The Myth of the Wars of Religion

Yet Another Cheap Trick

Voltaire once famously said, "History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead".  Voltaire had in view some "dishonest" historians.  Doubtless he was excluding himself and his fellow Philosophes from the sarcasm.  Yet, arguably the Enlightenment intelligentsia was guilty of playing more tricks upon the dead than most.

One of the staunch prejudices of the Philosophes of the Enlightenment was against religion and religious belief.  These were characterised as riddled with myth, superstition, purblind prejudice, and ignorance.  In contrast were the cool headed, evidence based intellectuals of the Age of Reason.  Or so the story ran.

One of the slurs against religious belief was that it was responsible for fomenting war.  People believed in things that were no more than ignorant prejudices.  Ignorance (rather than rational debate, analysis, and discussion) readily led to the use of force.  With no evidence, the only persuader in the face of disagreement was compulsion.  Hence, religion was responsible for much of the violence and bloodshed of the early modern period.  Terms like the Wars of Religion have been coined to characterise Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  These wars, we are told, only came to an end with the emergence of the secular Nation State.  When the map of Europe was redrawn into nation states, wars passed away.  Enlightenment flourished.  Convinced?

The Self-Made Saint

Hypocrisy Beyond Bounds

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is regarded by many as the patron saint of the French Enlightenment.  To this day he is cited as an authority on human rights, on liberty, on education and schooling, and on justice.  Yet he remains as one of the West's most vainglorious hypocrites.

Rousseau sought all his life to be accepted and honoured by the nobility.  He longed for recognition.  He sought attention constantly.  He was besotted with himself.  Few in the modern world recall, if they ever knew in the first place, that his personal home and family life was appalling.  It was meretricious because of Rousseau himself.

Rousseau never married, but he kept a mistress--or, more accurately, he had a mistress keep him.  Therese was dishonoured by him in public, in front of his guests at dinner, and in his general treatment of a poor and vulnerable woman.

The Great Lie

Believing Your Own Press . . . Or Not

What did the Enlightenment gurus really believe about human nature?  Remember that the philosophes of the period had faces set like flint against religion in general and Christianity in particular.  Virtually all that was evil in the world, they argued, could be traced back to religious superstition.  "Enlightenment" meant casting off the darkness inflicted upon to the West by the Church.  

But what would replace the Ten Commandments?  No problems at all.  Get rid of religion and mankind would return to his natural state of moral, spiritual, and intellectual innocence.  J. H. Huizinga summarises the Enlightenment world view:

The Great Debate: Burke Versus Paine, Part III

The Enlightenment and Its Tyranny

Most Western political philosophers from the Greeks through to Enlightenment liberals and their successors have a view that the origin of a state or nation is critical.  There is an emphasis upon the founding of a nation: whether it be in the form of a "Declaration of Independence" or a Constitutional Convention producing founding constitutional documents.

This emphasis upon the beginnings of a nation is a reflection of what is found in Scripture.  In the Bible, it becomes apparent that God is a covenant making and a covenant keeping God.  A covenant in Scripture is a solemn, formal agreement between parties which provides the foundation, the "basic law" or "higher law" of how the nation will cohere together.  It sets the goals, the motivation, and the standards which will govern the various parties.

Thus, when God called Abram and his household from Ur of the Chaldees, He made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants.  [Genesis 17: 1-2]  After God delivered Israel out of Egypt, He re-made His covenant with Abraham's descendants [Exodus 19:5].  Then, again, at the end of the wilderness wanderings over 40 years, He remade the covenant again with Israel, as recorded in the book of Deuteronomy.

Thus, when nations make covenants to define the fundamental structures, processes and laws of their nation, they are reaching back to a biblical construct.  The creation itself and the world of mankind are made to operate within covenantal structures.

No Thank You

Either An Oxymoron or an Abomination

Every so often we see calls for an Islamic Enlightenment.  This is a strange call.  It is also one which bespeaks ignorance both of the Enlightenment and of Islam.

The Enlightenment was anti-religious, period.  It was the beginning of Western atheism and secularism.  To be sure, its fruits have ripened in the twentieth century and in the present century.  Its fruits have been bloodshedding on a vast scale.  Consider, for example, the number of innocent children slaughtered in the womb daily throughout the West.  This outcome was not hard to predict, given the French Revolution--which was an Enlightenment effort.  That Revolution ended in the Reign of Terror--all in the name of Reason.

An "Islamic Enlightenment" would probably present a "version" of Islam which was atheistic, secular, and not Islam at all.  It would represent the dismantling of Islam as a religion--in precisely the same way that Enlightenment ideology has "transformed" Christianity by driving it out of society. The philosophes are "open" to retaining references to Christianity, even studying it, but only to consign it to the reliquaries of history.  Secularism and Islam do not mix; cannot mix.

