M. G. Oprea in her editorial
here entitled "Hollande Suggests France Will Finally Defend Its Culture Against ISIS" correctly points out that believing in nothing necessarily means falling for anything.
This was the point of Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel “Submission.” The story is set in a near future where a Muslim political party has just been voted into power. The new government begins to move France toward sharia law and away from its own values. All university professors must convert to Islam, and women are no longer allowed to wear pants.
Rather than push back, French society acquiesces, because France, much like the protagonist in the story, no longer believes in anything. So there is nothing with which to fight.
Unfortunately, this is true not only of France, but for much of western civilization including the United States. Having trashed long-held (for millennia) beliefs such as the institution of marriage and gender that are ultimately founded on the bedrock of Scriptural absolute truth, the culture now finds itself in a bottomless abyss.
In 2008, a Wall Street Journal article
here entitled "Look Who's Irrational Now" made an astonishing admission,
The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.
... Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.
The article goes on to highlight the inevitable gullibility of those that abandon their grip of absolute truth, by pointing to the late-night comic Bill Maher - who for many epitomizes the deadly twins of progressive liberalism and secular humanism.
On Oct. 3, Mr. Maher debuts "Religulous," his documentary that attacks religious belief. He talks to Hasidic scholars, Jews for Jesus, Muslims, polygamists, Satanists, creationists, and even Rael -- prophet of the Raelians -- before telling viewers: "The plain fact is religion must die for man to live."
But it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O'Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman -- a quintuple bypass survivor -- to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn't accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: "I don't believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory." He has told CNN's Larry King that he won't take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn't even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.
For decades, progressive liberalism together with secular humanism have quietly sown their deadly seed throughout the culture from the top-down. Espoused primarily by authority figures (i.e., politicians, educators, entertainers, judges, mainstream media, an increasing number of the clergy, etc.), these philosophies bore their poisonous fruit in an increasingly more significant percentage of the population, finally reaching a tipping point after the turn of the century with the election in 2008 and 2012 of the chief architect focused on the "transformation" of America ... a transformation ultimately characterized by a transition from orderly, rational common sense to lawless insanity.
Nonsense thrives whenever and wherever the Bible (a powerful antidote to superstition) is rejected or weakened. The form of Christianity that holds Scripture as the revealed, absolute truth and an authoritative revelation from the Creator God, was the driving force behind the birth of modern science. It also liberated countless people from all manner of superstition, harmful practice and fear. But with the wholesale rejection of Scripture now underway among the cultural elite, it is not surprising to witness an unprecedented flourishing of all manner of insanity, occult practice, bizarre superstition, and outright rejection of common sense among the intelligentsia. The "religious" among the progressive liberals with their supposed ‘superior minds of great rationality’, are in fact much more prone to superstition and delusional irrationality.
With western civilization descending into madness, G.K. Chesterton was right when he warned: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing—they believe in anything.”