One
comes across from time to time statements about the greatness of Western Civilization,
such as this one:
. . . Respectable conservatives are too busy being the
shadow that follows the continuing leftist revolution that has made holy
everything that opposes white, Western, Christian civilization.
Source: Dr
Michael Hill, ‘LS at CPAC’, League of the
South, http://leagueofthesouth.com/ls-at-cpac/,
posted 27 Feb. 2015, accessed 3 March 2015
Or
from Rudy Giuliani:
Or
indeed whole books on the subject:
But
there are two things that must be kept in mind when evaluating Western
culture’s place among the other cultures that have and do now exist:
1. ‘[W]hite, Western, Christian civilization’
did not spring to life on its own; it only became possible as a result of the
True Faith being brought to Western Europe out of love by the ‘dark-skinned’
people of Palestine, Syria, and North Africa.
2. The peoples of Western
Europe were not faithful to the Ancient Faith of Christ and His
Holy Apostles that was preached to them and accepted by their forefathers of
earlier centuries. They instead mingled
it with humanism. This was done first by
the Pope of Rome at the time of the Great Schism of 1054 A. D. (though there
were other important developments in this regard before this date) who banished
Christ as Head of His Church on earth, thus making Christianity a product of
the Pope’s merely human will. Later this
error took root among all Western Christians by the work of the Protestant
reformers: Christianity for Protestants is defined by the conviction of each
individual believer.
It
should therefore be no surprise that indifference and now hostility towards þe thought
of eternal, unchanging Truth should infect more and more people of Western
Europe and her children (including the South), as Roman Catholics and
Protestants continue to squabble over which doctrines are true and which false.
Þe
faithful weard of Christianity has not, withal, been Western Europe but ræðer
Eastern Europe (Hungary, Serbia, etc.), Russia,
and parts of the Middle East and Africa.
Father
Andrew Phillips, Orthodox priest in England, wrote a fitting rebuke for
those Westerners who think too highly of themselves and the things they have
made, who follow not the law of love, and are bereft of humility:
. . .
The
history of Western hypocrisy stretches back into the millennial past and even
beyond. Europe, and later its settlements around the world, was built on the
systemic violence which started with Charlemagne, called ‘the Father of
Europe’, on massacres, invasions, ‘crusades’, inquisitions, persecutions,
burnings and feudal wars, on the systemic killing, enslaving and looting of the
peoples of the planet, from Saxony to England, from Jerusalem to
Constantinople, from the Americas to Asia, from Australasia to Africa. Gold and
slaves were taken in the name of the idol of ‘progress’, concentration camps
(‘reservations’ and ‘detention camps’) set up in a process called ‘spreading
Western civilization’, the price of which is a billion Western and Westernized
prosperous consumerists, a billion modest, three billion poor, three billion
desperately poor and a planet on the verge of ecological catastrophe.
The
history of Western hypocrisy goes back then to that point in history when the
elite of the peripheral Western European provinces arrogantly appointed itself
as the centre of the world, usurping even the authority of God through its new
ideology called the ‘filioque’. This asserts that all the power and authority
of God (‘shock and awe’) comes from fallen human nature, which takes the place
of God and, worshipping itself, calls itself ‘humanism’ and ‘rationalism’.
Thus, the elite then usurped the legitimate Christian Empire, making the pagan
vestiges of Old Rome
into its model and plundering the Christian capital in New Rome with its
barbaric, military might. Today this is still apparent when Western people
refuse to become Christians, that is, refuse to join the Orthodox Church,
because they prefer their ‘Judeo-Christian’ (deformed Christian) culture, for
they put their culture before the Church.
Western
culture is then filioquized, that is, it claims the supreme authority of God
for the fallen human nature of the Western and Westernized (‘filioquized’),
thus idolizing and absolutizing that nature. Hypocritically, Western culture
claims to be multicultural. It is not. It is strictly monocultural. Its
cultural arrogance, utter intolerance and blasphemous disrespect are
breath-taking. Only when any religious belief is reduced to folklore or
psychopathological schism, degutted and castrated, is it acceptable to the
West. Any, including perhaps especially Western people, who seriously reject
and challenge Western atheism in favour of authentic and consistent Christian
beliefs, are ostracized, mocked, despised, condemned as ‘eccentric’, ‘backward’
or ‘retarded’ and their faith blasphemed. The West may be at the very centre of
apostasy, but spiritually it is hopelessly provincial, as it always has been.
This
is why, like its model, the pagan Roman Empire,
the egocentric and formerly ethnocentric modern West lives in moral degradation
amid suicidal depopulation, too selfish even to reproduce, relying on cheap
immigrant labour to function. This is the grave that Western ‘civilization’,
with its aggressive atheism, has dug for itself. The only Christian alternative
to Western totalitarian disrespect for spiritual belief is centred in Russia, at the
heart of Christian civilization. Viciously attacked by Western materialism and
atheism in 1917 and left for dead, it has risen from the tomb. Although it is
now facing a new propaganda onslaught from the atheist West, which is also
arming the Nazis in Kiev, its new Vietnam, it is the only strong centre of faith
in the Risen Saviour, around which the last spiritually healthy forces of Europe and of the world can gather as the storm clouds of
2015 loom.
Source: ‘The Origin of Western Hypocrisy’, Orthodox England events ‘blog, http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/the-origin-of-western-hypocrisy/
, posted 15 Jan. 2015, accessed 3 March 2015.
(For
further thoughts on this subject, the reader is invited to read this essay,
also by Fr Andrew, ‘Why Does the Western Elite Want to Destroy Russia?’ http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/why-does-the-western-elite-want-to-destroy-russia/)
Instead
of the pride of Rudy Giuliani, Rodney Stark, and others, let there be
repentance in the West and a return to the Ancient Orthodox Faith of our
forefathers.
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