timeimmortal

As Mark Shea notes, the theological gap between Catholics and Protestants is, in one particular regard, quite wide. Whereas Protestant — especially evangelical — theology tends to focus on Scripture, verbal confession of faith, and the action of the Spirit, Catholic Theology tends to focus on contemplation, the human person, and (of course) Eucharist. To an evangelical, prayer is supposed to be a means of achieving something. To a Catholic, prayer is meant to draw us closer into unity with God.

And in a certain way, the difference between Catholics and Protestants can be abstracted in the difference between women and men. Evangelicalism and Protestantism0 tend to be a more masculine expression of faith, while Catholicism tends toward the feminine (no doubt inspired by the Biblical image of the Church as the bride of Christ). The misunderstandings we have of each other tend to follow the same lines.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that while Protestants and evangelicals tend to favour St. Paul as their example of witness, Catholics tend to favour Mary as the ideal Christian model (remember: Jesus can’t show us how to be a disciple of Jesus; only a follower of Jesus can do that). And of course, at the heart of the Marian example is her assent to God’s plan in her saying “let it be done to me” to the angel, when the angel announced that she was to bear the Son of God.

I think we can all accept it to be true that, were it not for Paul’s considerable efforts, the Gospels would never have reached the Gentiles. No earnest Christian could disagree with this statement. But far too many Christians disagree with another equally reasonable statement: that without Mary, Christ would not have been born; the Gospels, then would never even have come to Earth!

I’ve heard all manner of responses to this before, most of which tend to be variants on “oh, God would have just chosen someone else.” To such a speaker, Mary is merely a life-support system for her uterus, a hot-swappable piece of hardware that can be disposed of at a later date when no longer necessary.

It is odd to hear such a view espoused by supposedly “Biblical” Christians, because such a view plainly contradicts Scripture. We come back to Luke 1 again:

[26] In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth,

[27] to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.
[28] And he came to her and said, “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”

Again, it serves to note that the term “o favoured one” is often translated as “full of grace”, and denotes that Mary herself was possessed of the sanctifying grace of the Lord at the outset. The specific term translated from Greek — kecharitomene — is the “passive participle of charitoo and means endowed with grace (charis), enriched with grace as in Ephesians. 1:6,…The Vulgate gratiae plena “is right, if it means ‘full of grace which thou hast received’; wrong, if it means ‘full of grace which thou hast to bestow’”. The translation of this word is undisputed across the broad spectrum of Christian denominations, and is a part of all common extant translations of the Bible.

In other words, we all agree on one thing, at least: Mary was indeed full of grace, and highly favoured of God. But the specific kind of grace she was endowed with was sanctifying grace, the salvific grace of God that is the basis of justification (c.f. Romans 5:20-21). We might thus construct a logical analysis thusly:

Premise: The Bible teaches that we are saved by the grace of God alone.
Premise: To be full of the grace of God is, thus, to be saved

Observation: Mary was full of the grace of God (c.f. Luke 1:28)

Conclusion: Mary, being full of grace (premise #1) is thus in a state of salvific sanctification (premise #2).

What does this mean? Well, for starters, it speaks to the uniqueness of Mary in God’s plan, and why no other woman would do. Mary was appointed, by God, for the task of bearing the Son. She was preserved from all sin by the sanctifying grace of God. And yet she was not an automoton; to the last moment, God left the decision as to whether or not she would bear the son in Mary’s hands; the angel appeared to announce the news to her, yes, but also to receive her consent (Luke 1:38).

And absent the consent of Mary, absent her saying “behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,” we don’t have Christ. Not in the flesh, at any rate. We do have the Logos, the Word, the second person of the Holy Trinity. But we don’t have Jesus, the man who lived and who died, and who rose again to fulfill the Scriptures and bring salvation to all the nations.

Would God have simply chosen another, had Mary not given her assent? Is that to say, then, that another young, virginal woman existed who was already full of the sanctifying grace of the Lord? No, the very suggestion is absurd on its face, and the angel’s greeting makes it very clear that Mary has been chosen and called by name. Moreover, in the Magnificat (the name given to Mary’s testimony to Elizabeth, later in Luke 1), Mary confesses:

[46] And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord,
[47] and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
[48] for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
[49] for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.

