It is succumbing to a "soft totalitarianism," which not only is creating an ugly mood of intolerance but is undermining its ability to defend itself against Islamic aggression. Thus the West is losing both its rationality and its freedoms. In medieval-style witch- hunts, scientists who are skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts Israel is ferociously demonized and the United States is vilified over the war on terror-all on the basis of falsehoods and propaganda that are believed as truth. The result has been a kind of mass derangement, as truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. The loss of religious belief has meant the West has replaced reason and truth with ideology and prejudice, which it enforces in the manner of a secular inquisition. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible that gave us our concepts of reason, progress and an orderly world-the foundations of science and modernity. We tell ourselves that religion and reason are incompatible, but in fact the opposite is the case. The basic cause of all this unreason is the erosion of the building blocks of western civilisation. There is widespread belief in ludicrous conspiracy theories, such as the 9/11 terrorist attack being an American plot. More and more people are signing up to weird and wacky cults, para-psychology, seances, paganism and witch- craft. In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving increasingly irrationally.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |