The Drama Of Our Times: RJ Moeller

Here is the latest from RJ Moeller's Voice In The Wilderness. RJ is one of the best new writers around and what sets him apart is how he covers all the details and the very fine print. Combining true Christianity, true conservative values and putting them together is what separates VITHW from other blogs that attempt to do the same. You will find no nasty writing, no flying off the handle or calling for outright hatred or violence to those who RJ disagrees with. A sane voice in the middle of a category five hurricane is how I see RJ's articles.


"Liberty and freedom are not compatible with top-down government control and social engineering. The enslaving of people onto the welfare plantation, regardless of the intentions of the parties responsible, is not compatible with real justice and compassion. Equality of Opportunity is not compatible with an unobtainable, stubborn, and arbitrary insistence upon Equality of Outcome."

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The Drama Of Our Time
By RJ Moeller

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." –G.K. Chesterton The Speaker, 12/15/00

Wisdom and insight can come from the strangest of places. A line in a movie, a lyric in a song, or a voice from the car-seat in the back of a minivan can open the eyes of your mind to new, profound truths and realizations about life, love, and faith. These revelations are occasionally delivered most clearly from people who disagree most vehemently with you and your worldview.

But you have to be listening, you need to be cultivating a reflective and vibrant inner thought life, to hear the wisdom that is lurking all around you; wisdom that wants to be set free from the chains of ignorance we’ve placed on it (or on each other).

Joseph Martin McCabe was born in Macclesfield, England 143 years ago. As a younger man he entered the priesthood, but six years later, and after a “loss of faith”, McCabe became an ardent critic of religion, a “devout” atheist, and prolific secular author in the first half of the 20th century. He became a defender and promoter of nearly everything a religious conservative like me disagrees with.

But what McCabe offered in his writing, what attracted the attention (and garnered the respect) of the legendary British Christian writer G.K. Chesterton, was an ability to see the seriousness of the debate between people of faith and secular materialists, and a willingness to acknowledge and discuss the implications of both side’s worldview to society and civilization.

Chesterton, in his classic work Heretics (1905), quotes a lengthy passage from an essay McCabe had written earlier that same year entitled “Christianity and Rationalism on Trial.” Chesterton had been attacked for being too humorous and light-hearted in his writings on “serious” topics, but being the Happy Warrior he was, Chesterton used the opportunity of a chapter in his own book not to personally attack McCabe, but to in large part highlight (and applaud) the refreshing clarity an atheist like McCabe had to offer to even those of us in the “God-fearing” camp.

Here is what Joseph McCabe wrote:

But before I follow Mr. Chesterton in some detail I would make a general observation about his method. He is as serious as I am in his ultimate purpose, and I respect him for that. He knows, as I do, that humanity stands at a solemn parting of the ways. Towards some unknown goal it presses through the ages, driven by an overmastering desire of happiness. Today it might hesitate, lightheartedly enough, but every serious thinker knows how momentous the decision may be. Western civilization is, apparently, deserting the path of religion and entering upon the path of secularism.


Will it lose itself in quagmires of sensuality down this new path, and suffer through years of civic and economic anarchy, only to learn it had lost the road, and must return to religion?


Or will it find that at last it is leaving the mists and quagmires behind it; that it is ascending the slope of the hill so long dimly discerned ahead, and making straight for the long-sought Utopia?


This is the drama of our time, and every man and woman should understand it

Wow.

I feel as Chesterton presumably did more than 100 years ago when he first read those same words: Where is that type of candid, honest, call-to-intellectual-and-moral-arms among believers in the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible today? Where do we hear and read this brand of candid, sober, exceptional reflection among religious conservatives (of any faith) in modern discourse?

Answer: basically, we don’t. We can count on one hand the public figures in recent memory who, regardless of your opinion of their views, clearly, accurately, and fairly described the parameters of the various cultural battles that impact us all. Continue reading here