As twilight fades....The Moloch State emerges

Russell Shaw writes, "As Robert Hugh Benson’s apocalyptic novel Lord of the World moves toward its shocking conclusion, a naïve young woman who has placed simple-minded faith in the utter goodness of the Antichrist figure at the center of the story awakens to the fact that her hero has artfully constructed a regime of violence, oppression and thought control.

Profoundly disillusioned, she turns to one of the new state-run euthanasia ‘homes’ for help in ending her life. As she ponders what has happened and what lies ahead, she thinks of the humanist belief system that has brought here: “There seemed no way out of it. The Humanity-Religion was the only one. Man was God, or at least His highest manifestation; and He was a God with which she did not wish to have anything more to do.”

It’s easy to see why Benson’s century-old tale is one of Pope Francis’s favorite books. Driven by a compelling narrative, the story depicts the frightening reality of a dystopian society without religion that in many respects resembles Western secular society now.

I thought of Lord of the World while absorbing the news from California that Gov. Jerry Brown—who the media obsessively kept reminding us is a “lifelong Catholic”—had signed into law a bill making his state the fifth in the U.S. where assisted suicide is legal. The others are Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana. Proponents of assisted suicide were quoted as saying they would turn next to New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Curiously enough, though, around the same time California was joining the ranks of states where doctors can help their patients do away with themselves without falling afoul of the law, Britain’s House of Commons was overwhelmingly rejecting an assisted suicide bill. The vote against was 330 to 118.

Our British cousins have hardly been slouches when it comes to endorsing whatever the secular establishment is currently pushing as the application du jour of utilitarian morality. Is it possible, then, that the lawmakers discerned some flaws in assisted suicide that have escaped the attention of Governor Brown and others like him?

Although even advocates of the right to die generally concede the need for safeguards against abuses, the dynamic of the underlying ideology encourages step by step movement in a radical direction. Perhaps the MPs who voted no were impressed by a medical journal report containing—along with other disturbing facts—the information that in one recent year a right-to-die clinic that had been set up in the Netherlands to serve people whose regular doctors wouldn’t give them lethal injections approved the killing of eleven whose only complaint was that they were “tired of living.”
Reviewing this and similar cases, the authors of the article in JAMA Internal Medicine concluded that European trends in euthanasia and assisted suicide were “very worrisome” and “should give us pause.” Really? That’s a bit like saying that you wonder if the neighbors have a problem while you watch the smoke and flames pouring out of the windows of their house.

Is America bent on going the same way? Are the rise of moral libertarianism and the decline of religious faith having the predictable result of making Americans increasingly vulnerable to an ideology of self-destruction promoted under the banner of liberation? Should we expect sooner or later to see the Supreme Court deliver a 5-4 decision announcing that the court has discovered a constitutional right to assisted suicide—complete with paper thin safeguards of course? This isn’t scare talk. I only wish it were.

Is there really any doubt where we are heading?


It was Edmund Leach who warned that, "Having abandoned the God of love, the Supreme Creator, 21st-century man is now ready to worship himself and to usurp the divine powers of creation and destruction. In the words of Dr. Edmund Leach of King's College at Cambridge: 'The scientist can now play God in his role as wonder-worker, but can he - and should he - also play God as moral arbiter?...There can be no source for these moral judgments except the scientist himself. In traditional religion, morality was held to derive from God, but God was only credited with the authority to establish and enforce moral laws because He was also credited with supernatural powers of creation and destruction. Those powers have now been usurped by man, and he must take on the moral responsibility that goes with them' (Edmund Leach, "We Scientists Have the Right to Play God," The Saturday Evening Post, November 16, 1968, p. 16).

But make no mistake about it, when man becomes God society becomes, in the words of the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (who inspired my philosophy), 'a termite colony.' We are still in the twilight . But unless we take a stand now, we will have the Moloch state. As at Auschwitz, men will determine who has quality of life and who should be "mercifully terminated."