On the other hand, this year celebrates the beginning of the Christian Reformation 500 years ago.

The Enlightenment's Pretension

Shattered Dreams

Judd Owen has written a plaintive book trying to reconstruct the Enlightenment Mind after it has been ravaged by the acids of post-modernism.  It is a noble venture, doomed to failure.  But the author's effort is heroic, akin to the Charge of the Light Brigade into the valley of death.  It's hard not to feel sympathetic.

The fundamental problem is that the Enlightenment Mind asserted the objective authority of human reason.  Truth and Reason were roughly equivalent concepts.  If something were rational, it must be true.  Yet we now all know this is a nonsense.

New Atheism's Pre-occupations

Weird

New Age atheists like to champion the Enlightenment.  They want to see it dominant.  Away with all mysticism and superstition and priestcraft.  Let the benefice of pure reason be established on the highest.

Why the hostility towards religion?  Well, there is the old chestnut that it represents superstition on steroids.  After all, you can't put God in a test-tube.  And what you can't put in a test-tube just ain't so.
But there is something else even more weird.  With a kind of Freudian overlay, New Age atheists connect religion with sexual repression.  David Berlinski points out that  Christopher Hitchens has made this extraordinary assertion:

. . . Christopher Hitchens claims that (religion) is dangerous because it is "the cause of dangerous sexual repression."  Short of gender insensitivity, what could be more dangerous than dangerous sexual repression?  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p 18.]

We suppose that Hitchens is making an oblique reference to the fact that Christians believe sex must be exclusively restricted to consenting adults bound in a holy oath of mutually exclusive fidelity.  Yup. That's dangerous sexual repression.  Presumably Hitchens wants us to join him in thinking that sexual libertinism is safe, upbuilding, and mutually supportive, particularly for the children being conceived and, if allowed to live, brought up in its serendipitous embrace.  Not dangerous at all.

In this high faluting sentiment, Hitchens is joined by fellow idealogue, Richard Dawkins.

Among the commandments that Richard Dawkins proposes as replacement for the original ten, the first encourages men and women "to enjoy [their] own sex lives so long as it damages nobody else."  [Ibid.]

Well, silly old Richie Rich.  Of course it is damaging--this libertine sexuality--if it represses people into a binary gender prison of having to be either male or female.  Get with the programme.  Shed that Oxford priggery.

Yup, Christianity and its commandments are positively dangerous for the human race.  You know the chorus: more evil has been done in the name of religion than any other name.  We atheists are the good guys.  We are of the Enlightenment Party--our creed is simple.  Men and women (oops, sorry) ought to be allowed to regulate their own conduct, guided solely by reason and experience.  What a glorious society that would be.

Glorious, it would seem, only if you like seeing blood flow.

Children of the Enlightenment do not, of course, dwell overly on the dreadful acts undertaken in its name when the Enlightenment first became a living historical force in France:

all perished, all--
Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,
Head after head, and never heads enough
For those that bade them fall.

[Berlinski, ibid.]

False Prophets

A Prescient Judge Points the Way

A judge in Downunder has caused discombobulation and outrage at his suggestion that there is nothing principially wrong with incest.  That incest should be advocated from the bench ought not be surprising to Christians.  When secular humanism becomes the regnant religion, anything that can be done will be done--and will likely be endorsed and approved.  The reason is that the ethic of secular humanism runs, "I am the master of my fate; man is the measure of all things; nothing human is foreign or absolutely wrong." 

When this ethic is applied consistently to sexual mores nothing is implicitly forbidden.  Explicit prohibitions are ignorant, primitive, time-bound prejudices and subject to change by the next more-enlightened generation.  We are in the middle of just such a sea change.

The secularists are actively pushing the boundaries.  But The Daily Telegraph in the land of Oz has been so outraged, it has called for a judge to be sacked. Why?  Because the judge has suggested that there is nothing wrong with incest, only sexual and physical mechanics which can easily be controlled.

Ceaselessly Tossed To and Fro

Seething In Vain

All Christians are utopians insofar as they believe that a day is coming when the Lord of heaven and earth will descend from heaven to dwell here and establish a perfect world, without sin--the unfolded and optimised and glorified Paradise of God's original creation.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more  And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.  He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."  (Revelation 21: 1-4)

Most human beings--whether Christian or not--are utopians of one stripe or other.  But at the same time, there is a strong streak of dystopianism running through the race.  In the Unbelieving frame, evil threatens to destroy us all; were it to succeed, suffering and devastation would be universal.  The causes vary--global warming, asteroid strike, economic inequality, famine, destructive ideologies, disease--but the general theme remains fairly constant.  So, the human race is bedevilled by a contradictory utopian-dystopian antithesis which gives no peace--social, personal or otherwise.  Sound familiar?  Any regular reader of a daily metropolitan newspaper will confirm it so. 

