Call yourself a Rationalist you should rethink!

Secularists fancy themselves as modern-day rationalists’ forgetting the term is subjective and based on nothing but their own say-so.

Consider one definition of a rationalist: a person who bases their opinions and actions on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response.

Whoa, there is a whole lot of bias implicit in that statement right there but there’s no getting away from it, what defines a rationalist now is down to personal opinion, in any case where meanings of words have been appropriated and redefined to fit subjective tastes, it’s unsurprising.

However, compare it to calling somebody rational, by which we mean objectively reasonable with the ability to think logically, which is the exact opposite of rationalist with its subjective connotations.

The post-modern liberal view of what constitutes rationalism has no precedent, making it a first in the annals of western society, which is a very bad place to be, isolated and just hanging there, in a vast empty space connected to nothing, like an oversized pair of a dog’s testicles, minus the dog.

What a Rationalist Is and Isn’t

First, it is NOT the philosophy of relativism, critical theory, scientism, irrational sentimentalism or the ideology of identity politics with its special emphasis on sexual and gender identities.

Having eliminated what rationalism is not, time to define what it IS, in historical terms.

William Shakespeare once said something profound; rejecting objective order will reduce everything to power, will, and appetite, which constitutes a “universal wolf” that will devour everything, finally turning on and devouring itself.

He could have been a prophet predicting the direction of the whirlwind just four hundred years later.

Yes, the lines are from one of his plays, Troilus and Cressida, but it’s uncanny how he seems to be addressing contemporary thought and culture as part of his dialogue.

Yes, modernism changed the way we view practically everything, a fact too few people recognize.

Some interesting facts about genuine rationalism

Rationalism properly understood is; believing science to be the ultimate tool of enquiry but essentially working hand-in-hand with a correct view of nature consistent with objective thinking, truth and morality.

Rationalism flourished in cultures within the confines of a well-developed Christian heritage or Deistic outlook.

Deists attributed the power of nature, indeed creation itself to a God, with deism rapidly declining just prior to the 1960’s, before that, a belief in God was the norm for mainstream culture.

Research points to deism and rational thinking disappearing in 3 generations beginning in the Nineteen Seventies.

What can be taken away from all this is atheism and rationalism are incompatible because without an objective framework, they don’t have any reason to wax lyrical about being on the right side of history in relation to any aspect of their ideological wishful thinking.

Dead End Cultures

Defining characteristics of the above are well documented, in a nutshell they are;

Entirely self-focused on day-to-day life, wants and needs without any interest in understanding nature or objective reality in any form, but seeking to redefine reality to align with specific goals.

This society goes by many names, a dead culture, an inert culture, a defunct culture or as Pope John Paul the Second called it- The Culture of Death.

These cultures will self-implode leaving them vulnerable to conquest by much stronger ones down the line, that or complete annihilation, and this is inevitable.

Thought for the Day

Modernism unleashed skepticism against all traditions and authorities, all in the name of reason; and postmodernism unleashed that skepticism against reason itself.

Focus and mull over that one.