Replacing God’s Inner and Outer Comfort

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explaining numinosity, extended family, nanny state, secular alteratives, social safety net, stressing individuality, traditional religion, wanting security

God once provided both physical security and inner comfort. Now our needs are divided between the state and psychology. (Photo: public domain)

When Christianity was strong in the West, the concept of God answered both the need for external physical protection and the interior need for something to account for that sense of the numinous most of us sense now and then. That is, God was, at the same time powerfully immanent in the cosmos and the comforting “God within our bosoms.” One could say that God was continuous across a boundary of objective outer and subjective inner life. People quite naturally felt a greater kinship with the world – or even the cosmos, if one included the crude conceptualization of the heavens extant at the time. Everything, including the human race was part of God’s Creation. The concept of the individual was not particularly well-developed.

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Why the West Is Falling Apart

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bankruptcy, deficits, disunity, ethnic, minorities, nanny state, politics, separatism, Socialism

A preoccupation with ethnicity, minorities, and differences erodes national identities based on what a people have in common. (Photo: public domain)

A striking feature of socialist Europe is the proliferation of separatist movements. Growing numbers in Northern Ireland want to split from the UK and found a new nation called Ulster. Nationalists in Scotland want independence. Belgium’s Flemings (the Dutch) want independence and some Walloons (the French) have responded with a proposed state of their own (you cannot fire me, I quit!). Denmark’s Faroe Islands and Greenland both have independence movements. In France, there are separatist rumblings in Brittany, Corsica, and the Basque country. Catalonia has recently expressed its displeasure with being part of Spain. Germany’s Bavaria gets restless now and then. In fact, there are many such movements within most European countries, although not all of them must be taken seriously.

Natural Selection Works on Societies

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Darwinian evolution, falling birthrates, feminism effects society, individuality impairs society, nanny state, socialism damage, societal adaptation, western civilization

Humans are much less subject to evolutionary pressures at the individual level. Those forces now apply at the level of society.

In nature, Darwinian evolution works at the level of individual creatures as they compete to survive and procreate. The process is ruthlessly simple and incredibly effective. Those individuals who leave behind the most offspring become the norm for their species. This is what we call “survival of the fittest.” On the surface, then, it would seem that the stress we humans place on individuality is the right thing to do; at least from a strict Darwinian perspective. Assuming we each make of our own brief lives what we can, evolution will select the most successful among us, and the species will prosper.

Remember that those with the most children are the most successful. Like it or not, there are no other rules.

Socialism Tramples Unpopular Minorities

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abuses of democracy, government as weapon, herd mentality, individual rights, loss of freedom, nanny state, oppressive majority, personal empowerment, voting blocks

Who shall we trample next? Socialism allows majority voting blocks to use government as a weapon against minorities. (Image: Public Domain Pictures)

More than ever before, people gleefully identify with and join “the herd.” I believe a lust for power in an age when individuals feel helpless drives this rapacious enthusiasm for joining the “majority.” Socialism is the major contributing factor here. When socialist democracies (and all Western nations are socialist democracies) espouse the idea that any majority has the right to control the property, money, and behaviour of any minority, it inevitably elevates herd thinking and values to the status of duly enacted law. The herd votes