Human conceit.

From what I've seen over the past 43 years, attempts to bypass the negatives of "organized religion" while still maintaining its "spiritual" benefits have failed, and the Boomers had the benefit of being raised in a functional society with actual rules and obligations. I'm not foolish enough to think I could do better on my own.^[1]

What could go wrong?

Just another take on the fatuous "modern" belief that tradition has nothing to offer and that we can just dump the past like a mattress on the edge of the highway. Alcoholics will tell stories of how they lost wife, children, health, job and self respect and then add, "And my best thinking got me there." It's a heck of a thought and one that should be taken to heart by all the mechanics and tinkerers among us who think they can sweep everything off the table with one smooth motion and then come up with something better.

The economic and immigration madness that has infected the West is something created by the deliberate actions of many highly educated people enamored of (1) secularism, (2) "equality," and (3) the idea that lemonade and candy can gush forth if a rational and humane "socialism" can replace the rotten ways of the past.

Life is unequal and unfair but more equality and fairness came into the world because of people freely pursuing their self interest in free markets. Wise, loving, "enlightened" people had nothing to do with, unless it was those who created a legal structure of rationality, predictability, an even-handedness within which trial and error could slowly lead to amelioration of the harshness of life.

No attempt to cast aside workable legal restraints has led to anything more decent or more just. When was "revolutionary justice" anything but a satisfaction of individual revenge fantasies and bestial instincts that led straight to more slaughter? Handing more and more political power to what some like to think are the "right" kind of people has only led to horror in our times, not just mass killing but social decay that threatens civilization itself. Once-great American cities in our own time are being laid waste by uncivilized people and where is there a scintilla, a soupcon, or a smidgin of evidence that that will ever be turned around? Destruction of our cities is today the course that we pursue with determination. Each new fracturing draws not leaders but buffoons and other political jokes like vultures on the Ferlinghetti Plain.

The Christian religion has attempted to deal with the idea of fallen man. It gives hope to people conscious of their own transgressions and keeps sinners as a part of a larger community. Not an insignificant effort in a world that has always had no lack of suffering humanity.

But secularists and iconoclasts have yet to address the issue of human limitation. In fact, they do not acknowledge it except to offload the defects of the world onto the shoulders of "bigots," "racists," "sexists," and such. This is what the psychologists refer to as "displacement" which is seen in people who transfer personal failings onto others. Only people who have no consciousness of their own failings and propensity for sin can so casually, so recklessly abandon, in the case of the U.S., the salutary protections of the Constitution. What is the need for law, if the rulers are good people?

Hubris is bound up in secularism and today we see its full flowering. Neither common sense, decency, tradition, law, or arithmetic restrain. All correction or limitation is swept aside like tissue. Are you an illegal immigrant? Well, then amnesty's just the thing for you. Is that yet another illegitimate child? Why, it's more money for you! Are education and a job to you like Kryptonite to Superman? Oh, but for structural racism! Eighty trillion dollars in the hole and counting? Please. Let there be an end to hate.

But we got rid of the accursed stupidity and cruelty of the Christian religion. There's that.

Notes
^[1] "Create Your Own Religion." The Lost Art of Self-Preservation (for Women), 1/3/2015.