The Suicide of Thought (Part Nine)
Part Nine: Anti-Christianity
The ironic conclusion of all this centuries-long corruption of Western thought, pursued generation to generation, is exactly the opposite of the original design.
Radical skepticism attempts to reduce the number of intuitive axioms needed for thought to zero, and hence find a system that was the opposite of religion, a perfectly rational world where nothing is taken on the authority of prophets or apostles. A world without authority, where trust in teachers is needless. A world without faith.
But we have in postmodern nihilism the most grotesque opposite of these goals.
The conclusions are taught in a conclusory fashion, mostly by bullying and browbeating innocent, gullible, or defenseless children into repeating mere nonsense which they are not allowed to question. They are flattered and their self-esteem inflated by being told that only the low class, the foolish, the stupid, and the backward would question any part of the glorious dogma of the nothingness where nothing is true.
The self-contradictions at every step are so obvious that only extraordinary and lifelong efforts can prevent the obvious from leaking unexpectedly into the narrow and hooded minds of the brainwash-victim.
Without God, there is no objective reasoning on matters of politics and ethics, no human nature needing external and internal laws to find the happiness for which we were designed, for there is no designer, and no being with authority to impose just and fair imperatives into our conscience.
Indeed, without God, there is no ruler found in the nothingness called the universe, there is no conscience, only a murky, deceptive darkness in the brain that comes from nonhuman chemical entities, cultural conditioning, or invisible actions of the sub-consciousness. There is no objective reality at all.
In the universe of nothingness, there is no free will, only the self-deception of helpless meat robots, fooled by selfish genes for no reason at all.
In the universe of nothingness, there is no logic, because the instrument used to judge whether the formal coherence of symbols is itself subject to doubt. There is no way to calibrate the brain, the very instrument we use for judging logic and illogic.
And hence there is no science, no debate, no reasoning on any topic. There is nothing but the strong overawing the weak, and passing along ideas that are in turn ultimately meaningless.
It is a philosophy with all the drawbacks of cultic religion, but without any of the advantages. Pagans at least could make beautiful statues. Nihilist artists make nothing but ugliness, and desire nothing but to shock and disgust.
It is the perfect anti-Christianity, taken utterly on faith, lacking the slightest intellectual component, mystical because wordless, irrational because self-contradictory, absurdist because it is adopted without any standard of true and false. It preaches immorality as its only moral cause, and hatred as its only goal.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
