Contemplation and Action in the Culture of Death

Contemplation and Action

I find it very difficult to write this blog this week with the traditional focus on Good Things. Whilst away on holiday, two horrendous events occurred in Britain, with our Parliament voting to remove legal protections from babies up to the point of viability and to legalise state-enacted suicide. I feel that this is a significant hammer-blow for our nation, a high-handed one-two sucker-punch that eliminates any sense of shared public morality. The mask has decisively slipped and we see now that, for all the language of compassion and equality, there is actually a much more sinister and dark dimension behind our public discourse. I have seen many people who wouldn’t normally using words like “demonic” and “satanic” and I have to say that I agree with the strength of this language. I believe that the enemy is truly showing us his hand. His love affair with death has become our love affair with death. How else can we understand the “humanists” cheering and celebrating the passing of the so-called “assisted dying” bill? We are everywhere beset by contradiction, incoherence and Orwellian Newspeak: diversity is uniformity; inclusion is conformity; compassion is death; love is killing; equality is the termination of the sick and the unborn.

I am not surprised by any of it. In fact, it is completely congruent with my argument in The Great Return: as our metaphysic changes, so inevitably will our ethics. As we abandon Christianity, we will inevitably reject the fruits of Christianity, preeminent among them the deeply held belief that each human life is inherently imbued with a sacral dignity which must not be violated. Even though I expected this and I expect that things will likely get much worse (unless, of course, a great return to the faith actually occurs) it is nevertheless viscerally disturbing, as though a nightmare is becoming real in front of our waking eyes.