Western Civilization Burning?   
   Part 1 of 2

   Along with his Sri Lanka comments (see yesterday's Views), Dennis Prager sees the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral as symbolic of Western Christendom. And with it, Western civilization.

   "Every major Western social and intellectual force has conspired to rid Europe of Christianity and the civilization it produced," he writes. 

   "The French Enlightenment - intellectual basis of the French Revolution and the modern West - sought to replace Christianity and religion in general with secularism rooted in reason. No God, Bible or Ten Commandments is necessary for morality or meaning," intellectuals contend. Reason and science prevail. 

   Prager says the final deathblows to Christianity in Europe were the world wars: "Christianity, already weakened by the Enlightenment, was further damaged by World War I. German, French and English Christians were killing each other." (Kings went to war for gain and pride; we don't know that drafted soldiers were so enthused.) 

   World War II produced even more death and destruction on the continent, with the failure of Catholic and Protestant churches to offer even minimal resistance to the Nazis' persecution of Jews. 

   Europeans emerged from war with new, moral and intellectual confidence in multiculturalism - a doctrine that all cultures are morally equivalent. Assuming that everybody else was a secular multiculturalist, they invited Muslims into Europe. 

   They had no idea that most Muslims wanted to replace Christianity with their religion, not secularism, Prager writes. 

   "As a result," he says, "secular leftism and Islamism each sought the end of Christianity and the West." (The left equates Western civilization with white supremacy.) 

   Is the American left a spin-off of European thinking? 

Continued tomorrow

       Jimmy