Wild Bill on the Cult of Softness...

On April 6, 1941, Bishop Fulton John Sheen gave a sermon on his radio show "The Catholic Hour" in which he reminded listeners that, "The basic spirit of the modern world for the last century has been a determination to escape the Cross." He told his audience as well that, "There is no such thing as living without a cross. We are free only to choose between crosses." And then he asked them: "Will it be the Cross of Christ which redeems us from our sins, or will it be the double cross, the swastika, the hammer and sickle, the fasces"?

Bishop Sheen believed, as I do, that America is at a crossroads. In his own words, "We in America are now faced with the threat of that double cross...Our choice is not: Will we or will we not have more discipline, more respect for law, more order, more sacrifice; but, where will we get it? Will we get it from without, or from within, Will it be inspired by Sparta or Calvary? By Valhalla or Gethsemane? By militarism or religion? By the double cross or the Cross? By Caesar or by God? That is the choice facing America today. The hour of false freedom is past. No longer can we have education without discipline, family life without sacrifice, individual existence without moral responsibility, economics and politics without subservience to the common good. We are now only free to say whence it shall come. We will have a sword. Shall it be only the sword that thrusts outward to cut off the ears of our enemies, or the sword that pierces inward to cut out our own selfish pride"?

Thus far, America has chosen the double cross. Fleeing from the Cross of Christ and the supernatural kingdom established by the Son of God; one of sacrifice and sanctity, America has chosen to pursue a terrestrial kingdom of pleasure and power founded upon a distorted idea of what constitutes liberty or freedom. But this city of man, which has certainly achieved astounding advancements in various spheres while increasing the affluence of some, has also contributed to a climate where men are regarded as mere machines whose only value is to be found in what they produce or consume. This in turn destroys the individual’s sense of personal dignity and responsibility.

Americans, in their tragic desire to flee from the Cross of Christ, have rushed to embrace this distorted notion of "freedom" and have forgotten that, as created beings, they only possess contingent rights. That is to say, rights which are accorded by Almighty God. Consequently, in their zeal to promote the fallacious idea that the basis of public morality should be whatever the majority of citizens are prepared to accept, they have also forgotten that man does not possess, and never will possess, the right to perform or engage in any act which is displeasing to God.

And where has this flight from the Cross of Christ led us up to this point? Was Bishop Sheen being an alarmist? In the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, taken from his Commencement Address at Harvard University entitled "A World Split Apart": "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. This is considered to be part of freedom, and theoretically counterbalanced by the young peoples’ right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."

Getting back to Bishop Sheen. What did he mean when he said that, "Our choice is not: Will we or will we not have more discipline, more respect for law, more order, more sacrifice; but, where will we get it"? I believe Pope Benedict XVI was providing us with a hint toward an answer when he spoke of the "dictatorship of relativism." Americans who have gleefully embraced the tenets of liberalism have not learned the lesson the concentration camp and the gulag. These unfortunate souls refuse to acknowledge that atheistic ideology (and make no mistake, the current idea of "freedom" which has taken root in America is itself rooted in atheistic ideology) always, and without exception, gives birth to sheer violence. This is the lesson of atheistic humanism. A lesson which the majority of Americans would rather not think about.

Who would deny that Bishop Sheen’s warning, issued some 64 years ago, was highly prophetic? America, and the West in general, is at a crossroads. We have before us two crosses: The Cross of Christ and the double cross (which may also be referred to today as the "dictatorship of relativism"). Which will we choose in the end? Will we continue on our present course or change direction and finally come to embrace the Cross of Christ? Will we embrace Christ and His kingdom of sacrifice and sanctity or continue to rush headlong into the idolatry of unbridled hedonism while declaring ourselves, albeit tacitly, to be God?

