Thomas Aquinas: “For those with faith, no evidence is necessary;
for those without it, no evidence will suffice.”
Aristotle: "Evil destroys even itself."
Immanuel Kant: "Science proper is based upon a priori knowledge of natural things."
Karl Popper: "All knowledge remains fallible, conjectural."
In some quarters, there is a belief which I would like in 2025 to somewhat defend as an atheist, that the rise of liberal totalitarianism and the universal descent of Western values of absolute right and wrong, are under threat by the loss of Christian faith, see, TCN, Walter E Williams, Candace Owens, Vincent Everett Ellison and others. Now the problem here, of course, is, though the idea is probably in part correct, Christians are less than a quarter of the population of the world and only 60 percent of the population of America. So here the prejudice of Christianity, (and all formal religions in their geographical arenas), is they have a hard time sharing important commonalities and values; i.e., what of the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and the others throughout our Western societies? Indeed what about the conservative and Libertarian unbelievers in the West; people like me who just can’t see it that way, for one reason or another? Are we to be abandoned by the people of faith? Christianity, as I was raised in my two parent happy Catholic small-town large family, is primarily different than let’s say, for instance, Hinduism anywhere in the world today, though both beliefs have also similarities; they are like Asians and Italians, both are humans with a cultural gulf between them. So for the argument to hold weight, it has to be much broader than Peter Hitchens and Douglas Murray make it. I had blindly thought like Margaret Atwood, that totalitarianism would always come from the Right, (indeed the religious right); but no, not at all. It has come from the Left in real time. Which only makes sense if you think about it. The original progressives were the first Fascists. They were determinists and thought of humankind as an engineering problem, and they at first believed that Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler had a good thing going. History betrayed them, but they are doing a make-over.
If we are to save some objective truth and fight this devastating moral relativity that is out there currently, we need a far wider base than the Christian conservative intellectuals suggest. I am sympathetic to this overall goal; and thus, some out there, if their spiritual needs aren’t met, fall into depravity; or in other words, if they lose their God, they lose their way. I can confirm that this is true for many souls I’ve known through my life. Empirical data exists, for instance, that boys without fathers are in a desperate situation, and that men without marriage do poorly. Some social moral structure is exceedingly important—stealing, drinking, drugs, philandering, i.e., hedonism in general, emit lifestyles that diminish all humankind and can be easily empirically shown, as does life without purpose, employment, or self-education for some examples. Moreover, a belief in nihilism or nothingness, a conviction that elders have no wisdom and other such easily refutable myths also hurt society. So faith is needed in this wilting age of ours, but so is credulity – given the behaviour of major religions in the past, (I mean without exception), caution is in order.
People of faith must not be reactionary and return to the “Days of Yore” which if nothing else, put women and children at risk from patriarchal ideology. We want decent and moral neighbourhoods; a loving community; law and order; freedom of speech; equality before the law; and a society without any repression of minorities, (especially Liberals who I hope will soon become one of them). So, how has the breakdown of moral standards occurred? Well, certainly a loss of faith, has not helped, but neither has licensed medicine, public supplied education, an obese population mirrored by obese welfare states, the 17 to 22 spook agencies of the American Deep State, the US Military Industrial Complex, the growth of subsidized industrial farming, the monopoly of tech giants, who, as bad actors, have betrayed the values of free speech; Big Pharma, and their famous regulatory capture of the FDA, HHS, NIH, CDC, and other state regulatory agencies; and all the unhealthy processed food supplied to a sugar-addicted population and okayed by government. In total, all these are threatening the Anglophere and Western Civilization,
So, there is a lot of blame to go around, including the atheistic neo-Marxist intelligentsia, spewing their irrationalism from inside subsidized and completely corrupted universities. So while Libertarians are not often welcome inside conservatives of faith organs, let’s say, Libertarians certainly accept their presence as our intellectual allies. We may have some Ron Paul-like differences in wanting the Full-Monty: the Night-Watchman State, laissez-faire capitalism, LGBQT tolerance and state’s rights as oppose, for instance, to the federal government burgeoning power structures. A Libertarian society would be a no-nonsense economic dynamic and culturally conservative one which people of all faiths could be satisfied with even if run by Austrian economists. In truth, that is why Libertarians are in a better position to run things than conservatives. This traditional religious view of life, this political movement, has had two to three centuries to stop liberal fascism, (rule utilitarianism, i.e., human sacrifice for political or scientific ends, and the outright absurd belief that we should continue talking about the old see-saw of Right and Left). Conservatives and Liberals’ era is done.
