Category Archives: Atheism

Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Paris: The Vestiges of Europe a Century on

When he was illegally deposed in 1917, the anointed Tsar-Prophet Nicholas II recorded that all around him were ‘treason and cowardice and deceit’. With these words he defined the attitude towards him of the elites of three nations and groups of nations and with these words he defined the whole history of the coming hundred years.

In speaking of treason, he referred to the majority of the Westernised upper classes in Saint Petersburg, who hated the Russian Faith and were so jealous of the Tsar that they blasphemously sought to seize his sacred authority for themselves, thus destroying their country and condemning themselves to death or exile, where many of them later apostasised from the Russian Church altogether.

In speaking of cowardice, he referred to the government in Vienna, and behind it in Berlin, which had sparked off the First World War through cowardice, the fear of granting justice to their peoples, and thus destroyed their countries, their empires and their monarchies, condemning them to abolition and themselves to collapse by 1945.

In speaking of deceit, he referred to Paris, and behind it London and Washington, who though supposed ‘Allies’, had hypocritically undermined Russia, even after the sacrifices of the Russian Armies, who had faced twice as many enemy soldiers and lost far fewer of their own than the Western Allies, miraculously saving Paris on the Marne in 1914 and the forces on the Western Front several times after this. By operating the palace revolution in Russia in early 1917, the Western Allies would bankrupt themselves, becoming colonies of foreign bankers in the USA.

Saint Petersburg, Vienna and Paris are the three centres of the old European culture.

Miraculously delivered and rebuilt after the destruction of Bolshevik atheism and of the later Nazi siege, Saint Petersburg still stands firm because of its Orthodox culture. Vienna, like Berlin, is much weakened, supported only by the vestiges of Orthodox culture feebly conserved in Catholicism. For the same reason Paris is even weaker – though not as weak as London and Washington, which have only the feeble vestiges of Catholicism, feebly conserved in secularist Protestantism.

Today in 2013, one hundred years on from 1913, the year before Europe fulfilled its death wish, the question is this:

Does Europe really want its new culture of atheist Apostasy, with its tyranny and perverted values, or does Europe still want its old culture of believing Tradition, with its freedom and Christian values?

The victory of the old culture of believing Tradition, however unlikely it may seem, is possible, but only if Europe refers back to its spiritual roots. This is why we Orthodox are being called on to gather together not only the faithful remnants among the peoples of Europe, but also to gather together the saints of Old Europe, who were faithful to Orthodoxy, so that they may intercede for Europe and for us. However, little time remains, for, as prophesied, all around are ‘treason and cowardice and deceit’.

The Ten Commandments and the DeChristianisation of the Western World

About 1300 years before the birth of Christ – nobody now knows exactly when – Moses received from God the Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, which provided a radical new basis for all human civilisation, life and morality. These Commandments were fulfilled and supplemented, but in no way rejected, by Christ in the Beatitudes. The Ten Commandments are expressed in the following simple form:

1. Thou shalt have no other Gods but me.
2. Thou shalt not make for thyself any idol, nor bow down to it or worship it.
3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
4. Thou shalt remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
5. Honour thy father and thy mother.
6. Thou shalt not murder.
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
8. Thou shalt not steal.
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.

During the first millennium after the birth of Christ, Western Europe was gradually Christianised, steadily submitting to the Ten Commandments in their natural order, from first to tenth. The Commandments were brought to it by the Church from Jerusalem, centred in Her Capital of New Rome (later called Constantinople), its double-headed eagle uniting east and west, Asia and Europe.

However, Western paganism, formed by a complex mixture of pagan Romanism and pagan Germanism, began to take over Western Europe. This process took place in an ever accelerating way, so that in the ten centuries of the second millennium after the birth of Christ, Western Europe rejected each of these Commandments in reverse order, in this way reversing its Christianisation.

This process took place in reverse order because the last Commandment to have been implemented had had the least time to become rooted in Western European society. Therefore, it was challenged and overturned more easily than the earlier Commandments which were better rooted. Thus, throughout the ten centuries of this second millennium, each Commandment was rejected in turn.

In the eleventh century, the covetous Crusades in the Iberian Peninsula, in Sicily, England and then the Middle East and the Holy Land, marked the systematic and institutional beginning of imperialist greed and colonisation, with Western Europe covetously ravaging and pillaging its neighbours.

In the twelfth century, filioquists bore false witness, asserting that the Church had omitted the filioque from the Creed!

