Four Horsemen
© Boris
There has been a storm brewing, probably since the turn of the 20th century, and certainly since the 1960s. It's something that represents a more profound threat than radical Islamic terrorism. A kind of whirlwind sowed pre-Enlightenment, if you want to get very technical and pointlessly pedantic. But this is not gonna be one of those articles; we don't have the time and, let's face it, with all the mood-altering drugs and crippling anxieties you face on a daily basis, you don't have the attention span for it.

The real watershed moment - though they certainly didn't realize it, at least not consciously - happened in a D.C. apartment on September 30th, 2007. Four notable atheists - Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet and Sam Harris - gathered around a table to film their smug triumphalism for all the world to see...

The Four Horsemen

The documentary was titled The Four Horsemen, which was completely unironic in the way only someone who hasn't actually read the bible could be. What their bombastic proclamations served to conceal was that Science is running head-long into a crisis.

That crisis can also be broken down into "four horsemen", harbingers of the fall from grace of the scientific establishment.
  • Global Warming, aka Climate Change
  • The Failures of Modern Medicine
  • The Scientific basis of Racism
  • The Failure of Scientific Morality
Each one of these points, which lies below the surface of the current discourse on secular and religious faith, the benefits of science, and where we as a species are heading, have far-reaching consequences, should they ever become the primary focus of the average person.

The Globe that Didn't Warm

We were all supposed to be drowning from melted polar ice caps by now. The world was supposed to be insufferably hotter. Anyone who was raised in the 80s or 90s knows that global warming was the topic du jour from every liberal pulpit. It all culminated in a not-unfamous documentary by Al Gore called "an inconvenient truth."

As criticism of Global Warming began to mount, the name was changed in the public discourse to "anthropogenic climate change." Or just climate change for short. Anyone who disagreed with the "science" or "conclusions" of so-called "climate science" were labeled, unironically, "climate deniers."

When dealing with secular people you will hear terms like x-deniers a lot. There are science-deniers, climate-deniers, aids-deniers, and so on and so forth. Really, what they are saying is that you are a heretic. They can't use the word heretic of course, so they just tack the subject onto the word "denier."

With the recent court decision forcing the University of Arizona to turn over its internal "Climate Gate" emails, the writing is on the wall for 97% of climate scientists.

In fact, so much effort has been put into assuring the public that everyone who is anyone believes in Global Warming Climate Change, when the house of cards comes falling down it will have nowhere else to fall but on all of their heads.

It won't just be a matter of all the policies and taxes stolen from the public by climate change policies, the industries crippled or ransomed to the Green Mafia, no: it will be the sheer immensity and futility of the lies.

All that guilt-tripping, all that pontificating, and for something as normal as a changing climate.

When Bill Nye, the "I-only-have-a-masters-in-mechanical-engineering" Science Guy, suggested that "climate-deniers" should be imprisoned, he erased the last rally point of science. If one could say anything for science, it was that at least they never overtly persecuted heretics. Sure, people like Simmelweiss and Velikovsky have disappeared down the memory hole, but there were always rationalizing narratives about ignorance or poor presentation that your average skeptic could cling to.

It's hard to rationalize away "put them in prison."

Immortal Zombies of the Spotless Sunshine

The incredible nature of the failure of modern medicine is so deep and broad that most peoples minds simply cannot grasp it. Even after years of revelation after revelation, essentially proving that modern medicine isn't merely corrupt, it is incompetent, people still choose to ignore this fundamental problem.

This is not a matter of pro'- or anti-vaxxers (at least they aren't called vaccine-deniers, but that's coming soon): it is a basic truth that modern medicine has not extended our lives; it has extended our torment.

What is the point of living till you're 96 if the last 20 of those years are lived in and out of hospitals and adult care homes, with stints here and there, and a nice bout of dementia so that you can spend your golden years drooling on yourself, unable to recognize your loved ones, or even where you are?

Life everlasting has been the central promise of every religion; most people don't realize that it is also the core promise of science. Every 10 years or so a new center piece is published in one popular science magazine or another claiming that immortality is only a decade away. Anti-aging creams, immortality pills, UV treatments, and the list goes on.

But modern medicine hasn't delivered the goods, and it never will.

What is worse, modern medicine has delivered us into inescapable dependence on modern medicine. We can no longer survive the rigors of nature without copious amounts of cleaning liquid and anti-biotics. As a result, our underdeveloped/compromised immune systems are causing a plague of chronic immune-related disorders.

For a secular science that purports to believe in evolution, they sure don't act like they believe in it. What did science expect the germs to do, if not evolve? Evolve they have, and now more people than ever are getting infections from aggressive infectious agents that are resistant to medicine. To add insult to injury, the most common place to be infected by something modern medicine can't cure is by visiting one of their hospitals!

Modern medicine has also managed to keep us chasing our tail with a constant stream of epidemic scares, the largest and most scandalous of which was the HIV hoax, and the AIDS epidemic that never happened.

You remember AIDS, right? That thing that was supposed to kill us all before the year 2000?

Remember the Avian Flu? Swine Flu? Ebola? All these so called epidemics and pandemics did was spike the price of turkey and pork and fill the coffers of pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines that usually don't work.

The Other Racists

The modern liberal narrative conspicuously depicts racists as ignorant religious people. That's very strange considering that racism was entirely a creation of secular, not religious, thinkers.