The Spirit desired us to know that Mary is blessed of God, and (moreover) that Mary is to be seen as, and called, “blessed” by every Christian. This is no interchangeable uterus-support system we are talking about here: this is a unique woman, solely chosen of God to give birth to the Saviour. Had she refused, there was no other.

Mary’s “yes” to God was the first participation of a human being in the salvific plan of God, and was the first step by which our salvation was secured. She was the Mother of the Son. Mary, alone amongst all women, gave us Jesus, and only Mary, alone amongst all women, could have given us Jesus.

Had she refused the angel, we would likely all still be living under the Old Covenant. Food for thought.

In some respects, it means less, now, to be a mother than it once did. I do not mean, in saying that, that those women who are mothers are possessed of less worth than their own mothers were; no, their worth is the same, and their “act” of being mothers equally noble and dignified.

I mean, instead, that so much which would have at one time been thought of as a nigh-unthinkable antithesis of motherhood — no-fault divorce, abortion-on-demand, the proliferation of birth control — has become nothing more, nor anything less, than a series of common commercial products in our society, as easily obtained as a pack of cigarettes once was (one could glibly note that today, in stark contrast to obtaining an abortion, one must still present convincing proof of age in excess of 18 years in order to obtain cigarettes legally).

And to an event and “product,” each of those things in some way flies in the face of motherhood. Divorce deprives it of its logical, biological, necessary opposite — fatherhood. Abortion abruptly ceases the natural course of nurturing and, in due time, birthing a child — it prevents one entirely from becoming a mother. And birth control attempts to circumvent the possibility that, through allowing the sexual act between one man and one woman to run its natural course, motherhood might result from the conjugal act.

But I wonder…could all this have been predicted, say, from some distant moment in history?

David Warren reflects, in his usual oblique way, on Mother’s Day through the lens of she who is the mother of us all: Mary, Mother of Christ, Mother of God:

In a sentence, the veneration of Mary is an inevitable extension of the worship of Christ: for if there is God the Son, there must be a Mother of God. Or to be plainer still, in line with the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. — the human “Jesus,” and the divine “Christ,” are not two different persons. They are one and the same, and He was the Son of God, and of Mary.

Hence the extraordinary veneration of Mary, from the earliest Christian times, and through the centuries — so powerful that even the Muslims, appearing from the 7th century A.D., also venerate her. And long, long before even Christianity dawned upon the world, she is anticipated in every “Mother Goddess” known to anthropology.

A Darwinist, or a Jungian, or sociobiologist, or whatever, may hold that this is all merely a projection of the big raw fact of human motherhood — onto a cosmos that is fearfully beyond the comprehension of the primitive human mind. This hypothesis has the glib plausibility that is required to monopolize teaching in the academy, today. It is itself a view of considerable antiquity, and the anthropologists have discovered essentially atheist primitive tribes.

This is a “secular” newspaper and I am only dealing with the pragmatic consequences of religious beliefs. What is the consequence of Marian “idolatry” (as my Protestant ancestors would call it, while turning in their graves), or as I would characterize it, the veneration of “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei” that has animated so much of this world’s most magnificent art and poetry?

Its practical effect is to found all our intellectual and emotional ideas about motherhood, deep as they are, in something still deeper. It is to believe that real substance and significance underlies our natural love for our own human mothers, that it is not simply a biological quirk to be explained away by a few material causes. That it is instead the profoundest echo of what Dante finally called, “l’ amor che move il sole e l’ alter stele” — “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

Buy into that, and one’s own human mother is not reduced to a mechanism of “sexual selection” (to quote a zoological sage of the century before last), nor arbitrarily salvaged with the tearjerk posturing of a card. She is rather enlarged to her true proportions.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Were I of a combative mindset, I might speculate that one could have reasoned, from the first moment Protestant thought began to turn against Mary and Marian adoration (it serves to note that the first Reformer, Luther, was a devoutly Marian in his personal practice of Christian faith), that all this secular nightmare would come to pass. It is a tenuous thing to suggest, and not easily defensible.

