Religion

The Left’s War on Faith

Culture at the Heart: Western Civilisation is in crisis, and at the heart of the crisis is culture. And yet (with the honourable exception of Quadrant and, to a lesser extent the IPA and CIS) the cultural field has largely been vacated by liberals and conservatives, or at least by their political representatives. The latter seem  content to focus on winning elections and retaining office (along with their substantial salaries, promising post-parliamentary careers, and lucrative superannuation schemes) as if power is an end in itself. Meanwhile, all around us the forces of barbarism continue their relentless ‘long march through the institutions’ of Western Civilisation, corrupting and degrading them as they go.

Levers of Cultural Power: An excellent topical example of the grip of the Left over the levers of cultural power in our society is the HSC Modern History subject. One of the most popular HSC subjects, taken by 50 percent of all students, it is their best chance to gain some perspective on the world in which they will soon be building their adult lives. Its exam was conducted on Friday, 12/11, and one question in particular highlights the Far Left orientation of the senior history teachers and academics who decide what our HSC students need to be know about Modern History and set the questions accordingly.

That question focused on Chinese Marxism, and asked students to explain

To what extent did competing versions of Marxism affect Chinese politics from 1966 to 1989?

Of all the things that happened in that period, why would students be required to focus on the arcane and murderous disputes within the Chinese Communist Party? Why should they need to understand Communist ideology to the level required to distinguish between the many varieties of Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Mao Zedong tThought, etc? The examiners clearly thought such knowledge is relevant, presumably because they believe (and hope?) that the world is heading towards Communism and the insanity of Marxist economics. But what do our elected representatives do to prevent, regulate, or even just balance such outlandish propaganda? Nothing! Their focus is entirely on themselves and their hold on office, apparently convinced that there are ‘no votes in Culture Wars’.

Jeremiad: Consequently, because of this scandalous desertion in the face of the cultural enemy the long-term political trend in the West will be towards the Left, as Greg Sheridan points out in a timely jeremiad (‘Democracy in crisis’, The Weekend Australian, 13/11). Indeed, the ongoing victories of the Left in the realm of culture (and above all, in education) means that our civilisation will be delivered into the hands of the fanatics of the extreme Left where lunacy, delusion, and even treason reign supreme, as the US Democrats and their media sycophants are presently demonstrating. Citing Karl Schmude “The Animating Force of Religious Faith” (Quadrant, November, 2021), Sheridan emphasizes not only that ‘politics is downstream of culture’ and that the latter must be fiercely contested by liberals and conservatives and their representatives, but that ‘culture is downstream of faith’ and that the contemporary denigration of faith and the West’s general loss of belief in the transcendent are proving to be culturally crippling.

Historical Propaganda: None of this is accidental, of course. It is the contemporary outcome of the systematic atheistic propaganda that has been a core component of the Leftist agenda for a quarter of a millennium, as even a basic familiarity with history reveals, i.e., an historical understanding not derived from the bogus narrative of Western mendacity imposed on the minds of students in NSW schools and reinforced in crucial HSC exams.

Denying the Transcendent: Indeed, the Left has long recognised that its program for comprehensive human transformation cannot be anchored in the transcendent, as Christianity has been able to do for nearly two millennia. Instead, because it rejects the transcendent, Leftism is by necessity relativist, anchored if at all merely in history, conceived as a supra-human but immanent entity as Karl Marx proclaimed, or Nature, as contemporary Gaia-worshipers insist. Ideologically, it continues to be essential for the Left to destroy all notions of faith and belief in the transcendent realm to which faith is directed. Only then can the Left compete on level terms with religion, or so it believes.

Re-building the World: Originating in the 18th Century Enlightenment, the Left had its first great victory in the French Revolution; French society was to be re-built from the ground up. This involved fundamental changes to all social institutions and everyday life, from religion, politics and language to women’s fashions, and even the calendar (i.e., 1792 became Year 1, and the 12 new 30-day months were each divided into three 10-day weeks, with the 10th day replacing Sunday as the day of rest. Each day was divided into 10 hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds, etc).

