When you take the metaphorical red pill, you realise how much you've been lied to all your life.
You discover that you've been fed an ideology, perpetuated through biased narratives and spin. You begin to discern truth from illusion and reject the programming that they attempted to indoctrinate you with.
The black pill is where you descend down the rabbit hole further and learn just how bad things have become. It's where the consequences of evil become truly apparent. It's also the point where you begin to experience a degree of hopelessness and despondency. This is the point of rock bottom. But luckily, from there, the only way is up. Things can seem bleak, but it's virtually impossible to stay black-pilled for long. It's simply too difficult to entertain nihilism or despair for extended periods of time. Eventually, an appetite for hope, optimism and meaning begins to develop. The soul requires nourishment.
Enter the white pill, also known as the God pill.
You begin to desire action, order, purpose and a semblance of values in your life. The world may be going crazy, but you're not going to. The very values that have been stripped from Western nations by the left for the last 50 years, gradually begin to make sense.
My atheist rebellion
I considered myself an atheist since I was about 13. I rejected the religious teachings of my parents, who were both devout Catholics and quite conservative. And as I entered my teenage years, I began to become more liberal. I believed that I could have all the answers - that science and secularism were adequate substitutes for religion and faith. But as I grew older, I began to realise that the wisdom of my parents was based on something timeless, universal, and tried and tested for thousands of years, that the teachings of Christ were a set of rules and instructions that not only made intuitive sense when carefully studied, but actually had been essential in building and maintaining our Western civilization.
In my mid to late 20s I buried myself in watching the 'four horseman' of the new atheism movement in debates - Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett. Time and time again, I dismissed all too quickly how the horsemen were unable to adequately refute the claim that you cannot get an 'ought' from an 'is'.
Science is the means by which we understand the physical world around us. It is not the means by which we derive our morality. For that we need philosophy, metaphysics, religion.
Human beings need relatable stories, instructions, parables, in order to develop a moral and ethical framework in which to live. Science and religion are actually not in conflict, as some atheists believe. One is the means by which we understand the physical world around us. The other is the means by which we derive meaning and moral instruction.
Why nations need religion
When an age of decadence is reached in a society, an age of liberalism follows. When you take God out of the equation, man tries to become God.
I began to realise that nations and even empires that lose religion tends to collapse within a couple of generations.
Communism, which is once again trying to infiltrate every facet of our culture and compromise our institutions in the form of globalism believes that the state is God, that it can be mother and father to an infantilized, powerless and impoverished proletariat. Everything the left has done has been a gradual attempt to take people away from who and what they are and where they came from.
Christianity celebrates the vital importance of the family unit, the most powerful defense against an authoritarian state. In Christianity, the roles of men and women are clearly defined, with great respect given to the unique roles of the mother and the father, and the importance of raising children in a set of values shared by other members of our faith. The community building aspect of the religious service ensure that everyone knows they are part of something bigger than themselves, that there's an authority beyond a democratically elected politician in office. This is how a nation state is maintained - by recognising the value of the family.
It's not hard to understand why the leftist cultural Marxist have attacked religion and the family at every turn. The subversion of America, like many Western nations has taken place by promoting hedonism, sexuality, drugs, and the obsession with materialism, individual rights and individualism, anything that gets people away from Christianity, settling down, starting a family and raising their children in the value system of their ancestors.
Losing the story
In Christian nations, the origin story of our culture is the birth of Christ. Now, even if you're not religious, even if you don't take the stories of Jesus literally, you can probably acknowledge that an origin story about the birth of a child and a savior, born to bring peace to the world, is a powerful message and a symbol of hope for future generations. But if people are encouraged to move away from Christianity, then they lose attachment to this story, and the origin story of who and what they are becomes rewritten. It's replaced with a focus on the worst moments in our history. This is why in many modern liberalized Western nations, the native people are being encouraged to be ashamed of their past.
In social justice infested college courses in America, young Americans are brainwashed into self loathing, they're encouraged to feel guilty for atrocities committed by their ancestors from hundreds of years ago. The same is true of many European nations, their people are being encouraged to feel an intense sense of guilt and self-hatred for their colonial past. So, once the story we told ourselves about where we came from spiritually was based on the hope of a young child being born who could usher in a new age of peace for all humanity. Now, it's about negativity, despair and hopelessness. You cannot build anything stable or successful on such foundations. On the theme of the birth of a child, third wave feminism has promoted and attempted to normalize abortion. So the left has literally become like a death cult.
Although the promotion of left wing ideology is ultimately about power, it's also not quite as simple as a straightforward attack on conservatism. It's an attack on Christianity that goes back as far as the crucifixion of Christ, getting people away from their Christian heritage and values, disconnecting people from God and making them docile and compliant by promoting distractions that placate the masses - consumerism, pornography, sex, instant gratification, drugs, and materialism.
'Lead us not into temptation'
My mother who was devoutly Christian died 22 months ago. Since her passing, it's as though something has resonated within me that hadn't before. It's as though when she left, the doorway to some other place was left just slightly ajar, wide enough for some kind of light to come through.
I knelt down one night, and for the first time, in many years, prayed the Lord's Prayer. I'd said the 'Our Father' many times as a child, I repeated it like a mantra - words that never truly meant anything to me. But this time, suddenly something changed when I reached the line, "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil".
All of a sudden, for the first time, given everything I was witnessing in the world, I could understand the context of why this prayer had been written this particular way. What has the left been promoting for the past number of decades? Temptation, sin, greed, materialism, deviation from the path of denial of nature. If you corrupt the people promote vice and their baser animal instincts you bring about the destruction of the nation state. Promiscuity rather than monogamy results in unplanned pregnancy, broken homes, low parental investment, marriage is destroyed by feminism. Alternative lifestyles are promoted. The active sexual union between two people is no longer respected. Pregnancy and the creation of new life becomes a nuisance. By no longer believing in a power beyond man, the state becomes the thing that everyone relies on - from welfare to their rights. It becomes extremely powerful and soon after, authoritarian.
