Sanity or insanity? Misery or faith? Pascal or Mohammed?

This is Charles Martel coming to you from Florida and bringing down the hammer for the Canada Free Press, because without America there is no freedom.

This past week, Richard Dawkins, the UK’s most renowned atheist and one of the most lauded non-believers in the world, declared that he preferred living in a culture that was predominantly Christian over one that is predominantly Islamic; specifically, Dawkins averred, quote, “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every time,” end quote.

He further declared that he was pleased with declining church attendance on the Continent, but allowed as how he was concerned that as Christianity was receding in Europe, Islam was on the rise. Lastly, he confessed that he was, quote, “slightly horrified” that in London the city was lit by Ramadan lights instead of Easter lights, and that he thought of himself as a cultural Christian. Evidently some flicker of hope, if not wisdom, remains yet in the good doctor.

Before going further, I want to state, publicly, that I wish I could drink a sumptuous amount of 25-year-old single malt Scotch without it affecting my waistline, my liver, and my bank account; however, there is Never-Never-Land frequented by Winnie the Pooh, and then there is reality. Determining that you want Christian culture without Christianity is akin to thinking you can hang Christmas ornaments in the air without a tree. Christianity, that is to say the Bible and its teachings, are the backbone and structure, the immutable foundation to all the cultural niceties Mr. Dawkins finds so appealing.

Please know that, for me, Judaism must be included in this argument. Christianity sprang from Judaism; the culture of Moses is parent to the culture of Jesus. At this moment, if I were Kamala Harris, I would offer up a Venn diagram and point out the overlap.

A couple of generations ago, before individual innovation coupled with free market capitalism reached down the economic ladder and pulled nearly everyone in the West up three or four rungs, it was common to see ugly metal posts in even middleclass backyards, with gray strands of wire stretching from one post to the other. Remember clothes lines?

On wash day the lines would be hung with all the family’s pretty clothes, multicolored and fashionable, sheets, dresses, and shirts, all drying in the breeze. Remove the hideous posts and wire, and the clothes would be a wet heap on the ground. Such it is with Christianity and Christian culture.

They are indivisible; it is not a buffet. Dawkins and his fellow travelers scoff at miracles, but a human comprehension of time and distance is impossible. They can never be known. They are eternally defeated by “What was before that?” “When was the beginning?” There was existence; there was something. We look in the night sky and see it. What is that, if not a miracle?

And, as Christianity is an imperative to the West, miracles are an imperative to Christianity. We have no vocabulary to comprehend, let alone express, “What was before that?” “When was the beginning?” This demands either faith, or a belief in nothing. And nothing takes us where? There was no beginning? It seems one is forced to accept that there is a knowledge too great for us to know; if not, then there is no knowledge, there is only nothing. But as just noted, WE LOOK IN THE SKY AND SEE SOMETHING, and as we believe in science, any “something” implies a beginning. Well, explicit in anything we acknowledge but can’t understand is…faith.

Okay, well, life and death are obviously available, within our perception. We have learned nearly everything about conception and birth. Because of that a grasp of coming back to life from death and of conception without sex is within our reach. They are the digestible portions of a knowledge beyond our perception, the rope by which we tether our faith. We need miracles we can understand, in order to accept miracles we can’t understand.

The world has, over two millennium, benefitted enormously because of the spread of Christianity and its accompanying culture. Two examples are so bold as to present a formidable stand-in and model for countless others, the number and detail of which are outside my scope of time in this podcast, so here are those two.

First, consider how wars in the West ended prior to Christianity. It was mass murder, mass rape, and mass slavery. There wasn’t anything else; there were no exceptions; there was no notion of mercy. But, by the time we arrive at Europe’s Napoleanic conflicts, these acts were not countenanced; they were beyond the pale for any army.

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I’m not suggesting that there weren’t crimes committed by individuals; what I am saying is mass murder and rape were not given official sanction; they weren’t accepted and non-controversial in the way Romans would have considered, and slavery for fellow white Christians, was out of the question. What changed? Or more precisely, why did it change? Think about it. What, did plague or famine suddenly introduce ideas we’ve come to think of as proper and moral?! I don’t think so. The spread of Christianity is the only and obvious answer. In the Western world, a notion of mercy, forgiveness, and common humanity had taken hold, seeded by Christianity.

Closer to our time, think of Hitler with the Jews and Slavs; think of Stalin and Germany’s conquest. Hitler and Stalin eschewed any God greater than the State, which was represented by themselves. Without a greater God beyond human comprehension, and with humans resorting to form, mass murder, mass enslavement and mass rape became, once again, routine.