Finally, remember Ludwig Mises’ most important moral lesson about the state: Unintended Consequences of state welfare and charity: “In for the window, in for the whole house!” It might take 50 or 100 years but society ends in totalitarianism because we didn’t refuse the entire indefensible concept from the beginning: subsidize single motherhood, end up with fatherless boys; hand out free needles and drugs in safe places, end up with crime-infested havens for drug addicts; license doctors, they will end up in the pocket of Big Pharma and become their unionized anti-scientific stooges; compel children to get a public education and end up with a belligerent union of activist teachers who care neither about students’ hearts & souls or about parents’ wishes; have state run medical facilities and watch as they become unaffordable dinosaur institutions that strip you of your income in one visit; allow the state to monitor speech on Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and other tech platforms and observe as they become beacons of evil; allow the government to set the moral agenda and wait for Machiavellian foxes to take over the hen house; allow the military arm 17 to 22 spy agencies and try to drain the swamp; you end with a Goth thrasher band called, Two Dead Kennedys and the Donald in Dungeons. I can assure you I can go on in this vain for some time, suffice it to say, nothing ever entirely good comes from government. If they are necessary, they are a barely required iniquity; beware, humans are flawed, flawed, flawed, and power attracts the most morally defective of them.
Thank you for reading (or listening to), this short rant.
A Short Historical Aside
In a short, almost pitifully small historical analysis, I want to leave the reader with the idea of the dynamic dualism the world has been plagued with since the growth of the Greek Civilization; it is a dichotomy of sorts expressed best between Plato, the teacher at the Academy in Athens, Greece, circa 380 BCE, and one of his many understudies, Aristotle, a student of 22 years, who would start his own school, the Peripatetic School, which was located in the Lyceum, also in Athens around 335 BCE. These binary phenomena would heavily play-out in the world’s two greatest monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, both in the yesteryear logic and in the more modern sense, and why it would become in the end mistakenly biased toward, socialism, totalitarianism and collectivism.
In the birth of Christianity, two voices affected the story of the Jesus figure. The missionary, Saul of Tarsus, (i.e., St. Paul), born near the time of the Crucifixion of Christ and trained as a Rabbi. He became the most important person, only after Christ himself, who would author the Epistles which so influenced the early church Fathers and their followers and the whole direction of the movement. The other voice was Augustine of Hippo, (i.e., St. Augustine), circa 375, a theologian, philosopher, and bishop in Africa who had gone from a youthful hedonistic lifestyle to one of religious contemplation which would lead to the brilliant book, City of God. He became a doctor of the church on matters of theology. The gist of both Paul’s and Augustine’s voices were overall, Platonic, i.e., rift with Neo-Platonist and Plotinus thinking, and which eventually, (with many codicils), would somehow add to a turn toward mysticism and the dawning of the slow devolution into the Dark Ages.
However, in Islam at its birth, circa 600, the reverse occurred: here through the ascendency inside the Islamic early religious movement of the Persian physician-philosopher Al-Razi, (Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakariya Al-Razi, also known as Rhazes, circa 900), was the voice of an outright Aristotelian. He was responsible in part for bringing about the Golden Islamic Age and is considered the most important figure in medicine. He is also known in the West as Avicenna or Abu-Ali-Sina.
Years before the resurgence of the early Renaissance, circa 1400, the Christian theologian-philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, (i.e., St Thomas, a devout Dominican Friar), circa 1300, was introduced to Aristotle through Al-Razi’s work, Kitab al-Hawi fi al-tibb, known in the West as a Latin text, ‘The Comprehensive Book’. This likely occurred through the teacher Petrus de Ibernia, who taught Aquinas medicine, arithmetic, astronomy, music and other subjects. Aquinas' real interest in Aristotle's writings was cultivated, it is believed, by his mentor, Albert the Great, in Cologne, (i.e., St. Albert).
As Thomas Aquinas’ reputation grew, Aristotle came into the West through the Catholic Church’s monopoly on education, and by this time the Mecca era of detente with minorities and toleration of other religions was ending as the ascendency of a militant Medina view of the later prophet started to predominate among Muslim Mullahs and scholars, especially Sa'eed ibn al-Musayyab, Urwa ibn al-Zubayr ibn Al-Awam, Qasim ibn Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr, Ubaydullah ibn 'Abdullah ibn Utba ibn Mas'ud, Kharija ibn Zayd ibn Thabit and Sulayman ibn Yasar.
So, in the end, the segregation between Plato and Aristotle (which generally is a divide between idealism and empiricism, or sort of a gulf between mysticism and science, or intuition and reason), would separate along the Medina-Mecca periods, i.e., the Medina Islamic ascendency would see Platonism doom the religion to one of intolerance, Jihad, misogyny and even strict, repressive Sharia Law. The Holy Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, would bifurcate the other way: with the Franciscans, being in part Platonic, from St. Francis of Assisi, (circa 1250), and the Aristotelian-Dominicans, i.e., the Thomists, after St Dominic, (circa 1200). This would ultimately lead, through a tortuous twisted trail, to the loss of the Catholic monopoly on faith in Europe with Protestant reformations in England, Scotland, Germany, Holland and other nations inside the Catholic fold. In due course, it would result in the growth of the secular society, scepticism, empiricism, and finally, the Enlightenment, circa 1700, as a push-back against superstition, intellectual rigidity, religious intolerance, and even, indeed, the Thomists’ own scholastic achievements through the Aristotelian method such as the explanation of the Cosmos, gravity, the First Mover and philosophy itself.
