The war against Christianity.

Posted by Pointman on April 25, 2020 · 11 Comments 

I’ve never written an article on religion for two reasons. The first was it never was a prime objective of my blog, there are plenty of other good blogs that do a fine job in that area, and it’s a common experience we’ve all had that any serious discussion of a religious topic on the web tends to develop all too easily into a screaming match, if not seriously moderated. Fair warning, if the comments leave the area of civilised discourse, namely they’re neither lucid, civil or honest, which are the standard rules I’ve always applied in moderating this blog, the ban hammer will come down hard, so keep it polite please.

Given the subject, it’s appropriate that you get a description of my religious background. I was born Roman Catholic and raised in that tradition. We went to church on Sundays, all weddings, baptisms, First Communions and Confirmations were done in church with most of the extended family present and smartly dressed. I always found them enjoyable events as a child, most especially the weddings because of the mountains of food, music and the amazing coincidences that occur when two families and invited guests get to know each other.

I recall on one occasion the priest who’d just conducted the marriage ceremony for one of my sisters, happened to sit beside an elderly gentleman who was a neighbour, and therefore naturally invited to the party in our home that evening. It transpired they’d both served in the Great War and discovered they’d spent years in the trenches barely three miles apart. In those circumstances, it might as well have been three million miles. They had a fine evening chatting, laughing and drinking sherry out of those ridiculously small sherry glasses which my father took care to ensure were always kept filled.

I’m speculating here, but I think their experiences in the trenches made one turn to the priesthood and the other stayed in the army to pass on some hard earned lessons and got involved in the second big thrash. If any street could be said to have a kindly godfather, that would be the old gent. When he died there were about a hundred cars driving behind the hearse to the cemetery. It caused a gridlock like I’d never seen, but it was a good sendoff for an officer and a gentleman who was unfailingly kind and generous to all who knew him, us included.

My parents and grandparents had that slow and steady faith that had got their generations through two world wars, with a little ten year thing called the Great Depression sandwiched between them. That left a mark on them for the rest of their lives. Though they weren’t penny pinching, the pennies were always carefully watched. They were never militant about their beliefs, but if they disapproved of some development in their church – and you could tell – they never voiced their concerns, except on one occasion to the best of my recollection. The new parish priest, who looked young enough to be still out delivering newspapers, got up my father’s nose and after he’d left my father was angry enough to say “What would that fool know about raising a family?” I dare say someone had a word with the paper boy about the surprise family visits, which never occurred thereafter. He didn’t last long.

My primary and secondary education was in Catholic schools, who steadfastly resisted the education revolutions of the ’60s, and consequently their pupils left school being able to read and write, unlike so many of their contemporaries who’d been experimented on. By the time the world reached the mid ’70s, businesses were so desperate for young staff who were literate and numerate, that they resorted to poaching young people from Ireland, which had also resisted the wave that basic education was only about teaching kids how to express themselves. One of the young people poached from Ireland was to became my wife. It took about two decades to get the education system back on its feet and once again producing a useful educated workforce.

There were one or two instances of people who weren’t Catholic and despairing of the education their children were getting in state schools and not being able to afford a private school, tried to pass themselves off as Catholic. It never worked. At the same time, a handful of Jewish kids attended the same school, though they didn’t participate in any of our religious occasions. There wasn’t a Jewish school within reasonable travelling distance, so some sort of accommodation was made. They had their own religious instruction at the weekends. Apart from the different religions, they came from the same economic strata as us, which is to say, the children of a working class family. That old stereotype about all Jews being rich certainly didn’t apply to them.

They fitted in well, I think mainly because they had the same kind of strong family traditions which were reinforced outside school by a common feeling of being under siege as fellow minorities. The bus stops were nearly always the flash points, and that wasn’t helped by our school being over the road from an equally large Protestant school. Apart from the rugby and soccer games between the schools, which were brutally competitive at times, we really didn’t have much trouble from that quarter, since the schools had long ago settled into a kind of peaceful coexistence. We’re talking what was known at the time as MAD, an acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, which was very much in vogue at the time. If one side kicks it off, we all end up dead.