Enlightenment's Stepchildren

Hucksters and Tricksters

The Enlightenment was an anti-Christian movement.  It was the parent of modern atheistic, secular humanism, which has become the official established religion of our day.  The transition from Christendom to anti-Christendom took three centuries, but here we are.

The Enlightenment rejected Christianity and the Church.  But it attempted to retain those aspects of Christianity and Christendom it "liked".  To remove the foundation will naturally cause the superstructure to fall to the ground in pieces.  But that emerged only later--in our generation.  It was a gradual, but inevitable outcome.

Christopher Dawson explains how Enlightenment  philosophes rationalised their positions, in a manner akin to modern militant atheists who vehemently reject the Triune eternal God, whilst hypocritically clinging to aspects of Christian morality which their upbringing and past has ingrained into them.  They are dishonest brokers--much like the Enlightenment philosophes turned out to be.

But in spite of its unorthodox and even anti-Christian character, all the positive elements in the new creed were derived from the old religious tradition of Christendom.

Legends and Myths

The Myth of the Dark Ages

The standard secular humanist perspective on European history was wrapped up and handed to us by Enlightenment philosophes.  The basic thesis was that rational thought and accomplishment ended with the waning of the Roman Empire.  It was succeeded by the Dark Ages--a period of ignorance, disease, poverty and brutality--until Charlemagne (circa 800AD), who represented a flickering, dying ember of former glories.  But human history did not recommence its triumphant upward movement until the Enlightenment, which it began to hymn brazenly, and with just a smidgen of self-serving chutzpah, declaring "We are the Champions of the World". 

Nowadays only the untutored cling to such a deceitful trick, and then only for the purposes of propaganda--which is elegantly appropriate, since this was largely why Gibbon wrote his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  The way the story "rolled" was to magnify Rome and its Empire and contrast its glories with the succeeding degradations, then slip in an association of the "decline and fall" with the spread of Christianity (a superstition undermining classical thought), leading to the "inevitable" conclusion that the Christian religion was bad for the general well-being of mankind. 

Here is Gibbon's paean of praise to Roman accomplishment:

Tricksie

A Grand, But False Edifice

The really momentous, but notorious contributions of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason were the French Revolutions' Reign of Terror, the scourge of Nazism, and the totalitarian embrace of Communism.  These were all directly traceable to the doctrine of the autonomy of human reason, which was the lodestone both the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. 

The other benefits attributed to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason were actually incidental to both.  Benefits such as scientific and technological advances during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred due to the foundations laid centuries before.  Rodney Stark has it right when he writes:

The Real Dark Ages

Intellectual Snobbery Plays Tricks on Both the Dead and the Living

The dominant narrative of Western history runs something like this: the classical age (Greece, Alexander, and Rome) represents a crowning glory of human achievement.  This age was marked by an explosion of refined cultural achievement, knowledge, discovery, and scientific advance.  It was followed by the Dark Ages when the West came under the aegis of the Christian faith and its attendant superstition.  During nigh on a thousand dark years, the West lived in penury, illness, and degradation, presided over by tyrannical feudal despots and a superstitious religion.

Then came the Enlightenment which threw off the shackles of religious superstition and began to recover the glories of the classical age.  Out of the resulting explosion of knowledge and cultural advances of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment came the Western dominance of the world--culturally, politically, academically, scientifically, and so forth.

But as Voltaire observed, "history" is a trick the living play upon the dead.

Modern Niceties

 Secularist Persecution

In the early chapters of his book on Constantine, Peter Leithardt sets the scene of Constantine's accession to the purple, documenting the reign of Diocletian. As part of the scene-setting, he reviews the Diocletian persecution of the Church, which commenced in 303AD.  It was pretty gruesome stuff.  The move was a failure, although the suffering and bloodshed real enough. 

Leithardt also reviews modern revisionist views of Roman persecution of Christians in general, and Diocletian's in particular.  The revisionism began with the Enlightenment which had a general commitment to a piece of deliberate propaganda: the Christian religion was perverse superstition; therefore, the classical age that preceded it was the watershed of human sophistication and cultural maturity.  The Enlightenment was deliberately styled as a movement to recapture of the high points of classical culture, so that mankind could continue on its glorious upward trajectory.  In order to do so it must throw off the chains of Christian superstition and recapture the glories of ancient Greece and Rome. 