But I wonder if there isn’t, inherent in that historical rejection of Mary as the Mother of All (and, indeed, the Mother of God) that so infused Protestantism during its formative decades, to be found the seeds of modern secular society’s rejection of motherhood on principle.

James McGrath writes in to provide some alternative commentary on the issue of Battlestar Galactica’s Theology, which I discussed in this article.

I thought I’d draw attention to some of the posts on my blog about BSG and theology (I’m a religion professor who is also a fan), such as :

http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/2008/05/gospel- according-to-gaius.html

http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/2008/04/bartlestar- theodica.html

I’d welcome your comments!

While I could say more for Professor McGrath’s opinions regarding Bart Ehrman (my own views on the “problem” of evil and theodicy are well known; I don’t see the existence of evil and/or suffering in the world as any kind of challenge to the Christian conception of God, and regard those who use said issue(s) as an objection to Religion as being, shall we say, rather deluded themselves), some of his views on BSG and the theology of Gaius Baltar’s new religious movement (itself a derivation of the Cylon religion) are rather interesting.

For example, McGrath remarks thusly concerning the first episode of the latest, and final, season of BSG:

In the BSG Season 4 premiere, entitled “He That Believeth In Me“, a more relevant verse would seem to be “Whosoever seeks to save his life will lose it…” Gaius Baltar moves from an unwilling Messiah disgusted by the gaudy Hindu-style flashing votive lights surrounding his picture, to one who seems genuinely willing to give up his life to save another. The “one true God” has yet to be explored fully as a concept on the show, but in the mean time, interesting questions continue to be asked about how we live our lives and what matters most to us.

I observed to my wife, while we were watching the latest episode of the series to date, that Baltar seems unable to avoid some manner of beating in each and every episode he has been in this season. I’d have to go over all the episodes again (we have them on tape), but I can’t recall yet a time when Baltar has not been pistol-whipped, choked, or punched during the course of an episode since the fleet departed the Ionian Nebula

And in each and every case, Baltar’s personal sufferings have been intimately relevant to the narrative of the show. Indeed, through examples as varied as the knife attack on Baltar in the head to Galen Tyrol attempting to choke him, the series has demonstrated in almost every episode this season that the God whom Baltar is preaching effects His plan for humanity in part through human suffering.
Read the rest of this entry »

Does the Roman Catholic Church teaches that faith alone in Christ is all that is necessary for salvation?

Does the Roman Catholic Church not teach that according to Roman Catholicism, man cannot be saved by faith alone in Christ alone?

Do they not teach that a Christian must rely on faith plus “meritorious works” in order to be saved?

Is it essential to the Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation that one participate in the Seven Sacraments, which are: Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance [also called Reconciliation], Annointing of the Sick, Holy Orders, and Matrimony?

These will be the first four questions answered in what I hope will become an ongoing series. In truth, I’d prefer to answer only the first three at this time, but there’s a problem with that. Catholic doctrine is not a series of atomic statements, but rather a unified body of teachings that build off of, play into, and complement and enhance each other. In other words, and more plainly put, it would be impossible to discuss what the Church teaches about salvation without discussing, at least in brief, the various Sacraments of the Church.

But before we begin, let’s look at the short answers to each of the above questions:

1. If you mean: do Catholics acknowledge sola fides as it is commonly articulated? No.
2. If you mean: do Catholics reject sola fide as it is commonly articulated? Yes.
3. No. A more appropriate term would simply be “merit.”
4. No, not all of those seven.

Now, let’s unpack those answers a little bit, shall we?

Read the rest of this entry »

Joel writes in again with some additional commentary. While I usually excerpt messages in their entirety, I’m going to respond to this one in a more “interlinear” fashion, as it covers several points in brief, and I feel these would be best responded to “in the moment.”

Here’s sort of my point.

