Secular Faith and Fetish[krakatoa]

You can't swing a dead cat without hitting another story from our gatekeepers rejecting the unambiguous words of another terrorist and instead proclaiming the true cause of Orlando's massacre: Guns and the evil homophobic (and/or self-hating homo) culture that refuses to give them up.

In the breezy self-asserted absence of faith, the secular Left has only - faith. Faith in the myth of "civilized man" risen above brutish instinct. The discordant mutual faith in the myth of the Noble Savage, whose pure instinct is unsullied by Western civilization. Faith in the myth of the benevolent Omnipotence of the State. And most dangerously: Faith in the power of creating a world through words that has only ever existed in words.

Those words are a narrative of suicide. For every cliched "peaceful revolution" like Gandhi's India that has only met success due to rare and fortuitous circumstance, there are tens of millions of individual tragedies speaking silent testament to the folly of holding the misguided faith that one can reason with the unreasonable.

In order to maintain an often beleaguered belief system, the priests of secular faith must create instruments of power that explain away inconsistencies. Fetishes of great and mysterious magic acting in unpredictable ways that are only evident after some momentous occurrence.

And the problem with those that would make a fetish of an inanimate object such as a voodoo doll, or an airplane dropping mana from heaven, or a gun, or even that partially eaten pop-tart, is that the only power a fetish has is over the true believer, and over those peaceful people who lose their freedoms at the ballot box to the will of a deluded majority. The priest in which that power is centralized has a dangerous hold over his or her disciples. When that fetish is ultimately exposed to be powerless in the light of reality, the repercussions are generally bad for all.

Civilization. Freedom. Peace . These are states of societal luxury only achieved in fits and starts against the backdrop of basic human nature: If you have something of value, there will always be those willing to kill you to acquire it.

It is suicidal to act on the belief that human nature has evolved in any significant way from our brutish ancestors bred for a bare-knuckles conflict with a world that wants them dead.