THE BLAME GAME
Earlier this week I posted a short note on Substack – "Both sides use hateful rhetoric, then blame the other side for using hateful rhetoric. This must stop! Dehumanizing people is the first step toward annihilating a whole class, political party, or race. All humans are created in God’s image and must be treated with compassion." It referred to a video by Kaizen Asiedu about a teacher from California who attempted to assassinate the U.S. President last Saturday, April 25, at a special dinner celebrating freedom of the press.
Kaizen Asiedu is a brilliant young man (Wikipedia) who abandoned his Catholic faith as a teenager and became an atheist, graduated with a B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in two years and went on to get a master's degree in one year, then started a gaming company and became financially independent. Click his pic to read his earlier article. Recently, he posted that he's investigating Christianity, and today he posted "Did Jesus Really Rise From The Dead?" in which he writes – "Atheism is a negative claim. It says there is no God." That introduces the logical problem: you can't prove a negative hypothesis.
His earlier article discribes how society is breaking down because of social discord. The steps toward societal collapse are gradual: it begins with some sort of crisis – economic, disease, natural disaster, war, etc., which set the stage for various factions to begin contending against each other, each with its own ideas on how to correct the situation and "make the world a better place."
The first step is to begin naming "the other side" as supposedly inherently evil by nature: "filthy rich capitalists," "Nazis," "dictators," "communists," or even non-human creatures. Dehumanizing one's enemies is the step before the final step: approving their wholesale annihilation. That final step is firing squads, carpet bombing, gas chambers, or concentration camps like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, etc. or the Soviet forced labor camps in eastern European Russia and in Siberia. I've been in one after the dissolution of the USSR when I was delivering pneumoniia medicines to an ex-Soviet prison: they are terrible places, not fit for human beings.
On the flip side, the foundations of a stable, prospering society are faith, strong family values, and traditions that create virtuous people, a trust-based culture and a strong nation. By rediscovering what has worked before, we can thoughtfully apply ancient wisdom to modern challenges, translating sound principles into better institutions and policies.
Kaizen is on a philosophical journey back to Christianity. He hasn't yet returned to the faith of his childhood – he needs to approach it as an adult, using a rational methodology. In the second article, he writes: "I’m not claiming the world is getting worse, or that you can’t feel fulfilled without religion. Plenty of people do. What I’m saying is that even if you treat religion as just civilizational software – the operating system of meaning, morality, and orientation – it was doing real work. And we haven’t built anything that fills the void it left.
"You see the cracks. The meaning crisis. The purpose crisis. The collapse of trust in institutions. The rise of conspiracy thinking to fill explanatory vacuums. The loneliness epidemic. We are wealthier and more connected and more informed than any humans in history, and we are, by many measures, less okay." Rationality can lead up to the point of making a faith commitment, but reasoning alone is insufficient for that final step. It will take him a while to get there.
"We have come to believe and know that You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God" (John 6:69). Faith is like forming a hypothesis in science – a "hunch" or sense that this is how things might work. Then you experiment – you try it: you prove that it works. "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1).
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