AJ DiCintio

The Winter Solstice & the Triumph of Reason
December 17, 2008

“At this season of the Winter Solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.” — The Freedom From Religion Foundation

During this time of giving, no person of good will can read the statement quoted above without offering a gift that improves its ironically poor use of reason. Here, then, is one that its authors may find more useful than the usual solstice fruitcake:

“Because no empirical evidence has been discovered to verify the existence of any non-physical reality; we reject all metaphysical notions, including the precepts of religion.” — The FFRF

Happily, all is not lost if the authors relegate the gift to the special nook reserved for solstice ties; for as the statement stands, it serves the purpose of letting us know how the approach of the winter solstice affects the stream of consciousness of the Foundation’s members.

More important, however, it reminds us of the arrogant, angry, simplistic attitude toward religion held by materialist liberals; and it prompts us to consider the raging hypocrisy exhibited by these latter-day Spinozas hell bent on experiencing Baruch’s oxymoronic “intellectual love of God.”

An undeserved judgment? Well, let’s find out if liberals deserve to be included with their honest materialist brethren by examining a few ideas they claim to have discovered in the “natural world.” (Where else?)

“Humans are entitled to certain rights.”

“Democracy is a good thing — except when a democratic act clashes with truths of nature and therefore must be corrected with a dictatorial ruling issued by as few as five liberal activist justices.”

“Dictatorship is a bad thing — except as noted above.”

“War is not the answer.”

“The death penalty is inhuman.”

Sorry that the list is cut short, but it could go on endlessly because liberals are forever announcing amazing new truths they have derived from Mother Nature.

Ah, yes, liberals love to invoke Mother as the source of their ethics. However, they are so much consumed with arrogance that they fail to realize doing so imputes a purpose to her.

Purpose?

In her “natural world” that was banged into being by an unknowable something that gave rise only to matter, energy, and a variety of forces?

In her “natural world” in which the fortuitous bumping into each other of some perfectly purposeless amino acids created rudimentary life forms that released oxygen into the atmosphere for a few billion years and then for a billion more evolved into incredibly complex organisms, including the one scientists call Homo sapiens?

In her “natural world” in which every last bit of biological evolution is produced by a perfectly blind, brutally efficient, amoral trial and error that we humans prefer to pretty up with the euphemism “natural selection”?

In her “natural world” in which the patch of soil pressed by a limousine liberal’s Ferragamo is rife with a million examples of the wild mayhem and destruction that accompany nature’s ceaseless, blind experiments?

So, when liberals declare that they discover ethics in nature, they are telling us that the Big Bang blew into being a purely material Mother who, nevertheless, wants humanity to love the good and the beautiful (not to mention the United Nations, the World Court, and the ACLU).

(Too many problems arise if liberals were to tell the truth and admit that as mere, fallible, opinionated, emotional humans, they simply invent ideas about right and wrong the same way they claim Moses did.)

“Nature made them say it.” No wonder liberals regard their ideas about human rights and ethics as possessing the same unassailable quality the atheist Marx attributed to his discovery of “scientific socialism.” (Chew on that discovery, you quantum theorists who think you know a thing or two about the complexity of matter and energy!)

Actually, without disturbing a physicist at work or play, we can put the arrogant madness of materialist liberals into perspective simply by imagining a gang of them hotly trying to make atheists Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong understand that some of their ideas, though “well intentioned,” are “wrong” because they conflict with truths liberals have discovered in the “natural world,” truths that command the “right” and “best” way for humans to live, prosper, and survive as a species. (Remember, Joe and Mao, nature wants humanity to survive.)

Well, there’s so much else to say about the perfect metaphysics and perfect hypocrisy associated with the belief system materialist liberals hold to so religiously that they will, if need be, impose it upon us through the dictatorial edicts issued by their judicial high priests.

But that must wait for another day.

For now, this piece returns to its beginning, to end with two observations that just may explain the source of the anger that wells up in the minds of our otherwise perfectly reasonable neighbors every time the winter solstice approaches:

With the coming of Christmas and Hanukkah, Christians and Jews of the northern climes brave the bitter cold to send traditional songs of worship, prayer, and celebration to the heavens from the joyous, warm, beautifully decorated confines of churches, synagogues, and homes.

Meanwhile, ice footed and icicled nosed, liberal materialists slip and slide precariously in the middle of an empty, treacherous field where their frozen eyes and numbed minds behold not Dante’s stars but fusion furnaces, hoping, finally, this year, to find one that triggers the perfectly delicious thrill promised to occur when one experiences amor dei intellectualis.