The more usual trouble came from feral gangs cruising the area at chucking out time and beating up kids and stealing any money they had on them. I recall one Jewish kid who got that treatment two days in succession, so we baited a trap. We placed him at the head of the bus queue with about thirty of us placed behind him. A mixture of the bigger Rugby players, anyone who was up for a good scrap and the whole Jew posse thirsting for revenge. They duly came along, grabbed him, and were immediately set upon by us, who beat seven bowls of shit out of them. We never saw that gang again, but once in a while a new gang would appear trying to play the same game, and they always fell for the same bait. If it was one of us Rock Cakes getting attacked, the Jews were always a part of the revenge squad.

We had two or three lessons entitled Religious Instruction in the average week, and they could be quite interesting, though the emphasis was on studying the bible and catechism but they weren’t debating lessons. Debate tended to happen in other subjects in passing. I had one teacher who’d converted to Catholicism. She was part of a trend in the 30s, 40s and 50s of intellectuals to convert, partly I think because they were communists in their youth. Between the wars and during them, politics had polarised into the Fascist or Communists camps, the latter being the only political group actively fighting Fascists. It was a stark choice, if you hated Fascism and wanted to fight against it, joining the Party was the only alternative on offer since everyone else was appeasing it.

Communism was just another religion by another name, but things like the Molotov pact with the Nazis, the Russian invasion of Poland and the brutal post-war suppressions of independence movements in several places like Hungary, robbed them of their faith in it. They’d lost one religion and were replacing it with a real one.

She nominally was an English teacher – and a bad one – but the convert’s fervour easily distracted her from teaching the subject. She and I had long and protracted religious debates which meant the rest of the class got the lesson off, which in the main they were grateful to me for. She did supply me with religious tracts and books by theologians such as St. Thomas Aguinas, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Ignatius Loyola.

I found them dense but interesting reading. As arguments for the existence of God, which they mainly came down to at the core, they were famous works, but they all suffered some serious logic flaws obscured by the sanctity of the subject matter and an over complicated style of exposition. When stripped back to the bone, too many of the arguments came down to the conspiracy theorists’ demand to disprove a negative, which can’t be done, or a variety of inductive reasoning. The latter is essentially Sherlock Holmes’ famous phrase that when you’ve discounted all the possible explanations, the one remaining, however improbable, must therefore be true. In mathematics, it’s a solid technique, but in the real world it definitely trips up on the thorny problem of unknown unknowns.

The conclusion I came to after my one and only venture into deep theology, was God’s existence couldn’t be proven – it came down to having a faith that he existed. Taking something that big on faith alone gradually weaned me off religion, though I never lost my respect for somebody who had the capacity for a true faith irrespective of whatever religion they followed. I always had a sneaking regard for anybody who had that in them, if only because I didn’t have it.

After finishing education, getting out into the world and having some negative experiences, I became an atheist. In a religious sense, it was a carefree period, even though I invariably conformed to the moral tenets of the catholicism I’d been taught. The curious thing I find with atheists is that so often, they’re nearly as excitable about their atheism as the proselytising religious fanatics they claim to have left behind.

My atheism lasted for about ten years, until I found my beliefs moving into the agnostic area of the religious spectrum. Several factors were at work in that gradual shift, mainly in becoming more mature. The fading of bad memories, becoming more mellow and understanding, marriage, having children and possibly some deeper motivations I haven’t recognised. It’s an area where the biggest blind spot is in examining your own core beliefs. I don’t think I’ll ever get back to a formal religion, but you never know.

Anyway, that is my journey to date.

In this wonderful twenty-first century, there are a number of big threats surrounding a religious belief, Christianity in general but most especially Catholicism. The biggest one is the way Western religion in general seems to have been on apology tour for the last two decades. The tradition of having strong core beliefs, that were never previously negotiable, seems to be in full retreat from attacks from several directions. Too many of what were hitherto tenets of Christianity have been eroded, to the point where the ten commandments are regarded even in the churches themselves as fuzzy guidelines or pick and choose, rather than unbreakable rules you have to commit to if you’re a Christian.

