RELIGIOUS FREEDOM | MAY 15, 2018

Why is Religion Under Attack?

Over the past few decades, religion has been fighting off a sustained and widespread attack emanating from people who should know better—the so-called intelligentsia of our society. It has become popular in elite circles to eschew spirituality, belief in a Supreme Being, traditional beliefs of every kind and to ridicule and marginalize those with strong religious beliefs and practices.

Our thinkers and philosophers, the Ph.Ds who occupy key posts in higher education, those in our system of justice, our government and the myriad thinktanks and other NGOs that have proliferated in our global society, seem almost monolithic in their disdain for the Judeo-Christian ethic from which they sprang.

By redefining the freedom of religion enshrined in our constitution as freedom from religion, they have enabled and forwarded an assault on our traditional values. Worshipping Darwinism, they rail against any concept of Intelligent Design and determinedly defend the logical inconsistencies that make Natural Selection a mathematical impossibility as the total answer to how we got here. These “men of science” ridicule those with religious beliefs and make the university campus a hostile environment for believers.

The Ten Commandments being given to Moses by God

While not my religion, education has been their main target over the past two generations at least, they have more recently pushed efforts to remove religion from the public square and even from our language. ‘Merry Christmas’ has been revised to ‘Seasons Greetings’ and the nativity scene common outside almost every City Hall has disappeared, often as a result of litigation or threats of it. Christmas carols are not only passé but a sign of insensitivity and disrespect, possibly even bigotry. Religion has been attacked and even its symbols are being aggressively removed from our society. School prayer, the Ten Commandments, even crosses at military cemeteries have been targeted and eliminated.

Catholic priests and moral guidance (photo credit GMA News)

Why? The reason most often cited is that of tolerance for and sensitivity to the beliefs of others who may be offended by the presence of Judeo-Christian symbols and practices. I believe that the real reason is far more insidious than that. There has been a strong but largely hidden movement to push moral relativism and to relegate traditional morality to the trash heap. Religion has been the primary source of moral teachings in our societies for the past thousands of years. This has made it a target of those who have been working deliberately to erode the underpinnings and foundations our society is built upon. Evil men exist and they attempt to hide by blurring the concepts of good and evil as taught by religion. The very idea that there is a right way to act and a wrong way to act has been attacked as fallacious and the idea that “it is okay to do what feels good” has been pushed as its replacement.

A relatively small but ill-intentioned few, hiding within the much larger group of “liberal” thinkers, has hijacked true liberalism and under the guise of equal rights, tolerance and inclusiveness, has garnered public support for the rapid erosion of religious influence in our society. Who can be against equal rights? Who opposes tolerance? No one wants to be on the wrong side of that debate. So little by little, our fundamental beliefs are being chipped away as being on the wrong side of history, dated and obsolete. A complete collapse of morality is at the end of that road and the end of our civilization follows close behind if this is not reversed. Religion has been the great civilizer of Man. We cannot allow it to become irrelevant. Religious freedom means preserving and protecting the right to practice not just one’s own religion but the rights of each of us to practice in our own way.

For us and for posterity, we must defend religious rights from the assault of the godless.

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