What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a God!
– Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

Can you have too many angels?

Man is a spiritual being, blessed with reason, born with a mind that knows right and wrong, gifted by the grace of God with a heart that’s capable of almost infinite love, and a soul that can know God himself. Whenever and however it was we came to this state, we are the beneficiaries of a special miracle as great as the very miracle of life itself.

We inhabit a Universe of majesty and cataclysm. Through an infinitesimal crack between death by fire and the infinite wilderness of frozen sterile worlds we have infiltrated ourselves into this awesome, harsh and beautiful place.

We understand we inhabit a universe containing within it forces of immense creation and destruction, magnificent and beautiful, but insensible and indifferent. We see the imperfection in our own natures and dimly comprehend what they are meant to be.

With acute sensitivity, we perceive the suffering of ourselves and all living things, caused by our own flaws, or by unfeeling natural forces. Against these we hold up the revelation we hold in our hearts of a state of perfect being.

The gap between the two can seem so cruel.

Man longs for perfection and love. But rather than grieve over the absence of these spiritual blessings, shouldn’t we see our very awareness of this gap of this need to be the greatest spiritual gift of all?

A baby is baby is born with a heart tuned to love. A child brought up in an environment with abundant love will want for no moral teaching.

Can you have too much love?

We stare upon the works of ancient Man — great constructions like pyramids and megaliths — and call these things ‘Wonders’. But what is there to wonder about them. They were made by Man. Blessed by infinite imagination, he imagines a particular project, studies how it ought to be done, then does it. Why does that surprise us?

It would be pretty surprising if they were constructed by monkeys.

Why do we look upon mere constructions and contraptions with wonder, but so often regard our fellow Man as if he is a beast. ‘There are too many humans in that country’ some say, like a farmer discussing grazing livestock.

This is one of the pernicious lies that follow from Darwinism, that men and women are somehow just very smart animals. I don’t dispute the general outlines of the evolutionary process as, but there is very little philosophical truth to be derived from this mundane theory.

In some respects, it is a easy mistake to make for a higher animal, because of the effect we have on the animals. Man is so full with the gifts of heart and mind, that they seem to overflow his being and fill the creatures around us. Our pets learn love and loyalty from us. Some curious monkeys even learn language from us.

Even the inanimate objects we use start to seem alive.

This is as it should be. This is part of our mission here, to rule fondly over nature.

And we do it well. We have a natural desire to care for beast and plant. The kept tigress trusts her keeper but not the males of her own kind. We make homes for the untamed beasts by protecting the wild and beautiful places. We landscape our cities and suburbs into beautiful gardens, rarer and richer even than the rainforest.

An old lady tends the roses and puts out a bowl of milk for the cat.

There can never be too many men and women in the world.

Man is a spiritual being.

Just like an angel.

Can you have too many angels?

(cross-posted in littletinsoldier.net)

What people call ‘atheism’ these days is specifically materialistic atheism. Certain Buddhists, for example, claim to be atheist — not believing in an all-powerful God — but they nonetheless understand that Man has a soul (which they believe to be immortal); that there is a spiritual dimension underpinning life; and so on. What sets modern, materialistic atheism utterly apart is that it states that the material world is the only dimension of reality; that all aspects of life, thought, emotion and the world are entirely material or physical.

This what the materialist atheists consider to be a scientific point of view.

I want to emphasise a point I touched on previously. The idea — as expressed by the communists and others — that the moral underpinnings of secular Humanism (at least the anti-religious version), are simply bourgeois sentimentality, and that in secular Humanism or in any philosophy constructed on a foundation of materialist atheism, the logical end result is the Holocaust and the Killing Fields.

Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens would deny this strenuously. In fact, they both claim that neither Hitler nor Stalin were atheists in the true sense — for example I have it argued by atheists that Hitler was some sort of Pagan mystic, and that Stalin drew his world view from some corrupted Chritian notions he picked up in Childhood.

(This is in fact classic Socialist doublespeak — wherein whatever wrongs the Party does are immediately imputed upon the other side, of which the offenders are then said to be agents. I believe Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens are revealing something of themselves they might prefer hidden.)

Mr Dawkins argues that atheism was ‘incidental’ to Hitler, but the truth is, it is Secular Humanism itself which is inconsistent with materialistic atheism. Marxism, Nazism and mass murder are the logical and inevitable consequence of the philosophy of atheist materialism.