Destruction & Desecration: At the core of this totalitarian compulsion was a messianic fanaticism, proclaiming the birth of a new, militantly secular ‘political religion’, the prototype of Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and Islamism of the 20th Century. Christianity was to be jettisoned and replaced by the properly organized worship of Nature, with new non-Christian services being held in ‘de-Christianised’ churches, celebrating the ‘Festival of the Supreme Being’. As a great symbolic gesture, Chartres Cathedral was to be pulled down and a ‘Temple of Wisdom’ built in its place. The Basilica of Saint-Denis, the most important church in France, was devastated, its treasury looted, its reliquaries and liturgical objects melted down for their metals, and the royal tombs desecrated. Cluny Abbey was wiped off the map. Founded in 910, Cluny had been the largest church in Christendom until the completion of St. Peter’s 700 years later. It was renowned as the leading institution of Western monasticism. The revolutionary mobs destroyed it in 1793. Its massive and irreplaceable library and archives were burned, everything of value plundered, and its immense walls quarried for stone. Virtually nothing remained.

Descent into Terror: Events then descended into an orgy of violence as the Revolution turned on itself. The ruling Committee of Public Safety proclaimed that its revolutionary regime was in peril and that there were traitors everywhere. Civil war threatened, and amidst widespread panic and violence the infamous ‘Great Terror’ was unleashed. In institutionalizing terror as an official program, the ruling elite, led by Robespierre, saw itself as implementing a revolutionary type of virtue that made normal morality obsolete. As the radical St Just declared about those who resisted:

In a republic which can only be based on virtue, any pity shown towards crime is a flagrant proof of treason.

At least 300,000, mainly common people, were arrested, 17,000 executed, and some 10,000 died in prison. Meanwhile, the devout Catholics in the Vendée region rebelled against the imposition of the new religion and compulsory conscription into the Republican army. And so the order was given to the troops:

‘I order you to deliver to flames everything that can be burnt and to bayonet any locals you meet. I know there might be a few patriots but never mind, we must sacrifice them all.’

Some 250,000 Catholic rebels were slaughtered in what has been called the first modern genocide, and a harbinger of what was to come under other political religions in the 20th Century. Why isn’t this pivotal and very revealing event the subject of an HSC Modern History question when room can be found for the intricacies of Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong Thought and bogus accounts of the mendacity of the West?

Militant Atheism: Militant atheism developed through the 19th Century, when it was inextricably linked to the Socialist, Communist, Anarchist, and Nihilist movements.  Iconic advocates included the Communist, Karl Marx (“Religion is the opiate of the people”), and the Nihilist, Friedrich Nietzsche (“God is dead”). It then flourished in the 20th Century, with, e.g., Bertrand Russell proclaiming “Why I Am Not a Christian” (1927) and Sigmund Freud issuing his brutal atheistic polemic, The Future of an Illusion (1927).  It increasingly dominated politics and culture and found vigorous expression in Communism, Psychoanalysis, Existentialism, Nihilism, Anarchism, Logical Positivism, Randian Objectivism, Secular Humanism, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Postmodernism, and most contemporary social and cultural movements, all of which see the destruction of religion as essential if they are to successfully impose their own ideology on the masses (cf. Pater Watson, The Age of Atheists, 2014).

Soviet Atheism: In a repeat of the French experience, systematic atheism took an extreme form in the Soviet Union after the 1917 Russian Revolution. There the Bolsheviks established a repressive template that was then applied, with varying levels of restraint, and at the cost of tens of millions of lives, in Nazi Germany, the Eastern European Communist states, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and in other totalitarian regimes. Once again, one wonders why this very revealing aspect of modern history is not taught in schools or made the subject of an HSC question.

Brutal Suppression Indeed, in accordance with the Leftist program, one of the first steps taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks was the brutal suppression of all forms of religion, e.g., Christianity and Judaism especially, Islam to a lesser extent, but also shamanism, folk mysticism, and any other form of faith in the supernatural realm. The Soviet regime was based on a ramshackle foreign ideology that had little to offer the rural Russian masses, and so the Bolsheviks focused on destroying all competition for the hearts and minds of the people.

Targeted: In particular, they targeted the Russian Orthodox Church, with its 100 million adherents, 200,000 priests and monks, 75,000 churches and chapels, 37,000 primary schools, 1100 monasteries, 61 seminaries and academies, thousands of hospitals, old people’s homes and orphanages. This enormous traditional institution had long provided the cultural foundations of Russian Civilisation. Indeed, for the masses of the Russian people

culture meant religion – religious belief, but especially religious rituals and festivals: baptism, circumcision, confirmation, confession, and burial, Christmas, Easter, Passover, Yom Kippur, and Ramadan. Their lives revolved around the ceremonies of the religious calendar, because these not only glorified their hard and humdrum existences but gave even the humblest of them a sense of dignity in the eyes of God.” — Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime 1919-1924

It was this great foundational cultural dimension of life that the Bolsheviks set out to liquidate.

