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I have probably shocked and dismayed a lot of my readers with my recent changes in thinking. First, I took a heaping dump on love and marriage. Then, I got married. I have been an avowed atheist for over ten years. Now, I attend Mass and start RCIA classes next month. I still consider myself a libertarian, but I find myself becoming more conservative in my thinking as I read Burke and Kirk. What is happening to me?

All of these things are related. I am a total sell out. I did not have the intestinal fortitude required to continue in my bleak world of pessimistic atheistic nihilism. Actually, I did since I have been doing it for over a decade. I have written extensively on these things here at the C-blog for a long time. Reading my posts have been a combination of sucking the life out of you but leaving you with the consolation that no better life exists. Bathed in this pessimism, you are left with no hope but also no regret. So, why did I turn away from this darkness?

Life is a mixed bag. It isn’t Utopia, but it isn’t Hell either. What makes life tolerable is that there is some meaning to it all. But without meaning, paradise itself turns to misery. We live in nihilistic times, and it shows in our culture, our thinking, and the way we live. Yet, we see glimmers of hope, virtue, and majesty. A crazed gunman opens fire on a movie theater full of people. There is no real surprise in this. The surprising things were the young men who died shielding their girlfriends from the bullets. Good men still exist.

I see it all as the battle between good and evil. Atheism is evil. This doesn’t mean that all atheists are evil. Pat Tillman was an atheist, but he showed a high degree of selflessness. Camus showed compassion relative to the Stalin loving Sartre. But good atheists are like dogs who are friendly to cats. They exist but as rare exceptions. Most good atheists I know are good as a result of the residue of a Christian upbringing. Atheists raised in freethinking households tend to be thoroughly darkened.

I have scoured the internet and YouTube listening to atheists try to varying degrees of failure to posit moral truths without God. I have listened to various atheists defend everything from child rape to bestiality to infanticide. I have posted these things on my Facebook page, and no one seems to really care about this glaring moral deficiency.

The truth about atheism is clear. Atheists truck morality out when it conveniences them and ditch it when it inconveniences them. If you doubt this, tell a feminist atheist you want to abort a girl because you prefer a boy. It is entertaining to watch the contortions on their faces.

There is a moral law written on the hearts of human beings, and I don’t think this is a product of evolutionary accident. I think this is the divine spark of the Almighty. Atheists have this spark in them. They can deny it with their mouths and their brains, but it doesn’t change anything. I always felt it in me. Now, that I don’t lie to myself about it anymore, I feel the sting of conscience over a decade of evil living. I am such a piece of shit.

I wasn’t much better in my pre-atheist days. I will piss off even more people with this next one, but I will write it anyway. Protestant Christianity is a bastard stepchild. In all its schisms and permutations, Protestantism resembles true Christianity in much the same way that checkers resembles chess because they both are played on a checkerboard. This may seem harsh, cruel, and unfair; but it is charitable relative to the anti-Catholicism that pours out of Protestant churches declaring the Pope to be the Antichrist and the Roman Catholic Church to be the whore of Babylon. I can personally tell you that it is easier to be an atheist in the Bible Belt than to be a Catholic.

Protestantism isn’t true Christianity. It is simply a collection of heresies with various denominations picking which delicious errors they love most. But despite their differences, they all have a few key things in common. The first is that they all despise the Catholic Church. The only exception would be Anglo-Catholics who should quit kidding themselves and become Catholic. Protestants hate Catholics. Catholics do not hate Protestants.

The second thing Protestants all share in common is a de-emphasis of communion. Catholics believe in the Real Presence. Protestants have various doctrines on the Lord’s Supper, but they all deny the Real Presence to greater or lesser degrees. I don’t think this is accidental. I have read a lot on the subject, and it is clear from the words of Jesus in the Bible and church tradition dating to the first century that it is really the body and blood of Christ. You have to be in a serious state of self-denial to not see it. Yet, Protestants are able to divine from Scripture all sorts of bullshit like the Rapture and the prosperity gospel but not the Real Presence. Lutherans come closest to the Catholic view, but I find it interesting that even Luther had to issue a qualification on this doctrine. Protestants are unanimous. It is just juice and crackers. Calvinists and Lutherans will protest, but we know the truth by what they do with the leftovers. Catholics lock them away as precious things. Protestants toss it out with the garbage.

John 6:53 is clear on this point, “Most truly I say to you, Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves.” Protestants by their own admission do not eat the flesh or drink the blood of Jesus. They are not in the club. They want to be the club and set their own rules. But they are all counterfeit churches.

I think their rejection of the Real Presence is both an identifier of their inferior state and also a token of mercy from God. For Protestants, they are correct. There is no Real Presence for them. It is just juice and crackers, and it is good because the New Testament is clear that to eat unworthily is a big deal. Basically, they are kids given a toy gun instead of a loaded revolver. There is no damnation in juice and crackers.

The third and last thing all Protestants share in common is a virtual absence of good works. I don’t want to make the case that all Catholics are good people. There are lots of bad Catholics. But Catholics show a high degree of work on real moral acts and personal virtue that is lacking in Protestant churches. Catholics are known for their charitable works and living it out. Protestants reduce the sanctification to either reading Scripture daily and/or not dancing, drinking, or smoking. Saintliness is not a Protestant thing, and you aren’t going to see anyone like Mother Teresa come out of a Baptist or Presbyterian church.

The Protestant Reformation was born out of the simple fact that being Catholic is hard. Luther couldn’t take it anymore. He wanted out, and it was useful that there were plenty of scoundrels and abuses in Luther’s time to grease the skids for his exit. But the bottom line is that all those doctrines that came from the Reformation existed purely to delegitimize the authority of the Catholic Church. But this authority came from Jesus Himself. And there is no Scriptural justification for those doctrines either.

All this change in my religious thinking has certainly had an effect on my political thinking. I remember reading Ron Paul’s reasons for being pro-life, and it stung my heart a bit. I was atheist when I read that stuff, and I resisted what Ron Paul was getting at. But I knew he was right. Abortion is murder. The part where he relates how they were trying to save one unborn child in one room while aborting another at the same stage of development in another room was really hard to deal with. I can’t be pro-choice anymore.

I still identify as a libertarian, but I am less of a libertarian than before. I think abortion should be against the law. I also think that less government does not necessarily lead to a better society. Sweden has way more government than Somalia, but I think anyone would find Sweden preferable to Somalia. This doesn’t mean that I endorse the welfare state or anything, but I don’t think the elimination of government automatically results in libertopia. In fact, I don’t think libertopia is even possible. As such, I really have to define myself more as a conservative except that term hardly means today what it used to at one time. I am more like Jack Hunter now than Murray Rothbard.

I think freedom depends largely on morality. Without moral citizens, freedom is impossible. This is why Russia is a shithole even after the fall of communism. The cultural damage of atheism and vodka swilling makes Russia utterly unfit for liberty. This is why they get a guy like Putin. Similarly, if the USA becomes a nation of potheads addicted to videogames, it won’t be much better. There is no liberty without virtue.

I embrace the Burkean outlook now. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean much as I see nowhere to make a political home these days. Today’s Republicans are a joke. I could support a new Ronald Reagan even if the Gipper was a compromiser who sold out his principles during his presidency. I think Margaret Thatcher was pretty decent or even a guy like Calvin Coolidge.

I don’t know what government can do to promote virtue, but I definitely see how government undermines virtue. This would be the welfare state, bailouts, etc. I think a president can offer moral leadership from the bully pulpit as Reagan did, but I don’t see how it can be legislated. I don’t see me voting for Mitt Romney.

What makes society great is not just government but other institutions especially family and church. Before my recent change in heart, I was already touching on this moral dimension in society in my writings on the Parasite Class. I also think there is a good capitalism and a bad capitalism which is not a matter of government policy. Some companies just do bad because they are bad. It is their nature. I think libertarians are naive on this point. When you see a company do bad things totally unrelated to government policy, you realize that there is more to it than simply letting the free market fix things. Great examples are shysty car salesmen that fuck over customers and lie to them.

This is where I am now in my thinking. I don’t know if it makes any difference in the whole scheme of things, but as reported in a previous post, I am calling this change the “moral revolution.” I think personal morality matters, and this morality comes from God.

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