The left hates Christianity more than anything, because it can't control people who believe in something bigger than the state.
Suddenly in those few words of the 'Our Father', I had gained an insight and a truth that had been hiding in plain sight my whole life. Saint Augustine said a man has as many masters as he has vices. The left has sold vice as a form of liberation. In truth, we become enslaved to our base greedy and primitive natures and thus much easier for governments to control. The people become docile and malleable and atomized, especially since identity politics is promoted to further divide and conquer people, our nations are also becoming increasingly less safe, under leftist control, and further destabilized and therefore more heavily policed. The power of the stage is increasing as people surrender their freedom for more so called security.
Now, these words of this prayer began to make sense. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." If an organ in the body or a cell is damaged, if part of us is dying, the rest of the body suffers. If a large portion of individuals in our society are succumbing to a self destructive path, the society suffers as a whole. Ironically, people are being sold enslavement as freedom. The left hates Christianity more than anything, because it can't control people who believe in something bigger than the state.
It's now my belief that the greatest act of defiance we can make against globalism is to spread the teachings of Jesus Christ.
When rights go wrong
In Ireland, many people conflate the corrupted institution of the Catholic Church, with Christianity. And because people have rejected their spiritual tradition, what has happened in Ireland? Well, it's becoming less Irish by the day.
Try to think of a Western nation that's succumbed to leftism, that's also got strong borders. When Ireland began to lose its faith, which is the pillar it was built on, unsurprisingly it began to slowly unravel. Now marriage has been redefined and people have been so brainwashed that they've literally voted to take away the rights from a portion of their own society, the unborn. And they celebrated this with tears of joy in the streets when they did so.
People have been so brainwashed that they've literally voted to take away the rights from a portion of their own society, the unborn
They've given up on their future because the most vulnerable and precious in our society, our children are no longer protected, and their right to life has been superseded by a woman's right to treat that life as if it was nothing more than a piercing or a tattoo on her body.
If you change the values of a nation's people, you change the nation. If you distract the people with concerns about 'rights this' and 'rights that' hedonism, sexuality, etc they will become focused on selfish navel gazing and concerns that don't matter.
I look at the vandilisation of our Christian heritage and celebrations - St. Patrick's Day is reduced to a glorified excuse for massive alcohol consumption. Easter doesn't appear to be about the death of Christ for most people anymore, it's become about chocolate eggs and the Easter Bunny. Likewise, Christmas is completely divorced from the birth of Christ. And it's now become a tacky commercial holiday that begins in late September and promotes hyper consumerism and materialism. People now engage in alternative quasi-spiritual practices, trying to replace real spirituality with yoga and meditation.
With the loss of religion, we've also jettisoned notions of sacrifice, personal accountability, restraint, honor, and duty. These were considered virtues once.
Now there's another important component of this, the recognition that we are corruptible and imperfect, that we will try and often fail to be good. This is why no matter how much we mess up, no matter what we've said or done or not done, the challenge of redemption is always possible. The gift of forgiveness is always offered by God.
I'm not going to pontificate to you, or sell you some notion of an anthropomorphic, all powerful being in the sky. I have no idea what that force resembles. I'm also not going to tell you that the purpose of doing good is a reward in heaven. I'm not even fully sold on the idea of an afterlife. Maybe there is something. But that's not why I changed. To do good knowing there's no reward is to be truly noble. When I prayed to God, I said, "I will change even if I get no answer." Because the words of Jesus make more sense to me now, given the state of our world.
Why I believe
So at some point, I stopped believing in nothing. Because there is simply too much order in the universe. Too many telltale signs of purpose and intent in reality for me to ignore the possibility that some guiding hand was behind all of this. The universe began with the first subatomic particles, and then eventually, the formation of atoms, then light elements. Before too long, dense concentrations of gases and molecular clouds formed the first stars. Planets formed millions of years later. From the beginning, the universe is busy doing stuff, making stuff and creating ever increasing complexity.
There were too many telltale signs of purpose and intent in reality for me to ignore the possibility that some guiding hand was behind all of this
Simple life begins to form and begins to reproduce itself. Some of that life evolves to such a complex degree, that suddenly birds are flying around making nests, beavers are constructing dams and human beings are writing books, building civilizations and empires, and making movies and smartphones. If there's a single instruction that the divine software architect programmed into the universe from the beginning, its creation.
Planets will die, solar systems will be destroyed by exploding stars, but new material will continuously be created in stellar nurseries and recycled by the cosmos. We are the universe made flesh, made aware of itself. And what we believe and how we choose to live matters. Nations will fall, but powerful ideas will remain timeless and powerful forever.
The answer is not only about rejecting destructive ideology, it's about embracing the philosophy of creation. It's about choosing life and not death, hope and not despair.
I believe that we must pray for our enemies as they "know not what they do". We will all ultimately answer to the same authority in the end. Our enemies may hope for our destruction. But we do not pray for theirs. To do so would make us no different to them. So we pray that they can be saved from the evil they have succumbed to.
I believe that those we've lost have never truly left us, that they have become part of something greater and more powerful than any man made evil in our world. I believe this power is a benevolent and uniting force that governs all things in our universe, and seeks to provide us with the means to save ourselves from human frailty and damnation. I believe that within this force, we will find our salvation and peace and that if we place our faith in that power, it will lead us not into temptation, but it will deliver us from evil,
forever. Amen.
Dave Cullen is the founder of Computing Forever. For more information see his YouTube channel
