IDIOT SAVANT

Being cheap I don't actually buy a Sunday paper; I just read it online. But my friend Sean Busick (Ph.D., South Carolina) sent me an email about Marilyn vos Savant's column in Parade Magazine. Sean writes,

Someone asks: how would you teach morality to someone who doesn't believe in God or the hereafter? She replies that religion is not necessary to teaching morality. "The way children are taught to love, honor, respect--and sometimes fear--God, they also can be taught to love, honor, respect and fear mankind itself. Such teachings would guide human behavior: Any reasonable adult who desired the approval of his fellow man and woman would be motivated to do the right thing."

[Edmund] Burke would have recognized such nonsense as the revolutionary foundation of tyranny. Followers of such a moral code as she describes all too frequently trample individual men and women while acting out of love for mankind as a whole.

Just so, as Russell Kirk would have said. Sean has hit the nail on the head. All the great materialistic ideologies of 20th Century claimed to be for the good of 'mankind', yet were responsible for the slaughter of millions. All were also Godless ideologies. Again as Russell Kirk--Burke's greatest disciple and expositor--wrote, ideologies are inverted religions.

Professing to be wise, they became fools.