Below is my only slightly-edited reply to “Eli”, who kindly sent a comment on my first Podcast: “The Four Stages of Liberalism,” which is posted on this website. On re-reading my own reply, I would say that in a very short space it sums up the conclusion to which I have come with respect to mutations in the deep-ideology of the West. The “libertarian-socialism” I explain in my podcast is the most recent aspect of that mutation.
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“Hello Eli. Thx for sharing your thoughts. Hard to answer all this in short space. But The deepest analysis I can manage is this:
The decline of the Christian religion and belief in the Kingdom of Heaven – perfect justice – in an afterlife, is still with us. But no longer in a theological form. God has left the building, so to speak. But all the hard-wiring remains.
So all those formerly and feverishly expecting justice in the Afterlife, are demanding it here and now, in this world, rather than in the next. This is called the “secularization thesis,” whereby the idealistic, justice-seeking left strives to create the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, because they no longer believe it is waiting for them in Heaven.
Hence, the West has put itself thru a couple of centuries of “expectational” radical politics and has slaughtered untold millions of people who resisted their perfect justice on earth story. Sad to say, The root of the revolutionary spirit in the West, has arisen from a secularization of the Christian ethos. Who would ever have guessed?
The root of the Western Civilization’s secularization lies within the ‘Protestant Reformation’. The reformation was a revolution against the God given apostolic authority of the Catholic Church, this revolution was followed by the ‘enlightenment’, a series of republic revolutions from 1688 to 1822 against the traditional authority of European monarchies.
The republican revolutions of the enlightenment were followed by scientific, industrial, and Marxist revolutions. It is in Marxism and its derivatives that atheistic, materialistic, and hedonistic ideologies and mentalities arise. A revolution against God and nature. This gives rise to the ‘sexual’ and ‘feminist’ revolutions bring us to the synthesis of radical egalitarianism and radical individualism found in the manifest evil of modern liberalism.
The decline of Christianity is actually the decline of Protestantism. Protestantism is a contradictory, heretical form of Christianity and is increasingly incoherent with its 47,000 + denominations and sects. The Catholic Church had predicted the collapse of heretical Protestantism into secularism back in the early 1960s and also predicted that the ‘faithful’, i.e. Catholics, would be greatly affected by Protestantism collapse into secularism.
The Church is now under attack by this anti-Christian secularism, but, as Christ said, it will prevail against the gates of hell.