If we continue to choose the latter, then we should remember the words of Fr. Vincent Miceli, S.J., "When man becomes God, history testifies that then millions of men become imprisoned slaves, terrified automatons and murdered corpses. Society, in the words of Gabriel Marcel, becomes a ‘termite colony.’" (The Gods of Atheism, p. 463).

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding vaccine nanotechnology

"I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."
- Viktor E. Frankl, 1905-1997.


"Having abandoned the God of love, the Supreme Creator, 21st-century man is now ready to worship himself and to usurp the divine powers of creation and destruction. In the words of Dr. Edmund Leach of King's College at Cambridge: 'The scientist can now play God in his role as wonder-worker, but can he - and should he - also play God as moral arbiter?...There can be no source for these moral judgments except the scientist himself. In traditional religion, morality was held to derive from God, but God was only credited with the authority to establish and enforce moral laws because He was also credited with supernatural powers of creation and destruction. Those powers have now been usurped by man, and he must take on the moral responsibility that goes with them' (Edmund Leach, "We Scientists Have the Right to Play God," The Saturday Evening Post, November 16, 1968, p. 16).

But make no mistake about it, when man becomes God society becomes, in the words of the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, 'a termite colony.' We are still in the twilight. But unless we take a stand now, we will have the Moloch state. As at Auschwitz, men will determine who has quality of life and who should be "mercifully terminated."

Obama: The change we need or more of the same radical subjectivism?

In his work of critical importance entitled Man Against Mass Society, the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel explains that, "..a materialistic conception of the universe is radically incompatible with the idea of a free man: more precisely, that, in a society ruled by materialistic principles, freedom is transmuted into its opposite, or becomes merely the most treacherous and deceptive of empty slogans." (pp. 20-21). In other words, freedom becomes license. Freedom becomes slavery to sin.

Which is exactly where we find ourselves today. A radical subjectivism has taken hold of American culture and jurisprudence. And the consequences have proven disastrous. The U.S. Supreme Court, crippled by this radical subjectivism, has consistently repudiated challenges to its infamous Roe v. Wade decision. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Justice Anthony Kennedy asserted that, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

But Pope John Paul II, in his Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae, No. 20, warned of the dangers to the weak and vulnerable which arise from such a philosophy: "To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others."

Senator Obama and his supporters do claim a right to abortion and do recognize that right in law. And they know full well that this election is critical to their radical agenda which is committed to a perverse notion of "liberty." An idea of "freedom" which insists upon "absolute power over others and against others." In a statement released on the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, Senator Barack Obama said that, "With one more vacancy on the Supreme Court, we could be looking at a majority hostile to a women's fundamental right to choose for the first time since Roe v. Wade. The next president may be asked to nominate that Supreme Court justice. That is what is at stake in this election." (Full statement here).

What is really at stake is the soul of this nation. Gaudium et Spes, No. 51 of the Second Vatican Council teaches clearly that, "..God, the Lord of life, has conferred on men the surpassing ministry of safeguarding life in a manner which is worthy of man. Therefore, from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the greatest care, while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes."

Will we honor the ministry which the Lord of life has conferred upon us? Will we defend human life? Will we safeguard the weak and the vulnerable? Or will we opt for a radical subjectivism which first denies the sanctity of human life in the womb and eventually culminates in the denial of the sanctity of human life through all its stages*?

As we make our choice this election, let's remember the warning of Fr. Vincent Miceli: "When man becomes God, history testifies that then millions of men become imprisoned slaves, terrified automatons and murdered corpses. Society, in the words of Gabriel Marcel, becomes a ‘termite colony.’" (The Gods of Atheism, p. 463).

* "..the Nazi extermination programme began with the elderly, the sick, the mentally ill...Rabbi Cooper said that the killing of the disabled was a kind of training ground for the Nazi regime to 'fine-tune' its 'technology of death.'" (Read full text here).

* The parents of Terri Schiavo suffered as she was murdered by court-ordered starvation. Read here.

Related reading here.