timeimmortal

This is an image of North Korea and South Korea, taken at night. I have to say, it reminds me of that line from Lord of the Rings: “Sauron needs only this ring to cover all the lands in a second darkness.” There is something distinctly…wrong about the way that the normal, night-time lights of modern society simply stop dead at the border between the two Korean states.

And it would appear that the latest enviro-nuttery to rear its ugly head involves calls for other countries to emulate the North Korean example. Japan is seeing calls for convenience store owners to close earlier and turn out their lights, whilst Britain has for some time now been turning off its street lights at night in Buckinghamshire.

Does the good Reader see a potential problem with that neo-Luddite idea?

Like…say…increased crime rates?

Yeah, yeah, I know the usual drill for saying something like that. I’m supposed to admit that the Church has done its share of killing in the past, and I’m supposed to acknowledge the possibility that the declared atheism of either or both of the state and its leader(s) may not be the only/major contributing factor to the ongoing bloodbaths. The first is true, the second a lie, but these are the things one is expected to say in these circumstances.

So let’s take all that as read and get down to the nuts and bolts. In at least four countries today, Christians will lose their lives because they are religious believers and the state in which they live is ruled by atheists eager to stamp out religious belief from amongst the general populace.

There are four atheist countries in which atheists are presently jailing, torturing, and murdering Christians. These countries are China, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. (Cuba was doing the same in the past, but has shown some respect for religious freedom for nearly a decade now.) While American atheists customarily try to fall back on a spurious No True Atheist defense, government documents prove this defense to not only be illogical, but incontrovertibly false. For example, the motivation for China’s most recent wave of anti-Christian persecution was laid out in a government document entitled “Notice on Further Strengthening Marxist Atheism Research, Propaganda and Education“. This proves that the motivation underlying the persecution is atheism; specifically the Marxist variant which is the heart of a godless worldview that correctly sees Christianity [and other Religions — Ken] as a serious threat.

…

Given that at least 1,600 Falun Gong practitioners have been tortured to death and a number of recent Christian deaths have also been confirmed, such as the beating death of Ms. Jiang Zongxiu in prison on June 18, 2004 and the death of Bishop John Han Dingxian on September 12, 2007, there is absolutely no question that Chinese atheists are murdering Christians today and intend to continue doing so.

The situation is much worse in North Korea. In TIA, I quoted a 2004 article published by The Guardian: “The number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag is not known: one estimate is 200,000, held in 12 or more centres. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000. Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime. Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power.” These North Koreans are not “Kim Jong-ilists”; they are atheists and correctly identify themselves as such.

…In Vietnam, the atheist regime is currently persecuting the Montagnards, a predominantly Christian minority. This is probably done as much for ethnic reasons as anti-religious ones, but the persecution has been purely religious and directed against ethnic Vietnamese Christians in the recent past.

…In Laos, Christians are considered to be enemies of the state and have been viciously persecuted since 1975. Although the persecution has not been as intense in the last three years, it still continues: “At least thirteen Christian villagers who were falsely accused of stirring rebel dissent have been killed by authorities in Laos over the past month, according to an August 7, [2007] report from Compass Direct. The report also states that approximately 200 Christians in the village of Sai Jerern have been arrested and imprisoned.”

The long and short of it is this: the atheism of the ruler can be strongly correlated with the state engaging in brutal and murderous campaigns against its own populace, to the tune of over 50%. In just shy of a century, the bodycount of regimes headed by atheists and/or espousing atheism as state policy has launched itself well clear of 100 million, and the estimate I see most commonly given tends to be on the order of about 148 million (if memory serves). That is a number against which Christian regimes simply cannot compete in the modern era, and I’m pretty sure that if we took a 91-year slice of history — any 91-year slice will do — we would not be able to see a similarly high bodycount generated by Christian hands, even allowing for the fact that technology back then wasn’t geared toward mass-casualty destruction.

And yes, I’ve heard it said that what’s really to blame is the sociopathy of the leader, not his atheism. Sociopaths are, essentially, those who lack any innate moral sensibility. When advantageous, they may adhere to the morality of the surrounding culture. When advantageous, they will flout that same morality in the pursuit of a selfish end. Obviously, their own philosophcal point of view will play a role in determining when and how they do this.

