Continued:

Minette Marrin says something similar: One of the things that strikes me more, not less, forcibly as time has passed is the contempt that Muslim extremists feel for us. They despise us for our decadence, and I feel more and more forced to accept the painful truth that they have a point.

Johnathan Pearce maintains: For all that I have problems with religion and unreason, I cannot overlook the benign side of religion or the contributions that the Judeo-Christian tradition has played in the West, for instance. It is arguable, for example, that notions of individualism, free will and dignity of the person have been greatly driven by that tradition, as well as other schools of thought.

And Tom Paine concludes: Our society was shaped by Christian thought. It was not rationalism that caused us to abolish slavery, well before France or America, it was William Wilberforce’s Christian belief. Public health, education, social welfare and other reforms were driven not by socialist ideas but by the desire of Christians in public life to serve God by serving their fellow men. He goes on to say: Nature abhors a vacuum. I think our nation is missing its faith.

These writers are correct but they do make one fundamental mistake in seeing the term ‘rationalist’ as being in opposition to ‘Christian’ but that is the standard error they’ve been induced into by the humanistic school which has ordered society since the so called Enlightenment [or Luciferization] and which colours much of the intellectual and scientific thought in the higher institutions.

To employ the term ‘rational’ is to believe in ‘reason’ but the application of reason would induce one to dispassionately reflect on all evidence on the historical record from all sources, however shaky, then to filter out that which doesn’t accord with the combined tendency of the other fragments.

And the historical record clearly shows that something quite major occurred in the ‘western’ world [as distinct from China] about 2000 year ago. It didn’t go away, despite the most abhorrent strictures, it didn’t depend on brute force to spread it – in fact quite the opposite. When the Christian symbol was hijacked and the brute force of the secular state was used near the end of the 11th century in the holy lands, it was relatively short-lived in historical terms.

There are two major thrusts to Christianity – the theological, redemptive aspect covered in John 3:16 and the social aspect, referred to by the writers above and encapsulated in the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew Chapters 5 to 7]. Even if the former is ignored, just the latter is a great start and immediately produces two effects:

1. It reorders our relations in respect to others;
2. It provides a strong bulwark against incursion both temporal and spiritual.

Blogger after blogger after blogger writes at length about the threat to our way of life. Yet it’s so, so simple to see why the drugs, teenage pregnancies, street danger, black [theistically] youth culture, Muslim incursion and the softening of the underbelly of society are as they are.

The root cause is there to see but most shy away near the end, close the eyes and refuse to take that final hurdle.

And so it will ever be.

Thus we hurtle ever onwards towards the apocalyptic scenario - the militarization of society, the globalized economic convergence, the reduction of humans to the brute state which Tom Paine refers to in another part of his article and the inevitable final denouement for humanity.