I’m not a car guy. If you tell me technical things about your car, I probably don’t care and don’t udnerstand. Mileage, sure, but cam shafts? Nope.

This is a fair enough standpoint for as far as it goes, but there are certain limitations to it as well. I too, O Reader, am not a “car guy” — as long as the car gets up and runs, I’m not all that interested in the technical details of what is under the hood. On the flip side, I am a “computer guy” — I’m obsessive about the ins and outs of computers. I am also a “camera guy” — I’m obsessive about the inner workings of all manner of digital imaging devices, cameras first and foremost. I love Photography.

The astute Reader will note that, in keeping with my interests and areas of expertise, I often discuss computers and cameras on this site. The Reader will also note that I never discuss cars on this site. That is because I do not wish to be caught up in an obvious attempt to exceed my “academic authority”; I don’t want to discuss things I have not made at least some attempt to become familiar with at a level above “basic.”

Reciprocally, if I enter into a discussion about something on another person’s website, I take pains to become familiar with the issue at hand at a higher level than “passing familiarity” — I try to learn at least a few “technical things” before I begin to comment on a subject.

It would, I think, be more than a little boorish and arrogant to enter into a higher-level discussion at The Car Blog without first taking pains to become somewhat familiar with the inner workings of an automobile, or at least the ins and outs of the auto industry. Similarly, it is more than a little boorish and arrogant to enter into a higher-level discussion of religion on a blog that is open about its religious foundation if one is not prepared to discuss, in detail, the distinctions between different Religions or denominations thereof. Especially when the discussion is, in part, about the validity of a religious conjecture and its application to everyday life.

Bitching about Fords because one’s Chevolet blew a gasket is meaningless, silly, and irrational. Bitching about religion without bothering to engage or acknowledge the substantial differences in “technical details” between religions or religious denominations is likewise meaningless, silly, and irrational.

That Joel is opting for an approach which I have just finished describing as meaningless, silly, and irrational is somewhat disappointing, especially because Joel himself seems to be a nice enough guy as far as correspondence goes. One hates to speak in generalities, but this sort of presumptive arrogance — the assumption that one can freely and openly pronounce all manner of things about religion while at the same time refusing to engage such technical details as, say, the differences between the Mu’tazilah and Ash’ari schools of Islamic theology — is something one has come to expect from atheists.

In some contexts, I might care about the distinctions between Mormons and Catholics and so on. For example, if we were debating how best to alter relationships between governments and various christian denominations, the centralized power of the catholic church versus the more decentralized authority of protestants (if I’m getting that
right) might be relevant.

But in the context of this discussion (who proseletyzes and who doesn’t) the various denominations are virtually identical. You all believe in a supernatural sky-god and his divine son. Whether christ rose bodily or only in spirit are not particularly relevant (as an
example).

This is, O Reader, exactly what I’m getting at — the second paragraph, in particular, drips with all manner of presumptive arrogance that describes absolutely nothing about the reality of the situation.

To his credit, Joel does note a key difference between most flavours of Protestantism and Catholicism — Catholic teaching flows through a centralized office of doctrine, whereas Protestant teaching tends not to have any such central doctrinal body.

But any credibility that suggestion might have leant to his argument is all but destroyed by the paragraph following it (to quote XKCD: “while the author’s wildly swerving train of thought did at one point flirt with coherence, this brief encounter was more likely a chance event…”).

It would be enough to simply laugh off as inconsequential any argument that attempts to framework an objection to religion by beginning with the observation that “the various denominations are virtually identical” (despite the fact that in my previous response to Joel, I pointed out how seemingly minor differences between some Christian denominations are, in fact, rather large gulfs of difference when considered in light of what Christ actually taught. Add in even a brief consideration of religious denominations from other, non-Christian religions, and the absurdity of Joel’s claim becomes readily apparent.

As to specific beliefs, as I have pointed out, these are the most important thing at issue in the discussion of who proselytizes, because virtually every Western philosophy proselytizes (including, as I have noted, atheism). Several Eastern philosophies do likewise. And when everyone proselytizes, the issue of who does it becomes less relevant than the issue of what each evangelist is offering — in terms of philosophy, teaching, and doctrine — to those he or she is attempting to convert.