Of course, sociopaths come in all sorts of philosophical colours — funnily, though, history demonstrates to us that it would seem to be the irreligious ones that have the stongest tendency toward mass murder and large bodycounts.

Eh, atheist persecution of Christians is nothing new, any more than was pagan persecution of Christians way back when. In the end, the Church will emerge stronger for its suffering and blood, and the ones who set themselves against her will vanish into the dusty pages of the history books. ‘Twas ever thus.

Never thought this day would come.

In a gesture demonstrating its commitment to halt its nuclear weapons program, North Korea blew up the most prominent symbol of its plutonium production Friday.

Next they’ll be telling me that Kim Jong Il’s regime has been overthrown and replaced with a liberal democracy.

Of course, in a sense, this gesture is just symbolic; North Korea could always get nuclear material from somewhere else, although it would be ruinously expensive. Still, even the gesture is something that your good blogger thought would never come about. And on that score, he is pleasantly surprised.

Another wave of atheists seems to be upon me; while I can’t quite set my watch by them, at least I can be assured that there will be periodic sources of content not related to doings on any other blog save this one, which I appreciate.

In this case, the amusingly-handled Aspentroll writes in with a few thoughts on this article.

“Atheism will endure, as it has for many ages now. But it will never dominate a free people, and in due course gives way to the spiritual. Falsehood must necessarily give way to truth in the end, or at least to a less severe falsehood.”

The word “atheism” above could be replaced by the word “Religion” or “Christianity” and the rest of the quote would be just as true.

Atheists believe that the Bible is a huge falsehood and to pattern your life on such a nebulous writing is in most cases dangerous. You cannot govern a country using the laws of the bible which seems to be what some “fundies” want. We would all be up in arms if Sharia Law was allowed in the US, because it is archaic and discriminatory against women and free thought.

Atheism, agnosticism and free thought is the only check and balance we have to keep overly zealous delusional people from taking over and spoiling what is a normal modern way of life.

Did the reader note the tacit suggestion that religious people are necessarily delusional? The footnote to this more recent article seems relevant to mention here.

A good first question I might ask is: what checks and balances exist to keep overly zealous atheists from taking over and spoiling what is a normal, modern way of life that, in the West at least (though it perhaps does not always realize it), benefits greatly from reserves of Christian moral capital built up over the centuries? History has demonstrated that those states which have made atheism an explicit policy of the state have inexorably become brutal and bloody-minded, and several examples of the trend persist to this day.

The Mark Shea article I cited previously addresses this point rather directly: it is within human nature to desire to believe, and when force of will fails to ensure that the populace does not stray back toward the spiritual, force of arms is a necessary recourse of the atheistic state. It might be easy to laugh this off as fallacy, but one observes that in the explicitly atheistic regimes in places such as the Soviet Union, Burma, China, and North Korea (an incomplete list of examples, but sufficient for our purposes) did have something of a penchant for murderously cracking down on spiritual movements and religions within their borders. Certain exceptions to the trend exist, of course, but only in those cases where the religion(s) in question — the Orthodox Church in Russia, the “Catholic” Church in China — has allowed itself to be co-opted by the state.

One possible objection is that the generally secular regimes in many Western nations do not actively persecute the religious faithful in their midst. While the statement about persecution is up for debate, it is generally true that secular Western states do not, at least, murderously persecute their religious citizens. But then, even in various Scandinavian nations, the secularism itself is not explicit state policy, and most of those states still acknowledge that there is a Christian aspect to their origins.

As to the quote of mine that Apentroll cites in opening his message, it should be observed that his attempt to gainsay it, in the first sentence of his response to me, really amounts to little more than saying “I know you are, but what am I?” Although it sounds more reasonable than that on the surface — heck, it even sounds somewhat rational — the statement itself can be revealed to be something of a patent falsehood, on several levels, upon closer examination.

First off, Christianity’s aim — and the aim of true religion (as opposed to the various false teachings one can stumble across from time to time*) — is freedom. And by freedom, I don’t mean being free “from rules of conduct or social constraints” (as the all-too talented authors of the character of Durandal in the Marathon series of games so eloquently word it). I do, however, mean being free “to understand, to imagine, to make metaphor.”