Now, the typical atheist will immediately object. In the West, this person is usually a ‘me first’ sort of person, and in most cases the basis of their belief is nothing more than ‘I can’t see it so it doesn’t exist’ (’If a tree falls in a forest and I wasn’t there to see it, did it make a sound?’). So, this person will become annoyed if confronted with the statement that atheism leads to genocide and mass murder. He or she will argue that ‘I am not like that, nor my atheist friends, therefore the argument is preposterous.’

And it’s natural that he or she would be offended, so please let me assure him or her, that I am not suggesting he or she is a Nazi Brownshirt. What I am saying is that, in the communist vernacular, he or she is a sentimental or ‘decadent’ Bourgeois, who has an attachment to traditional morality logically inconsistent with their philosophical outlook — a characteristic the ‘heroes’ of Socialism understood very well, hence their scorn and hostility to middle class ‘’reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries’, even those who regarded themselves as Socialists.

This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.
–Che Guevara

(Let me hasten to add, I am no friend of the communists. If you find yourself in the sad position of having been persuaded an evil philosophy such as materialistic atheism is true, having a moral code that is inconsistent with it is not a bad thing.)

As I argued previously, atheism taken to its logical conclusion leads to a nihilistic disregard for human life and human exceptionality; and the subsequent license to murder and destroy. That most Western middle class atheists (to their credit) do not embrace this is a result of their upbringing, the social surroundings and habits, and sadly it will diminish over time (rapidly on a generational scale). There is no logical philosophical basis in materialistic atheism for the values our society holds dear, its ‘progressive’ and godless middle class included. They are just a product of affinity to those we most encounter (’people like us’).

I would say this to materialistic atheists: it’s a mistake to open this Pandora’s Box. You feel wise and knowledgeable when you broadcast to the world the foolishness of the old ways, and your great superiority in intellect and reasoning. You see this as the clear light of reason, a gift for young and old.

But cast far, this seed will land in hearts and lives very different from your own, and the results will not be what you predict. The evidence for this is that it has happened numerous times before. When you broadcast your message to the world, the young and impressionable, the disillusioned, the lost — that there is no God; and that Man has no soul and knows of no truths other than what he constructs for himself — not everyone is going to embrace this philosophy in the half hearted manner of the Western Bourgeois

Not everyone is going to put their mind into this brave new world of pure freedom, but keep their heart in the altruistic moral order of times past.

Sentimentality is a product of comfort. What will happen when this philosophy finds as its raw material those who have grown up ouside the cocoon — the timid Georgian boy whose childhood was a constant torment of fear; the poor Austrian small town boy, impoverished and humiliated in an imperial capital full of privileged elites? What when these men, grown to manhood, their souls shaped by the influence of their harsh life experience refracted through a philosophy of spiritual nihilism?

Bred outside the cocoon, outisde the middle class comfort zone, what attachment will these men have for middle class values?

When they arrive, with their armies of lost and twisted souls, will you be the first to recoil in shock and dismay as they work out the implacable logic of a soulless world?

Will you be the first to cry ‘why me?’, as they line you up for elimination.

‘You called us forth,’ they will say. ‘Why do you cry out?’

Will you then also cry out “Oh, God, no!”

‘Too late to call for God’, they will say. ‘God is dead.’

…and who killed Him?

Richard Dawkins — erstwhile captain of a veritable army of lost souls — has posted an extensive interview with Pastor Mark Roberts, the renowned New Testament scholar

…and a wonderful interview with Professor Alister McGrath.

(Concerning the Alistair McGrath interview, it needs to be noted that this was omitted from Mr Dawkins TV series “Root of All Evil”. I watched some of that disappointing series — a cynic might say this excellent interview with a great Christian intellectual was excluded because didn’t fit Mr Dawkins’ Mike-Moore-esque style of pseudo-documentary film-making.

This is what I had to say on Mr Dawkins’ comments page:

Mr Dawkins, you’re certainly right when you say that Christianity is more rational than atheism. Despite the archaic poetry it uses to express itself, there is a level of understanding in the Bible that no materialistic philosophy can approach.

