A group that refers to itself as the \u201cArkansas Society of Freethinkers\u201d is not in the Christmas spirit.\u00a0 When it caught wind of the fact that Little Rock\u2019s Terry Elementary School had arranged for its students to attend a stage performance of \u201cA Charlie Brown Christmas\u201d at a local church, it began to eye the school up for a lawsuit.<\/p>\n
Inasmuch as one of its key characters quotes the Gospel of Luke, \u201cA Charlie Brown Christmas,\u201d you see, has an explicitly religious theme.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That there is no such \u201cseparation\u201d clause in the United States Constitution has long been established.\u00a0 Yet this episode is telling not because it reveals the atheist\u2019s ignorance of the Constitution.\u00a0 Rather, it is telling insofar as it reveals his ignorance of his cultural inheritance.<\/p>\n
The great Catholic writer, Hilaire Belloc, had famously declared that \u201cthe faith is Europe and Europe is the faith.\u201d\u00a0 We can paraphrase him by saying just as assuredly that Christianity is the West and the West is Christianity.<\/p>\n
It is true that the Western mind is indebted to classical, pre-Christian Greek and Roman sources, but even here, it is primarily to Christian men of learning to whom we owe thanks for resurrecting and restoring to European civilization the lost riches of antiquity.<\/p>\n
For the last two millennia there has been no aspect of Western existence that hasn\u2019t borne upon it the indelible impress of the Christian religion.<\/p>\n
Take science.\u00a0 That it is the Western world within which the sciences first emerged and where they continue to flourish is no coincidence.\u00a0 Prior to the rise of Judaism (from which Christianity spun off), and outside of the Christian West to this day, time is conceived cyclically, not linearly.\u00a0 But it is our linear conception of time that inspires the scientist\u2019s faith in the possibility of achieving progress within his craft.<\/p>\n
There are still other distinctively Christian concepts from which science has taken flight.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That the universe has been created by an all-good God and that this God has entrusted its care to the custody of human beings render it impossible for those who\u2019ve been influenced by these beliefs to deny the reality of the world, as do Hindus and Buddhists, or to assume an attitude of indifference toward it, as did the Stoics.\u00a0 These Christian beliefs make it impossible to proclaim, with Plato and his disciples, that matter is somehow debased and, thus, unworthy of investigation.\u00a0 They make it impossible to deny the rationality of the world and, hence, the knowledge to be gotten from it.<\/p>\n
The very (scientific) enterprise at which the scientist makes his living would have been unthinkable in the absence of the religious faith that he now ignores, and\u2014far too frequently\u2014disdains.\u00a0 Furthermore, he continues to erect his monuments upon the back of the Christian faith, for the supposition that nature is knowable and worth studying makes sense only within a larger Christian context.\u00a0 Once it has been plucked from that framework, however, then it is about as meaningful as a piece of a puzzle without the puzzle to which it belongs.<\/p>\n
And what is true of the ideas underlying science are no less true of those of our morality.<\/p>\n
The famed Russian novelist Dostoyevsky had said that if there is no God, then all things are possible.\u00a0 Dostoyevsky was a Christian.\u00a0 Yet some honest atheists\u2014like the existentialist philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre\u2014have admitted that he was correct.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIndeed,\u201d Sartre wrote, it is precisely because \u201ceverything is permissible if God does not exist\u201d that existentialist atheists like himself find life \u201cvery distressing [.]\u201d\u00a0 Since there is no God, \u201call possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him [.]\u201d\u00a0 There are \u201cno values or commands\u201d that \u201clegitimize our conduct,\u201d there is \u201cno excuse behind us, nor justification before us,\u201d for \u201cwe are alone\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
If Christianity is to go the way of the dinosaur, so too must natural law, natural rights, human rights, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and each and every one of our traditional moral ideals go this route, for without the theological gestalt <\/em>supplied by Christianity, these ideals are reduced to arbitrary human inventions.<\/p>\n This Christmas season, let the \u201cfree thinkers\u201d among us recognize that nothing that we take for granted\u2014including our thought\u2014is free.\u00a0 The price we pay for the goods we value is civilization, and for this civilization of ours we owe an eternal debt of gratitude to the very religion that too many of our \u201cfree thinkers\u201d are intent upon destroying.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A group that refers to itself as the \u201cArkansas Society of Freethinkers\u201d is not in the Christmas spirit.\u00a0 When it caught wind of the fact that Little Rock\u2019s Terry Elementary School had arranged for its students to attend a stage performance of \u201cA Charlie Brown Christmas\u201d at a local church, it began to eye the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n