Notre Dame: An
Omen
Source: AP Photo/Lori Hinant
Dennis Prager
Posted: Apr 16, 2019 12:01 AM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do
not represent the views of Townhall.com
The symbolism of the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral, the
most renowned building in Western civilization, the iconic symbol of Western
Christendom, is hard to miss.
It is as if God Himself wanted to warn us in the most
unmistakable way that Western Christianity is burning -- and with it, Western
civilization.
Every major Western (and one major non-Western) social
and intellectual force has conspired to rid Europe of Christianity and the
civilization it produced.
Every major Western (and one major non-Western) social
and intellectual force has conspired to rid Europe of Christianity and the
civilization it produced.
Within the Western world, the French Enlightenment -- the
intellectual basis of the French Revolution and the modern West -- sought to
replace Christianity, and religion in general, with secularism rooted in
reason. No God, Bible or Ten Commandments is necessary for morality or meaning:
reason (and science) will replace them.
The two final deathblows to Christianity in Europe were
the world wars. World War I ended most Westerners' belief in the nation-state
and the West. Christianity, already weakened by the Enlightenment, was further
weakened by World War I. German Christians were killing millions of French and
English Christians, and French and English Christians were killing millions of
German Christians. So the argument and sentiment against Christianity went.
Then World War II saw even more death on the Christian continent as well as the
failure of Catholic and Protestant churches in Nazi Germany to offer even
minimal noncompliance with the Nazis' Jew-hatred.
With the end of World War II, every internal Western
intellectual doctrine was secular. God, the Bible and religion were regarded at
best as innocuous nonsense and at worst as noxious nonsense.
Meanwhile, Europeans brought a non-European ideology into
Europe, an ideology that, for more than a thousand years, sought to replace
Christianity as the world's dominant religion. The Europeans, believing in
nothing distinctly Christian or Western and believing in the moral and
intellectual nonsense known as "multiculturalism" -- a doctrine that
asserts that all cultures are morally equivalent -- saw nothing problematic in
bringing millions of Muslims into Europe. They had no idea that most of these
people actually wanted to replace Christianity with their religion. They had no
idea because, in their ignorance and arrogance, they assumed that because they
were secular multiculturalists, everybody else was, too -- or would be, once
they lived in Europe.
They were wrong, of course. And as a result, the two
dominant forces in Europe -- secular leftism and Islamism -- sought the end of
Christianity and the West. (The left believes that protecting Western
civilization is equivalent to protecting white supremacy.)
This is not producing a pretty picture. Generally
speaking, Islam has not been nearly as kind, tolerant, open, medically or
scientifically innovative or intellectually curious as Western civilization
(and yes, Nazism and communism were born in the West, but they were
anti-Western).
Even without tens of millions of Muslims, post-Christian
Europe has not produced a pretty picture. This was predicted in 1834, 100 years
before Hitler's rise, by the great German poet Heinrich Heine, a secular Jew
(who later converted to Protestantism, "the ticket of admission into
European culture"):
"Christianity -- and that is its greatest merit --
has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy
it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied
madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards
have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman
(the cross) is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably.
Then ... a play will be performed in Germany which will make the French
Revolution look like an innocent idyll."
European Christians persecuted European Jews, often
brutally. But it took a post-Christian ideology, secular Nazism, to produce
Auschwitz -- just as it took post-Christian communism to produce the Gulag, the
Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Ukrainian and Cambodian genocides.
Moreover, Nazism and communism aside, the left's belief
that secular reason can replace God and the Bible turns out to be completely
wrong. The alleged citadels of secular reason -- the universities -- are the
most irrational and morally confused institutions in the West.
I don't know if a worker accident or a radical Muslim set
fire to Notre Dame Cathedral (as they have scores of other churches around
Europe). In terms of what the fire represented, it doesn't much matter. What
matters is the omen: Europe is burning, just as Notre Dame was.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk
show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery on May 7, 2019,
is "The
Rational Bible: Genesis," a commentary on the book of
Genesis.. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at
dennisprager.com.
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