As you pointed out, the proof of this is that the logical outcome of a purely materialistic atheistic ‘cult’ belief is profoundly at odds with what we we intuitively know to be true and right. Whereas Christian thought, despite its unfashionable tendency towards mysticism and an understanding that certain things cannot be understood on our plane of being (hence the need for Faith), is both logical; internally consistent; and, most importantly, consistent with our experience of the world (not to mention our experience of the presence of God, but sadly most of your readers have been denied that that).

I guess atheism is just too solipsistic to have anything useful to offer. The idea that just what ‘I’ can see and touch is enough to know the universe — apart from being philosophically risible — is so grossly unscientific that the rational mind rebels with the heart.

Thanks for your link to Dr Roberts web site. There is some very interesting material there. Isn’t it extraordinary to realise that by all objective standards the New Testament is actually the most reliable document to reach us from ancient times!

Thanks again Mr Dawkins, and I’m delighted that you have found Christ at last after all these years.

They f– you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

…

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don’t have any kids yourself.

–Philip Larkin (This Be The Verse)

That poem (it’s short there’s only one other verse) is brutal and brilliant. It’s not true, of course, but it’s painfully honest. It cuts through whole libraries worth of modern verbiage and lays out one of the central theses of our times like a bloody human heart slapped down on a butcher’s shop counter.

Billions of people weep oceans over this simple misapprehension. That something happened to them to make them to make them sad. Because this psychic sadness is so universal, we conclude — logically but erroneously — that it must be a consequence of the experience all adult humans have shared; our childhood.

This lie — that our parents have ‘f–ed us up’ — ruins lives, it divides families, it murders the bond of love between parent and child. As the poem suggests, it drives people to agony, solitude and suicide.

Some bear this grudge inwardly, some proclaim it like a religion, but it’s all a lie. It’s just about the worst lie in the world.

I’m a born-again, fundamentalist Christian, but I’m also a terrible heretic, so I draw many of my conclusions about God and Man from other religions, none more so than the noble philosophy of Buddhism.

Before he became Buddha, ‘the one who has seen the light’, his name was Siddhattha Gotama and he was an Indian prince. He had everything, as you may know, palaces, pleasure gardens, a beautiful childhood. He had love, luxury and all the pleasures of family and court. Enough to guarantee happiness in any young man.

But he left it all behind and spent long years seeking he knew not what, because deep in his heart there was a great unfulfilled longing.

As it happens, a revelation regarding this aspect of human experience is one of the foundation stones of Christianity, the Story of the Garden of Eden. This is not a myth or folk tale, it is a mystical riddle of great philosophical and spiritual profundity.

And, as we fundamentalists will tell you, it’s pure literal truth.

We are all spiritual beings fallen from our heavenly Father’s side. We inherit pain and sadness in this world, but we don’t inherit from anyone. We don’t inherit it from our parents, our culture, from oppression by some other class or people, from capitalism, from religion, from advertising, from war, or from any other worldly thing.

We are beings who have tasted perfection and now we born flawed and ugly in a material universe defined by calamity and death.

We inherit our pain and sadness from a time before the world. From an event — if it was an event — that we are no longer perfect enough to comprehend.

Oh dear ones, cry for your lost innocence.

Just don’t blame Mummy and Daddy for it.

It’s all over the news of course — Dawkins, Hitchens, ‘religion is superstition’, ‘there is no god but Reason’, you know the sort of thing.

It’s grimly amusing to see these atheists, in trying to twist facts to suit their theories, categorise Nazism and Communism as forms of religion, in order to inflate their case that religion is the cause of the world’s woes. What all these godless beliefs — atheism, Nazism, Communism, Jacobinism, Greenism, you name it — have in common, is that they are philosophically materialistic.

One of the characteristic delusions of the materialist is that they think they can find a materialistic means to fix the faults of Man. You know how it goes:- Things can be made perfect… …if only we can change how people think, …if only we can eliminate this superstitious belief, …if only we can liquidate this class of people, …if only we can exterminate this race.

One of the things that first drew me towards Christ (a long journey), was realising that, behind its archaic expressive style, the Bible holds a more accurate, insightful and enlightened understanding of humans and human nature than any amount of Darwinism or Psychology.

The Bible explains that Man is imperfect, and no amount of self-improvement or social engineering can fix him. No amount of murdered class enemies, or race enemies, or evolutionary rejects can be enough to fix Man. If you could reach into his heart and mind and set every dial to the ideal, he would still be imperfect. And the Devil would still be out there waiting to tempt him.