Now, imagine if after the war Roosevelt or Churchill had said “Okay, it’s open season on German women; kill all the males over 16, and we’ll split up the children for slave labor in our factories.” Impossible, isn’t it? Why weren’t Roosevelt and Churchill the same as Stalin and Hitler or Ceasar and Mohammed? The answer, to my thinking, is obvious and undeniable.

You no doubt noted my mentioning that slavery of WHITE Christians was unacceptable. As we all know, enslavement of blacks remained a norm. However, even a shallow dive into history will reveal that the English, motivated by Christian conviction, put an end to the slave trade on the high seas, even going so far as to commandeer ships from other nations.

And, by historical terms not long after, Abraham Lincoln, determined by Christian principle of Constitutional and Biblical provenance, the first of those founded in and stemming from the second, commanded a force that put an end to slavery in America.

In sum, we owe the notions of mercy in war and the unacceptability of slavery among civilized people to Christianity. And to disagree is to imply some evolutionary leap in men in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary. In fact, we are in every dimension the same as those who laid waste to Carthage; who rode with Genghis Khan; who shoved Jews into gas chambers; and who sat on the juries in Stalin’s purge trials. To ignore this is to ignore or deny what happened last October 7^th in Israel. Or are we simply superior to Muslims? I don’t think that’s a notion your average progressive will find palatable.

Professor Dawkins may deride and hold contempt for the stories of creation and virgin birth and resurrection, but without them, there is no Christian culture. Its virtues don’t exist. He is asking a flower to grow in the desert, to be rooted in a vacuum.

And here I must apply the postulate attributed to Aristotle: “horror vacui” or, nature abhors a vacuum. Also applicable is the cousin epigram, apocryphally, as I’m led to believe, attributed to GK Chesterton, herewith, “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.” It has, I suppose, become cliché to employ these hoary chestnuts, but the simple truth is examples abound in Europe and in the States.

The godless, for instance, flock to global warming. The foolishness of this idiotic endeavor is revealed with the simplest review of the facts: We cannot depend on wind and sun for our power without resuming a 19^th Century lifestyle. Saddle up those horses, cowboy; get those mules in harness.

Even if we were able to reduce our fossil fuel consumption, we have no control over what China, India or the developing nations in Africa do, and these nations have shown and declared zero inclination to be bothered by western panty twisting over fluorocarbons. Still, the godless must cling to something ---reality be damned-- and their faith in this conviction has become a golden calf.

Recall, please, however awful to contemplate, the devotion to the COVID lockdowns and the vaccines that must be taken because it’s science! Of course, it was all wrong and caused incalculable damage, but when you’ve nothing else to cling to, well, any port in a storm. And obviously, when you jettison God, any idea of human freedom, of an individual having God-given rights is also kicked to the gutter.

More proximate to my case has been this notion that we determine our sex and the concomitant race to mutilate little children. Fortunately, we seem, mercifully, to be backing off this particular bit of insanity, but it would, I am sure, be enlightening to see a ratio of atheist parents to evangelical Christian parents who’ve given their children puberty blockers or had their boys’ penis’s and girls’ breasts lopped off.

I think my favorite recent example of an embrace of lunacy to fill the hole in the heart, if I may borrow Pascal’s construct, is the beyond satire, queers for Palestine.

Is it not circus entertainment to watch them flock to their various idols? And it is nearly riotous irony that they mock the observant for their beliefs! No one, no one but a progressive could be so self-oblivious. Sadly, for them and us, it is a mirthless entertainment.

In the States, the outcome is misery, loneliness, anger, and even insanity, if I’m to believe the polls taken of liberal women and their mental health issues. In Europe, it seems to have led to a sort of general lassitude that recently-arrived Muslims evidently don’t care to observe. Put plain, since Europe’s former Christians have ex-communicated God, the Muslims have a force to whom they’ll award the seat.

It seems so easy to me: Christianity and hope, or atheism and nihilism; or, through a less existential lens: destruction and Islam. Isn’t it as simple as sanity or insanity?

I think that some of the Richard Dawkins of the world have awakened to a fear greater than any they’ve previously imagined. The problem is, having shunned God they long ago assumed for themselves infallibility, and admitting they’re wrong and something must be done is a bridge they are not quite yet prepared to cross. Trouble is, by the time they are ready, they may be left with nothing but a prayer that a God they betrayed remains merciful.

This is Charles Martel for the Canada Free Press. You can also listen to my podcasts on Rumble and Spotify at CharlesMartelCFP.

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