When a Nation Stops Believing in God...
Timothy Birdnow
He's not wrong but I think he misses the point.
His argument is that the Third World, by learning to manipulate the Western psyche, is systematically destroying Western Civilization as we keep reacting to problems in the developing world rather than reacting to them.
He and I agree the West is teetering, and that it was built on a sand foundation, but the problem has little to do with poor countries and everything to do with rising corruption and a rejection of Christianity - the core of the West - as the Left from the time of Rousseau, certainly, and actually before him turned away from the God of our forefathers and embraced new, strange gods. Everything that followed was a rejection of Christian morality and Christian rationality. It is THAT which hollowed out the West. The economics that he so worries about follow the moral, spiritual, and intellectual decay.
Socialism, for example, has hollowed out the West as it has been a constant will-o-the-wisp Western man has pursued. It ultimately fails every time it's tried but we keep trying it because everyone is jealous of the rich and the old idea that we could get rich on our own seem to have disappeared. So now everyone pursues the use of government to force "equity" on the public. This was the brainchild of Jean Jacques Rousseau, as was Fascism, and essentially the West IS fascist in all but name now. Corporatism - the partnership between giant corporations and government, is the model used by the Fascists and Nazis. All socialism, be it Communism or Fascism or Democratic Socialism, eventually leads to poverty and economic distress, as well as spiritual bankrupcy.
It also leads to rising statism and we've seen the metastasizing of the state in the last decades. Statism is rarely that successful because it stifles initiative and takes the best and brightest from pursuing innovation and actually improving people's lives and puts them in government, where they pursue the aims of the King or Emperor of Fuehrer. China was always dirt poor and is only now more wealthy since they took their boot off the throats of business. But of course that won't last more than a few decades if they don't continue to make reforms, something they appear unwilling to do. Oh ,and we in the West set out to MAKE them rich and powerful out of our greed for cheap labor, cheap goods, and the hope to sell a Coke or McDonalds burger to every single Chinaman - all billion plus of them. China's success came from our moral and intellectual failings, and those failings came from our rejection of the Judeo-Christian ethic.
And there has been an insidious marxist movement that has labored for a hundred years to destroy Western civilization, and they control the schools and now even the churches, and their century of labor is finally bearing it's evil fruit.
So all these things the author cites are ancilliary to the core problem in the West. We kicked God out of our schools and turned our children into commodities and are surprised our civilization is dying.
We no longer believe we have a right to defend our own existence, which is why Biden invited millions of aliens - non-Western aliens - into the country. And the same goes for Europe and Australia and New Zealand; there is a hatred for the West born of decades of lies told by the Left about it. So many now actually want civilization to die because they believe the lie that paradise was the pre-industrial West and that what we created poisoned and destroyed Eden. They never read accounts of the "good old days" before industrialization; rampant poverty, starvation, bitter cold in winter and scalding heat in summer, disease riddled food and water, etc. In other words - the Third World. We didn't steal prosperity from the Third World - they never had it to begin with and wouldn't make the necessary changes needed to industrialize and make prosperity for themselves. And we can't just give it to them; we've tried that repeatedly and failed because they don't know how to use what they are given to accomplish more. Instead they simply squander the largess sent them and come back for more.
But we've had decades of anti-Americanism in our schools and a load of guilt was heaped on the American child and now most believe we destroyed the Third World via colonialism. In fact colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to many of these places; we brought them good things, medicines, food, jobs, military security. Sadly the educators, almost all leftists or leaning left, have turned this on it's head and made US the villains. We aren't and never were. Oh, there were lots of bad things that we did, no question, but we were better than the potentates who ruled in their lands.
Take the Aztecs; they were a holy terror whom the other natives so despised and feared they joined Cortez in attacking Mexico. The Spanish could be bad guys, but they were not as bad as Montezuma and his human-sacrificing nation. Yes, the Spanish made many Indians slaves, but that was no big deal to the natives at that time as they all kept slaves themselves. It was ubiquitous in human civilization yet young people now think white men INVENTED slavery. Why do they think that? Because they have been lied to by people they trust to teach them.
I could go on and on but the key point is we no longer believe in an objective truth because we no longer believe in God and so what they majority believes is now "true" and the left labors to change the perceptions and beliefs of the public, seducing them with lies.
The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars nor our Third World but in ourselves. As has been attributed to G.K. Chesterton, when man stops believing in God he will believe in anything.
With the rise of television and now AI we see the most devastating propaganda tool in human history and the coming AI craze is going to make people turn to a fantasy world more and more. Truth will only be what The Machine says it is, and it will be able to prove that with photographs it created or with scientific papers that it claims exist even though they do not How do you argue against such a monster? Ultimately the machine will only be as it is programmed to be, and the people doing the programming will put an agenda into it. We've already seen that with the nascent AI tech.
At any rate we are now a nation that believes anything BUT God. God is the measure of all things. This way lies doom.
Oh, by the way, Rome had the exact same problems as do we and they followed a very similar path; most people rejected religion in the old Empire and the Emperors began claiming divinity too, and Rome had a slew of troubles from illegal immigration to inflation to crop failures to civil unrest and an over-concentration of wealth, to the collapse of family farms which became corporate farms, a dearth of people who knew how to do things (thus leading Diocletian to issue orders that said a person had to go into the same profession as his father, thus birthing feudalism), to rising welfare and a host of other problems we recognize today. Sex too;; homosexuality became common, for instance, and those not sodomizing other men were busy doing the lovely ladies of Italy, or Gaul, or what have you.
Rome lost it's spiritual core. While the late empire is described as Christian in most cases people weren't Christian except that they had to be after Constantine made it the law. But the Christianizing of Europe came as a result of many and varied horrible things from barbarian invasions to Viking raids, massive climate change, a volcanic eruption that led to near total darkness in Ireland and mde much of the Western Empire dark, which led to crop failures in the sixth century, etc. Without all that Europe would have gone back to Roman paganism or worse. And with the rise of modern agriculture, world trade, and machinery we have returned to the easy life that the Romans enjoyed, even better. Man is easily corrupted and our civilization now believes we can become gods and dismiss the one who gave us all this prosperity.
This essay was a good try but in the end I think the author fell short.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
12:02 PM
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