Crazy-talk

Once again, Shea, though perhaps the most annoying of the American NeoProtCaths, has made a good point.

I won't mince words: Myers is an evil man. And as evil men -- particularly evil intellectuals -- tend to be, he is also a madman, as are most of his acolytes and followers. One need only read Pharyngula to know this. Not all atheists are driven mad by their atheism. Many are quite respectable human beings. But those who make it their raison d'être tend to be made crazy by it. That's the tragedy of sins of the intellect. They don't just make you stupid; if you persist in them, and particularly if you persist in them to this degree, they make you crazy.

I think I've noticed this before. I think it's because modern atheism is one of those anti-rational ideas. It ends up denying, in its enthusiasm to kill God, the existence of everything. Taken to its logical conclusions, it ends up creating a self-consuming intellectual black hole that cannot be maintained. Materialist atheism eats its own tail. The inability of atheists to follow simple rational lines of argument is surprising when you first meet it. But once you follow them down their trail a bit you can quickly see where it is leading and soon come to understand that their position is not tenable, full of those internal contradictions that, like unexploded buzz-bombs in a 1945 London suburb, are best left strictly alone.

The ones who go crazy are the ones who, deciding ahead of time that atheism is the only reasonable route to take, discover that it is a logically untenable position and attempt to forge ahead anyway. And, as our friends the Islams have shown us, anyone who knowingly attempts to embrace a logical contradiction has embraced his own destruction. Anti-matter cannot be hugged.

Chesterton said something about this didn't he? That a madman is not someone who has taken leave of reason, but of everything other than reason.

The ones who manage to hang on to their sanity longest are the ones who do not follow the logic to its self-consuming end but busy and distract themselves setting up straw men. Dawkins is the master of this trick, (but I'm worried about him lately; he's starting to twitch a bit). It was a habit of Catholic-baiters from way back, as attested to by the late Great Fulton Sheen, who said something along the lines of "People almost never hate the real Catholic Church, but only that thing they believe the Catholic Church to be". It is impossible to hate Truth, but quite fun to hate something you have invented yourself to help you ignore the truth.

Atheists are deliberately working against a whole raft of things they know are true.

Poor old Nietzsche found out what happens to you when you do that.

I put it to someone last year:

...the fact that morals are morals, right is right and that's that, actually points to Christianity being the true religion; the one, in other words that reflects the true order of the universe.

You might be interested to know that in philosophy there is this thing called the "Natural Law", that has nothing to do, itself, with any religion. It is upon this law that the Christian moral law is founded, not the other way around.

The natural law theory, developed by the Greeks and later by Roman jurisprudes, and thereby finding its way into Roman law and later medieval law and theology, is that there is a universal idea of right and wrong, embedded in the nature of the universe, that can be known by anyone essentially instinctively. It is the moral law written on our souls that enables us to say, good is good and evil, evil. To shun evil and do the good and that we all know what that is.

...

Islam insists on its laws but only because it is the "will of Allah", and not because it is "right" in any universal sense, (they have no concept of universal moral norms). Whatever is willed by "Allah" is the good, whether it is a grave evil or not. Whatever Allah wills, whether it be the rape of six year old girls, or sawing off the heads of foreign journalists, is the good. They refuse to acknowledge the existence of any universal moral law, saying that if Allah wills the evil, that is the good.

This is the basis of the argument made by many faithful Christians that the notion Muslims and Christians (and Jews, let's not forget) worship the same deity is nonsense. The Muslim Allah is anti-rational and contradicts its own nature. Allah is able to make or break the moral laws at will. This is the essence of the criticism made by Pope Benedict at Regensberg, that God, the moral law and the good are all of a piece and that it is simply anti-rational to say that God could possibly change the moral law or will what is clearly an objective evil. God cannot, by His will, contradict His own nature and say that an evil thing is really a good.

In Christianity, the moral law is what it is because it is a reflection of the nature of God. It is good because He is good. It is eternal and universal because He is eternal and universal. The two cannot be separated.

The fact that you have said "morals are morals" proves that you think like a Christian,...The concept, "Morals are morals" is a Christian concept.

And that is the essence of the problem we are having with the Islams. We make these moral and philosophical assumptions so naturally, and are taught so little about it in what we laughably still call our "schools" that we make another unconscious assumption that everyone in the world thinks like we do. This assumption is shared equally by secularists, leftists, liberals and by thinking religious people. We have been so immersed in the Christian way of thought for so long that we simply can't imagine any other way of thinking.

But there is another way, and the two are not just incompatible, they are like matter and anti-matter: the two cannot exist in the same place at the same time...or there will be an explosion.