This is a revised and expanded version of a prior column
I am haunted by a sense that the End Times are nigh.
It is as if the battle lines are being drawn, and the No Man’s Land between Heaven and Hell is shrinking day by day, hour by hour. There will be no Switzerland in the next world war. Every soul is being forced to take a side.
I am shocked at how open Uncle Screwtape is being: we have apparently given the forces of evil reason to be confident enough, insolent enough, to drop all pretense. Meanwhile the hatred and contempt toward all that is normal and wholesome and healthy grows and grows.
The room for compromise, for mutual toleration, the possibility of ambiguity, all are narrowing, shrinking, vanishing. Everyone not for Christ is against Him.
Sanity vanishes. Now madness reigns.
I am old enough to remember a time when one could have a rational conversation with a Liberal. There were people who had rejected God, but who had not rejected love of truth or thirst for justice.
They had some sort of argument to make based on some sort of facts, framed in a shared moral view.
Those days are gone.
I have recently read an essay by an activist affirming that aborticide, the slaying of one’s one child in the womb, was always justified as an act of self defense, on the grounds that the growing child took nutriment from the mother, and offered risks to health and wellbeing akin to a mortal threat. The right of self defense ergo always justifies the slaying of any inconvenient dependent. So the argument ran.
Anyone who defines being a mammal as being a victim of violence in order to justify a mom murdering her innocent baby is beyond the reach of rational conversation.
Now they have nothing. They believe in nothing.
The reject the notion of truth: all is narrative.
They reject logic: reasoning is patriarchy.
They reject morality: only vice is virtuous.
They reject love, preferring adultery and homosex.
They reject life, preferring aborticide, euthanasia.
They reject beauty: see any modern art museum.
They reject liberty, preferring totalitarianism.
They reject civilization, preferring barbarism.
They reject happiness.
They reject God.
What is left?
Nothing.
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