Bill Berg
Bill Berg
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

I found the root of my difficulty agreement with your worldview here … “That strange yet undeniable fact of human nature is what makes love possible, grief necessary, and life meaningful. And so to be immoral is never to realize one’s nature, and to stay distant from happiness, meaning, truth, and beauty. That is to live in the deepest kind of ignorance there is.”

Ah, “human nature”. The god that shits and has WAY less understanding of anything about ourselves than we do about the computer we are typing on declares we “KNOW our nature”. Seriously? The question of what or even if human conciousness is or is not is as old as man and still just as fresh as it was when the ancients wrestled with it.

As a matter of “history”, another commonly misunderstood concept, the nation that was “America”, created as John Adams so well realized for ONLY a moral and religious people, ceased to be either moral or religious in the 20th century, and thus descended officially into BOistan early in the 21st.

Western Civilization worked because it was founded on Judaeo / Christian morality, and minimized “The State” to be a government that actually served the people and allowed the miracle of econimic growth. There is a recent work that covers this quite well … “Suicide of the West” by Jonah Goldberg. Liberal democracy and capitalism were tools that were used successfully by a moral and religious people. When the nature of the people changed, the tools were no longer sufficient.

The short short summary of the book is that in 17–1800 the combination of certain thinkers (Locke, Adam Smith, etc) created what Goldberg calls “the miracle” of liberal democracy and capitalism which resulted in the greatest improvement of the human condition in all of human history.

“…liberalism — by which I mean not partisan Democrats or progressives, but the original Enlightenment-based understanding of natural rights and limited government — and capitalism”.

“Liberalism, by enforcing the rule of law and recognizing the rights of everybody, especially property rights, makes trade easier, and trade makes liberalism more desireable.

The Miracle comes out of this worldview. It is the product of a bourgeois revolution, an eighteenth-century middle-class ideology of merit, industriousness, innovation, contracts, and rights. Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of peoples lives. It has only a single fatal flaw: It doesn’t FEEL like it”.

America, and Western Civilization peaked somewhere around the Moon Landing and the fall of the USSR, but it’s decline was already well underway. No civilization has ever been successful without grounding in religion — either by design or by evolutonary “accident” … see Darwin’s Cathedral to get a better grasp on that.

On page 228 he really gets down to brass tacks.

“ It is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal descriptions of the real world, but this merely forces us to recognize two forms of realism; a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and a practical realism based on behavioral adaptiveness.”

“Rationality is not the gold standard on which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought.”

and then … “… factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors. It is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective”.

I happen to believe that the Christian worldview is actual TRUTH … however, even if it is only “practical realism”, my problem with the worldview of the article is that secular humanism while MAYBE “literally corresponding” to something, seems clearly to not be “adaptive”.

Most of the problem with America was not in the founding — it was with the population changing to no longer being a “moral and religious people”. Which would be impossible if your theory of man’s innate nature was true — ALL human civilizations would be “kind, loving, generous, etc” if that was man’s basic nature — my view of history says your case has been proven wrong for millenia, not just since Trump was elected.

In any case, the true wonder of the Christian worldview is the goal that with Christ’s help, we can find the capacity to love those who disagree with us and find us to be in “deep ignorance”. In my universe, my weakness and ignorance are strength, because they are only the very slightest beginning of wisdom, since I fear God.

    Bill Berg

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    Bill Berg