The Pope is currently making concessions right, left and centre to a militant Islam which has never and will never compromise with any other religion, and it’s plain are determined to destroy Christianity by any means possible. Their track record of Jihad across Europe is obvious to everyone but the ruling globalist elite, whose downfall it will eventually contribute to. He’s a crap Pope by the way. If you can be bothered to research them, the cardinals he’s been appointing would have been burned for apostasy in the middle ages. The same old story – crap promotes crap.

Ordinary people are getting fed up of things like Notre Dame being torched, three churches a week in France being desecrated, attacking and murdering priests, religious symbols like crosses being banned from workplaces and schools, and of course people being butchered by jihadis. The globalist elites already have some big problems, but I predict a religious backlash is already on its way, and let’s not forget, the vast majority of their populations are from a judeo-christian background. According to the Gatestone Institute: “Roughly 3,000 Christian churches, schools, cemeteries and monuments were vandalized, looted or defaced in Europe during 2019 — which is on track to becoming a record year for anti-Christian sacrilege on the continent.”

The genocide of Christians by Islamic militants in places like Iraq, Syria and Turkey continues apace without it ever being mentioned by the Pope, the globalist ruling elite, the MSM and the left-wing political parties. Even when Islamic refugees from those countries were being given asylum in America, not one Christian was allowed in, they were all Muslims. It was plain to see where Barack Hussein Obama’s sympathies lay. One of the first things Trump did was to squash that policy.

Witness the stereotypes of Christians in movies and television. They’re invarially portrayed as ignorant, intolerant people who’re disapproving or actively attempting to block some noble liberal initiative, and they always lose. In general, the portrayal follows the fanatic atheist compulsion to sneer and disrespect them. By the way, that attitude only applies to white Christians – if you’re black, you get a free pass. Islam, of course, is above any criticism by them.

It’s a characteristic of new religions that they tend to be aggressively expansionist at the start. Both Christianity and Islam followed that trend, though the latter expanded by military conquest into Spain and central Europe, and the conquered people either converted to Islam or were slaughtered. As with all fanatics, they didn’t know when to stop and consolidate, and that combined with their brutal ways, eventually created such hostility that they were chased out of Europe and back to the Arab world.

That same phenomenon is at work with socialism, which is after all a relatively new religion barely a hundred years old and wherever it’s been tried, has resulted in economic catastrophe and thinly veiled totalitarianism, as has happened in Venezuela. Communism and Nazism both followed that same religious pattern. The other pattern shared by Islam, Socialism, Communism and Nazism, is that they’re totally intolerant of other more established religions, because those others represent competition. The latter two gave up on being able to suppress religion, Socialism is trying the same trick while Islam is still sticking to its old way of convert or we’ll kill you.

Leaving aside the engineered invasion of Europe by feckless but violent migrants hostile to Christianity, the main attack on it in the West is being done by left-wing and socialist parties. Any big, strong and organised religion has to be smashed or at least neutralised by the new faith. Against the Catholic church, the past and sorry history of pedophilia in the priesthood is being heavily used to discredit the whole church, but nobody in their right mind thinks that the historic breach of trust by the clergy was solely confined to the Catholic church.

In the same way, rabid anti-antisemitism, under the guise of anti-Zionism, is endemic on the Left, because it’s not only seen as a competitor religion but it also curries favour with Islam. I’ll leave it to you to figure out why Islam isn’t on the Left’s hit list, but a clue might be who really gets to act out the Left’s fantasy of actually murdering Christians and Jews. A few weekends ago, four Jews were attacked on the streets of New York. Two were severely beaten up, one was whipped with his own belt and the fourth clubbed into unconsciousness with a brick.

On any reasonable assessment of global trends, populist nationalism is on the rise in both America and Europe, because people have had enough of their centuries old traditions and religious beliefs being trampled on by the people in power. Despite massive amounts of censorship and blatant propaganda against it, populist nationalism is here to stay, rolling back the Left’s decades long central role in politics. When I say the “Left”, that also includes nominally “Right” wing parties who have policies and attitudes to their serf populations which are virtually identical to the Left’s.

