamic Sunni soldiers now operating in Iraq are simply being consistent. And, we want to ask the chattering classes and the Commentariat in the West, what could possibly be wrong with that? Upon what high moral stool is the West sitting whence to declaim such behaviour?
The established religion of the West is secular humanism, and its philosophy of existence is evolutionism. But the West has conveniently forgotten that secular humanism and evolutionism is morally neutral at best, vacuous at worst. Yet still the West clings forlornly to notions of morality, of right and wrong.
In one of the weirdest and most circular circumlocutions ever devised, the Commentariat and the Academy have argued that our moral notions are better than the morality of the Medieval Period because we are more evolved. We have progressed. We declaim murder, rape, incest, and even theft sometimes because we have morally developed. Our public morality is evolved.
But secular humanism has no morality: it is built upon brute materialism. Whatever is, is right. Evolutionism, similarly, has no morality. It is neutral or amoral--whatever survives is right. Whatever passes away out of existence and history is wrong--in the sense of inferior, or unfit for purpose. So, if the active and energetic rebels in Iraq succeed, all power to them. They are the more evolved species in that land, not the effete chattering classes in the West.
The problem lies right here: the West hates the God of the Ten Commandments. But, the West wants to continue believing in the last six commandments--from honouring father and mother to not coveting what belongs to one's neighbour. The West wants the Law, without acknowledging nor worshipping the God whose Law it is. Thus, the West lives an acute contradictory nonsense.
As historian Christopher Dawson expressed it:
. . . the moral idealism which is still so characteristic of the Western mind is the fruit of an age-long tradition of religious faith and spiritual discipline. Humanitarianism is the peculiar possession of a people who have worshipped for centuries the Divine Humanity--apart from all that even our humanism would have been other than it is. It is from this Christian moral tradition that both the older Deist movement and the new movement of evolutionary vitalism have derived whatever positive religious value they possess. Nevertheless this element cannot continue to exist indefinitely, if it is divorced from the historic religious beliefs on which it is really founded. [Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945), p. 242f.]So, when the Modern Man, the card carrying member of the Academy or the Commentariat, declaims the brutality being perpetrated in Iraq he or she is drawing on a mere echo--and a faint echo at that--of the Law of the Lord of Sinai and Calvary. In the light of the evolutionary secularism prevailing in the West it comes across as quaint, even foolish.
In the spirit of Elijah we find ourselves wanting to cry out, "Grow up, and get a life!" If the Baal of secular humanism is true, stop prattling on about morality and immorality, right and wrong, decency and indecency. Live before and serve your god with a modicum of integrity and consistency. But if God be true, then repent and embrace His Law and His Word with fear and reverence.
The West is both limping and limpid. It claims both the autonomy of evolutionism, and the righteous decency of the Lord. It lives in a pathetic joke. The Sunni warriors no doubt get the punchline. That's why they call the West the Great Satan.
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