Freethinking, a misnomer if ever there was one, actually ruins freedom. “Freethinkers supposedly want “the pursuit of ideas for their own sake,” but no one pursues ideas simply for their own sake, but in order to understand, to act or to believe, or to have some combination of these. Men pursue ideas so that they may understand the world, and they seek to understand the world to have wisdom. Men desire wisdom in order to live well, and part of living well is to pursue and know the Good, and the Good is that which fulfills human nature and causes it to flourish. The desire to know is a natural desire, one implanted in us as part of our created being; we yearn to know and to enter into the unknown because we yearn for unity with the One Who desires that all things be united in Him. If no religion had ever caused men to live virtuously and flourish, religion would have disappeared ages ago. If no religion had produced saints and cultivated the finest aspects of human nature, very few would adhere themselves to it and even then it would only be the mad and obsessive. There is nothing interesting in rehearsing the catalogue of crimes that religious adherents have committed against each other, since men have always been slaughtering and oppressing one another and they have tended to do more of it when they are less in thrall to their religious tradition than when they are strictly obedient to it. What is remarkable is how much at least some religions have contributed to the civilisation and edification of men, which would hardly seem probable if they were not much more than elaborate exercises in self-deception and nonsense.”

One point, in particular, that can be taken out of the above quotation is that “we yearn to know and to enter into the unknown because we yearn for unity with the One Who desires that all things be united in Him.” It is the result of no accident that science and discovery flourished in the Christian West after ending up misfiring almost everywhere else in the world (historically speaking). As David Warren notes, “[to] those who know some history, the modern sciences emerged in an unambiguously Christian milieu. They flourished, over centuries in the West, as the direct result of the Judaeo-Christian teaching that “God does not contradict Himself.” The whole notion of unalterable physical laws, and thus a universal order that will repay inquiry, is the product of a theological position unique to the West. It is a view that has been glimpsed in other civilizations, but could only be doggedly pursued in this one. Science was stillborn in all other civilizations.”

And the same is true of the wider concept of freedom. Nowhere else in the world, save in a West born out of Christendom, did the concept of human freedom, individual liberty, and human rights genuinely flourish. It did not, certainly, flourish in the Islamic world, nor in the castes of Hinduism in India, nor in any of the places where Buddhism took hold, nor in…any other place, really, save for the West that Christendom birthed. Indeed, the ideas that man should be free and that all men are “equal” is, ultimately, only defensible from within a teleological framework, and then a Christian teleology.

And in the numerous examples one could draw out of the 19th and 20th centuries, one can observe that in those regimes where atheism has, so to speak, become the law of the land, not only has human freedom been impaired and/or outright trampled on, but so too has science, to say nothing of human rights.

Now, I will grant that I stand in agreement with Aspentroll’s objetion to governance by “fundies” — fundamentalism leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Equally, though, I don’t think that society has any right to demand that a politician leave his Christianity at the door when he takes office.

Atheists are welcome to consider the Bible a book of falsehoods; I consider it God’s inerrant, infallible revelation to the world**. Who is to say which of us is right? I will grant that many, many people have a poor understanding of exactly what the Bible teaches, and fundamentalists seem especially prone to this unfortunate reality. But is it genuinely dangerous to pattern one’s life on the core teachings of Scripture? Exactly how terrible a place would the world be to live in if we all actually followed what Christ taught? Exactly how terrible a place would the world be to live in if everyone followed, as a bare minimum, the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes, and patterned their lives on the concepts articulated therein?

I very much doubt it would be a perfect place to live in…but I’ve no doubt that it would be a much better world. But then, Chesterton had it exactly right when he noted that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried.”

I also agree with Aspentroll that it would be horrible if Islamic sharia law became the law of the land, in Canada or anywhere else. I suspect that Aspentroll, however, has temporarily taken leave of reason and erroneously assumes that because some types of religious law are brutal and evil, all forms of religious law must necessarily also be brutal and evil. It’s a rather common logical fallacy among atheists to assert this — Christopher Hitchens is particularly vulnerable to it.