Leading that trend is Trump’s America, with old Eastern Europe turning to that same populist nationalism, primarily because they’re defending their ancient cultures from being swamped by hordes of people from the Arab world who have absolutely no intention of being assimilated. France is in the midst of a second revolution against the virtual dictator Macron, sparked by many causes, the assault on their religion by the foreign hordes being one of them.

Germany, using a mix of draconian censorship and heavy use of the law, is keeping down the lid of the pressure cooker, but it’ll blow eventually. The EU is slowly disintegrating under the twin strains of its dictatorial manner of rule and the refusal by the member states to have their cultures and religions thrown into some kind of big euro melting pot. England to all intents and purposes, has already left the EU, and in part that is at resentment of its petty regulations against wearing religious symbols with directives seemingly aimed purely at Christians.

The result of this roll back of leftist parties by populations embracing populist nationalism, is that they’re moving inexorably from being left-wing to being far-left socialist parties, because if they did the sensible political thing and moved towards the centre, it would be an explicit admission that their religion had failed, and they’ll never do that. Fanatics can’t change their mind. You can see this shift occurring with the Dems seeming being led by AOC and the squad, the Labour party in Britain being led by an openly Marxist Corbyn and the same shift of left-wing parties in other countries across Europe. Sensibly exploited by the emergent new Right, that shift in the political spectrum will keep the socialists out of power for two decades or so.

The DNC recently passed a resolution which said the party would embrace “religiously unaffiliated” voters and basically sneered at Americans of faith. This is of course political suicide, and it has echoes of that same in the bubble thinking that lost them the 2016 presidential election. That policy may sound great in the stylish salons on the East and West coasts, but it’ll lose them a lot of voters in the centre of the country who’re sick and tired of getting their religious beliefs treated as some sort of mental illness.

If there’s a difference between the Dem party and Trump, it is that they concentrate on appearing to be winning, whereas he actually does win and then he delivers. The bubble they live in is a massively biased fake news machine and social media, which only pushes their agenda and suppresses anything contrary to it. The end result of living inside the bubble is self-delusion. They miss the fact that outside that bubble there are not just a handful of people who practice a religion, but millions, and there are even more millions who avoid and mistrust big tech’s social media. Most people I know still attend church on Sundays, their children get married in church and the new baby gets christened there. Sound familiar? In the heartland, nothing much has changed despite what you hear from fake news.

It doesn’t matter if big tech completely censors it off their platforms, Christianity and all its variants have never gone away, nor will they. The fact that Silicon Valley won’t allow religon’s voice to be heard, just makes it more determined. Religious events regularly pull in unreported huge crowds at revivals and rallies and dare I say it, they’re massively bigger than the total collective attendance at the public meetings called by all the Dem’s presidential primary candidates put together, most recently a crowd of 100,000 people.

There are nicer ways of putting it, but Christianity is in a war, and if it doesn’t fight back, it’ll be annihilated. The Muslim invasion of Europe was repulsed not by compromise but by use of the sword. In the end, Nazism was ended by organised violence. Communism was defeated by a cold war, but a war none the less. In Europe, it’ll have to fight back or risk ending up like the lost cause Sweden where the native population is being forced to flee their own country.

There are signs western Europe, swamped by Muslims, is heading for a religious war, which most people cannot imagine could possibly happen in modern times, but they’d be wrong. Consider the massacre that occurred in Paris of Algerians in 1961 and think again. With the connivance of ruling globalist elites suppressing a mounting anger by local populaces, there seems no democratic way forward. Given that, then I can see a distinct possibility of portions of what’s called populist nationalism splintering into far right movements, who’ll deal with protecting their culture, and that includes their religious traditions, with violence.

The only way I can see that growing trend to violence being averted is with the fall of the ruling elites and their replacement with populist nationalist leaders prepared to defend their countries from internal subversion, both cultural and religious. How they’d do that is difficult to say, but a mix of forced assimilation or expulsion, and an end to state favouritism of aggressive religious minorities in favour of going back to supporting the cultural traditions of the majority. Turning the other cheek simply isn’t going to work. At some point, it’ll escalate to either the rise of violent ultra right movements or a return to historic traditions.

