Will The Atheists Plan Work - Road to the Middle Class

WHAT WITH Governor-elect Bobby Jindal’s win in Louisiana (yes, they are celebrating back at his village in India) and Dinesh D’Souza’s new book out his month, race manipulators may start to wonder if South Asians are becoming overrepresented somehow or other.

That’s what happened about a century ago when the immigrant Jews started becoming too eminent too quickly and turning up at the gates of Harvard.

But never mind about that. Let’s talk about D’Souza’s book instead.

Dinesh D’Souza’s book is called What’s So Great About Christianity. In an excerpt he wonders about the atheists’ grand plan to convert the masses.

The strategy can be described simply: let the religious people breed them, and we will educate them to despise their parents’ beliefs.

This is not new, of course. Schools and universities have been indoctrinating children in the wonders of the nation state for at least a couple of centuries. The Germans were a dab hand at that, creating a national school system in Prussia during the Napoleonic wars in order to rebuilt the German nation and beat back the French.

The question is: will it work? It’s all very well for the atheists to write all their books and prove that transcendental religion is a crock. What do they have to replace it, and can they learn from Chesterton’s warning that people who do not believe in God will believe in anything?

Elite atheism works rather well for people ensconced in prestigious university chairs. Secure financially and spiritually in the comfortable groves of academe their belief system need not extend further than the glory of reason and the divine, er, universal truth of academic tenure and freedom.

But ordinary people in the real world face terrors that the university professor can only begin to imagine. They need something a little more robust and a little more powerful than university secularism.

I went to Gluck’s opera Iphigenie in Tauris over the weekend. It’s a story about the revenge of the gods and the awful fate of princes of the blood—in this case Iphigenie and Orestes, the surviving children of Agamemnon.

The king of Tauris turns up at the temple of Diana (run by Iphigenie) in a terror lest the gods take revenge on him for his crimes—much like Al Gore runs around today warning of climate change if we don’t repent of our environmental crimes.

The solution to the king’s problem, he reckons, is sacrifice, preferably the sacrifice of any strangers turning up in Tauris, and he gives the job to Iphigenie. That should appease the gods—just like hybrid cars and low-energy light bulbs are recommended for saving the planet today.

Of course his grand plan gets ditched because the first stranger who turns up in Tauris is Orestes, Iphigenie’s brother. Iphigenie finds that she just can’t quite bring herself to sacrifice her own brother, especially since she hasn’t seen him for fifteen years.

Christianity has a rather different strategy. It turns the tables. Instead of human sisters sacrificing their human brothers, God does all the sacrificing instead, once for all, by sacrificing his Son.

And in this blood sacrifice. the greatest blood sacrifice of all time, God says that he forgives us humans for all our wicked ways.

It’s a truly remarkable concept, you’ll have to admit. God sacrifices his Son so we don’t have to sacrifice our own sons.

There’s an interesting corollary to God’s offer that will be obvious to all sensitive souls. If God forgives us, shouldn’t we forgive, in return, the mother-in-law and the others in our life who torment us?

I don’t know if the atheists have thought of this, but I would recommend that they gin up something similar. Otherwise their ingenious plan to indoctrinate our children might not work out.

People might start asking: What’s So Great About Atheism?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.