The main problem with the assertion is that a thing may be true even if certain individuals don’t accept it as being true. This is easily understood in the case of the fundamentalist objection to e.g. the theory of evolution and the geological research that has revealed the approximate age of the Earth. Young Earth Creationism insists, passionately, that Earth is a mere 6,000 years old, and most creationists of this bent do not accept as truthful or valid the various discoveries made in the fields of geology, astronomy, and evolutionary biology (among others). That doesn’t mean that the theories and discoveries aren’t true, however.

The same is true in regard to atheistic assertions regarding religions. Aspentroll would hardly be the first atheist to look at, say, the evils perpetrated in the name of Islam and declare that all religions are murderous death cults obsessed with paedophilia and suicide belts. That might come as news to Buddhists, and indeed to most Christians, but not everyone can be counted on to let facts get in the way of good rhetoric, especially if it sells books with provocative titles. And yet, a more reasonable, rational person would notice that there are many critical differences between, say, Islam and Catholicism, visible both by a close analysis of doctrine and by taking an honest, objective look at the actions of the followers of each respective faith on a global scale.

As previously noted, the creature we call a human being is wired to be a believer, and the only real question is what said human being will believe in. We’ve seen this played out through history, and we see its logical consequences played out in that movement which denies this very aspect of human nature: atheism. In individual atheists like Sam Harris or Andre Comte-Sponville, we see the beginnings of post-atheistic spiritualism beginning to creep in. The same trend can be observed in Russia, in the wake of the collapse of an explicitly atheistic regime. It’s regrettable that the spirituality that such people are gravitating towards is, quite often, some new form of paganism (or “new” in that Roger Daltry “same as the old boss” sense of the word), although it is good that people are also finding, or rediscovering, the Church.

There seems to be a rather pernicious lie going around that religion and freedom are antithetical to one another; this is not completely true. It is true in regard to specific religions (e.g. Islam), but not in regard to the Christian truth. Indeed, it was a particularly Christian sense of telos that informed the very constraints, concepts, and ideals which enabled the West to value freedom. By contrast, the application of atheistic ideals as the formative values of a state has tended to be the true antithesis of freedom, of science, and of human rights.

And in perhaps the most amusingly ironic twist, I just realized that if I re-worded Aspentroll’s message to me and flipped the references to religion and atheism in every instance (and substituted the title of any New Atheist tract for “the bible”), the message itself would not only be a lot more truthful, but also a lot more historically defensible.

* this statement said with tongue firmly implanted in cheek

BCF writes in with what I presume is a comment on this article.

They can’t possibly hope to win this case, can they? They aren an affront to society.

I shall answer in reverse order, O Reader: they are, yes, and yes, they can and do.

That the CHRC is an affront to Canadian society is beyond doubt. When an HRC staffer like Dean Steacy can openly opine, in all seriousness, that he doesn’t put much stock in “an American concept” like freedom of speech, it becomes very obvious that human rights commissions openly spit on the rights of the people of Canada in pursuit of a collection of activist agendas. When EGALE member Richard Warman can abuse the system to the point that a) he is the only plaintiff of note in all Section 13 cases heard by the CHRC so far in this century, and that b) he has won all but one* such case, it becomes very obvious that the HRCs aren’t even about human rights at all.

So yes, they are an affront to society. Or, at least, to a free society. They’d be right at home in Soviet Russia, China, or North Korea.

But can they expect to win their case against Marc Lemire? Of course they can…why shouldn’t they? When both the plaintiff against Marc Lemire and one of the lead investigators of the government agency which is supposed to hear the complaint and, in an ideal world, render a non-biased judgement thereupon, are both engaging in acts of online entrapment to make the charge of racism against Marc Lemire seem more solid, what other outcome can there possibly be?

* and in the case he lost, the Canadian Nazi Party, his target, only “won” its case because it did not, in fact, exist

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

At least a part of the reason appears to be that he was unabashedly open about his Christianity. That sort of thing can get you killed in the rabidly atheistic nation that is North Korea.

(Oops, sorry, forgot myself…I’m supposed to say that atheists don’t kill people for their beliefs; that’s for us religious types to do!)

Let us pray, O Reader, for the safe return home of Je Yell Kim, whose only fault appears to be his generosity and his overwhelming desire to help the starving people of an impoverished nation, led by madmen more interested in establishing their country as a nuclear power.