This particular piece of propaganda meant that the persecution of the Church by the Roman Empire needed some decent revisionist work.

Islam's Cultural Fruit

Saudi Arabian Enlightenment

At the root of all cultures is a religion--a shared belief in ultimate realities (of one kind or another).  All human beings are religious.  All have beliefs in the ultimate.  Even those who insist that everything is relative and there are no ultimates or universals governing all of life are espousing their particular ultimate belief.

When a religion becomes widely shared, it produces a dominant culture which in its turn governs the law, the state, the family, education, relationships between the sexes, between parents and children and so forth.

In Arabia, Islam has been the dominant religion for 1500 years.  It has produced a certain culture.  The prevailing wisdom amongst the Commentariat in the West is that Arabia is economically primitive and therefore is peopled by the ignorant, the barbarian, and savages.  The subtle sub-text is that Arabians are Islamic because of their ignorance.  That is, if they had the "privileges" of a Western education and the benefits of a Western standard of living they would evolve to hold Islam in a nominal sense only.  This is the same perspective the West holds upon the Christian religion--it is part of our tradition, but a fairy story, a myth.  No more, no less.  Wise men gave up on long ago. 

The notion that ignorance begets adherence to Islam in Arabia paternalistically reverses history's cause and effect.  If Islam had been a recent innovation in Arabia, the case may be arguable.  But not when the religion of Islam has controlled Arabia for one and a half millennia.

Fly, You Fools!

 Unbelief's Dirty Little Secrets

The Bible says that the fool is one who denies God's existence: "the fool says in his heart, 'there is no God'."  (Psalm 14:1).  At first glance this statement on its own does not allow us to declare with certainty that all Unbelievers are therefore fools.  To draw that conclusion would entail us falling into the fourth form logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.  The subsequent declarations in Psalm 14, however, put the matter beyond dispute: all Unbelievers are indeed fools.

1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
    They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds,
    there is none who does good.

² The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man,
    to see if there are any who understand,
    who seek after God.

³ They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
    there is none who does good,
    not even one. (Psalm 14: 1-3)

On the other hand, Unbelief confronts us with an array of arguments to the opposite: it is the Believer who is foolish and ignorant. Is Belief and Unbelief destined, then, to pass like ships in the night.  Not really.  Unbelief at its most honest candidly acknowledges its own foolishness.

A Man Has to Know His Limitations

Round and Round the Garden Went the Teddy Bear

You just have to love Ludwig Wittgenstein--not that he was a very lovable character.  If Hume was the enfant terrible, the dismantler of the Enlightenment's claim to objective, evidence based, rationalistic "truth", Wittgenstein was his twentieth century step-child.  He was the gladiatorial, scathing, sarcastic progenitor of post-modernism.

Wittgenstein pointed out that in all reasoning and arguments there are sets of pre-interpretative grids at play which lead one to certain inferences and conclusions about the facts and data being discussed.  All knowledge is circular.  All reasoning is circular.  To Enlightenment rationalists and their twentieth century descendants, this is hateful stuff.

A Shot of Faith to the Head

Evidentialism is Quite Dead

We have just picked up a copy of Mitch Stokes's A Shot of Faith {To the Head}(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012) which is a well written, very approachable piece of work on the intellectual battle against the Christian faith being waged at a neighbourhood near you.

The work makes the philosophical contributions of men like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff accessible and useful to the wider Christian community.  (For their part, Plantinga and Wolterstorff have, in turn, been making Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid accessible to modern readers.)

Here is an initial excerpt:

Western Civilisation

The Age of Vaunting Pride and Gnawing Doubt

The title of Dickens novel "Great Expectations" aptly summarizes a dominant theme in Victorian England (and the West in general at that time, for that matter).  There was a widespread, burgeoning belief that nirvana was just ahead.  Much of the optimism was due to advances in technology and science. 

To our jaded eyes, technological advances have become the norm.  Another "breakthrough" has become decidedly deja-vu.  But in the late eighteenth century this was not the case.  Consider Sebastien Mercier's account of the first balloon flight in November 21, 1783:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Postmodernism and My Neighbor

Goo-Mongers - Postmodernism
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, December 03, 2011

Please let me take a moment of your time so that I might explain why I hate postmodernism so much. It is the same reason, at bottom, why I hate socialism so much. But I repeat myself -- they are at root the same thing, actually.

Modernity is a good thing, brought into existence by the influence of the gospel. Modernism was a parasitic ideology, sneeveling in to take credit for those good things it could not produce or sustain.