Christopher Hitchens used to challenge people at his debates to come up with a single evil thing that could only be uttered by an atheist and not a religious person. I've always wondered why no one suggested: "Step into this gas chamber because you are genetically unfit to live."

Religious people have a long list of reasons for killing, but one that is not on that list is killing someone because they are evolutionarily unfit for procreation. Euthanization to maintain genetic purity could only ever matter to a materialist who believes in evolution, not in a fallen creation.

You can stone a woman for adultery, or stone a man for blasphemy, string up a philistine or a sodomite without compunction, but a thorn in the flesh or a frailty is a curse from God, that's just the way he wanted it.

The science of old that was used for racism has been recast by modern scientists as "pseudo-science."

They weren't calling it pseudo-science then. Whatever you want to say about Doctor Josef Mengele, the words Good Christian rarely come to mind. Christianity, and most religions, are too universalist to be genocidal. It's true that on occasion we'll kill a few apostates or unbelievers, but most of our crusades could have been avoided if the heathens just saw the light of Jesus (Jesus love you long time). That's the good thing about religion, no matter how murderous it gets, there's an easy way out: convert.

I am pretty sure the NAZIs in the concentration camps didn't give the people they were planning to murder the option of converting to National Socialism.

That's why the genocidal tendency of science is worse: there is no escape once some high-minded academic fruitcake gets his hands on the levers of power; people die in the tens of millions. It took the Auto da fé 300 years to murder 12,000 people (it was really only 5,000 - but let's take the upper estimate); socialists managed over 100 million in less than 74 years. That's about 4,000+ people a day; in 3 days they beat the Catholic Church - no one likes an over-achiever.

In 1511, Antonio Montesinos denounced the mistreatment of New World Indians in one of the most eloquent and inditing sermons ever written. "This voice declares that you are in mortal sin, and live and die therein by reason of the cruelty and tyranny that you practice on these innocent people. Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery?"

Whatever you wish to say about Christianity in the West, it has long been against slavery, though due to political pressure and a confused policy, the Church was easily ignored in the West Indies, to the great delight of psychopathic and greedy conquistadors.

What was uniquely horrible about black slavery in the American South, as well as South American slavery, was that it was a marriage between utilitarian greed and secular rationality. By all scientific measurements of the time, native peoples like the West Indians and black Africans, were unevolved creatures fit only to be beasts of burden.

The racism of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries now conveniently swept under the rug as "pseudo-science" is something that the scientific establishment has never really dealt with, has never fully acknowledged, and so its memory doesn't serve to temper scientific hubris today.

How many Angels can pole dance on a needle?

The final horseperson of the coming scientific apocalypse is subtle and fraught with danger. At the same time it is so catastrophically important that it is virtually impossible to overstate its significance because it is at the very core of all of our current cultural problems.

The undertone of all of modern science has been the search for a materialist and secular source of incontestable morality. In between the lines of early 18th and 19th century atheist debates with religious authorities, was the implicit promise that secular leadership could and would establish a moral order that would be superior to the one extant under Christianity.

I am using Christianity here because I was born in the West, but much of what I am saying would be just as true under Confucianism.

If we look back in time, what was considered immoral in the days leading up to the Enlightenment shift, and even to a lesser degree in the lead up to the 1960s, were things like infidelity and divorce, sexual promiscuity, murder, theft, bearing false witness, homosexuality and parasitism.

But if you look around you today the overwhelming majority of moral truths we once accepted as a culture are no more. There is no moral weight to divorce, promiscuity, homosexuality or parasitism on society. Aborting your own child would have been considered murder (it requires premeditation) then; now it carries almost no moral weight.

That is because secularism became moral by discovering that nothing is really wrong if you have a justifying narrative.

The situation of secular morality being scientifically grounded is far worse than postmodernism - which posits a purely relativistic morality based on power and privilege - would indicate. It is not that morality is relative, it is that morality is whatever you need it to be.

We hear it every day when people declare something to be moral or immoral as if by sheer force of rhetoric. We have all become judges, we have all become Gods. The morality of today is decided by consensus, because today we don't feel that homosexuality is wrong, so then it mustn't be. If we feel today that breaking a solemn oath before God and divorcing your mate is a personal right, then it must be.

If we don't want to accept the responsibility of our promiscuity, well, we'll just abort it, after all it's only murder once it passes through the magic tunnel. But what if the mother's life is threatened?

That's the issue at hand: what do we value? Morality is about valuing the future. We don't murder because it can destroy our community's ability to survive. We refrain from theft or adultery or promiscuousness because we value not the moment, not ourselves, but our progeny. We value the next generation.

Children have a right to be born not by accident, but by the intent of a bonded man and woman committed to sacrificing their own personal happiness for their children.

Not anymore, and that is why the West is dying.

And Now For Something Completely Unintuitive

When the four horsemen met in Washington, D.C. that day in September, what drove them to new heights of proselytizing for anti-theism was not a sure belief in unbelief, nor was it their fear of radical Islam or the clash of civilizations, it was their recognition that secular thinkers had failed miserably.

What they wanted to do was talk really loudly and hope no one noticed. The ensuing wave of internet Atheism and Skepticism spread like a wildfire. The problem with wildfires is, they burn themselves out. And that is precisely what has happened.

The real fear of Islam and the Middle East is not that radical Islamic terrorism will kill us all, but that Muslim fervor will reignite the faith of the West. Which it seems to have done.