Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? A fresh look at an old essay.

I originally posted this essay nearly 18 years ago, when I was influenced by the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) as “processed” by David Ray Griffin (1939-2022).

I was then also navigating (internally) my relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, wherein I was raised, educated, and married but which I had set aside, first in 1979 and again (and, I hope, finally) in 2017 for the dispensationalist eschatology and ecclesiology of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) buttressed by the Reformed apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987).

Natural law libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics, as filtered mainly through the person and writings of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), added another layer of tension to this journey, one that is reflected in part in Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic.

I had not yet returned to the view of the Bible to which He had once led me and from which, for reasons inexplicable to me, He let me wander. Despite that detour, I articulated concerns about the roots of the secularizing forces that have polluted Western culture over the past three centuries.

This essay asks questions that, for all their verbose inelegance, merit being disinterred from my old site and displayed on this one. Light editing, restructured paragraphs, and linked reference notes have, I hope, lightened the prospective reader’s burden. At over 7,000 words, it’s hardly a quick read, but I hope its contents will repay the effort of the hardy few who undertake to read it.

[Here is the original prefatory paragraph]

Worth doing EVEN badly, I think he meant.

G. K. Chesterton once defended the amateur against the professional by aphorizing that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly” (What’s Wrong with the World [1910]; last sentence of Part Four, Chapter XIV). And so in the spirit of this site’s “workshop” character, I am posting my notes toward an investigation I unfortunately do not see myself returning to in the near future. The following is not an essay fit for a journal.

The scholarship cited in this unfinished piece suggests an affirmative answer to the title’s question. By displaying this yet unripe fruit, however, I acknowledge that I may have overlooked important sources or misinterpreted those I have used. I invite interested readers to show, if they can, that either of these potential failings of mine is more than a theoretical possibility. I hope the order of some of the paragraphs and the occasional repetition of points does not put any reader off.

Anthony Flood, October 13, 2006

Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? Notes on David Ray Griffin’s Implicit Counterpoint to Stanley L. Jaki

Thomas E. Woods has written a book that has an ostensibly Catholic apologetic purpose.[1] By locating the roots of the West’s choicest fruits (science, law, education, charitable institutions, economics, etc.) in the soil of Western Christianity, Woods offers an eloquent, if indirect, apologetic for the Catholic faith. By indirect I mean that his observations do not so much argue for the truth of what Catholics believe as challenge those who are so sure that what Catholics believe is false. Presupposing that it is irrational to malign one’s benefactor, Woods’ challenge trades on his reader’s being a beneficiary of the civilization that the Catholic Church built. In one chapter, however, he has unintentionally documented how the Catholic Church, while building Western civilization, planted, seeded, and watered the garden of that civilization’s weeds, namely, materialistic mechanism, upon which it is now in danger of choking.[2]

Woods never comments on this dialectical reversal, whose irony cuts much more deeply than does his correction of popular ignorance of, say, what really happened in the Galileo episode. In recent decades scholars have been paying increasing attention to extra-scientific influences in the rise of modern science.

What does not even surface as a question in Woods’ narrative is the possibility that an enterprise that we would recognize generically as science—sustained, experimental study of nature—not only might have developed other than the way it did, but that such an alternative was already incipient in Western Europe.

In fact, Catholic divines nipped that alternative in the bud ostensibly because they deemed it incompatible with revealed truth and more pragmatically because any loss on their spiritual monopoly was bad for business. That is, science as “a self-perpetuating field of endeavor” was “enabled by a Catholic milieu” (76) because Catholic divines prevented another milieu, equally Western and arguably on the way to establishing that field of endeavor, from flourishing. Continue reading “Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? A fresh look at an old essay.”

Civilizational decline via institutional capture

In 1997 Gary North 2022 (1942-2022) produced a thousand-page study of one instance of such capture: Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church.[1] Its funding from humanists and other people we’d now call “globalists,” the coordination of subversive agents outside and inside the targeted institution, their ideological self-consciousness and discipline, are familiar to anyone aware of the accelerating corrosion of Western institutions.

