Year 2020: What can we do about these atheists?

Tui sunt caeli, et tua est terra, orbem terrarum, et plenitudinem eius tu fundasti: justitia et judicium praeparatio sedis tuae.[1]

Atheists like to think their views are grounded in facts and they mock those who believe in God. But they don’t start with facts at all. They start with their own act of belief that it is impossible that God exists: they believe in ‘no-God’. They embrace this as their guiding principle; then they go looking for facts to support it.

This belief system has its corollaries. The atheist thinks he has no need to look for an efficient cause (one that causes by acting) of his own being. He will happily admit that the computer at which he sits had such a cause—a number of them, in fact, working together—but will deny that need in respect of himself, even though he is an infinitely more complicated being than any computer. To the charge that his position is irrational he responds—

(1) that what applies to things made by human hands (artificial things) does not apply to the things found in the natural world; or

(2) that Darwin has shown that every element of every natural thing has reached its present state of development through evolution; or

(3) that he is entitled simply to accept the way things are and is under no duty to look further; or

(4) that belief in God involves submitting oneself to a tyranny its believers seek to impose on others and he will not suffer that imposition; or

(5) that belief in God may be true for those who choose it, but it is not true for those who don’t,

He finds support for his position in popular opinion, for a majority of people support his view and such a majority could not possibly be wrong.

It is easy to establish that not one of these arguments is grounded in reality but the atheist will not be persuaded even if you were to show him its defects. The reason is that the atheistic belief system does not depend on intellectual commitment so much as on a prejudice wilfully embraced. The atheist will not allow his intellect to consider any argument that contradicts it. He has closed his mind.

He is a true Gnostic, one possessed of a superior knowledge. He knows better than those who oppose him! In this he resembles Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin. And like Hitler in National Socialist Germany and Stalin in Communist Russia he wants to impose his belief system on the rest of the populace regardless of their objections. This is why atheists write that what the world needs to make it a better place is the banning of religion. It is why atheists have laboured so trenchantly to impose their moral system on the rest of us, first by getting an unthinking populace to accept it, then by persuading politicians—garrulous, morally ambivalent and easily intimidated—to impose it through legislative action, and finally by pushing to make it compulsory; three steps: acceptance; legislative imposition; compulsion.

Atheists are hypocrites, complaining of a tyranny by those who believe in God and ignoring the tyranny they themselves are in the process of seeking to impose.

There are three basic forms of government, monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. If a monarch misbehaves he can be removed, as can a defective oligarchy, though with greater difficulty. When a democracy goes awry, however, the corrective action required is much more radical because the voting populace itself has gone astray. It is frightening to realize that whereas National Socialism and Communism and the moral harm that resulted from their evil regimes were imposed on an unwilling populace by ideologues from without, the atheism of the modern world and its protocols have largely been adopted by the populace from within. The problem is not external to, but is at the heart of, our modern society.

There is an insignificant peak in the Victorian high country between Mt Speculation and Mt Howitt along the ridge known as The Crosscut Saw whose name, reflecting its utter uselessness as a destination, is known by Australia’s bushwalkers as Mt Buggery. If the word be taken as a generic term for useless sexual activity, the atheistic moral program might be categorized in a list from A to F as follows—

They are all in place in Australia as regards popular acceptance. They are almost all in place as regards legislative imposition: now comes the endeavour to make each compulsory.

The list is in alphabetical order. The ontological order of their operation is rather different. First comes Fornication (in which is to be included adultery), disordered sexual intercourse, which disposes to marital instability and Divorce. It was the ground of the primal collapse of Henry Tudor (Henry VIII) from moral principle and his abandonment of the Catholic faith. His ‘playing in the muck’ as Cardinal Wolsey puts it in Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons disposed him to attack his lawful marriage to Catherine of Aragon and have its dissolution acknowledged by the Commons. This led to the institution of legislatively sanctioned divorce, the systematic devaluation of marriage, and the immense social damage that has followed. The degradation of young men and women by the popular removal of sanctions against fornication destabilizes society by reducing the conjugal union of man and woman in marriage—a metaphysical union of two persons—to an issue of mere physical compatibility, drowning the formal in the material.

Contraception is, of course, a necessity if fornication is to become an institution, and the advances in technology which have been such a boon to us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have been garnered to streamline contraceptive effectiveness and entrench its ravaging mentality in the psyche. Most modern fiction, larded with passages of gratuitous fornication, assumes the acceptance of the mentality. And since chemical contraceptive devices are abortifacients the next step is inevitable.