The Bible explains all this. Despite its ancient poetry, it is still the authority on the soul of Man.

Incidentally, Dawkins, Hitchens and their kind never properly describe anything close to Christian belief. They paint a picture of a superstitious pagan-style deity — the ‘invisible friend’ or ‘the macaroni monster’, ‘the old man in the sky’ — and then say ‘how absurd’. Well, I agree. There are no false gods with flowing beards living on Mt Olympus or anywhere.

But that also goes for the false gods of our new ruling class — the gods of Reason, Science, The Self, The Environment, Freedom– or the king of all the new gods, Politics. These false gods truly are what their followers claim, human constructions with no existence outside our own imaginations.

But as King David said,’My soul thirsteth for the living God’. The Bible teaches that God is mysterious, His nature unknowable, that life and all things come are of Him and from Him. This is the enlightened truth. And the more I learn of the universe — with its multitude of miraculous coincidences, its intelligent and self-organising nature, its simplicity and complexity; and the more I see of living things, how exceptional and unbound Life is by the laws of the material world; the more logical and obvious seem the philosophies of true religion, and the more sadly benighted those of the materialist.

With this, I know every free thinking reader will agree.

The word ‘fundamentalist’ has no meaning, and when the world starts accusing Christians on the basis of fundamentalism it merely shows they have run out of arguments.

There is no meaningful similarity between Born Again Christians and terrorists — they are evil, cruel, deluded, murdering monsters; we are righteous, loving, pro-life and enlightened. The number of terrorists and fanatics who claim to derive their motivation from Christian belief is so vanishingly small — vastly less than the percentage of the violently mentally ill (proof in itself of the healing power of Christ) — that not even the continuous glare of media spotlight can make it seem otherwise.

So, experts in deceit as they are, the Left coined the term ‘Christian fundamentalist’ and, over-accommodating as always, we find ourselves debating it.

What meaningful definition can fundamentalism have?

Does it mean people with a simplified understanding of their religion or philosophy? If so, given that half of the believers of any religion will be, by definition, people of below average intelligence, this is just ivory tower scorn, unfit for discussion.

Does it mean people who believe something deeply and sincerely, perhaps lacking sufficient modernist angst and post-modern irony? If so, it’s nothing but a trite fashion statement.

Christians and terrorists have nothing in common; but terrorists, Communists, militant atheists and such have much in common — they are all amoral, unrighteous and anti-life. To highlight this similarity no new words are required. There are familiar words — ‘evil’ for one — that describe it perfectly.

I had lunch with Luke and Martha the other day.

I like Luke and Martha a lot, they’re lovely people and great committed Christians who’ve dedicated the best part of their lives to Christ and to ministry. We disagree on one or two issues, and unfortunately — prompted by Al Gore staring at us from the cover of ‘The Melbourne Anglican’ — our conversation immediately turned to the most contentious of these, the supposed problem of ‘Human Induced Climate Change’.

I began to explain the reasons why the correlation between human activities and observed climatic variations is at best an extremely speculative and unlikely theory, and at worst a deliberate fabrication — an outright lie — but we were unable to engage in any interesting debate of the topic, because merely questioning this theory was making Luke and Martha angry.

Their reaction: horror and pity, that curious combination heretics against any of the doctrines of the times quickly get used to.

To change the subject

So I changed the subject, which is what I’m about to do here.

Despite us being friends there is no prospect of me convincing Luke or Martha any time soon even to listen to any of the arguments against the Human Induced Climate Change doctrine, let alone to seriously consider whether the theory could be false. And if I can’t persuade my friends, certainly I can’t persuade a reader of this story, so I won’t try.

But there is one point that I would invite readers to consider, especially those — which is probably most people these days — who believe humans are destroying the Earth.

During our conversation, Martha said something I think was very telling. She said (and I’m paraphrasing this rather roughly from memory) that as Christians we need to accept that humans have to take responsibility for the effect we have on the planet. She stated this is supported by scripture — because God made us stewards of the world.

Presented cleverly, as it always is presented cleverly (not to mention passionately, fashionably, incessantly, ubiquitously and continuously from early childhood onward), the Green philosophy can appeal to Christians. It seems to connect with so many things we know to be true, that God placed us over the rest of Creation, but that Man is fallen and contaminated by evil, and so we must control our innately destructive nature.