‘New Soviet Man’: As committed Marxists, the Bolsheviks knew that Communist ideology and the Christian religion could not co-exist, as they both made comprehensive psychological demands for belief and commitment. Like all terror-based regimes, the Soviets set out to create ‘Year Zero’ from which all history would subsequently begin. Consequently, the traditional Russian Christian had to disappear, so that ‘the New Soviet Man’ could be born, a worker bee in a hive. This collectivist creature would be .

a rational, disciplined and collective being who lived only for the interests of the greater good, like a cell in a living organism. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy

Therefore, Russia’s centuries-old, all-encompassing world of faith had to be eradicated if the new totalitarian Soviet system was to be erected in its place.  As Lenin explained,

if the Revolution was fully to liquidate the Old Regime it had to settle accounts with the Church. It could not rest content with toppling the Tsar, the supreme symbol of worldly authority: first and foremost, it had to seek to undermine the foundations on which the Russian world had hitherto reposed”, i.e., Orthodox Christianity Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime 

Scientific Atheism: All religion was to be relentlessly ridiculed and systematically repressed, to be replaced with a specially designed ‘Scientific Atheism’. There were even ‘God Builders’ – Bolshevik fanatics determined to create a formal religion out of Communism and for whom ‘Man is god to Man’. And so, within months of the October Revolution, ten Hierarchs (archbishops) were summarily executed, and ‘the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment’ was established, soon followed by ‘the All-Russian Union of Teachers-Internationalists’, and ‘the League of the Militant Godless’. These organizations were tasked with eliminating every last shred of religious material from the school curricula, and replacing it with ‘scientific atheism’, which evolved eventually into ‘Dialectical Materialism’, designed by Stalin and offering a complete materialist cosmology meant to serve as a secular substitute religion. This bureaucratic and ideological onslaught was joined in November 1920 by ‘the Chief Administration for Political Enlightenment’. The Bolsheviks were determined to closely regulate, suppress, and ultimately eliminate all religion.

Persecution: They therefore mounted a campaign of religious persecution on a scale not seen since the persecution of the Christians in the early centuries of the Roman Empire. In a series of decrees beginning in 1918, the Bolsheviks severed all links between the Church and the State, eliminated the Church’s status as a legal entity, ended all financial support, denied it the right to acquire or own property, denounced all miracles, confiscated all liturgical instruments, shut down all religious festivals, and prohibited the teaching of religion in all schools or to any youth group. More senior clergy and priests were arrested and executed. Party members and the public were encouraged to openly ridicule, harass and beat up priests, and many were simply killed. Overall,

The clergy was made destitute … Churches and monasteries were despoiled and converted to secular use, [as] were synagogues and mosques. Clergy of all faiths (except for Muslims) were deprived of civil rights and subjected to violent harassment and sham trials, which ended for many in imprisonment or execution. Religious instruction [was] replaced by atheistic propaganda [while] religious holidays gave way to Communist festivals.” Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

Public Reaction: As the Socialist Left regime under Dan Andrews in Victoria is discovering, these campaigns of State repression often have unexpected results, even when the regime can rely on the abject loyalty of the security and police forces. The Soviet campaign certainly intimidated many people who stopped attending church, but others attended just to silently protest their opposition to the new regime and its extreme demands. In some towns, when the security forces arrived to loot and destroy the local churches, the people pelted them with stones and even beat them up, prompting vicious retaliation.  In one infamous case, when Alexandra Kollontai, the Commissar for Social Welfare (and pioneering Radical Feminist), sent troops to Petrograd to ‘confiscate’ a famous monastery, huge crowds turned out to defend it. The troops opened fire, but the crowd refused to disperse and soon a massive religious procession of several hundred thousand faithful swept through the city in support. However, such resistance only strengthened the Soviet regimes’ determination to crush religion “with such brutality that they will not forget it for decades to come,” as an official direction to the police dictated. Consequently, hideous torture and murder were inflicted across the country on all religious folk who resisted the suppression of their faith.

Impact: This campaign eventually had a cataclysmic impact on national morale. Indeed,

The aggressive atheism [of the Bolsheviks] affected the mass of citizens far more painfully than the suppression of political dissent or the imposition of censorship. Next to Economic hardships, no action of Lenin’s government brought greater suffering to the population than the profanation of their religious beliefs, the closing of the houses of worship, and the mistreatment of the clergy. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

Death Toll: The death toll of this anti-religion terror campaign is difficult to estimate. However, between June 1918 and January 1919 in the Moscow region alone, official church figures record that one metropolitan, 18 bishops, 102 priests, 154 deacons, and 94 monks and nuns were murdered by the security forces. In addition, across the country, 579 monasteries and convents were liquidated, accompanied by the mass execution of many more monks and nuns. In the longer term, at least 106,000 Russian clergymen were executed during the Great Purge in the 1930s, while the total number of Christians killed under the Soviet regime is estimated at some 12-20 million. Across the Communist world tens of millions more were murdered or sent to die in concentration and ‘re-education’ camps.