I don’t believe in a “sky god,” for example; I believe in a God who transcends the physical limitations of our empirical Universe. Nor do I believe God is wholly “invisible” any more than I am invisible. That I do not always see God no more means He is invisible than it means that I am invisible because some farmer in Africa cannot see me with his own eyes. If I cannot see God, it is because I lack the capacity to see Him, not because He cannot be seen.

And here Joel again demonstrates the fundamental illogic at the center of his argument, for already he has made an assumption that is incorrect. Were I a Hindu attempting to win a friend over to my faith, I would not regale him or her with tales of a solitary sky god. Hinduism is a polytheistic faith (or, perhaps more accurately, a henotheistic faith); my discussion with my friend would center primarily on the supremacy of Ishvara, but would also verge into discussions of Brahma and Vishnu, and perhaps even into talk of Shiva, the destroyer. We would talk about Dharma, Samsara, Karma, and Moshka.

And even if we only talked about Ishvara and his primacy as God, above other deities, we would still not be talking about a “sky god,” because Ishvara is, alternatively, interpreted as being without a fixed realm of any kind, or as incorporating all creation into his realm (Hinduism, then, also flirts with pantheism and panentheism at times).

Moreover, were a Muslim attempting to evangelize me, he or she would run into a major brick wall by insisting that God is unary and solitary (that is, arguing that there is no God but Allah, and that the Christian Trinity is actually a form of polytheism — that’s something which is specifically stated in the Koran). Muslims say “God is One” while Christians say “God is One but also Three.” It’s not the same thing, despite the fact that from the outside it all looks like monotheism.

To say nothing of the fact that were I not a Christian, my evangelism would have absolutely nothing to do with Christ or the notion that He died and rose from the dead, except perhaps in the sense that I would be attempting to refute that claim.

To briefly summarize, then: we’re not a third of the way through Joel’s one sentence, and already there are gaping holes in the logic.

Continuing on, Joel is right: I do believe in God’s divine Son, Christ Jesus, who died and rose again. Joel seems to dismiss as a minor issue the debate as to whether Christ rose literally or only in spirit, and in so doing betrays his ignorance yet again. For as St. Paul reminds us, if Christ did not literally rise from the grave then the Christian faith is meaningless, and Christians are fools who are to be most pitied. Victory over death in spirit alone is no victory at all.

And were I, a Catholic, attempting to evangelize someone, the literal nature of Christ’s resurrection would be a very big issue indeed, if in fact it came up as a subject for debate. One cannot deny the bodily resurrection of Christ and be a Christian…not, that is, if one is honest with oneself.

*shrug* again, my basic point was, and remains, Christians run the U.S., as a rule, if there’s a crossing of church and state, it involves some flavor of christianity. My atheism may hold all religions in much the same light (at least in that I believe they are
all equally delusional), but its Christianity that most often causes problems here. On a global scale, certainly, in this timeframe, radical Islam is a much bigger threat.

As I have before, O Reader, I observe that in a nation where over 70% of the population is Christian, it should come as no surprise that Christians should have a high level of participation in an elected, ostensibly “representative” government. That’s not to say that Christians “run” America, however…at least, not in the sinister, “implication of looming Christian theocracy” sense of the term that Joel’s statement would seem to be implying.

If one went to Sweden and complained that white people “run Sweden,” or that one’s objection to white people in government was in any way based on the fact that the majority of Swedish politicians were white, one would rightly be derided as a laughingstock. Sweden is a Caucasian nation — it is really only to be expected that its government would have a lot of white people in it.

Similarly, it is meaningless to complain about the quantity of Christians in government in a nation where most people are Christian, unless one is openly advocating that only persons of a secular bent should be allowed to govern a nation. In a nation like the U.S., which prides itself upon its representative democracy, such a notion is unthinkable.

I do, though, believe that all religions should be treated equally. In the U.S., for example, I don’t believe that schools should have Hannukah celebrations but not Xmas ones, etc.

