On Dominion & Ziti

 A while back I mentioned the book Dominion written by Tom Holland, a non-Christian presenting his historical perspective on the way Christianity transformed culture.  Today I was surprised (after following a link on Drudge of all places) to find that book mentioned again in the following from a story entitled, "Christianity’s decline has unleashed terrible new gods" by Madeline Grant: 

"New Atheism assumed that, as people abandoned Christianity they would embrace a sort of enlightened, secular position… New Atheism was mistaken in its diagnosis of what would follow religion’s decline. The rational world we were promised hasn’t materialized and a nastier, less reasonable one is supplanting what was there before.

…New Atheism assumed that, as people abandoned Christianity they would embrace a sort of enlightened, secular position. The death of Christian Scotland shows this was wrong. Faith there has been replaced by derangement and the birthplace of the Scottish enlightenment – which rose out of Christian principles – now worships intolerant new gods

… the thesis of Tom Holland’s book Dominion seems to be winning out, via a growing recognition that the ethics we hold as natural and universal are, in fact, anything but. Much of what atheists ascribed to vague concepts of “reason” emerged out of the faith which informed the West’s intellectual, moral, and, yes, scientific life – a cultural oxygen we breathe but never see. 

I am reminded of Levin’s epiphany at the end of Anna Karenina. Throughout the novel, Levin, a dissatisfied religious sceptic, is plagued with doubt over the purpose of existence. Yet he finally comes to a stark realization about the real roots of his belief, and the limits of a “rational” life."  

Grant closes with a line from this by Tolstoy in Chapter 12: 

"He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked in with his mother's milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.

Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

"What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me." And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.

"I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an answer to my question--it is incommensurable with my question. The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all men, GIVEN, because I could not have got it from anywhere.

"Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one's neighbor reason could never discover, because it's irrational."