If one were to compare centuries like wine, the 18th wasn't a bad one; sophisticated, civilized, with a pleasant aroma and the promise of much better to come.  But 20th would be blood red, strong, burning the throat; it was the dregs, the bottom of the barrel, full of murky sediment and bitter aftertaste. If the Enlightenment began in aristocratic drawing rooms full of powdered wigs, it ended in the surreal hells of Auschwitz, Dresden, Stalingrad, Choeung Ek.  If the Enlightenment condemned the Inquisition for burning 5000 souls over the course of 3 centuries, it introduced the atheism that took the life of more than 100 million in one century alone.  There is no denying that the men responsible for these deaths came from different continents, diverse cultures, differing races and nationalities, yet were all united by a single common trait:  they were all avowed atheists.  Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Hussein, Ataturk...  And yet,   and yet,   we knew how it would end. We knew!

John Locke, the pinnacle of 17th century Enlightenment thought, wrote in 1689 :

Matthew Arnold, contemplating a materialist, atheist future in 1869 wrote "Dover Beach":

...The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. / But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, / Retreating, to the breath / Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true/To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; / And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.

If all our wisest men saw this disaster looming, why then did we embrace the one faith that destroys us?  (And why, you might ask, are the wikipedia entries for all those brutal atheists so whitewashed? Why does the wikipedia entry on "genocide" not include the millions killed under the Stalinist purges where he explicitly targetted Jews? Who is still defending this creep? Jews? Christians? Muslims?)

What could possibly be the benefits imagined by an atheist evangelist?  Well, here's a short example, found of course, in the NYT. But even more intriguing than the Locke quote I used above, which demonstrated a certain self-irony, are the last two sentences of that article:

Instead of waging intellectual battles over the existence of god(s), those of us who live in secular society might profit by being slower to judge others and by trying very hard to understand how it is possible for John Locke and our many atheist friends to continue to gaze at each other in such a state of mutual misunderstanding.

Richard A. Shweder is a professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago and a co-editor of “Engaging Cultural Differences.” 

What is Dr Shweder asking us to do? Stop quoting history. Stop reciting the facts. Stop all that intellectual stuff, and just lean across the table, stare in each other's eyes, and repeat after me "I feel for you". 

Now I ask you, if your Mom had used this strategy to break up the fights you had with your siblings, what would have happened to the younger one? And what would your Dad have said when he saw the result? And this guy is a professor! This is the stuff they are teaching your kid  for $35,000 per year at the prestigious University of Chicago.  "Just the feelings Ma'am, stop giving me the facts."

No, you're right, I am being unfair. Our dear Professor is not as brain dead as this appears, he is just trying to make you that way. He is being totally dishonest by arguing intellectually for his anti-intellectual position. He is arguing subliminally, attempting to sway you with arguments based on completely unfounded and unstated assumptions. It is the new, passive-aggressive style of teaching. "Now, now Johnny, of course you feel that way, you were brought up a Fundamentalist."  Or my favorite all-purpose psychology put-down, "Oh I'm sorry, is that important to you?"

For the unspoken assumption of that same Professor, is that all these problems between atheists and theists are, well, irrelevant because, after all, if God exists he doesn't matter anyway. Shweder's no Arbitrator, he's a bleeding Atheist, trying to defend the worst report card in history!

Well is this just a problem for all those Communists who have infiltrated our University liberal arts departments? No, despite the better track record in Engineering and the Sciences, Atheism there is alive, well and has plans for the 21st century. I recently got this note from a friend:


Ponder the wider consequences of this article. If scientists, which is what research doctors are really, are willing to misrepresent the facts to the public, they are willing to misrepresent the facts to each other. If one does that, one ends up fueling a lot of misguided research, wasting dollars, killing patients, and not making progress. Now science doesn't have a lock on progress, our world has made a lot of progress by trial-and-error, but most of the advances of the last 300 years were due to a systematic, objective approach to hypothesis testing that we call "The Scientific Method". It's a well-known formula, and if you didn't hear it in 8th and 9th grades then there was something deficient in your education.

 So why are these people so willing to discard a proven, effective approach, and embrace the sort of rabbit-trail, self-indulgent, court-magician, smoke-and-mirrors showmanship that stymied the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians and the Chinese for 2000 years?

•  Agenda? -- perhaps they want to use science for ulterior reasons, to make societal changes, for example.
•  Greed? -- perhaps they want money and will do or say anything that gets grants.
•  Fame? -- perhaps they look to see what the right answer is, what Nobel committees are awarding nowadays.
•  Malice? -- perhaps they hate "adult stem cell" research so much they have mounted a counter-attack.
•  Incompetence? -- perhaps they are persuaded by someone else, and are just coasting along for the ride.

In my short life I have seen all five. The really dangerous ones are the most moral, the ones who have a hidden agenda, the ones who gravitate to power and influence based on their "integrity". For there are plenty of bottom-dwellers who can be easily manipulated, what Stalin called "useful idiots", willing to do the dirty work but are not the source of the lie. These kinds of evil require more than greed or incompetence, they require forethought, they require planning, require postponing gratification.  And the more I contemplate that evil, the more I fear for my country.

And there you have it. Modernism was the Enlightenment way of being a respectable atheist. Those 20th century scumbags listed above gave Modernism a bad name. So we're all Post-Modernists now, but still trying to be respectable atheists.  Here's a NYT quote given the NYT treatment but with ellipses marked:  "...how it is possible for ... our many atheist friends to continue ... in such a state of mutual misunderstanding."   Since you asked, I'll tell you how. Because they would rather embrace Pol Pot than God.

This century's vintage might not be better than the last.