“[T]he first effect of not believing in God [is] that you lose your common sense…
“[H]ard-shelled materialists [are] all balanced on the very edge… of belief in almost anything.”G K Chesterton[1]
Written by Michael Baker
A famous Australian cricketer died a few months ago; of a heart attack; at age fifty two. The newspapers and media were full of the deeds he performed – on the cricket pitch. If they mentioned some of the less salubrious features of his life, these were submerged in the ‘heroic’ deeds he performed as an athlete. The confusion between one who is good secundum quid (good under some respect) and one who is good simpliciter (a good man) is characteristic of the age. This glossing over of essential distinctions reflects the materialism that dominates modern thinking. No public commentator speaks of the cricketer’s ultimate destiny, for materialism, allied as it is to atheism, refuses to acknowledge any life beyond this earthly one. Notwithstanding the yearnings of the human heart, for the materialist nothing abides eternally; certainly not the soul of one who has died. All we have is the memory of him.
No God; no life after death; no moral law; no Judge to whom we must give an account of the gifts we have been given so bountifully. The domination of the atheist zeitgeist may be seen in the serial abandonment of the moral law summarised in the Ten Commandments and the principle enunciated by Christ as ‘the greatest commandment’, the law of love of God and of one’s neighbour.
The abiding characteristic of citizens of our world is a cheerful insouciance of their dependence and contingency as of the limitedness of the time they have to live and ambivalence about life’s purpose. In this unconcern they breach the first and third of the Ten Commandments because they neglect the performance of a duty to acknowledge their Creator. They do more. Along with the gift of their being there is given a duty, a duty attaching only to creatures possessed of intellect with the power to determine their own ends, a duty to conform themselves to the moral law which, as St Paul says, is written in their hearts and binds their consciences. (Romans 2: 15)
Once a principle is admitted consequences flow. If you ignore ultimate realities – and God, one’s existence, one’s dependence, one’s duties under the moral law, are ultimate realities – you dispose yourself to ignore less important things, to give credence to any potted opinion; to believe (as Chesterton noted) in almost anything. This is the price of atheism’s serial irrationality, a loss of common sense coupled with the scope for belief in things irrational. Characteristic of the loss is a confusion over what is natural (that is, established by God) and what is voluntary (that is, within the power of the human intellect). The disposition to folly is fuelled by subjectivism, the error that holds that truth is determined by what the majority think. In place of reason the atheist turns to ideology – someone’s idea about reality – finding support in the opinion of others just as blind. And when the blind lead the blind… !
Since Bacon and Descartes, philosophy has descended from a consideration of reality to a species (one species or another) of ideology. The explanations the modern philosopher offers derive not from reality but from his own ideas. Possessed by this creature of his mind he sets about doing what he can to force reality to conform to it.[2] Such ‘philosophies’ fall into two classes: materialist (nothing exists save what is material – or nothing exists that cannot be detected by the senses) or subjectivist (that is true which the thinker asserts to be true), or a compound of the two. Inevitably, such thinking percolates into the popular mind.
The consequences of atheism/materialism/subjectivism are becoming more and more manifest. There is a flourishing abroad of hatred, rather than of concern, for one’s neighbour; a spirit of divisiveness, of harm, aided and abetted by the media. The news channels are full of episodes of murder (breach of the 5th Commandment), of sexual abuse (breaches of the 6th and 9th Commandments), of contempt by one man for another (breach of the Greatest Commandment). We hardly finish with one crisis before the media’s proponents are looking for another. It is right to fear evils but much more important to see these as inevitable effects of the stupidity involved in adopting atheism’s protocols. They are manifest at the personal level, the social level and the economic.
Ideology has this signal characteristic: its votaries are quite incapable of tolerating laughter at their beliefs. One has only to think of the moral ‘high ground’ adopted by feminists, by those asserting ‘climate change’ or ‘zero emissions’, those claiming oppression of indigenous peoples by ‘white races’, or those insisting that they can determine their sex against the ordination of nature, to see this in action. Ideologues cannot suffer to be mocked for their beliefs. Should anyone engage in such mockery, they will insist on an apology.