North identified Modernism as the root ideological and spiritual perversion of our world. It was a nice ecumenical touch for the Calvinist (anti-Romanist) scholar to begin his book’s foreword by quoting the popular 20th champion of the Roman Catholic worldview, G. K. Chesterton:

Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these . . . can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.[2]

Chesterton’s Orthodoxy was published in 1924, the year he joined the institution that had formally condemned Modernism as a heresy.[3] Continue reading “Civilizational decline via institutional capture”

The good of order

With that good under attack today with increasing frequency, it’s good to recall what it is and what suffers when the attack succeeds. I’ve excerpted the following paragraphs from “What Is ‘The Free Market’?,” Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic (2019), 122-123.

* * *

The free market is a good of order, as distinct from goods of immediate satisfaction. The regular enjoyment of such goods requires that persons explicitly regard the good of order as worthy of attainment and protection. (Not just, for example, “This meal for me now,” but also “Good meals for me and my family several times a day, every day.”)

Persons face a moral challenge when they realize that they can enjoy a good of immediate satisfaction only by rending the fabric of the good of order. In the name of eudaimonia[1], they must at times forfeit particular satisfactions. Continue reading “The good of order”

In defense of Lord Acton, revisited

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, Knight Commander Victorian Order, Deputy Lieutenant, January 10, 1834 – June 19, 1902

On the birthday of the great liberal Catholic historian John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902), I’ve decided to republish what I posted three years ago. (It will be new to some, if not most, of you.) It’s prefaced by links to Acton-related posts of mine and followed by the text of a 2006 answer to an attack on Acton—which I’d call ignorant were its author not a learned Catholic historian. Like my Christ, Capital & Liberty, whose chapters began as blog posts critical of another traditionalist Catholic, the arguments and evidence marshaled in my essay deserve more exposure than my old site can give them.—A.G.F.

- Lord Acton: ambiguous democrat, libertarian modernist (December 7, 2018)
- When Acton met Whitehead? (December 11, 2018)
- Happy Birthday, Lord Acton! (January 10, 2019)

John C. Rao, Ph. D. [Oxon.], Associate Professor of History emeritus, Saint John’s University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

“In Defense of Lord Acton,” reproduced below, was written in January 2006 in response to “A Message from Bethlehem: Lord Acton Tends to Corrupt,” a smear of Acton as a “Gnostic” by Professor John C. Rao of St. John’s University. The Remnant, a traditionalist Catholic periodical, published Rao’s defamation of Acton on the last day of 2005. Its original title of my response was, “Do Illiberals Tend to Smear? Or Is It Just Professor Rao When It Comes to Lord Acton?” The editor not only didn’t publish it, but even after more than one query, wouldn’t even acknowledge receiving it.

In Defense of Lord Acton

The significance of the Incarnation of the Prince of Peace for society is always a timely topic, and never a more welcome one than at Christmastime. It is the motif of Professor John C. Rao’s vast historical studies, and I expected his recent column in The Remnant¹ to add one more variation on that theme. He more than disappointed any such expectation by taking the occasion of the season to impute heresy-mongering, if not heresy itself, to Lord Acton, a man who regarded communion with the Church as dearer than life itself. That is, Professor Rao maligned a fellow member of his own profession, a towering figure in European historiography who participated in the unearthing of many official archives. And he did it not by examining any of Acton’s own words, but rather by repeatedly asserting what he “really” meant. Feeling glum² cannot excuse such a lapse from the standards of controversy. Continue reading “In defense of Lord Acton, revisited”

Newsflash: They’re godless commies!

Bingeing these days on YouTube lectures by Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin, I had a flashback when I heard his answer to Uncommon Knowledge host, Peter Robinson:

. . . it occurred to me that you have probably spent more time reading Soviet archives than any other person. And I said to you, Stephen, what’s the one central finding? And you replied immediately, “They were communists.” The leaders of the Soviet Union really believed that stuff and they really wanted to achieve the communist goal of worldwide revolution.[1]

This reminded me not only of Kotkin’s documented evaluation of the Bolsheviks in general and Stalin in particular—they were not cynics, but convinced Marxists who expressed themselves behind closed doors as they did in their propaganda—but also of the opening paragraph of Murray Rothbard’s, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist.”

