I do take religion seriously, as Roy stated. When by the grace of God I trip or blunder my way into humility, then I laugh at myself, for there’s plenty to laugh at.

In saying that Leftists are acting out their functional religion, I’m certainly not disparaging religion per se. I wasn’t even disparaging their functional religion (Leftism) although it certainly deserves disparaging.

I was merely agreeing — in my usual longwinded way — with Adrian Vermeule’s comment that the Left’s insanity is “theological” in nature (“theological” being a shorthand for “related to their functional religion”).

Reality currently stands in obvious contradiction of the Left’s functional religion. Their self-image — there assuredness of their own moral acceptability and freedom from crushing guilt, for example — is built entirely on the foundation of that religion. That is why they’re doubling down on the religion more and more frantically as its tenets become increasingly risible. For if Leftism turns out merely to be wrong…what then?

Here’s an example in miniature: Consider a woman who had an abortion. In the days after the abortion, she fiercely resisted allowing herself to think the thought, “If that was really my unborn son or daughter, then what, exactly, have I just done? And what does that say about me?” Such a thought was painful, so she habitually distracted herself from thinking it, or even anything close to it. She erected an “Ugh Field” in her mind: A little invisible force-field, a frictionless cloaking device, around that topic. Any time her mind wanders in that direction, her mood shifts to agitation…which is not fun, so she doesn’t let her mind wander that way.

Unsurprisingly she finds the company of persons who talk about that kind of thing intolerable, and prefers to surf on the feelings of confidence and camaraderie she experiences around a coterie of Leftist women. (They, of all persons, are the least likely to ever utter the sentence, “I wonder sometimes if maybe abortion isn’t a kind of murder, after all.”)

So it’s no surprise when she becomes a Leftist herself. She may even utter testimonials about how wonderful her abortion was. But she didn’t conclude that Leftism was true and therefore it was okay to have an abortion. It’s the other way around: She had gut instincts telling her something was wrong about the abortion, when she did it. But afterwards she suppressed those and settled, via emotional associations, into a firm conviction that Leftism must be true. Because if it wasn’t, then she willfully contracted the murder of her own child, and how could she possibly live with herself then?

And what if reality (in the form of technological advancements and plain reasoning from scientific facts) were to challenge the foundations of her Leftism?

That would run the risk of piercing that “Ugh Field,” which would be intolerable. Thus her frantic shrillness in denouncing anyone who questions her functional religion.

Multiply that one example by some 25% of the American population, and that’s why the Left is unhinged.

I have read and re-read both your and my comments above. If you are taking issue with me it seems that while I am saying that conservatives continue to fight a rear-guard action and will do so until they recognize the left as evil; you, in contrast seem to be saying that conservatives already recognize the left as evil and are taking action. Am I correct in this interpretation?

You write: “Those whose moral compass is still intact are repulsed by democrat extremism and that repulsion enables a new openness to the right’s POV.” I suspect that such a broad statement is more wishful thinking than provable fact, but I hope you are correct.

If true, why weren’t the 2018 elections a Republican sweep. If true, why do any Never-Trumpers remain at all? I fear that there are still many, many voters out there who see the Dems as well intentioned even while they think they are wrong. I live in an urban blue enclave and I see it all the time. While such voters might be willing to vote non-Democrat, they see no need to crush and destroy the Democrat party even after the debacle of the Democrat debates and CNN’s climate change town hall.

I think conservatives are only in the very beginning stages of bringing century-old Democrat Progressivism to heel and while I am optimistic, I am hardly certain of what the eventual outcome will actually be.

Re: R.C.

On the contrary. He takes religion very seriously and has given it a great deal of thought.

I’ve read only a bit of it so far, but noted that it talks about Adrian Vermeule, whose tweet led into Neo’s post.

Someone said “man is the animal who laughs”; and that’s all very well but insufficient. It was, I think, Chesterton who put it better: Man is the animal who makes dogmas.

Everyone has a functional religion.

A man’s functional religion is the worldview built up from his…
– metaphysics
– epistemology
– cosmology
– anthropology
– ethics
– approach to the great problems (human sin, natural disasters, suffering, death)

Each man’s answers to the “great questions” in the preceding list of categories are the first part of his functional religion. The second part consists of the culture, ritual, education, and means of advocacy he adopts for…
(a.) reinforcing those answers in himself;
(b.) changing his own behavior to help himself live in accord with those answers;
(c.) passing on those answers and behaviors to his children and others under his influence;
(d.) extending his influence to broaden his ability to popularize those answers.

These answers (and the associated culture, ritual, education, and advocacy) function in an atheist in the exact same way that they function in a Catholic or a Wiccan. The answers given by the Atheist are different, to be sure, from those given by the Catholic or the Wiccan, but they still serve as his functional religion, since the things he does spring from them in much the same way. The “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism” a decade ago were simply Popular Evangelists for their Religion.

In fact, the atheist often doesn’t realize he has a metaphysics (as a result of which it’s often a bad, even self-contradictory one). The dupes of mainstream mass-media propaganda don’t have a good epistemology, but they have a bad one. Proponents of “scientific”/reductive materialism have a very clear, if intrinsically meaningless, cosmology. The anthropology of the materialist neuroscience is straightforward enough. I suppose it’s vain to talk much of the ethics of men inasmuch as one’s chosen behavior often varies from his professed ethics. But modern man’s approach to sin and suffering and death is painfully obvious: Call the first item a myth, use pharmacology to alleviate the second, and delay the last one as long as possible (or until pharmacology falls down on the job).

All these items work together to produce the worldview of each person, even leftists. The average leftist follows either no name-brand religion, or a watered-down and vestigial version of one. But that’s because his functional religion is leftism: There is no room in his mind and guts and will for another.

So, yes, the cognitive dissonance of the leftists is results from a theological problem in the same way that the cognitive dissonance of Harold Camping’s followers resulted from a theological problem when Harold Camping predicted the Rapture occurring on September 6, 1994. (When it failed to occur, he revised the date to September 29 and then to October 2, and then, to May 21, 2011, and finally October 21, 2011. Eventually he was incapacitated by a stroke and passed away late 2013.)

It’s sad that very few leftists have responded by examining the blind-spots in their theology. But it isn’t very surprising: After all, “a mind is a difficult thing to change.”