Caleb Anderson
Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over 30 years, 20 as a school principal.
Nietzsche, a non-Christian, warned that the dissolution of God would lead to nihilism and relativism. He once commented as follows.
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.”
(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)
Further, Nietzsche famously commented that, with the dissolution of the concept of God, there would ultimately be insufficient water to wash away the blood. The first half of the twentieth century makes Nietzsche's pronouncements look almost prophetic.
Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist has authored a monumental 1,500 page treatise titled "The Matter With Things" which is seen by many highly credible academics as perhaps the most significant book written in the last one hundred years. He writes on page 1292 as follows.
“When Solzhenitsyn asked himself what had given rise to the catastrophic brutalities of the twentieth century, his conclusion was that men had forgotten God.” In a speech in 1983, he repeated: “If I were called upon to identify the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and more pithy than to repeat once again: men have forgotten God.” More than this, a positive “hatred of God”, he thought, was the principal driving force behind the philosophy and psychology of Marxism-Leninism: (militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist Policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.” The hatred of God is indeed a fascinating phenomenon, one more and more evident in our time - and not just in political philosophies, but in the vox pop of media scientists.
(Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, page 1292)
So the birth of the post-modern cult, with its pantheistic, tribalistic, and naturalistic underpinnings, along with its pathological hatred of Christianity, might be more than it seems on the surface. Perhaps our desire to be accountable to none other than ourselves will be the seed of our ultimate demise.
And perhaps the principal drivers of the New Zealand left’s lurch toward nihilism and anarchy, reflect little more than this... the denial that a conscience (whether of divine or utilitarian origin) bears witness to the fact that there is a God (however you choose to conceive God), to whom we are accountable, and from whom we depart at an unimaginable cost.
Carl Jung stated emphatically that the things we should most fear reside within the deepest recesses of being. To Jung, the integration (not denial) of our individual and collective shadow (our darker side) was the only way to reconcile conflicts that had the potential to destroy humanity itself. Within each of us, and within every collective group, exists a cauldron of competing forces amenable only to something external, something that calls to a higher good, to a loftier purpose, to virtue.
This is not an attempt to proselytize at all, you can define terms as you choose, but Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn, Jung, McGilchrist, and an army of eminent others, are far from light-weight.
This is not about Christianity per se, it is about what happens when Christian morality is removed.
Good and evil exist. They compete within every human heart. The left-wing moral counterfeit, with its tribalism, its hatred for the religious, for any binding (and constraining) morality, for freedom of thought and speech, and for truth itself is not merely chaff, it is the incendiary device capable of bringing hell to earth.
And to revisit my opening quote...
“When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.”
(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols).
The hatred of God (nearly always wrapped in a panoply of pretend virtue) is indeed a most interesting phenomenon and, itself, not at all what it seems.
This article was originally published by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research.
