After the weakening of religion and tradition, man has returned to the spoiled fruits of the past
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In 380 AD, Christianity was made the official religion of Rome by Emperor Theodosius. For the next thousand years, and then some, Christianity shaped humanity and made it better. The history of the West is Christianity; it built the West.
Medicine? Scholastics? Art? Architecture? Music? Law? Politics? Christianity.
What happens when you take Christianity out of the world? You return to what there was before it — Paganism.
The Descent of Man
Christianity’s dominance began to erode from a variety of factors — the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and Industrialization. By 1900, after a previous century of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, the world of the Middle Ages was almost gone.
The Great War marked the end of the Old World. It was a war so barbaric, so terrible, that humanity could not comprehend it. Instead of trying to comprehend what happened, and what led to such a horror, the Roaring Twenties were ushered in by the constantly accelerating change in the world— an age of hedonism: think The Great Gatsby, Paris, and the degeneracy of destitute Berlin.
It was only a matter of time before the shadow of war once again came over the world.
World War 2 was even worse than World War 1. That war consisted of over-industrialized, rationalistic, and militaristic, countries such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. To those countries, human dignity mattered little.
The theorists who called World War 1 “The War to End All Wars” were dead wrong. War had only gotten worse. Whereas wars in the Middle Ages, such as the Crusades, actually made sense — they were fought over territory or other purposes— these new wars with machine guns, tanks, and trenches were complete bloodbaths. There was little honor; in them, man showed himself to be a monster.
If the 19th century was man’s attack on God, “disproving” Him with evolution, reason, heliocentrism, and relativism, the 20th century was God’s attack on man, proving him not to be the god he thought he was, but a creature capable of evil — the guard in the concentration camp, the pilot in the Luftwaffe, the eugenist, a Stalin, a Hitler, a Mao, a man capable of all things.
What made Fyodor Dostoevsky the prophetic writer he was, a writer who predicted the Underground Man (a resentful person who lashes out at society), the radical (the communist revolutionaries), the nihilist and the relativist (with his book Crime and Punishment, he forecasted killers who kill for no reason because they believe life has no purpose or morality), was that he saw firsthand, while in a Siberian prison, how evil man could be.
Man is stained by sin, and can only be made good, with much fear and trembling. After the 20th century, the most evil century in the history of man, for anyone to believe that man is born pure they have to be ignorant, or intentionally blind, to what happened before. Far from being made better, by enlightenment, reason, and science, man has only become more evil; and he has increasingly resorted to trying to justify that he is not evil.
While the world is relatively peaceful today, that peace is held by a thread. Above us, the sword of Damocles hangs.
Pernicious Confusion
The philosopher Charles Taylor says that we live in a “Secular Age.” The defining consequence, Taylor says, of this disenchantment of the world is that it is now nearly impossible to believe in God; whereas, in the Middle Ages, it was nearly impossible to not believe in God.
I would argue that, while you can disenchant the world with science, it is impossible to desymbolize the world. That is because man experiences the world with patterns, symbols, and order.
You don’t look or touch a tree and think that it is a random assortment of atoms and elements. No, you experience it as a tree (a tree qualified as a tree because there are other things like it).
This is the Aristotelian view of the world.
Things exist as they are. We understand the world because we are part of the world. Note that Christianity, specifically Thomism, is a direct continuation of the Aristotelian tradition.
Before Aristotle, there was Plato, who thought the “forms” of things existed outside of things. René Descartes, in the 17th century, is the continuation of Plato.
Descartes thought that the human soul existed outside of the body — and was skeptical of the outside world’s existence. His confusion can explain much of the transgenderism we see today — or those who believe that they were born something other than what their physical body is.
Modern thinkers such as the relativists believe that morality, right and wrong, depends on the individual person’s opinion instead of being an objective thing. But think: Do you determine what a tree is? Or does the tree, which exists as a physical thing, tell you what it is?
The tree tells us what it is when we perceive it. That is why we all have the same experience of a tree — I don’t think a tree is a mountain and you don’t think it is a flower. We both have a similar belief of what a tree is — a tree is a tree. You don’t determine what a tree is; the tree determines how you will experience it by existing as it does.
Morality is no different than trees. Most humans have the same idea of what is right and what is wrong. That is because morality is objective. We don’t determine what morality is; we are subjected to it much the same way we are subjected to the experience of a tree when we perceive it.
Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is in the object perceived.
Disorder
World Economic Forum Agenda Contributor Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, said that:
“There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.”
As well as:
“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”
While it’s okay to be wrong, he is dangerously wrong. I make that claim because Harari is a powerful man, because of whom the WEF is associated with, from world leaders to CEOs. Unsurprisingly, he is also one of the leading proponents of transhumanism.
Taking into account Descartes, transhumanism can be seen in the light of being a push towards abnormality, derived from the belief that there is no objective order. Harari doesn’t believe there are objective human rights, or morals, because he deceives himself. He denies his own experience of the world. He is a human; yet he yearns to be an “enlightened” cyborg.
It is not natural to cut your arm off, purposely, and replace it with a stronger robotic arm — it is a diabolic attack on the natural order of the world. Your arm, counter to what Descartes might have said, is you, though not the whole of you. You are your body; and your body is you.
Transhumanism, then, in the sense that it seeks to carve and change the natural body, is an attack on the natural, and thus a denial of life, since all of life, or our experience of the world, comes from the natural order.
Modern Pagans
The modern world, as St. John Paul II called it, is a culture of death.
Our society believes that the individual, not the majority, not the patterns, the symbols, and images, not the natural order, determines what is right.
Prevalent abortion and euthanasia are an extrapolation of prevailing "individual rights".
People who support such things are espousers of abnormalities of the natural order.
In nature, a mother carries a child to birth; and she dies a death, in time. In modern, unnatural society, since she is supported by others who think like her, a mother can kill her child, because she doesn’t want it, and choose to die when she wants.
Someone once said that “The most dangerous place for a baby to be in America is in their mother’s womb.” The aborted child who can not yet speak has no say if he lives, not because he can not speak or cry, but because he requires a mother to care for and deliver him.
The mother’s opinion, since there are apparently no objective truths, as Yuval Noah Harari would say, can be whatever she wants it to be; and it will be her own “truth.”
Frankly, abortion shares much of the same horror of the pagan’s child sacrifice. Moloch was the god to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children to.
The times before Rome adopted Christianity were not much different than the times which we now live in.
Those were superstitious times. Are our own times not superstitious?
Superstition has become more common in humanity since the downfall of Christianity. It started with the burning of witches, which was a product of superstitious Protestants. Now, we have young women who act like witches, with their crystals, and with their astrology.
Charlemagne outlawed witch burning when he was the Holy Roman Emperor in the 9th century. Witch burning is not a thing of the Middle Ages, but of the Pagan Age, before 400 AD, and the Modern Age, which began after 1500.
But superstition is not only related to witches. You wouldn’t have to look further than the coronavirus to see superstitious people; think about all of the protective measures. Even the alien sightings, conspiracy theorists, and ghost hunters, are a reflection of the rise of superstition.
Next, we have Gnosticism. Gnosticism, which is the belief in secret knowledge, revealed to only a select few, seems to have made a comeback with the tide of modern relativism. It can also be seen with the Protestants who think they can interpret the Bible themselves; and the Protestants and agnostics who don’t go to church at all yet believe they can fully understand God on their own.
Tattoos and drugs, which are so common today, wouldn’t be that rare in Pagan Britain, before it was converted to Christianity. Neither would rampant sexual depravity be rare in the Pagan lands. People nowadays partake in things that prostitutes in the Middle Ages would be ashamed to do.
Something as benign as walking has reverted to the pagan past. In the Middle Ages, people enjoyed and appreciated nature, believing it to be beautiful in and of itself, created by God. Now, people walk through nature and have a distorted Romanticist perception of nature where they become inebriated by it, because of the supposed effect they receive from it — think the German Romantics, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman.
Lastly, the barbarism, brutality, and senseless killing, that we saw last century, are similiar to the ancient Pagan wars; and murderers who kill in the most horrible ways, showing no respect to human dignity, are ancestors not of the Christians but of the pagans.
There are numerous other examples I could point to, but I hope for now you at least have something to think about and ponder. Ultimately, I hope I convinced you that Paganism has returned.
“Indeed, the only cause of their [Rome] perishing was that they chose for their protectors gods condemned to perish.” ― St. Augustine, The City of God