Evangelical Atheists: It is to this dark heritage that contemporary atheists belong and owe their ideological allegiance. The most prominent of these present-day propagandists are Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2007), Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2006), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell, 2006), and A.C. Grayling (The God Argument, 2013). Described as ‘evangelical atheists’, they serve as the vanguard of the New Atheism. The titles of their books reveal the arrogance with which they approach their mission. 

The New Atheism: Their highly publicised iconoclasm promotes a belligerent oppositional stance towards religion, particularly Christianity, which proponents portray as mere superstition, bigotry, and irrationalism. Grayling, for example, is explicitly an anti-Christian polemicist, pursuing his mission on three fronts in a manner reminiscent of the Bolshevik strategy: (1) A determined philosophical attack on all notions of the supernatural or transcendent; (2) The replacement of the Judeo-Christian foundations of the Western ethical system by secular, humanist values; (3) The demotion or removal of all religious organizations from the public sphere beyond the status allowed secular groups, e.g., trade unions.

Ultimate Objective: Grayling’s ultimate objective is the same as that of the Bolsheviks, i.e., the construction of an atheistic state religion (although one hopes he would resist implementing mass terror and murder to achieve this).  Consequently, he has produced The Good Book: A Secular Bible, a self-help book that mirrors The Bible, being divided up into Genesis, Parables, Lamentations, Songs, Proverbs, Acts, Epistles, and The Good), with each of these being divided into chapters and verses, so that people can properly cite the wisdom and teachings of A.C. Grayling. For example, ‘The Good’, provides his ‘Ten Commandments’, e.g., Love Well, Harm No-one, Respect Nature, Be Informed, etc. Adherence to all this, he insists, will deliver humanity into a secular Golden Age. This campaign has been very influential, especially amongst intellectuals, academics, teachers and others who welcome the ‘cancellation’ of a field of scholarship about which they know little or nothing and for which they have no aptitude.

Different Gods: Ultimately, the atheist attack on Christianity is fundamental to the Leftist project to remake humanity on Progressivist terms. And at the heart of the contest there are two fundamentally different conceptions of God. Targeted by the Left for ridicule and the scrap-heap is the traditional Judeo-Christian God, who is transcendent and other-worldly; while being promoted is the Progressivist/Communist ideal of a god-like mega-State, which is entirely immanent and this-worldly. Instead of salvation being sought through a transcendent God, it will be sought from an all-powerful and omnipresent state apparatus that seeks to control every aspect of individual and social life in order to deliver a secular paradise to the previously benighted masses (whether they want it or not).

Dereliction: Something of this dystopian nature seems to be under construction in Victoria, while in NSW schools students are being ideologically prepared to embrace such a future. Consequently, the dereliction of duty by the NSW and federal governments in this sphere is absolutely reprehensible (with the possible exception of the federal Education Minister Alan Tudge, who is contesting the new National Curriculum). As Sir Winston Churchill declared to the House of Commons in 1948 as the Cold War with Communism set in:  “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

But how can people learn from history if they are never taught history, but instead are fed bogus Leftist propaganda? This is why the Culture Wars are so important and why those who care about Western Civilisation must insist that their elected representatives properly exercise their responsibilities in contesting the forces of collectivist barbarism.

24 thoughts on “The Left’s War on Faith

  • andrew2 says:

    The relevance to our country is this: any action the “left” is able to get away with in Australia is because the baby boomers abandoned religion. They were not forced to do it. They chose this of their own free will.

  • Stephen Due says:

    Daniel Andrews, fully supported by the BC and other mainstream media, is conducting an ongoing, covert war against Christianity and Christian values. Christians are slowly beginning to wake up to what is going on. At the rally in Melbourne yesterday there was a strong minority Christian presence.
    This presence was noted by the (non-Christian) organisers in their review of the day. They also noted the widely-held belief among attendees that the pandemic agenda of Victorian Labor is ‘evil’ – a point the organisers saw as aligning the predominantly secular movement with a broadly Christian perspective.
    The vast crowd at this rally was reliably estimated at over 300,000. It was certainly the largest ever seen in a protest march on the streets of Melbourne (a fact carefully disguised by the media in their reporting).
    The objectives were: (1) to stop the proposed pandemic law that will give Andrews tyrannical powers; (2) to put an end to coerced vaccination, including vaccine mandates for employees, and vaccine ‘passports’; and (3) to end the program to inject children with toxic mRNA products.

