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- I Give Up: History Wins
I Give Up: History Wins
Last updated on: October 1, 2015 at 7:54 am by John Mark N. Reynolds
I Give Up: History Wins 2015-09-30T00:02:40-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds
Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.
History always wins and those who stand against the dialectical truth that comes from the interplay of ideas will be left on the dustbin of the past.
I see this now and I am sorry to have ever opposed the arc of history. A man might as well stand against the tide with a sand castle as oppose history. We cannot just react. The intellectual class knows we have failed and stands critical of what has been. Those who have been most successful in this system, cossetted by the university system, have seen the corruption of the system.
Our best novelists condemn what we have been and demand we do better than we have. We are failures in the eyes of the intellectual elites. Our university students, particular our leading schools, have created a generation critical of the old truths. The arts flourish, but only because the mild oppression of our corrupt elites provide the perfect foil for our creative class. Meanwhile the masses are placated by “bread and circuses.”
We are stuck with a constitution written by reactionaries who were mentally from another time. We cannot go forward shackled by paper chains that prevent the solutions that modernity demands. The past is dead and allowing it to limit us will kill us.
I should have grasped my failure when most young people rejected the ideas of my own childhood. Young people are passionate for truth in our era. Technology has made it impossible for them to accept the old truths. One cannot simply repeat the old ideas when media allows them to hear ideas from all over the world with the speed of sound.
Younger people are tired of being told “no” when “no” cannot be supported by science. We are animals and as animals can see that the old rules are just priest craft used to repress natural desires. What is natural is not what humans should do, but what they do. We cannot study “should” in a lab, should is a word for priests, but only “is.” For this generation “is” and “ought” must be the same because we are not going to take the sexual repression of their parent’s generation.
Besides, the best of religion always said what the Spirit of Youth feels today.
Poverty and social injustice permeate the system. We prop it up with our votes for legislators who talk and talk, but do nothing. Business leaders enrich themselves and our great economic growth only points to the disparity. The rapid spread of literacy and higher education means that people cannot accept the growth of inequality that comes with the spread of obscene wealth.
The middle class has greater creature comforts than ever and access to more information. This means that the establishment cannot satisfy, but also that to any thoughtful person an odious, complacent middleclass morality has arisen.
Politicians who represent the left or the right of the middle are only the Tweedledum or Tweedledee of a dying establishment. We need more radical choices, stronger leaders, and a willingness to face the truth: science has made religion a folly in the modern world. If we can simply spread the word, get the truth to every town through attractive presentations of atheism, people will get it.
We must trust people.
Comrade Lenin is leading us to an inevitable, brighter, secular future. Atheism and science will tell us how we should live. What could go wrong?
History is with us.
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