There Is a War

 

A Jehovah’s Witness recently justified their non-observance of Christmas to me by quoting 2 Corinthians 6:

“14 Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 15 What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? …

17 Therefore, “Come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.”

This only works as a reason to shun Christmas if you think Christians are unbelievers. And then you contradict St. Paul in this passage, for he cites Christ as the object of belief. 

But this advice to stay clear of unbelievers is standard for monotheists in general. It should not be ignored.

The same advice is in the Talmud: "Separate yourself from the nations, and do not eat with them." Jubilees 22: 16.

The Quran is more violent: “Kill them [the unbelievers, kafirs] wherever you come upon them and drive them out of the places from which they have driven you out. For persecution is far worse than killing.” Surah Al-Baqarah 191.

Even John Locke and the philosophers of liberal democracy say so: religious liberty is a necessary human right, freedom of conscience, but atheism is not to be tolerated in a liberal democracy.

This is vital advice. We cannot ignore or reject it; it comes with the warrant of God himself. Believers cannot mix with those who do not believe in God. One or the other will be persecuted. Belief and unbelief are fire and water.

This is indeed historically shown to be true. The pagan Roman empire could get along with the worshippers of any given pagan/polytheistic deity. But they could not tolerate the Jews, and levelled Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. And they persecuted the early Christians. So did the polytheistic Babylonians before them—then the Jews were allowed to return to their lands by Cyrus, the Zoroastrian, a fellow monotheist. 

Other historical examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely. 

But why are the two positions incompatible? Why can’t we all just get along?

Belief in God means belief in the absolute. God is the absolute, by definition. God is the good, the real, and the beautiful. Rejecting God is relativism. Relativism cannot permit the existence of the absolute, and therefore cannot accept absolutism as tolerable. And absolutism must view some things as positively wrong; therefore it cannot accept relativism. 

Locke’s objection is that an unbeliever cannot feel himself bound by an oath. Not recognizing the authority of God implies not recognizing the demands of morality, or truth, or beauty. Relativism cannot accept that there is such a thing as reality, or truth. 

Similarly, it cannot accept that anything is either good or bad. So a relativist will not accept the demands of morality.

That is usually why people become relativists: to escape their conscience. The existence of God is accessible to human reason. It has been proven by the philosophers a dozen or more ways. Given that this is so, anyone rejects God ultimately because they reject the authority of God, reject being subject to Him, or to anyone but themselves. 

“Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.” – Milton, Stan’s speech, Paradise Lost.

Accordingly, as Locke argued, one cannot trust an unbeliever. 

Now let’s get to the third great transcendental. Rejecting God means rejecting reality, for God is the ultimate real. It means rejecting good and evil, rejecting morality. It also means rejecting the concept of beauty. As, for fear of their conscience, unbelievers will shun any hint of the absolute, they will actually shun beauty.

This illuminates Jesus’s repeated test of the false prophet: “By their fruits you shall know them.” 

A relativistic age like our own will lose its capacity to produce beauty in the arts. Artists who are unbelievers will not produce anything of value.

But here’s the bigger, more ominous problem: we are now living cheek by jowl, throughout the West, with a large mass of genuine unbelievers, kafirs. This is unsustainable, and must lead to trench warfare, figuratively or even literally. There is a reason why we all it a "culture war."

We are seeing the battle lines draw up more clearly all the time: the religious cluster around Trump in the US, Catholics like RFK or JD Vance, evangelicals like Huckabee or Cruz, Hindus like Ramaswamy or Gabbard, orthodox Jews like Ben Shapiro; while the Liberal Party in Canada bans from their ranks anyone who opposes abortion.

And one side or he other must triumph. They cannot just coexist.