  • Stephen Due says:

    Sorry that should be “Daniel Andrews fully supported by the ABC…”

  • Elizabeth Beare says:

    And today we see it all happening again with the cultish religion of climate change. I am always struck by how very Marxist is the way in which we are all asked to never question ‘the historical inevitability’ of our need to remake much of our current culture, economy and personal lives. It is such a revitalisation of this old destructive communist call to arms.
    Amor Towel’s very apposite book ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ takes a wry view on this, as the gentleman in question sadly listens to a young woman of whom he is rather parentally fond join the Young Communists, explaining cheerfully to him why she as a good young communist she is now off to assist with the collectivisation of the Kulaks, having no idea of course what that horror was really about. He most sadly watches her walk across the Moscow square to the station to catch her train on time for ‘her meeting with historical inevitability’.
    When I first began ‘history’ for the Day Matriculation in 1963, which followed the fifth and final year curriculum, the excellent teacher said we would spend time firstly on the French Revolution, which had been part of the 4th year study and was hence excluded from our formal curriculum. You cannot possibly comprehend anything about the modern world though until we deal with this, she commented. I have never thought her wrong about that insistance in any study I have made of history since.
    I’ve also found it not unsurprising that Stalin, who started his adult life in Georgia as a trainee priest, in his later life showed some personal, and little recorded, inclinations towards Christian belief. And that after all the damage done.

    .

  • Stoneboat says:

    There is no neutrality in academia. This applies to the study of history.
    .
    Historians abandoned any commitment to neutral history a century ago. Yet they pretend that they are sufficiently neutral to be entitled to financial support by taxpayers. Public day schools and tax-funded universities teach anti-Christian history.
    .
    Homeschool families have no materials to teach students how to deal with humanistic historians in college. The students are sent into the academic meatgrinder unprepared.
    .
    (This) book will prepare them.
    .
    The chapters will be published here daily.
    .
    This series will be published as a book after all of the chapters are online.
    .
    https://www.garynorth.com/public/22828.cfm

  • Adam J says:

    And the great Christian leader called Scott Morrison is silent. And if Alan Tudge was serious about the curriculum, he would get a team of Conservative scholars to make a new one and force it to be taught. But he won’t.
    Conservatives are so obsessed with the concept of moral victory they won’t fight back until it’s too late.

  • andrew2 says:

    Adam J, Scott Morrison is silent and Alan Tudge is not serious because there are no votes in religion anymore. The seriously religious are a minority now yet do not act like it.

    The appropriate way to act is to withdraw, nurture a smaller niche culture centred around God and people of goodwill and await the inevitable collapse of the mainstream culture as it devours itself. There is no point in confronting it now, you will only lose or invite massive bloodshed as demonstrated above in this essay.

    All passion, love, time, prayer, energy, money should go towards fostering this alternative culture an not trying to win the battle for the mainstream culture anymore.

  • Adam J says:

    Andrew2, you are only 99% right. It would be 100% except for one very important point: people do need to see and hear an alternative. People can, have, and will change their minds, but they can’t do that if there’s nothing to help them on their way.
    Scott Morrison can and should fight for a good historical education for all Australians, and he doesn’t need to be seriously religious to do that.
    Otherwise your attitude is correct. 🙁

  • colin_jory says:

    A most penetrating overview, Mervyn Bendle. However, the withholding of knowledge about Christianity is at least as culturally destructive and politically dangerous as what is taught to undermine Christianity. As Robert Hutchins, one-time President of the University of Chicago and co-compiler with Mortimer Adler of the Great Books of the Western World, stated, “We do not need to burn books to kill our civilization; we need only to leave them unread for a generation.” When I taught junior secondary school Social Science students were required by the curriculum to know the Five Pillars of Islam, the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, the Five Principles of Hinduism, these being implicitly considered innocuous for the modern West. They were not, however, made aware of the Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity — these are recognised as perilous to the indoctrination in secularist voidrancy to which the students were and are continuously subjected.

