We're living in a void. So says Paul Kingsworth, and he has a point. Is the dominant culture pagan, secular or even atheist? Hardly, it's nothing at all, a void or vacuum in which Christianity is taken-for-granted-rejected and thus the West itself. Call it intellectual and cultural suicide if you like, call it nihilism, call it blasphemy LARPING as lib project freedom. Anyway, here's a snapshot:
In the West today, that means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing. Most significantly, we are now even ceasing to believe in the ideas which arose to replace all religions in the age of ‘Enlightenment.’ Reason, progress, liberalism, freedom of speech, democracy, the enlightened rational individual, the scientific process as a means of determining truth: everywhere, these ‘secular’ beliefs, which were supposed to replace religion worldwide, are either under fire or have already fallen too.
Is this an atheist age, then? In one obvious sense, yes. We are perhaps the first godless culture in human history. Religious cosmologies have differed vastly across time and space, but no society has ever existed without one. Ours has tried to, for a brief, violent and explosive time. I don’t think that time has long to run. So yes, we are living in an atheist age - and yet, at the same time, that’s not quite the full picture either.
Atheism, like religion, implies some sort of confidence; some sort of actual stance. A-theism is a position. It states: there is no God, and it can state that because it has a set of alternative beliefs, usually those which emerged from the European ‘age of reason’: the ability of science to demonstrate universal truth; the objectivity of rational thought; the knowability of reality. Atheism often also refuses religion on moral grounds: religions, it is said, are archaic, irrational, unjust and oppressive. Some version of ‘humanism’ is a better and fairer fit for the modern world.
All of these are positions. They are statements of faith in the world working in a certain way, and in the way that it should work, and should be arranged. Atheism can even amount to a quasi-religious system itself. Orthodox convert Seraphim Rose, formerly a committed atheist himself, once wrote that ‘atheism, true “existential” atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God.’
Does our age believe this? Hardly. These days even Richard Dawkins publicly regrets the results of the ignorant anti-Christian fatwa he helped to lead. They say they are no atheists in foxholes; I wonder how many of them there are in post-religious societies. What happens when the dedicated rationalist realises that his destruction of religious faith has not led to the triumph of reason but to its long sleep, which is producing, now, increasingly terrible monsters? So no, this is not an atheist age either. It is not, I would say, any kind of ‘age’ at all. It has no shape. It has no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is, taken in the round, simply a vacuum. There is nothing here at all.
You can read the whole thing here, and you should. In the meanwhile, we have to ask, what will fill the vacuum nature abhors? A renewed Faith and/or Satan? At the moment it's most definitely the latter, but we know how this clash ends. Curiously enough, at the Colosseum.
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