A Modern-Day St. Patrick

I've mentioned To The Source before; an internet-based ministry dedicated to "Challenging Hardcore Secularism with Principled Pluralism."  Today's article, by Dr. Jean Bethke Elshtain, addresses the tendancy in today's Europe to ignore the European roots in Judaism and Christianity.  Here are a couple of tantalizing snippets from this excellent discourse:

 

"If a culture forgets what it is, as I believe Europe has done, it falls first into an agnostic shrugging of the shoulders, unable to say exactly what it is and believes, and from there it will inevitably fall into nihilism. Detached from its religious foundations, Europe will not remain agnostic."

 

"A culture must believe in its own enculturating responsibility and mission in order to make claims of value and to institutionalize them in social and political forms. This a post-Christian Europe cannot do."

 

"A sign carried by radical Islamist protestors in London during the fracas over the Dutch cartoons proclaimed, "Europe is a cancer / Islam is the answer." A perverted idea of Islam confronts a Europe that has lost a sense of who she is and what she represents."

 

"Over time human rights, now almost universally accepted among Europeans, will themselves come to be seen as so many arbitrary constructions that may, on utilitarian grounds, be revoked—because there is nothing intrinsic about human beings such that they are not to be ill-treated or violated or even killed. "

 

"A new protocol for euthanizing newborns with disabilities is institutionalized in the Netherlands, and the doctor who authored the protocols, Eduard Verhagen, tells us how "beautiful" it is when the newborns are killed, for, at last, they are at peace."

 

"No good has ever— ever—come from narrowing and constricting our understanding of humanity in this way."

 

"Without God, without some transcendent principle, the wretched life is not worth living at all. And others have the power to decide whose life is wretched based on utilitarian criteria. The utilitarian ethic would annihilate the Christian ethic in the name of progress and decency and the ending of suffering."

 

The last paragraph:  "Evil can take the form of refusing to be what one is. The retreat from defining Europe in relation to her Jewish and Christian heritage is the face of European nihilism. When a reaction comes, it is likely to be extreme and distorted because indifference prevailed too long."

 

Ms. Elshtain's Gifford Lectures have been published as Sovereignty: God, State and Self anad the book is available from Amazon.

 

"The difference between prejudice and conviction is that you can explain a conviction without getting angry."