  • andrew2 says:

    Adam J, I think people will find the alternative if they really want to find it. The problem is most people don’t want to. It is like an alcoholic: you can’t actually help one until they reach the point where they want help. It is like the Matrix movies, most people are happy in the Matrix. I can’t see any other way to reconcile the life of Jesus and his words in the Bible with what we are facing today. Some on the right side of politics are calling for active culture war or even civil war. When the left makes Superman bi-sexual in DC comics, do you fight for Superman or do you give up on Superman and make your own comics? Jesus said new wine goes into new wineskins. He existed among the people, he did missionary work into the old world and provided direct help to people when needed, but he retreated when confronted with violence. He didn’t try and retake the old ground but sowed into new ground. And as God, he allowed the old way to collapse with the destruction of the Temple and the collapse of the Roman Empire. This doesn’t mean that you completely disappear into monastic communities but it does mean that you actively form networks of people and activities of your own. The Soviet Union fell mainly because there was an alternative Empire to fall into, but we have no alternative Empire. We are facing times like the Roman times, with the one big Empire trying to dominate everything.

  • pgang says:

    Mr Bendle has been writing some good stuff lately. To this excellent summary of secular humanism (which seems to me to be essentially what ‘Leftism’ is), could perhaps be added that the underlying goal of the socialist agenda or mindset is the destruction of humanity and the human spirit. The road to destruction is through authoritarian collectivism, based on the concept of some sort of utopian future. The broken present must be destroyed to make way for the glorious future in which we are all the same under one rule.
    Socialism takes Christian soteriology and twists it into a human-centred nightmare, with the opposite outcome from Christ’s salvation. It is a form of anti-Christ and is thus inherently antagonistic towards the Christian faith. As with darkness and light, the two cannot co-exist. Politics is now entirely focussed on driving socialist outcomes, whether our clueless politicians care or not.

  • abrogard says:

    I think there’s a desperate need for this god and jesus thing to be sorted out and put to rest and I think I know how to do it,.

    Haha. Don’t believe that, do you? But I do. It is NDE. Near Death Experiences.

    Just take them seriously. There must be at least a hundred videos on Youtube now that you can view.
    After viewing dozens I’m convinced that our consciousness somehow survives death. And these people are the living proof of it.
    And that it is highly likely that Jesus along with many other prophets and seers had experienced this.
    They all come back and try to tell the same story – influenced in each case by their own particular situation.
    But the essence is quite simple: there’s one ‘vibe’ or ‘energy’ in the universe and it is conscious and we are part of it.
    And we choose to come and inhabit earthly bodies, it’s all our own choosing.
    And that one essence, that one energy, that one consciousness is a vibe we call ‘love’ and our whole thing is to be it and spread it around. Not an easy job at all, but that’s it.
    And there’s the meeting point for every religion and every non-religion: love is king, the answer in all sense and reason and faith is the same: love trumps all.
    You’ll never build an exemplary civilization based on anything but.
    So we don’t need the religiosi and their religions but neither do we need to denigrate them. We need the essence of their teachings, just as they do: recognition that love is the way. That is we don’t need religions, we need the essence of them. And then we’ve got religion! Bit of a joke, eh?
    But that’s it.

  • whitelaughter says:

    Withdraw, andrew2? It is withdrawal that has got us into this mess!

    A powerful image that would add to this excellent article is the execution by firing squad of Jesus by Spanish Marxists; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_(Spain)

    The upside to this attack is we can see the value of religions simply by how much the traitors hate them! So we know that Christianity and Judaism are the best and Islam the worst, with Buddhism etc being ‘meh’.

  • pgang says:

    abrogard the problem with all of those experiences is that the people don’t actually stay dead. Or in other words, they’re not dead but just very ill. Kerry Packer once famously proclaimed that he saw nothing after his heart stopped for a while. The memories work both ways.
    Your pantheism is a form of superstition. Clearly love does not trump all in the human interpretation of existence, so this immediately discounts the value of the ‘natural’ one-spirit (which is yet another socialistic concept with the goal of killing off the individual).
    Pantheism is one of the many failed answers to the insoluble conundrum of the One and The Many – how individualism co-exists with communalism. Parliamentary democracy answered to this tension in a worthy attempt at a peaceful truce. But with the West’s underlying beliefs now fatally eroded, democracy is being sucked into the whirlpool of communalism.
    Outside of the Trinitarian, personal, beyond-creation creator God, there is no answer to the problem. The early Americans, for example, knew this. Only in the Trinity is this fundamental question of existence answerable. All humanist philosophies (including pantheism) are an exercise in futility.