The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly trite and banal statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon-ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, and culture, yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial focus, far more central than the class struggle, the dialectic, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God’s prophets and saints, will establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (for pre-millennials, Jesus will have many human assistants in setting up such a kingdom), so, for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, will establish a secularized Kingdom of Heaven on earth.[2]

They weren’t cynics, but dreamers. The real-world nightmare that claimed hundred million lives and enslaved billions in the 20^th century began as a 19^th-century Christian apostate’s dream. As Gary North summarized Marx’s legacy:

Karl Heinrich Marx, the bourgeois son of a bourgeois father, was born in Trier, in what is now Rhineland Germany, on May 5, 1818. He was a Jew by birth, but in 1816 or 1817, his father joined the state’s official Christian church, and he saw to it that his children were baptized into his new faith in 1824. After a brief fling with a liberal, pietistic form of Christianity, young Karl became a dedicated humanist. He took his humanism to revolutionary conclusions. Karl Marx, the grandson of rabbis, would become the rabbi of Europe’s most important religious movement: revolutionary humanism.[3]

He inspired generations of murderous missionaries, counter-evangelists—dysangelists, if you will—proselytizers of the bad news of this world’s God (2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 2:2; John 12:31). Remember that the next time of “social justice warriors” nonchalantly claim to be “trained Marxists.”[4] Their corrupt plans do not stop at exploiting “white guilt” for pecuniary gain, but extend to society’s every nook and cranny.

Notes

[1] Uncommon Knowledge, 5 Questions for Stephen Kotkin, February 5, 2022. See Robinson’s other interviews of Kotkin, “Hoover Fellow Stephen Kotkin Discusses Stalin’s Rise To And Consolidation Of Power,” October 6, 2015.

[2] Murray N. Rothbard, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist,” in Rothbard and Walter Block, eds., The Review of Austrian Economics. 1990, Springer. Republished as Chapter 22 of Rothbard, The Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School, Edward Elgar, 1997. Free pdf.

[3] Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: Regeneration through Chaos, Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989, 7-8. Free pdf. On North, however, see my “Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?,” April 20, 2020.

[4] Jason Morgan, “Black Lives Matters Goes Full Marxist,” Crisis Magazine, April 19, 2021

“Rigged,” Mollie Hemingway’s patriotic service, on the anniversary of The Big Steal

In “If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state,” published January 7th of this year, the day after the political equivalent of a Democrat Party Reichstag Fire evicted The Big Steal from the headlines, I asked how we could wait patiently for another election cycle. What they did a year ago today, and during the years leading up to November 3, 2020, they could do again, effectively perverting this country into a one-party dictatorship.

In the months since, I’ve wondered whether the truth about the war against Trump’s 80 million-strong base (Trump himself is but one man), a war I had followed daily for over five years, could ever vacuum up the corrupt media’s smokescreen.

Without election integrity, which was eviscerated last year, a citizenry in a nominal republic has the potential to become either an aggregate of slaves or an army of soldiers in a kinetic civil war.

Where could people open to the truth find a patient, comprehensive rebuttal of academedia’s bodyguard of liars? How can people who wouldn’t be caught dead searching conservative websites consider what is, for them, the unthinkable?

We now have the answer: they can read Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections (Regnery, October 12, 2021). Her patriotic service justifies a qualified hope that, “Yes, truth can win out.” You can read Rigged, and you can put it in their hands.

Hemingway, the eloquent, soft-spoken conservative author, columnist and commentator, a senior editor at The Federalist and Fox News contributor, will not scare off your liberal relatives. In her book, she painstakingly, but never boringly, explores how Democrat operatives, led by corrupt officials and financed by the “Big Money” they excoriated not many years ago, exploited the pandemic to make mail-in ballots the rule, not the exception thereto, and to enact voting “reforms” that make a mockery of “one person, one vote.”

Then she documents the corruption that predictably followed.

Continue reading ““Rigged,” Mollie Hemingway’s patriotic service, on the anniversary of The Big Steal”

Of Monuments and Memory: The Commitment of Donald Martin Reynolds

Before Peter identified the God-fearing (but non-Israelite) household of Cornelius with Jesus (Acts 10:48), a messenger of God assured the Roman centurion that his prayers and charitable acts had gone up before God as a memorial (μνημόσυνον, mnēmosynon) (Acts 10:4).[1]

After the woman with the alabaster box poured precious ointment on His head, Jesus predicted that it will be a recounted as a memorial (μνημόσυνον) to her wherever the Gospel will be proclaimed (Matthew 26:13, Mark 14:9).