By and large, the situation in Europe falls into three categories. Countries like Sweden that have allowed themselves to be culturally annihilated and are lost, the former Eastern Europe who’ve put up fierce border defenses to preempt being swamped by Jihad hordes, and the rest who’re heading into major civil unrest because their elites insist on not listening to the concerns of their own citizens.

There is a fourth situation where liberals, in countries like America, are deeply embedded in grass root positions and are slowly working a cultural change to the fabric of the country away from its essential customs and traditions. It starts in education and in junior school. Crosses are taken down, wearing a cross necklace is forbidden and Christianity is being demoted to just another face in the crowd of beliefs, and one that children are made to feel vaguely ashamed of.

I read of a junior school principal sending a letter to parents that an all day visit to a mosque was going to happen, and they were free to refuse permission, but a note of it would be entered on the child’s permanent school record. That’s pure coercion and must be fought against tooth and nail at that grass root level, and what’s more, the individuals who’re basically programming your children have to be actively confronted, not just passively resisted. If you want to keep your religion, that’s the level you have to start fighting for it.

Secondary level is basically getting the same liberal workover and the same solution applies; don’t resist it, fight against it. By the time the kid gets to college, they’re halfway conditioned and are easy meat for the liberal professors to complete the job.

That is the cycle that has to be broken, and as I said, it has to be at grass roots level, or the results of it will be fed back into the system in the form of politically correct adults going into teaching who’re both anti-Christian and socialist from the word go. There’s nothing new about that loop, it was used by the Nazis and Communists to pry children away from the traditional beliefs of their parents, and that’s what the socialist infiltration of education is actively doing.

Take down that cross in the classroom and replace with a swastika or hammer and sickle, or whatever symbol they cleave to. Remove all symbols of any strong belief and replace them with your own. It all flows from there. All those purveyors of fake news, the entertainment industry and big tech are products spat out of that selfsame loop and the very concept of anyone resisting is not only abhorrent, but immediately triggers the lynch mob reflex in them.

It is a war, and it’ll only be won by a long steady push to reassert your cultural and religious traditions. Without taking on that task, all will eventually be lost.

That analysis of the problem is shared by many, as is how to fight back against it. I found it heartening that VP Mike Pence in a recent speech said that crosses would never be taken down in VA facilities. He, no doubt like his boss, knows what the game is and when a line has to be drawn in the sand, so you know you’ve got an ally in the Oval Office, but he can’t do it alone. Ordinary people have to fight back against the creeping erosion of fundamental national values.

That’s the grass roots way to halt your cultural destruction, but the big one is to use that magic thing called your vote, aggressively and in public, irrespective of your tribal political leanings. Get focused. Which is more important, protecting your religious beliefs from those who want to tear them down or electing someone to Congress who’ll ignore you for the next four years either way? Put them on the spot.

Next time some jackass stands up making a speech to get your magic vote at local, state or federal level, press them for a commitment, and make sure you’ve a posse of like-minded people around you. Don’t be a lone voice. “Will you actively defend Christianity as it’s the main religion of this country?” Once they start to shilly shally around, say it loud, say it proud.

“I’ll take that as a No, so you’re not getting my vote”. If enough Christians do that, you’d soon see a change.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Silence doesn’t mean approval, nor does it mean acceptance.

The democrats – one stupid move after another.

Some thoughts on fanatics and how to fight them.

External articles referenced:

DNC Embraces ‘Religiously Unaffiliated,’ Belittles Americans of Faith.

100,000 attend California crusade focused on God and country.

massacre that occurred in Paris

LGBT Activists Seek to Destroy Christianity

Report: Global Persecution of Christians Nearing Genocide Levels

Report: Record 3,000 Christian Sites in Europe Vandalized in 2019

Click for a list of other articles by Pointman.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Christianity, Communism, Nazism, Religion, Socialism