  • guilfoyle says:

    Adam J draws attention to the silence of the ‘Christian ‘ leader Scott Morrison. This is the crux of the problem- the Liberal Party have no developed moral code in their policies. The Protestant idea that all our rights and values stem from the ‘Enlightenment ‘ as though the world suddenly woke up after the dark fog of the Middle Ages, implicitly embraces the ‘separatIon of religion ‘ from matters of state – conveying a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of separation of church and state. This ultimately leads to a self-imposed acquiescence to calls for silence when any moral issue is raised (at least any issue relevant to Christian belief). The vacuum in regard to moral principle is opportunistically filled by the left – who dress up their opposition to political action in motherhood terms designed to appeal to any right-thinking person. Interviews with cold-war Russian veterans such as Yuri Bezmenov reveal that the ‘peace movement ‘ of the 1960’s truly was funded and promoted by the KGB after all!
    My mother, a teacher in the 1970’s observed that the Education Department been ‘taken over by Marxists’.
    Yet the Liberal party do not move in either developing policies in which morality plays a part or in defending the Christian Faith from attack from secular media. In such circumstances the ordinary Australians are left with no-one to prosecute their stance.
    What can the ordinary person do when the syllabus itself calls for the indoctrination of their child and the conservative government voted in by them in protest against this very ideology does nothing about it?
    The Liberal party do not seem to have the wit or depth of culture to recognise that they need more than economics to represent the people.
    One example is their failure to meet the climate change criticism. As one of the main networks and their newspapers are beholden to China – why is there no comment on this?
    As our ‘greenhouse emissions ‘ are infinitesimal in the greater scheme of emissions (especially Chinese emissions) why is this not mentioned?
    Why does Scot Morrison not demand reductions in pollution as opposed to greenhouse gases? Sewerage into the sea? Really? In a country that is substantially desert? The climate change hysterics all using air conditioning- really? Flying to Aspen for holidays? Flying to Glasgow for climate change conferences?
    The Liberals need to develop cohesive policy because we need alternatives to the left. They also need to take a stand on the ABC. It is all right for a private newspaper to be a vehicle for propaganda, but the ABC is tax-payer funded and is an example of the complete stupidity of the conservatives that they allow a disseminator of information designed to destabilise our own culture to be paid for by the very culture they deride and that they are cowed by their own calls for ‘free speech.’

  • whitelaughter says:

    abrogard, ok, assume for the argument that you have proof of life after death.
    So what?
    Currently, a Muslim ‘fanatic’ (ie mainstream, ordinary believer) can kill you. Do you really think that the idea that he can *then* spend time, possibly eternity, tormenting you in the afterlife is going to make things better?
    If there is life after death, then Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Tamerlane, Mohammad – they’re still out there.
    You need to be able to hook up with the people who defeated them: your afterlife needs Crusaders if you are to avoid endless torment.

  • davyddwilliams says:

    Christianity is what men have made of the teachings of Christ. Essentially, it is a watered down version of the truth and therefore, cannot endure. For those who choose to follow Christ, however, this world is an alien environment irrespective of the nature of the government. “Democratic” Governments tend to reflect culture and Australia’s culture, and that of the West generally, is hedonistic, the fruit of compromised Christianity.
    Why anyone would send their children to any sort of school today is a mystery to me. The corruption of our culture began many years ago in teacher training colleges and Universities. . The trend towards cultural fascism is irreversible if you look at history, but the outcome is also foreseeable if you look at history. The French revolution, after an orgy of destruction and corruption, petered out and France reverted to its traditional culture. The same is true of the Soviet revolution and the Nazi era. It is just a matter of how long it takes.

  • davyddwilliams says:

    Christianity is what men have made of the teachings of Christ. Essentially, it is a watered down version of the truth and therefore, cannot endure. For those who choose to follow Christ, however, this world is an alien environment irrespective of the nature of the government. “Democratic” Governments tend to reflect culture and Australia’s culture, and that of the West generally, is hedonistic, the fruit of compromised Christianity.
    Why anyone would send their children to any sort of school today is a mystery to me. The corruption of our culture began many years ago in teacher training colleges and Universities. . The trend towards cultural fascism is irreversible if you look at history, but the outcome is also foreseeable if you look at history. The French revolution, after an orgy of destruction and corruption, petered out and France reverted to its traditional culture. The same is true of the Soviet revolution and the Nazi era. It is just a matter of how long it takes.

  • andrew2 says:

    whitelaughter, it is not withdrawal that got us into this mess but apostasy.
    Endless torment is what Hell is. If you destination is the presence of God, you need not fear an eternal tormenter because they will not be able to bear to be in the presence of Eternal Goodness.