That word is also the Greek root of “monument” (monere, the Latin, meaning “to remind, advise, warn”). The artifacts we Anglophones call monuments commemorate, remind, and warn. To create, behold, and contemplate a monument is to lift up in our minds the figures they commemorate. Photos of behemoth monuments that dot the former Soviet Union’s landscape convey but an inkling of their evocative power. Successor states have removed, warehoused, or destroyed some of these reminders of a dark past, lest they occasion the veneration of evil. All things being equal, however, aides to memory are beneficial.

My friend, the art historian Dr. Donald Martin Reynolds has devoted his life to studying monuments and, at Columbia University for over three decades, imparting his profound appreciation of them to generations of students. Earlier this year Routledge reissued “Remove Not the Ancient Landmark”: Public Monuments and Moral Values, an anthology of 22 scholarly essays on the monumental form which their authors originally read at two symposia Dr. Reynolds had convened. (Besides the Introduction, he also contributed Chapter 7, “The Value of Public Monuments.”) Its topics include “Arch, Column, Equestrian Statue: Three Persistent Forms of Public Monument,” “The Psychology of Public Monuments,” “Venice: Time and Conservation,” “Statues of the Tsars and the Redefinition of Russia’s Past,” “Monument to Russian Martyrs under Stalinism,” “Monumental Revisions of History in Twentieth-Century Germany,” “Eternal Celebrations in American Memorials,” and “Cathedral.”[2]

The reissued book’s title is from Proverbs 22:28. The Hebrew word for “landmark” is גְּב֣וּל (gebuhl): monuments are not only memorials, but also historical and cultural landmarks that delineate one worldview’s “turf” from another as landmarks demarcate one territory’s boundaries from another’s. Forbidden memorials tell us as much about a society as do the ones it insists upon erecting.

Dr. Reynolds, believing that we depreciate such markers at our spiritual peril[3], compiled The Remarkable Prescience of a Biblical Imperative, which tells the story of (and documents) his passion for architecture in general and monuments in particular. When he sent it to me, he gave me permission to share it. Clicking on Remarkable Prescience will download a PDF file.

Santuário de Cristo Rei, Almada, Portugal (facing Lisbon)

This post is an inadequate token of my appreciation of Don and his wonderful wife Nancy Zlobik Reynolds for their years of friendship and fellowship at The Shrine of the Holy Innocents in Manhattan and for having invited me to many of his conferences, not all of which, I regretfully recall, I accepted. I hope it piques the interest of many others in his rich legacy.

Notes

[1] The English “to be baptized” does not translate but merely transliterates the Greek βαπτισθῆναι, baptisthēnai. The root baptizo (from bapto) conveys the idea of identification of one thing with another to the point of merger (e.g., when white linen is dipped into a bowl of dye). “To be identified with” is better than “to be baptized.” In the River Jordan, John identified Jesus with the submissive company in Israel (Matthew 3:13-17). The reality to which the ceremony refers is key, but since churches merely pour their distinctive dogmas into the symbol “baptize,” they see little need to translate.

[2] Dr. Reynolds’s other books include Hiram Powers and His Ideal Sculpture, Garland Publishers, 1977; Masters of American Sculpture: The Figurative Tradition from the American Renaissance to the Millennium, Abbeville Press, 1994; Monuments and Masterpieces: Histories and Views of Public Sculpture in New York City, Wiley, 1988, revised 1997; The Architecture of New York City, Wiley, 1984, revised, 1994; For Our Freedom and Yours: The Art and Life of Andrew Pitynski, Portrait of an American Master, 2015. His Introduction to 19th Century Art and Architecture, Cambridge University Press, 1988 and 1992, has been translated into in several languages.