In the thirteenth century, in 1204 the Christian Capital of New Rome was looted, its shrines, relics and artefacts stolen as were many other Christian towns and cities.

In the fourteenth century, the ‘Church’ of Western Europe committed adultery with State values, its vestigial Christianity being made subject to a State-like authority, so becoming a ‘Church-State’.

In the fifteenth century, Western Europe began its murder of the peoples of the New World in unspeakable genocides, thus bringing them ‘Western civilisation’, ‘freedom and democracy’.

In the sixteenth century, Western Europe dishonoured its father and mother by rejecting many of the remaining vestiges of the Orthodox Faith by falling into Protestantism.

In the seventeenth century the Western world dishonoured holiness through its iconoclasm.

In the eighteenth century, the Western Enlightenment took God’s name in vain, rejecting the Revelation of God the Holy Trinity, preaching man-hating deism and then atheism in violent wars and revolutions.

In the nineteenth century, the ethnocentric Western world made an idol of itself, idolising its newly acquired knowledge of the fallen world (‘science’) in a cruel industrial revolution, idolising its all-limiting rationalism in a multitude of theories that despised God and exploited man.

In the twentieth century, the Western world rejected God and instead made gods of everything, inventing every ism, so beginning its suicide in World Wars and giving itself the ability to destroy every living thing on the Earth many times over.

If, one by one, the Ten Commandments were rejected in the Western world, century by century during the second millennium, what then can be said of the twenty-first century, of the third millennium?

Only this – that the Western world is living on borrowed time.

The Final Delusion

One of the oldest standard atheist cliches is that religion causes all wars and strife in the world. As the Jewish-American left-winger Tom Lehrer sang nearly fifty years ago:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Moslems
And everybody hates the Jews.

A generation later, his words were echoed by another anti-religious left-wing singer, John Lennon:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace.

Of course, none of this true. In reality, to paraphrase Dr Johnson (1709-84), religion, and not patriotism, is ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’. Scoundrels do not justify their hatred, envy, malice, cruelty and lust for wealth, territory and power by announcing truthfully that they are hateful, envious, malicious, cruel and lustful for wealth, territory and power, they camouflage it behind the noblest human instincts. Religion, the noblest, is therefore their flag, their best excuse, although ‘patriotism’ or ‘freedom and democracy’ will do, whenever atheistic and secularist societies want to justify their evil aggression and massacres.

However, interestingly, in the Gospels Christ does not ask if on His return, He will find religion on earth, rather He asks if He will ‘find faith on earth’ (Lk 18, 8). For religion means a humanised, institutionalised, thisworldly system, adapted to the demands of states. It is a State-manipulated substitute for real faith and it may well abound when Christ returns. On the other hand, faith is the Holy Spirit living and acting in the hearts of the faithful, and that will be very rare when Christ returns, if it exists at all.

And this is what Tom Lehrer’s song and John Lennon’s songs are about. We can see it very clearly in the present war in Syria, where ethnic groups hide behind their religious name tags. Daily we hear of Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Druze and Christians, all fighting and slaughtering one another. It is the same in Burma (Buddhists versus Muslims), in Northern Ireland (Protestants versus Catholics), in Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), and in almost every other conflict in the world, present, past and future.

So are Tom Lehrer, his follower John Lennon and the standard atheist, right when they imply that religion is the cause of war?

Of course, they are not right. It is human evil that causes war, though very, very often it cloaks itself in ‘religion’ – but never in faith. Faith, the knowledge of spiritual reality (not institutionalised or nationalised ‘religion’), is the cause of peace, not of war.

However, such subtlety is lost on the atheistic mass media, which always present human conflicts as caused by ‘religion’, despite all the obvious cases when it is caused by anti-religious atheists – like Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and any number of other tyrants. The mass media always present wars as ‘religious wars’, ‘wars about religion’, and not about ethnic identities fighting for wealth, territory, natural resources and power.

And this is how, surely, the end will come. Some ‘great’ man will appear as a peacemaker and unite, i.e. destroy, all religions and settle in Jerusalem, not far from Syria, where deluded people will bow down before him and all his magic tricks and illusions. Peace will come for a short time – but at the cost of freedom, and Antichrist, the Grand Inquisitor, as Dostoyevsky foretold, will triumph from his throne. No religion, no heaven, no hell, just imagine – ‘it’s easy if you try’, ‘all the people living for today’. We have seen so many of Antichrist’s little forerunners, from Charlemagne to Napoleon, from Hitler and even the deluded imagination of John Lennon, that we know the story of the end. Let us then beware.