Liberalism to Western Civilization: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN

Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. So I caught a quick glance at a National Geographic show last night.  It was about the European Settlers in the New World.  You may want to sit down for this, but the portrayal of them was less than positive.  Only it wasn't their sadistic and deliberate genocidal slaughter of the indigenous people that we so often hear about.  Nope.  It was because they came and ravaged the countryside, 'declaring war on the forests', and depleting the land of it natural resources, leaving it an empty shell in the manner of their homes in the Old World.  Poor folks, to hear modern progressive scholarship, they just didn't do anything right. Therefore a growing percentage of the emergent left is  hoping that the days of Western Civilization are numbered.

Of course, nothing is mentioned of the fact that they were bringing the civilization and ideological belief system that would introduce the world to liberty, freedom, equality, and the dignity of the human person.  No matter how poorly those settlers did in living up to those standards, they would nonetheless help form the foundations of the only civilization in history to be so lofty in its principles, that it would commit suicide out of guilt for failing to have lived up to those principles.

Yet it's not surprising that these things mean little as a counterbalance to the sins of the West.  After all, as we move into a post-Western, post-Christian culture, notions of the dignity of human beings, equality for all, tolerance for beliefs and religions, are all going by the wayside.  In our post-abortion, post-modern age, a growing yen for censorship, intolerance, oppression, and the redefining of human life based on some Darwinian notion of the fittest, is replacing such old, antiquated notions.  And ironically, we are becoming the parts of the pre-Christian world that were once seen as the most barbaric, the most heinous.