That’s about as open-minded as anyone could be asked to be; personally, I do see value in people learning about the traditions of other religions. I would agree that all religions should be treated equally, for the most part — I disagree, obviously, that all religions are equal. And for the record, I include atheism in the previous sentence when I say “religion,” because it is as much a metaphysical conjecture as is my own Catholicism.

Sorry if this email seems random, its something of an unfortunate and scattered day here.

I am genuinely sorry to hear that. I will pray that Joel will find the strength to move past the pitfalls and confusion of today, and I encourage the good Reader to do the same.

GuyInCT writes in with a wistful reflection on the current state of freedom of expression in Canada.

The thing you have to realize is that the Leftists are basically cowards and bullies. Like any bullies, they capitulate in the face of bigger bullies. Thus Christians calling for their natural and legal rights are ignored or ridiculed. Similar calls from Islamists have the unspoken threat of physical or economic harm behind them. So like true cowards, the Left backs down and turns on the other guys even harder.

There is definitely a correlation between the actions of the average modern progressive and the actions of the average schoolyard bully, and I think one could even make the case that the mentalities are similar, as are the relative levels of emotional maturity. The fact is, progressives are very quick to pounce upon what they see as being the “traditional” values of a nation like Canada, which inherit (heavily) from Judeo-Christian tradition and the moral law of the Church (and/or its various Protestant offshoots). Stepping on, transgressing, offending, and pushing the boundaries of those values — preferably in ways which are so offensive as to elicit a response from those who still find value in said values — are the highest virtues of leftist philosophy.

And those “traditionalists” who do complain can, for the most part, be denigrated as rubes, as backwards, as being opposed to (take your pick…) modernity, progress, human rights, etc.

It really is a bully-esque mentality, and much like a bully the average progressive cowers in fear when someone more aggressive shows up on the scene.

The fact is, Rome doesn’t issue fatwas. Sinead O’Connor tearing up a picture of the Pope, art like Piss Pope and Piss Christ, or depictions of the Blessed Virgin made out of elephant dung will not inspire murderous riots around the world in regions where Christians comprise the majority population segment — when you offend Christians, most of the time the worst that Christians will do is shake their head, maybe tell their friends to not bother going to the museum this week, and then offer prayers for you and whatever issue is your beef with Christianity. But if you draw a scribbled cartoon of Muhammad, rampaging throngs of tens of thousands will take to the streets worldwide, burn your national flag, burn you in effigy…and perhaps even murder a priest or a nun, just for good measure. Oh, and call for the extermination of the Jews.

And there have been numerous instances, in recent months, of so-called “cutting edge” artists actually admitting that while they have no problem maligning Christ or Christians, they are in fear for their life when the issue of Islam arises, and so produce no similar mockeries of the Koran or the (false) prophet Muhammad. Is this blatantly hypocritical? Yes, it is…but then, one tends to expect no less from bullies, or from liberals/progressives.

Still, this must all come to pass — Jesus foretold that we who believe in Him would be hated for that exact reason — and pass it will. The Christian victory is already assured, which (I think) is why the post-modern world is so harsh toward Christians. The secular world can be driven by nothing other — and can have no greater “good” — than power, and the average post-modern fears those who, by their actions, exert more power than s/he. That is why transgressive artists fear the violence of Islam.

But even more than that, the average post-modern fears something more than power — s/he fears those who do not fear. Post-modernism fears that we — Christians, assured in the victory that Christ has not only promised but in fact already delivered — see no need to fear. That makes us something to fear not in the way that leads those who array themselves against us to cower, but in the way that leads those who array themselves against us to lash out, desperate for any means by which they might push us aside.

I think all Christians can take heart when someone maligns us. They are, after all, just a desperate coward, a fact which they almost always demonstrate even as they attempt to insult us.

…Bishop [the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali] made another point about the way in which the growth of Islam has been used as a pretext to dethrone Christianity in British public life.

