By David Truman
Western civilization was created by Christianity. Jürgen Habermas, German atheist philosopher and public intellectual, told an interviewer in 1999:
“Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”
Christian legislators ended slavery from 1833 in the British empire– because they believed we are all made in the image and likeness of God. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, said:
“ This validity of human dignity, previous to every political action and to every political decision, refers back ultimately to the Creator: only He can establish values that are founded on the essence of man and that are intangible. That there be values that cannot be manipulated by anyone is the real, true guarantee of our freedom and of man’s greatness; Christian faith sees in this the mystery of the Creator and of the condition of the image of God that He conferred upon man.”
Our human rights do not come from government or the United Nations! They are not found in Islamic or Chinese or African cultures. They are not universal but Western human rights.
The attack from within and without
Our core Western values of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of expression, free inquiry, the rule of one secular law for all, economic freedom, and universal human rights are under attack from two principal sources:
- OUR OWN LOSS OF FAITH in the core underpinnings of our culture – shared understandings, shared beliefs, shared observances, shared values. This has led to moral and religious relativism, multiculturalism (“all beliefs and cultures are equal”), and political correctness; and
2. AGGRESSIVE AND TOTALITARIAN POLITICAL ISLAM.
You’ll find many posts on Islam on this website.
Walt Kelly, in a famous Pogo cartoon from 1953, says:
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Theodore Dalrymple wrote in 2008: “Our civilization, until recently, was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.”
What is now prevalent is a new atheistic secular humanism, which says that man is now God, and that religion itself is a human construct. A key extreme proponent of just this – that man can become god – is the dangerously megalomaniac Israeli adviser to the World Economic Forum, Yuval Noah Harari.
Harari’s book Homo Deus [man God] (2015) posits that during the 21st century, humanity is likely to make a significant attempt to gain happiness, immortality, and god-like powers. He says that human life is an algorithm which can be hacked by Artificial Intelligence. As humans absorb more data, they become more algorithmic and more efficient at processing data. However, the rapidly growing data may ultimately consume humans in a sense that nothing that originally made us human is left, and humans become obsolete. In a speech in 2018 titled “Will the Future be Human?” he said “In a century or two, earth will be dominated by entities that are more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals or chimpanzees. We will learn how to engineer body, and brain, and mind…” Watch him at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL9uk4hKyg4 – and SQUIRM. Harari, and the WEF, are social and personal engineering on steroids.
The unimaginable EVIL of people like Yuval Harari – a top adviser to Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum – is shown in his appalling remarks in this Youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZuWhF7ejHA titled “WEF Declares ‘We Just Don’t Need The Vast Majority of You’. He says that most people are going to be redundant – to the future world planned by these insufferable, megalomaniac and Satanic tech elites. Hence the need (pushed also by Bill Gates) for large-scale DEPOPULATION.
Nietzsche, in The Will to Power, writes: “There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths. There are no facts, only interpretations.” Quicksand! Denial of absolute truth, denial of absolute standards. Make your ethics up as you go, according to your situation. So what is left? Relativism and nihilism. And, of course, the will to power, untrammelled by any external moral considerations.
The culture of decadence is deeply entrenched in America, Canada, Australia, France and throughout most of the West.
And relativistic attitudes have permeated many of the churches, as they strive to fit in with the contemporary culture (which hates Christianity).
If you have no solidly held values and beliefs to affirm and defend, you have no defence against a hostile, supremacist and culture-destroying invader like Islam.
Signs of a dying civilization include cultural, moral and religious relativism; denial of the importance of one’s own culture; and the idea that the highest virtue is non-judgmentalism. And what does non-judgmentalism mean? It means having no standards.
Aristotle is supposed to have said: Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society. Thomas Mann (German writer) has rightly said: Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
The key imperative for Australia and the rest of the West now is to understand, affirm and defend our culture and the values that made our civilization. Whether you have faith or not, Freedom and Heritage believes that we must honour and defend Christianity as the bedrock of the values that made our nation and made the West by far the best civilization to live in.