Nihilism: Why America and the West are Committing Suicide

Renew America ^ | Feb.9, 2012 | Linda Kimball

[spirited irish]

ZC: It forgets that the Biblical G-d is not a creation of chrstianity or even “the West” but a true self-existent Person who is the Creator and rightful ruler of all nations and cultures, not just “Protestant America” or “the West” (west of what, exactly?).

Spirited: In the first place, nowhere in the essay does the author speak of the transcendent God as a “creation of christianity,” as if men decided to conjure up a ‘god’ to worship. This ugly charge arises from your own imagination which you have transferred onto the author.

Next, the author does not imply that God the Father is not the “rightful ruler of all nations and cultures,” as you imagine. Careful attention on your part to the fact that the essay is not about other nations and cultures but about Christendom and Protestant America would have kept you from rashly accusing the author as you have done.

ZC: By identifying G-d with a particular culture it commits the crime of henotheism. By conflating the Biblical G-d with the chrstian “gxd” that was created later it ignores history (as also its insistence on the “triune gxd,” as if this were how G-d had been understood from the very beginning rather than a chrstian innovation).

Spirit: That you have no liking for and perhaps even loathe Christianity is obvious and doubtless accounts for your attempts at tearing down the essay with your outrageous claims.

Your charge of henotheism is not only ridiculous but seethes with resentment. Henotheism is the belief and worship of a single god while accepting the existence or possible existence of other deities, hence your charge amounts to saying that while Christians worship the Triune God they also accept the existence of Siva, Gaia, various goddesses, etc.

America was founded on Protestantism and not on Judaism, Islam, or pagan naturalism, a fact affirmed by Don Feder in his enormously researched book, “Back-Fired.”

Feder is a Jew who is grateful for Protestantism but as he makes clear, this truth rankles many who call themselves Americans. They want the fruits of the tree of liberty yet hate and despise the roots. Feder concludes that those who were allowed to come here and worship, such as Jews, Muslims, and other non-believers, have seized control of the ship of state and are pushing the Protestants out.

It appears that you are one of them.

[x]

The point is, those "very different ideas which contradict and compete with each other" don't compete at all. They co-exist as peacefully as the heels of professional wrestling do in their dressing room. Perfect peace, with nary a snarl to disrupt the absolute harmony! Hey . . . that would make a great heel tag team--Charles Darwin and The Shaman!

Those Darwinians of today -- who Darwin may or may not have agreed with -- approach life from a materialistic point of view, and Buddhist approach it from a point of view that is anything but materialistic. What the two groups mean when they say that the self doesn't exist isn't the same thing.

Hegel, Marx, and Teilhard drew much more from the Judaeo-Christian tradition than from anything Hindu or Buddhist. If they argued that the self didn't in some way exist -- and I'm not sure they did -- it wasn't because Buddha corrupted them. There was plenty in their own tradition to work with.

And we could turn your argument around. A devout Jew or Christian may be a great believer in the self and soul. Ayn Rand, no believer in the soul, had as much belief in the self as Linda Kimball, the author of this article, has. Maybe somewhere in the world there is a Buddhist asserting that Ayn's and Linda's beliefs are all the same, all part of one great threat to Eastern civilization.

And check this out:

Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism, claims there really is no you, that soul, spirit and will are illusions caused by chemical interactions in the brain while his partner in nihilism, naturalist Tom Wolfe proclaims, “Sorry, but your soul just died.” (The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, Beauregard and O’Leary, p. 4)

I'd have to read the whole article that Tom Wolfe, the journalist and novelist, wrote to be sure, but I don't think calling him Dennett's "partner in nihilism" really describes where he was coming from.