Dumb and Dumber

How the West Was Lost

The dominant--indeed, established--religion of our day is materialistic atheism.  Put into doctrinal form, its profession of faith is as follows:

All that exists is matter: there is nothing else.
Matter exists by chance.

Naturally, these two proposition result in a rather barren, empty existence.  It is impossible to make any  meaning of one's life, let alone the cosmos.  It is hard to believe anything when everything is supposedly irrational.

In order to cope with the resultant crisis, folk just invent things.  Consequently, most in the West live in a make-believe world--one made up to impart the appearance of sense, meaning, significance and rationality.  It can be described as living in a make-believe world viewed through Alice's looking glass.

One pop manifestation of this make-believe world is a near universal belief in luck, or the "stars".  From the Christian perspective it comes as no surprise at all that our popular culture is deeply wedded to astrology--the belief that astral bodies providentially govern some, if not all, things in the world.
 We are constantly confronted with folk who rush out to buy lottery tickets because of a prediction in the local astrological column of a newspaper promising unbelievable good fortune around the corner.

They do this without any form of self-conscious embarrassment or shame.  Having been raised in the most materialistic and atheistic culture yet possible to be wrought in a democracy, they cling to the most inane nonsense in the attempt to preserve the last possible shreds of meaning to life.  One of the great glories of our compulsory secular state education system  is that it has turned out graduates riddled with ignorant superstition.

Hippolytus of Rome mocked the idiocy of astrology as far back as the early third-century AD.  The astrologers of his day claimed that

. . . one born in Leo will be brave; and that one born in Virgo will have long straight hair, be of fair complexion, childless, modest.  These statements, however, and others similar to them, are rather deserving of laughter than serious consideration.  For, according to them, it is possible for no Aethiopian to be born in Virgo; otherwise he would allow that such a one is white, and with long straight hair and the rest.  [Refutation of All Heresies, IV, vi.]

When men turn away from God--as our culture has done now for over three hundred years--they don't believe in nothing.  They invent alternatives and replacements to fill the vacuum.  Unable to live in any way consistently with the official religion of the day--

All that exists is matter: there is nothing else.
Matter exists by chance . . .  

they invent stop-gaps, fillers.  It is the pagan version of the "god of the gaps" theory.  Believing in the providential control of man by stars is just one of the stop-gap fillers.

The Apostle Paul, a sage greater than any other found in our modern world, spoke of his generation as follows--(thereby condemning our own):

For although they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.  [Romans 1: 21--25] 

Thus, instead of worshipping the God whom they all know, they suppress that truth.  But since vacuums cannot hold, they invent their own gods--in this case, the stars.  Our generation prefers to live in a realm of superstitious ignorance, predicated upon a cosmos where only matter and chance exist.

The West lauds its great learning.  It is a false boast.  Its superstitious ignorance becomes more evident with each passing generation.