Christianity and Nuttiness

Examples could be multiplied endlessly, but I will give only two. A libertarian who grounds his moral philosophy in contract law, and says man is free except where he undertakes an obligation voluntarily, overlooks such realities of life as, say childrearing or the needs of war. Under a hedonist’s philosophy, where all moral good is merely pleasure delayed, what explanation is there for a young man who throws himself on a hand grenade to save his squad? What explanation for a fireman who runs into a burning skyscraper, when all rational animals, (Vulcans and Houyhnhnms) acting rationally to preserve their own life, are running the other way? A socialist who grounds his moral philosophy in a thinly-disguised lust for the property of other men, overlooks the realities of the laws of economics, and eventually must come to overlook the reality of such things as the sanctity of language for communication. Totalitarians of the violent sort, fascists and communists and Big Brother, go in for Newspeak. Totalitarians of the nonviolent sort, but equally as bent on controlling every aspect of human mental life, go in for Political Correctness, for much the same reasons. In the same way the Libertarians have gaping holes in their moral philosophy, where the are reduced to stammering when one asks them about the duties of childrearing or the duties of war, the socialists have gaping holes in their moral philosophy when it comes to economics, politics, and honesty in thought and in word.

Far too often, the gaping holes would overwhelm the rest of the moral system. Philosophers who started with some common-sense axiom, such as the idea that everything must have a cause, wouldend up with some utterly nonsensical conclusion, such as the idea that men’s thoughts are an epiphenomenon of matter, that we are merely meat machines.

A year or two before I converted I began to realize that one too many of my fellow secularists were just plain nuts.

Some of them talking about baby-killing as if it were normal, others talking about Transhumanism as if it were possible or desirable to create a species to exterminate us, others talking as if they thought they were meat robots, without free will and without a moral code. That is a nuts idea, on the same order as a man who thinks he is made of glass. Ayn Rand was one of the more sane of the atheists I’d read, but even she was nuts: Ayn would talk as if adultery and fornication were not merely acceptable, but rational and desirable.

They kept insisting they were the reasonable fellows, but very few of them had reason enough to come to the conclusion that human beings only prosper under a moral code suited to human life, both human strengths and human weaknesses. Half the secularists I knew were members of the political-economic philosophy that makes an especial merit of denying reality, and answering all arguments by calling people stupid.

Don’t get me wrong, some atheists I knew were stand-up guys, didn’t cheat at cards, didn’t talk about Eugenics, didn’t have wet-dreams about farfetched socialist or libertarian utopias. They believe in the Second Amendment and in Limited Government-style democracy (which, if you think about it, keeping in mind those real limitations of human nature I mentioned, an Armed Citizenry and a Limited Government are much the same thing). 

But, in geometry, if even a stand-up guys gets his axioms wrong, with the best will in the world, he gets the conclusions wrong. In theology, if you get a wrong idea of the spiritual nature of man and his needs, if your axioms about the metaphysics are wrong, your conclusions about common sense and every-day things will be wildly wrong too.

I do not object when a reasonable secularist dismisses the concept of the Incarnation: it is a mysterious concept at best. It is an act of faith to believe in God-in-Man, is it not? But I do object to those secularists who dismiss a concept like Free Will, which is not a mysterious concept at all: nothing could be more patently obvious. It is not an act of faith to believe in Mind-in-Man, it is logically impossible for a man to use his mind to believe (for belief is an act of mind) that men have no minds.

I do object when a reasonable secularist cannot tell me a single reason, within his moral system, for outlawing cannibalism, dueling, aborticide, euthanasia, and other things that are simply lunatic.   

The mystery and paradox of their secular religion is more mysterious and more paradoxical than my religious religion. If it is a lunacy of megalomania for me to say Men are the Children of God, then it is so much more the lunacy of microlomania (if there is such a word) to them to say Men are Beasts no different from apes, or are meat machines no different from pocket calculators.  

I believe Men, albeit godlike, are corrupted by original sin, an idea that has painfully obvious empirical proof in every age and nation. They believe Men, albeit beastlike, are capable of moral improvement through education and social organization, an article of faith that has suffered painfully obvious disproof in every age and nation where such daydreams have been attempted: and yet they call us the unreasonable ones.

The secularists of this particular type have irrational delusions of rationality.

And they are after our children to kill them.

They’re nuts.   

Nuts is not the right word. Diabolic is the word.