The devil has no sense of humour: neither has the ideologue for he is on the side of the devil and against reality which alone is the determinant of the truth.
_______________________
It is truly remarkable how the vast majority of the Australian populace submitted to the imperative that they should suffer ‘vaccination’ against a virus which has proven to be much less fatal than one of the not infrequent bouts of influenza that trouble the world. They did so for no other reason than that popular opinion insisted it was more to be feared. Against common sense, health was elevated from a relative to an absolute value. The vast majority of the populace bowed to contrived opinion for no other reason than that this opinion was held in common. The underlying protocol at work was the subjectivist principle – It is impossible for the majority to be wrong.
The ‘vaccinations’ offered were rushed in their approval in breach of accepted standards and protocols. They remain at the experimental level. They were, and continue to be, questionable as to their efficacy, pretty well useless for the purpose for which they were marketed and for the price demanded. The reasonable fears of outspoken members of the medical and nursing professions as to harmful side effects were ignored or dismissed as irrational. Now the birds of promise given flight by this atheist-driven blindness are coming home to roost.
On April 9th last Spectator Australia’s Rebecca Weisser reported Edward Dowd, a Wall Street consultant, as noting that in the US the millennial generation aged 25-44 suffered its worst-ever excess mortality rate last autumn when vaccine mandates were imposed and booster shots approved.[3] In an article the following week she noted the crisis that has befallen Australian State ambulance and hospital services as a result of an upsurge in demand precipitated by heart attacks, chest pain and breathing problems.[4] While government and the media refused to acknowledge that the ‘vaccines’ may be the cause of the problems this was not reflected in the frank remarks made by participants in Melbourne television’s Footy Show after one of the AFL stars was taken to hospital with heart irregularities.
Little objection was raised among members of the medical profession that the best immunity to any virus – no matter how it may have arisen – is natural immunity. Its members were content, in the vast majority, to be driven along by the zeitgeist that this ‘vaccination’ was essential to the health of society and individual alike, to the point where cheaper and more effective medications were not simply ignored, but outlawed—an outrageous breach of legal as of democratic principle!
The subtext endorsed the mind-set that artificial means of controlling viruses are always more effective than the protection elicited by the natural order—a view grounded in atheistic principle.[5] Government authorities pandered to the claims of self-interested pharmaceutical companies with huge financial investments at stake. Medical ‘experts’ and health bureaucrats agreed; voices in the various media outlets, aided and abetted by journalists who had abandoned their duties of investigation in favour of trumpeting their obsequiousness to the popular will, said so. The credulous majority, like a flock of sheep chasing a stampeding few, said so. It must have been true! For it is impossible for the majority to be wrong!
In a recent article Maurice Newman, a former chairman of the ABC, remarked:
“The unprecedented use of force to control the population during the pandemic means all previous notions of limited state power belong in the dustbin of history. Any lingering doubts evaporated when Victorian protesters, alarmed by their losses of liberty, were fired on by their own police.
“Worst of all, this atrocity was met with a deafening silence. The media behaved like an arm of government. The Prime Minister and the federal and state parliaments were silent. Business leaders were invisible. It was a defining moment in our nation’s history and confirmed that we now live in a society where freedom and the rule of law are at the sole discretion of the state.”[6]
How many were there who rushed to condemn the four hundred odd people who protested against the Victorian State government’s oppression of their liberties at the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance in September 2021? A majority of Australians, it would seem.
On the Day of Judgement the men and women who died for Australia and whose lives and deaths for the sake of their fellow Australians are commemorated at the Shrine will rise up and condemn this generation because when liberty demanded they risk their lives for their children they did so. But their children have shown that they prefer bondage to liberty.
Michael Baker
Appendix
The Greatest Commandment
Matthew 22: 35-40
Mark 12: 28-34
Luke 10: 27
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy strength, with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.
The Ten Commandments
Exodus 20: 2-17
Cf. Leviticus 19
1. I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt not have strange gods before me.
2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
3. Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.
4. Honour thy father and thy mother.
5. Thou shalt not murder.
6. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
7. Thou shalt not steal.
8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife.
10. Thou shalt not covet they neighbour’s goods.
