Will The Atheists Plan Work - Road to the Middle Class

WHAT WITH Governor-elect Bobby Jindal’s win in Louisiana (yes, they are celebrating back at his village in India) and Dinesh D’Souza’s new book out his month, race manipulators may start to wonder if South Asians are becoming overrepresented somehow or other.

That’s what happened about a century ago when the immigrant Jews started becoming too eminent too quickly and turning up at the gates of Harvard.

But never mind about that. Let’s talk about D’Souza’s book instead.

Dinesh D’Souza’s book is called What’s So Great About Christianity. In an excerpt he wonders about the atheists’ grand plan to convert the masses.

The strategy can be described simply: let the religious people breed them, and we will educate them to despise their parents’ beliefs.

This is not new, of course. Schools and universities have been indoctrinating children in the wonders of the nation state for at least a couple of centuries. The Germans were a dab hand at that, creating a national school system in Prussia during the Napoleonic wars in order to rebuilt the German nation and beat back the French.

The question is: will it work? It’s all very well for the atheists to write all their books and prove that transcendental religion is a crock. What do they have to replace it, and can they learn from Chesterton’s warning that people who do not believe in God will believe in anything?

Elite atheism works rather well for people ensconced in prestigious university chairs. Secure financially and spiritually in the comfortable groves of academe their belief system need not extend further than the glory of reason and the divine, er, universal truth of academic tenure and freedom.

But ordinary people in the real world face terrors that the university professor can only begin to imagine. They need something a little more robust and a little more powerful than university secularism.

I went to Gluck’s opera Iphigenie in Tauris over the weekend. It’s a story about the revenge of the gods and the awful fate of princes of the blood—in this case Iphigenie and Orestes, the surviving children of Agamemnon.

The king of Tauris turns up at the temple of Diana (run by Iphigenie) in a terror lest the gods take revenge on him for his crimes—much like Al Gore runs around today warning of climate change if we don’t repent of our environmental crimes.

The solution to the king’s problem, he reckons, is sacrifice, preferably the sacrifice of any strangers turning up in Tauris, and he gives the job to Iphigenie. That should appease the gods—just like hybrid cars and low-energy light bulbs are recommended for saving the planet today.

Of course his grand plan gets ditched because the first stranger who turns up in Tauris is Orestes, Iphigenie’s brother. Iphigenie finds that she just can’t quite bring herself to sacrifice her own brother, especially since she hasn’t seen him for fifteen years.

Christianity has a rather different strategy. It turns the tables. Instead of human sisters sacrificing their human brothers, God does all the sacrificing instead, once for all, by sacrificing his Son.

And in this blood sacrifice. the greatest blood sacrifice of all time, God says that he forgives us humans for all our wicked ways.

It’s a truly remarkable concept, you’ll have to admit. God sacrifices his Son so we don’t have to sacrifice our own sons.

There’s an interesting corollary to God’s offer that will be obvious to all sensitive souls. If God forgives us, shouldn’t we forgive, in return, the mother-in-law and the others in our life who torment us?

I don’t know if the atheists have thought of this, but I would recommend that they gin up something similar. Otherwise their ingenious plan to indoctrinate our children might not work out.

People might start asking: What’s So Great About Atheism?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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