  • lbloveday says:

    “Why anyone would send their children to any sort of school today is a mystery to me”.
    .
    Because children in Australia between the ages of 6 to 15 legally have to be at school or home-schooled, and many parents/guardians do not have the time (usually due to employment) or the ability, or both, to home-school their children.

  • Rebekah Meredith says:

    Andrew–I agree with you that apostasy is a lot of our problem (though you and I would have very differing views on what constitutes apostasy). But withdrawal is another large part. Many Christians do not even bother to vote, if they can get away with not doing so. We have allowed the world to set the cultural tone. How many Christians ever bother to write government leaders about their concerns? How many write to the newspaper? How many even put forth the effort to state their beliefs in conversations with those they know, except when the majority are in agreement with them?
    I was already frustrated by this apathy, but the Present Crisis has sharply revealed it in all its ugliness. Last year, hairdressers successfully lobbied the Commonwealth to have the thirty-minute time-limit overturned. I wonder how many Christians bothered to write their representatives about church closures–even setting aside the fact that, biblically, churches had no right to close down in the first place.
    It is agonising to me to see Christians largely passive at this time. We should not be dependent on non-Christians to get us out of this mess. This is not to take away from the many Christians who HAVE done what they could to fight this evil, as noted by Stephen Due above. But it seems to me that most Christians think that their only duty is prayer, and most of those prayers seem to be about the disease, not the sins (including those of churches) involved in the response to it. On a Christian film called SHEFFEY, the titular character (a real-life American circuit-riding preacher) says, “Sometimes praying can be an excuse.” So many times, it is easier to pray than to pray AND act.

  • Ian MacDougall says:

    I am reminded here of the observation made by Gough Whitlam concerning the Rev Dr Malcom Mackay, who became a Liberal MHR for Evans (and was my local member when I lived at Five Dock, Sydney.) Aside from theology, Mackay was also heavily into investing in oil exploration, prompting some Labor politicians to refer to him by the honorific ‘His Oiliness.’ Whitlam suggested that Mackay had achieved a remarkable ‘theological breakthrough’ by finding a way for himself “to worship both God and Mammon; but not necessarily in that order.”
    Sadly, Mackay and his wife both died in a car accident shortly after.
    Some Christians focus on sin and redemption. I have never been able to participate in that aspect of Christianity, since I cannot believe that the god who created the Universe and everthing in it, and invented all the laws of Nature from gravity down to quantum mechanics, would at the same time be into blood sacrifice, and moreover would incarnate himself as his only son and have that son sacrificed TO HIMSELF; by way of one of the most painful deaths to be devised by the Roman death-culture. And all because Eve and Adam ate of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden? Come on!

  • andrew2 says:

    Rebekah, I think you misunderstand what I mean by withdrawal. It is the absolute opposite of inaction, it is action that directly benefits you and your goals. It means choosing your battlegrounds to suit your army and community. Instead of fighting and complaining that mainstream media doesn’t represent us anymore, we build our own media that does. A media that is controlled by us and can’t be infiltrated. Any industry, organisation or political party that has “bent the knee” to the ideology of the left doesn’t deserve our patronage or support. Jordan Peterson rightly points out that any organisational structure relies on the 20% of the workforce that does 80% of the work. These people only carry this burden because of the financial reward that comes in an environment of understandable rules. But when organisations start adopting equity quotas, that commitment to reward for hard work no longer exists. So if those highly valuable hardworkers move off, and the organisations are left with 80% of the workforce who can only do 20% of the work. They will eventually collapse.

  • abrogard says:

    I don’t know if it’s worth posting a reply after five days – we don’t get notifications, do we? I didn’t know anyone had responded to me. Just an accident I came back here. The tab was still open in Firefox.
    But I’ll say this:
    whitelaughter – you’ve got the wrong idea of what the NDE people tell us. We can’t be killed. We can only be detached from these human bodies and return back from whence we came. Which is apparently kinda like an ocean of love.
    In that state you don’t go about hating and attacking and no one goes about hating and attacking you.
    Hell and purgatory are not ‘heaven’ or afterlife states. They are mortal states. Look around you. There’s people living in hells and purgatories all about – and people busy trying to create hells and purgatories for others. You can see it all right here.
    I suggest you don’t listen to me. I won’t say any more anyway. But go watch a selection of NDE videos. There’s many. And some I like more than others. I guess you’d be the same. So browse and see what catches your attention: ‘resonates with you’ as they say these days.

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