But this is a subtle and seductive alteration to Christian wisdom. By rewriting the Genesis revelation into an environmentalist narrative, it transposes the spiritual message of the Bible into a purely materialistic plane — a plane in which God is absent.

And it is immensely seductive. I was there too. I also grew up with the songs, the books, the movies, the slogans. ‘Where will the children play?’ ‘We have to get ourselves back to the garden.’ ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.’

I love all that stuff!

But it’s not my religion.

Please consider this

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

There is an ancient spiritual belief that sees man as an inherently negative being, whose very existence is destructive, a blot, an insult to God and an assault on God’s creation, but it is not the Christian view.

Christians know that Man is fallen, but that he is also a higher spiritual being, and is also saved. Man has wedded his higher nature, his intellectual gifts, with love for God’s creation curiosity for the secrets of creation.

Man — divorced from God — gave us Communism, Nazism, the Mongol Horde and the French Revolution.

But Man is also he who has solved world hunger (although not yet the deeper problem of tyranny). Man is he who currently drives disease from the world like a routed enemy fleeing before a victorious army. Beasts kill and rend each other without conscience. Man is the only one whose heart cries out in love for all living beings. Man doesn’t pollute like the beasts who drop their waste on the ground. Man is he who replants the forests, who constructs great projects of public health and welfare. He devotes the power of his intellect to improve the well being of human, animal and plant. It is he who created a garden where there was wilderness; in the Nile valley, the two rivers, the terraces of Asia, and in the beautiful, green and leafy suburbs of every Western city.

Man tends the roses and sweeps the driveway.

Man is he who built a whole culture on the bond of family love, and the spiritual quest for righteousness (for what are freedom and justice if not manifestations of righteousness).

This is the Christian understanding of Man, made in the image of God.

If you want to get metaphysical, there is one who says ‘Man is that low creature of dust and clay, unworthy of God and unfit to rule God’s creation’. That being is Iblis the proud!

Think about this.

I don’t ask you to deny your dearly held beliefs on Human Induced Climate Change or even throw away your Joni Mitchell albums (I kept mine), but just give some thought the philosophical assumptions that underlie such theories, and consider how much of what is believed about Man’s influence on the environment is simply premised on these assumptions rather than proven by solid evidence.

The rest will follow.

Update:

Ezra comments:

Technology isn’t a neutral thing which is self evidently good. It’s morally qualified by the philosophical commitments of those who use it.

My reply:

Technology is an abstract term, so necessarily generalised statements about it will rapidly break down in specifics. Furthermore, I agree that philosophical commitment — as one aspect of spiritual awareness, the essential component of a meaningful life — is very important. Wicked tyrants can twist any good thing to evil purposes, as the Communists have proven on countless occasions.

Even then, however, the tyrants who deny the benefits of technology to their people — such as the Maoists, with Pol Pot their most infamous example, Saddam Hussein withholding food and medicine to his population, or the many Communist slave-masters who ground their people down to near mediaeval subsistence — cause harm more often than the technologically sophisticated exceptions like the Nazis, although with the latter the power of technology makes them more lethal.

But such abominations aside, is starvation a moral good? Or disease? Or childhood mortality or premature death? Perhaps an extreme Green would see these as necessary, justified or even righteous, but no sane individual. What about destitution? Ignorance? Unfulfilled potential?

Technology represents the fruits of Man’s intellectual gifts — given to him by God. And on balance it is indeed an enormous moral good, both to ourselves and ultimately all living things.

The man above (standing in front of the bookcase) is Professor Peter singer, the man who preaches infanticide, who teaches that if it suits their doctors or guardians, infants can be regarded as less than animals.

When the Nazis began the large scale extermination of the Jews, Heinrich Himmler (who himself was made physically sick by the things his men did) famously gave a speech to those of his SS troops who were then tasked with those abominable deeds, telling them they must suppress their natural human responses to what they were about to do — their feelings of horror and revulsion — because Reason demanded that the Jews must be exterminated.

The Iblis Pill

Among those who died in the camps were Professor Singer’s grandparents.