[3] In July 2020, for example, when a great hue and cry arose demanding that James Earle Fraser’s equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt be removed from the grounds of the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Reynolds appealed to the Executive Director of the National Sculpture Society to request that New York City “realize the integrity of John Russell Pope’s original plan for an Inter-Museum Promenade through Central Park thereby connecting those two great cultural institutions of international renown, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” A few months later, his account of this effort was published as “The Original Plan for the Theodore Roosevelt Monument,” Sculpture Review, Vol. 69(3), September 1, 2020, 37-41, doi/10.1177/0747528420967271.

The quickest way to get up to speed on Diana West

Welcome to my shortest blog post to date.

Video interview (February 22, 2021; UK) with Diana West.* In less than an hour, she traces the genesis of her research into Communist subversion via her interest in Islam immediately post-9/11.

Diana West : The Secret Assault on our Nations Character

SPOILER ALERT: There was no “victory over Communism”!

Share the link while you can.

* American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character; The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization; The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy

American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character: West, Diana: 9780312630782: Amazon.com: Books The Death of the Grown-Up | Diana West | Macmillan The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy: West, Diana: 9781796761276: Amazon.com: Books

When fascists were frank: Another look at “We were the first fascists”

Talk of fascism is in the air; fascist violence, masquerading as opposition thereto, in the streets. Its appeal crosses racial lines, and it isn’t the first time. It seems opportune to republish “‘We were the first fascists’: from Garvey to Farrakhan.” — Anthony Flood

“We were the first fascists”: from Garvey to Farrakhan

First published February 21, 2019

On August 13, 1920 Marcus Garvey presided at the convention of the United Negro Improvement Association held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There he promulgated the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. Its 54 points comprise the farthest thing from a fascist manifesto.

And yet, as my friend Hugh Murray noted a quarter-century ago, Garvey “admired . . . leading anti-communists, such as Mussolini. Indeed, in 1937 Garvey proudly proclaimed of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, ‘We were the first fascists.'”[1]

Here’s the full quote:

We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.[2]

He said this in 1937, after Mussolini consolidated his rape of Ethiopia.

While many liberals [Murray continues] are the first to hurl the word “fascist” at those with whom they disagree, they usually ignore the fascism of blacks, even when publicly advocated.[3]

A few years after Hugh wrote those words, King’s College Professor of American and English Literature Paul Gilroy came out with “Black Fascism” (Transition, Indiana UPress, 2000, 70-91), a scholarly monograph on Garvey’s boast, the first instance of Black public advocacy of fascism. I recommend it to students of this overlooked chapter of Black American history.

On June 25, 1961 American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell sat in the Uline Arena, Washington, DC (where the Beatles would give their first US concert a few years later). He was there at the invitation of Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Elijah Muhammad. Thousands were in attendance. During the collection, Rockwell shouted:

George Lincoln Rockwell gives $20!

Continue reading “When fascists were frank: Another look at “We were the first fascists””

G. Edward Griffin: Prophet with Honor

I was so impressed by the video John A. Lancaster posted today that I feel compelled to join him in getting the word out. He entitled his post “Is the Current Unrest a Communist Prophecy?,” but I decided to drop the rhetorical question mark.

The presenter is G. Edward Griffin (b. 1931). When he delivered this talk, so calmly, so professionally, the Left called him a “Red baiter.” Today he’s called a “conspiracy theorist.” Both are empty tags signalling the tagger’s determination not to have a conversation.

Griffin’s topic is a conspiracy—the Communist conspiracy, its self-understanding and its exploitation of America’s racial tensions. As you watch and listen, ask yourself whether the violence, mayhem, and frank advocacy of communism you see nightly on television is not exactly what Griffin was warning Americans about.

Color, Communism, and /Common Sense is an eight-minute YouTube video, excerpted from Griffin’s full presentation, also on YouTube, More Deadly Than War The Communist Revolution in America.

The film has the “look-and-feel” of the early ’60s. At the 2.47 mark, Griffin holds up and quotes from The Nature of Revolution, a 1959 pamphlet by Communist Party theoretician Herbert Aptheker (for whom I worked as a research assistant in the early ’70s). That made me think the film is earlier than 1969, the date given for Griffin’s pamphlet on Amazon. (In 1969, would he cite something from 1959?) I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who can settle the date of the original filmed presentation.