Posted on 04/14/2016 7:11:18 AM PDT by Sir Napsalot
(snip)
Europe has a religion problem, and it's not necessarily Islam. ....... The West's real religion problem according to astrophysicist Bernard Haisch is with the contradictions engendered by the real official faith, reductionist materialism. That creed which long ago supplanted Christianity as the de facto religion of the West, holds there is nothing objective to fight for, something which the Marxist Bertrand Russell long ago understood.......
While the struggle between Western political correctness and radical Islam has many aspects, at least one of them is the contradiction between materialist reductionism and the Jihad on the one hand, and materialist reductionism with itself on the other. To the modern Western intelligensia Islam is simply a superstition just like Christianity; if no worse than certainly no better. From that point of view replacing one with the other should be an inconsequential detail.
It is militant Islam's insistence on taking itself seriously that is so insolubly problematic to reductionist materialism. Why won't they be bought off? Why don't they take the public housing and welfare and watch Miley Cyrus? Islam does not behave according to their model and so, does not compute.
The UK treats radical Islam, but in principle all militant religious belief except reductionist materialism like a mental illness. It has no operating framework for dealing with populations that take their faith seriously, who mentally regard themselves as living in two worlds. In retrospect the West's earlier triumph in the Cold War can be regarded as failure to convince Ronald Reagan (who only completed Eureka College) to accept the teachings of the infinitely more intelligent Bertrand Russell (Trinity College, Cambridge). Maybe this time they'll get it right. ......
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Interesting piece.
I’m a bit more simplistic on the situation. Two world wars depleted the gene pool. The milky have inherited the earth. Now it’s going to be taken from them.
Bertrand Russell was a horrible, evil man, but like most English philosophers, capable of acute, pithy observations. My favorite:
“Most people would rather die than think, and millions have.”
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But for a long time a good portion of the faithful were truly faithful.
Materialism only got its foothold when the "faithful" became faithless and were Christians and Jews in name only.
Imagine another religion such as Islam actually believing and acting according to their precepts, however abominable?
That just doesn't compute for scientists.
They no longer have enough faith to even beget.
I’ve heard whatever illness being described as (post-)postmodernism; nihilism; and now materialist reductionism. Same illness, different names.
It only seems in the last half of the last century the illness (almost typed silliness) became pervasive in huge swatch of general public, and not just the few so-called intellectuals.
I tried to read it, but only got a bit of the way in before I was bored to tears. However I think I got the gist since where I thought it was going is where Cliff Notes told me it went.
Needless to say we as a society are wallowing in angst and ennui while the "righteous" Islamists are gaining strength and gaining ground.
When their intentions are finally known to all in the West, there still won't be much resistance I'm afraid. Many will trade nihilist consumerism for Islamic absurdity that appears at least on the surface to have meaning and purpose.
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