And yet the lesson the Professor Singer has taken from the Nazi Holocaust is not that the post-Christian, secular, atheist, materialist West had lost its soul, but that the West was not post-Christian enough, that there was still too much human emotion ruling our affairs, indeed that it was emotion itself that caused the Holocaust.

That Reason would save us. The same Reason that had marched us through the slave trade, the French Revolution, Marxism, the Gulag, Eugenics, Nazism, the Final Solution, the Killing Fields…

We had spent our 400 years in the wilderness. This time, Reason would lead us to the promised land.

Evil begets evil, perhaps the pain of such a personal loss — and such a profound loss of power — has produced a man with the overpowering desire to possess that power.

But no, the truth is that the highly intelligent are so often the greatest fools, the most easily seduced. He’s just a stupid man, in love with his own brilliance, who’s taken the Iblis Pill.

A few nice links from one of my current favourite Blogs, Ali Eteraz, who has a nice mix of Islamic matters and politics.

He has a link to a translation of Surah Rahman from the Koran, which I think most Christians would enjoy.

He also has an interesting piece on ‘Iblis the Jinn’.

Iblis was the jinn who prior to the creation of man was a faithful and virtuous being. His piety was such that he spent an infinity of worship upon every square foot of the universe, and where he bowed he left roses blooming in the night. (more…)

A third time he returned to Ravenna. Again he was captured, hacked with knives, had scalding water poured over his wounds, was beaten in the mouth with stones because he persisted in preaching, and then, loaded with chains, was flung into a horrible dungeon to starve to death;
…
Apollinaris was kept concealed for some time, but as he was passing out of the gates of the city, was set upon and savagely beaten, probably at Classis, a suburb, but he lived for seven days…
From Catholic Encyclopaedia, linked in ‘The Fury of the Pagans’ at fathersofthechurch.com

This is what the old pagans were like. Enraged by the preaching of the truth, they were possessed of a murderous fury and sought to destroy Christ’s followers with great cruelty and brutality.

We have an exact match for them in our time; the followers of the many cults of godless Materialism. They think and behave the same. They consider themselves sophisticated and enlightened, just as the citizens of Greece and Rome did, but the brutality committed by these cults, most obviously Socialism, perfectly corresponds to (and often vastly exceeds) the savagery of the idolators of the ancient world.

These are the pagans of our time, the enemies of God and Truth. Throughout the world, and the last several centuries, these cults have gone by many names. But in our time the most common are; Socialists, Feminists and Greens.

The Earth Worshipers want to define humans as a plague, the Darwinists want to define us as beasts, the Eugenicists want to eliminate the weak among us as if we were livestock, the Feminists want to break down family bonds and the Socialists to rebuild us all as New Socialist Man.

They hate God and they hate God’s followers. They can’t imprison, torture and murder Christians here as their ideological brethren do in China and North Korea. But they are nevertheless possessed by fury and hatred by the preaching of Christ’s truth. They oppose the truth at every turn, and devise strategies for the spreading of lies — the favourite strategy, just as it was in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, being the indoctrination of the young.

We shouldn’t blame them. Their ideas have led them into the arms of the great deceiver and the great seducer. And we shouldn’t fear them. The Paganism of Rome and Greece was overthrown by Christian truth, and the same will happen in our time.

However, we most definitely should not be seduced ourselves by these destructive cults.

One thing I’ve noticed recently, is Christians who will imply the great philosophies of the East are a form of Paganism that must be rejected, and yet they embrace the beliefs of the actual pagan cults right here among us. They lift Feminist, Green and Socialist idols onto the alter of Christ and into first place in their hearts.

Now, I don’t much understand the relationship between the Eastern philosophies — Confuncianism and Buddhism in particular — and God, but I know these great philosophies don’t support the death-dealing beliefs of the pagan cults. And I know the eternal enemy knows and fears God’s truth, And under the Socialist tyrannies of Asia, Buddhism is persecuted as aggressively as Christianity.

Christ commanded us to be guileless like little children, to judge the tree by its fruit. ‘Those who have eyes, let them see,’ he said. We must see things as they are, not as words would make them.

To condemn the followers of a noble truth-seeking philosophy — like Buddhism — because we call it by the name of religion, and yet to embrace an evil cult — such as Socialism or Feminism — because we call it by the name of science or philosophy, is not to see real things as they really are, but to be blinded by logical illusions of our own creation.