He said “It is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain. The existence of chapels and chaplaincies in places such as hospitals, prisons and institutions of further and higher education is in jeopardy either because of financial cuts or because the authorities want “multifaith” provision, without regard to the distinctively Christian character of the nation’s laws, values, customs and culture.”

I think this probably the most worrying aspect of the problem. Diplomacy, tolerance and good sense can - in the right conditions - almost certainly bring about integration in the divided cities of this country, given enough time and a breathing space in which mass immigration is halted.

A strong Muslim minority in this country could have many good effects (I’ll come to that later). But it is important that Islam does not gain the status of Christianity, for that will mean a moral and cultural revolution of enormous force.

One of the great puzzles of modern Britain is the political left’s attitude to Islam.

Why should an atheist, sexual liberationist, morally relaxed liberal attack people such as me (as they do) for criticising Islam? They have nothing in common.

It is in fact quite simple.

The left will deal with any ally against conservative Britain. It thinks it can use Islam to further its ends, just as in the past it has allied itself with any anti-conservative, anti-patriotic cause that was going. But the alliance lasts only long enough to allow the Left to destroy what it doesn’t like.

The trouble is, Islam is more serious and determined than any of the other people whom the left have sought to use for such purposes.

And so, while intending to dethrone Christianity and make this a secular society, the left now risks helping make this an Islamic society, which - if it comes to pass - will be profoundly hostile to everything the left wants.

These are the fruits of cynicism.

As the bishop notes, and as hospital chaplaincies so clearly show, the disestablishment of Christianity has not led to the opening of Richard Dawkins reading rooms in our hospitals, but in the increasing creation of multi-faith rooms which have an increasingly Islamic character, thanks to the fervour and devotion of Muslims, and the fading faith of the Christian churches.

Likewise the removal of Christianity from the state schools may well end in the existence if an increasing number of state schools which are in effect Islamic, while the official national religion, Christianity, goes neglected and untaught.

A Christian country would have kept the chapels, and allowed and encouraged the opening of separate rooms for other faiths.

I haven’t room or time here for an argument about the respective merits of Christianity and Islam, though it would be interesting to have one.

But I finish with this point.

There is no doubt that the laws, institutions, customs, language, marital arrangements, relaxations, family structure, even the diet of this country are the result of centuries of Christianity.

If it became a Muslim country, all these things would change, some beyond recognition.

If we want that to happen, and deliberately choose it, then all well and good.

Islam, as I stated earlier, has many admirable characteristics and would surely be better than total Godlessness, but how foolish to let it happen by mistake, and then regret it when it was too late.

The militant ‘war on terror’ sorts who inveigh against Islam still seem to think that the Maxim gun, or the CIA, or MI5, or airstrikes on Afghanistan, or invasions of Iraq and Iran, will defeat this powerful ideology.

The anti-British left seem to think, by contrast, that Islam is a pet pussycat which they can toy with, set on their enemies for while, and lay aside.

Both are wrong.

If you prefer our sort of society to an Islamic one, then you have to recognise that the good things about our society come from Christianity - and the more we throw those good things aside and the more we dismantle Christianity in our state, our schools, our culture in general, the weaker our society will become and the more likely it will be to embrace Islam - which suffers from no doubts about its rightness and is not in the least bit afraid of Professor Dawkins.

When I speak of atheism as the greatest threat to human liberty, I do so for two reasons. One is that, of course, if one is to look at the lessons of history, one observes an essentially 1-to-1 correlation between the act of a regime making atheism an explicit policy of the state and the engagement of that regime in murderous, repressive actions against its own people. The gulag is, really, the most logical outcome of officially-mandated state secularism.

But second to that is that atheism, in those states which drift toward a secular character without ever officially enshrining atheism as the ‘religion’ of the land, also serves as an enabler. Faced with the hopelessness that the materialist philosophy houses at its core, many people who have grown up in essentially secular lifestyles are finding, more and more, the need to discover meaning in their existence. And we see, in Europe especially, that they are finding it, in droves, in religion. Fortunate are those that find their way into Catholicism, or even into some of the various noble and respectable forms of Protestantism that have emerged from European tradition. Less fortunate are those whose thirst for meaning finds its fulfillment in the confidence and swagger of the more radicalized forms of Islam now sweeping through that same continent, and indeed through all the world.

Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, and the same can be said for the spiritual vacuum that the secular worldview causes in the human soul. So not only is applied atheism a threat, but so is ‘merely philosophical’ atheism, for it serves as an enabler for other violent pathologies to insert themselves into Western societies.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)

…one also detects the whiff of soured Puritanism in our wide-spread faith in the doctrine of Strength Through Evil that is part and parcel of the Culture of Fear.

Strength Through Evil? When put like that, we don’t like to think we believe in such things. But looking not at our protestations but at our art, the notion that Bad is Powerful is everywhere. The myth created by that great son of Scotch Calvinist culture, Robert Louis Stevenson, is as potent today as ever: Jekyll is a weenie. Hyde is strong. Captain Kirk “needs” his evil side in order to avoid the same fate of terminal weeniness. From The Cowboys (where a wimpy stuttering kid finds inner strength through profanity, and boys become men through the brutal killing of a bad guy) to Million Dollar Baby (where the hero finds inner strength through murder) to Titanic (where a girl trapped in a colorless life finds inner strength through fornication), our culture loves and deeply believes the story of finding Strength Through Evil.

That’s no accident; it’s part of a Calvinist and post-Calvinist anthropology. That’s why one constant refrain in anti-Catholic apologetics is that the Immaculate Conception just can’t be true because, if it were, it would mean that Mary is not “fully human.” Why? Because you need sin and evil in order to be fully human, we are told. That, in the end, is what is implied by the wholly unbiblical and philosophically preposterous phrase “sinful nature.” What Calvinism and its postmodern descendants all tend to affirm is that sin is not what corrupts human nature, but what constitutes it. That’s because we have failed, as a culture, to make the distinction between what is normal and what is natural. Sin is normal. It is never natural. Indeed, it is what destroys nature.

…

The problem with this Faustian arrangement is simply this: Evil is not constitutive of the human person; evil is not healthy and natural and realistic and, most of all, evil is not strong. Evil saps strength, darkens reason, and corrupts our very ability to grasp reality. Evil does not, in fact, keep us safe, make us happy, or help us win the war on Radical Islam. It makes us weaker, confuses us, and leaves us more vulnerable than ever to our enemies. Indeed, mortal sin is radically contrary to the good of the human person and always results in disaster when we embrace it.

It’s funny that so much of Calvinist thinking — that is, a Christian religious philosophy that emerged in opposition to medieval Catholicism — now underpins secularist/atheist/materialist reasoning in so many ways. It’s everywhere in the atheist mind. Whether it’s Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (of which The Golden Compass, more properly called Northern Lights, is the first book) and its doctrine of the salvation of the universe through the sexual intimacy of its (unwed) teenaged protagonists, Amanda Marcotte’s weird obsession with proving that virginity is just a “myth” or artificial social construct, or Richard Dawkins‘ assertions that human beings overcome their base animal nature by giving in to the temptation to commit adultery (from which he draws the subsequent conclusion that society should no more stigmatize people who take multiple sexual partners, even after they are married, than it should stigmatize those who like two or three different kinds of wine), the idea that sin can in some way “save” us (from what we are saved is never clearly established) permeates secular thinking everywhere one finds it.

It’s sad that Protestantism has become such an enabler for modern atheism, and sadder still that so much of Protestant thinking — which was erroneous even at its promulgation centuries ago — has become so prevalent in our modern world. The most telling example for me, I think, was an argument I once had with a Southern Baptist kid who was attempting to explain how engaging in a little anonymous cyber-sex did not constitute cheating on his then-girlfriend.

But as Chesterton noted, fallacies do not suddenly become truths simply because they become fads. The only question, I suppose, is how messy the societal collapse triggered our willing embrace of every sinful tendency will be. Because that is the ultimate destination of decadence and of a society which abandons notions of self-restraint in pursuit of an uninterrupted experience of “what feels good at the time.”