Winds of War: “If You Believe In Nothing, You Believe In Everything”

This was said by G.K. Chesterton about a hundred years ago: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." If we substitute the word ‘culture’ for God, an we have the state of non-Muslim cultures today.

There are two recent articles that bring home this sad fact. One by Melanie Phillips and the other by Luigi Frascat. They describe the threat to our cultural survival.

First, Melanie Philips.

Suddenly , Britain seems to be developing into a cultural and religious battleground. Hard on the heels of Jack Straw’s criticism of the Muslim full-face veil, local government minister Phil Woolas has said that Aishah Azmi, the Dewsbury teaching assistant who insists on wearing such a veil in her primary school classroom, should be sacked. Not to be outdone, the Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, has accused Muslims of promoting a kind of ‘voluntary apartheid’ by shutting themselves away in closed societies and demanding immunity from criticism, corroding the very foundations of British culture. Meanwhile, British Airways is being sued for religious discrimination after it required a Christian woman employee to conceal her cross while permitting other faiths to wear turbans, hijabs or Hindu bangles. This echoed the controversy earlier this month when the BBC agonised over whether newsreader Fiona Bruce should wear a small cross on a chain in case it might cause offence. How can Britain have arrived at a situation where it is seriously argued that a class of children who don’t speak English as their first language should be taught by a shrouded woman whose expression they can’t see and whose voice they can’t even hear properly — while the BBC thinks that wearing the symbol of Britain’s established religion might be offensive? The source of this confusion is a profound loss of national, cultural and religious nerve. The Christian values that once defined national identity have simply collapsed, creating a cultural vacuum which Islam — Britain’s fastest-growing and most assertive religion — is busily filling.

This is why the argument over the place of the veil and the cross in public life is so significant. This is not about prejudice or discrimination. It is about cultural survival.

In its bare essence, the substance of Pope Benedict XVI's argument can be summed up in the following syllogism: Islam is faith devoid of reason; modern secularism is reason devoid of faith.

Islam is a complete way of life. It embraces the spiritual, social, moral, economic and cultural life of its followers, as well as their belief in God. This all encompassing system is similar to the Rule of the Holy Roman Empire and the Popes who headed it up in the Middle Ages. Just as Christian morals, ideals and ideas permeated the society of the Middle Ages to its core as ruled by the Holy Roman Church, so did Islam at the beginning of the 21st Century. A secular culture without absolutes – no right or wrong, no good or evil, cannot stand up to an absolute believing culture with finely defined lines between what they believe and don’t believe, what is advantageous to is and what is not, what they find good and what they find evil, and what behavior is appropriate and what is not. A cultural moral equivalency where everything is equal can not muster the will to stand up for some absolute morals and beliefs. It becomes a culture not worth defending. The belief in self-preservation is lost. The relativistic culture is not worth preserving because in accepting in everything, it believes strongly in nothing.