The Ultimate Delusion And Why The Left Is Defeated

There have been no takers, so far, in my ongoing challenge to atheists to identify where in their atheist universe they find equal rights which are real, inherent to all and inalienable by the means which atheists use to dispose of those entities they don't like and which cannot be made to conform to their radically reduced and restrictive materialist universe.  Neither have they tried to do the even harder thing under atheism, come up with a durable, effective moral obligation to act in respect of those rights in other people, especially when acting morally costs something.

In thinking about politics, liberal politics, over the past decade the entire program of civil rights, of human rights rests, inevitably, basically and necessarily on the reality of those things, without those being really believed in and acted on, liberalism is impossible.  A left without those is no better than the right, as the history of allegedly leftist atheist governments in the 20th century but, also, going back to the French Revolution proves beyond any reasonable doubt.

The major theme of the 20th century could be summed up as the test of time given to politics as if those metaphysical holdings were not really real or not real at all.  It is among the things which both fascism and Marxism held in common, in reality and, to a large extent, as an ideological base.  It is the means by which capitalism tramples over the rights of people.  When rights are merely a matter of social convention and an agreed to myth instead of an absolute and real entity in life, their unequal distribution is a given as no aristocrat, oligarch or member of the military-political-judicial elite will do without freedoms which they will deny to most other people.   The denial of the reality of rights and the moral obligation to observer them equally and impartially is what all of those have in common with the reality of the alleged democracies of the West.

This issue really matters in life in the most basic way, to deny that is pathologically delusional.  Any political ideology or philosophical position that can't produce them within itself is dangerous.  That is especially true of monistic ideologies such as materialism, the ideology of almost all atheists. Under monist systems of thought, nothing that can't be found within it and made to conform entirely to its totalitarian system is deemed to be unreal, belief in it, delusional.  When, as under materialism and the promotion of atheism through alleged science, the objective reality those ideas and the basis of human consciousness they depend on, are denied using the faith most people have in anything asserted to be science, it is especially corrosive of rights and, so extremely dangerous.   If a politician said what Richard Dawkins said about morality in River Out of Eden, they would be known to be dangerous to life and freedom we would readily identify them as a dangerous figure:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

But promoting that idea as scientific truth is just one step back from its use in politics and the law. The Nazis, fascists, the Marxists all gave scientific reasons as the truth on which they constructed their ideologies and policies and practices.   The Nazi genocide was, at every step, justified by using biological science and the purported science of economics.   During The God Delusion book tour Dawkins asked:

Well, what if I'm wrong, I mean — anybody could be wrong. We could all be wrong about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the pink unicorn and the flying teapot.

What could go wrong if people believed what he said in the first quote is written in the history and the criminal indictments of the Marxist, fascist and Nazi regimes of the past century with their scores and hundreds of millions of murders, in the practices of imperialism, both in its military conquest form and its rapacious forms using trade agreements, concessions, international corporations, banking and the international and national systems to crush large numbers of people and the environment.  Those political, economic and military entities act in a way that betrays their real and effective belief in the materialist doctrine, no matter what their pretended ideals and purposes are.  That view of life is inescapable in the total inability of materialism, of atheism, to produce purpose, good, evil of which rights and morality are made,  Such a view will produce, especially for those unconnected with our experience "blind pitiless indifference."   The widespread, nearly ubiquitous behavior by individuals, societies, governments and international organizations out of pitiless indifference proves that its prevention and opposition requires an enormous force which atheism will never provide. That force isn't an act of will, it is an act of moral choice which is frequently a struggle against what is willed.   The gate to depravity is far wider than the one to morality. Acting out of pitiliess indifference when we can profit from it is easy and attractive, caring and considering what we are doing to other people, to animals, to the environment is hard and always comes at a cost.  Liberalism is harder than conservatism for that reason, the reason that liberalism starts with an inborn hurdle to jump, hobbling liberalism with materialism makes its struggle impossible.

That huge numbers of people on the alleged left don't see that for what it really is accounts for the total failure of the dereligionized substitute for a real left we've got today and which we've mostly had since about 1968.   Materialism is probably the most dangerous ideology which has ever been devised no matter what name it hides behind these days.  With those hardest of hard lessons of the 20th century and up till today, denying that reality is the ultimate delusion.