Sunday 25 February 2018

Enlightenment values as a secular religion

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"The world is trying to experiment with attempting to form a civilised but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail, but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide."
T. S. Eliot, "Thoughts After Lambeth" {the 1930 Lambeth Conference that permitted Anglicans to use contraceptives in certain circumstances)

"Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Justice" was the official and public motto of the Ottoman Empire under the reforming liberal Young Turks who organized and carried out the Armenian Genocide -the template for the litany of nation-building State slaughters that has ensued for over a century of progress. Christian Roy



"I'm being overly-harsh here, no doubt, but I've always felt a slight air of sterility in France - the effects of aggressive secularism perhaps? Spain still has life in it. I feel bad saying it, but one can sometimes quickly pick up on a mood or a vibe in a place. Spanish Catholicism with its emotion and mysticism still has residues - I never pick up anything like that in France." Karl White

"What is ironic about the overwhelming majority of academics is the dogmatic and hackneyed way they describe the “values” of the Enlightenment. It was not humane. It saw the development of a monstrous centralized state that was capable and willing to slaughter millions of its citizens, which it did and continues to do. Royal Europe knew nothing of this. The Enlightenment had nothing to do with freedom, the state was often in the hands of vapid oligarchs while, in western Europe, thousands of peasants were thrown off the land to find work in the increasingly squalid cities. Warfare became increasingly bloody as science put its brain, rather than its mind, at the behest of the state (which had originally financed the “scientific revolution” in the first place). Napoleon was soon to introduce the shards of Christian civilization to total warfare and mass armies that would have horrified Michael or Alexis in the East, Louis IX or Charles in the West. The agricultural classes and monasteries were pillaged by the state to finance this demonic behemoth that sent the cream of European manhood to their death from the Napoleonic Wars to World War II, all based on the “humane” scientific advances of the “Enlightenment,” and, no doubt, their commitment to “freedom and progress" Matthew Raphael Johnson

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