The popular acceptance of Abortion signifies, more than any other of the moral evils promoted by the atheist, the blindness of people to ultimate moral principle and the common good. Abortion is in its very essence destructive of society—killing its new members at a whim. Hateful those who engage in it, wilfully forgetful of their own provenance; replete with rejection of the eternal character of the human person: a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance, it renders its proponents blind to the inevitable consequences. There is no need to look further to explain the upsurge in murders and violence in society that has occurred in the last thirty years.

And, if a majority can see no moral difficulty in murdering the unborn, it is but a small step to their seeking to justify the murder of the aged and infirm in Euthanasia. Of a piece is the toleration, even promotion, of suicide. Suicide is the logical end of the atheist who cannot distinguish the formal from the material. In suicide the atheist’s blindness brings him to his ultimate end; not annihilation—as he thinks—but face to face with that God whose existence he has spent a lifetime rejecting. It is matter that impedes knowledge. Bereft of his body in death there is nowhere for the atheist to hide. He finds himself confronted with the reality of his own existence. Too late he realises the truth that, since he did not bring himself into existence, he was quite incapable of taking himself out of existence. All he did in committing suicide was to speed the final confrontation with his Judge.

Which leaves us with Buggery—useless sexual activity—another branch of the sin of fornication; another abuse of the sexual powers but now in an unnatural setting; another sin that cries to heaven for vengeance.

In the course of debate in the New South Wales legislature that attended the passing of the Abortion Law Reform Act in October 2019 the Premier, Gladys Berejiklian said against those who opposed her, “I have the numbers”. What she and the members of her government do not have is power over the State’s weather.

The current drought is as bad as any previous, the extent of the bushfires surrounding Sydney unparalleled. Despite the massive size of its catchment area Sydney’s water supply is under threat. The city’s resident atheists and their fellow travellers continue to blame ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’. They give lip-service to concerns over the effects of the drought and the fires but have rejected the suggestion that the New Year’s Eve fireworks extravaganza should be abandoned and the millions earmarked for it devoted to relief of the thousands who are suffering. They have demonstrated here, too, the hypocrisy of the claim that the drought is an effect of ‘global warming’. If they were serious they would be leading the push to prevent the pollution resulting from the fireworks display.

No one links the meteorological chaos to the moral evils the State government has sanctioned, the institutionalized murder of the unborn, and the ‘buggers’ parade’ that fouls Sydney’s streets every year. Were one to suggest the physical evils we are suffering might be brought to an end if the government suspended the operation of that appalling abortion statute and the ‘gay mardi gras’ procession for twelve months he would be laughed to scorn. Sydney’s atheists would never sanction such a retreat. But what if the drought and the fires should continue until Sydney’s water supply had dropped to, say, 20% capacity? Do you not think that, under pressure from the people, they might not begin to have second thoughts about the certainty of their position?

So here we are in the Year of Our Lord 2020 beset with evils of which the moral are infinitely worse than the physical. We have no leaders to confront the atheistic drive towards destruction. The Catholic bishops have seemingly taken vows of silence to offset the vows they took to conduct themselves in imitation of the Apostles of whom they are nominally the successors. Any urging to moral principle comes largely from people who are not even Catholics, whose common sense is revolted by the atheistic nonsense. What are we to do?

In Lesson VIII of the Office of Matins for Christmas Day St Ambrose reminds us that God has ordained as shepherds of His flock not only bishops but angels. If the bishops have failed us it might be time to turn to the angels, the Prince of whom is St Michael—

This is behind my suggestion that we should pray and fast not for an ending of the troubles that afflict us but for their continuance in the hope that, in the working of God’s providence, this will serve to convert the atheists in our midst from their systematic stupidity.

Let us pray to the Queen of Apostles, too, that she may work the conversion of just one of our Catholic bishops from his moral apathy to give us leadership at this appalling time.

We have, moreover, a duty to pray for those who are effectively damned unless they abandon atheism’s mindless tenets and embrace God’s revelation. The Church’s prayer on the Feast of St Stephen is apposite—

Grant us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, so to imitate what we revere, that we may learn to love even our enemies: for we celebrate the heavenly birthday of him who knew how to pray for his very persecutors to Our Lord Jesus Christ: Who with Thee liveth and reigneth world without end. Amen

[1] Thine are the heavens and Thine is the earth ; the world and the fullness thereof Thou hast established : justice and judgement are the foundations of Thy throne. The extract is reproduced in the Offertory of the Third Mass on Christmas Day.

YEAR 2020:

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THESE ATHEISTS?