Thursday’s Goldman Moment Open Exchange

If I were as smart and could write as well as my intellectual hero, David P. Goldman, I would be a better and richer man.

Like the Nazis, Islamist terrorism weaponized horror to demoralize the West. Christianity has a soft underbelly: It struggles to reconcile belief in a God who so loved the world that He sacrificed Himself for its salvation with the suffering of innocents. That was the nub of Voltaire’s attack on theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake killed 12,000 in 1755, as well as Ivan Karamazov’s protest that “if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”

The post-Christian world, which eschews the mystery of Divine Providence in favor of a squeamish urge for earthly salvation, is all the more vulnerable to the theater of horror. The post-Christian West has become paralyzed by the fear that the world is beset by forces hostile to humankind, which J.R.R. Tolkien called “the black breath.”

and,

The Muslim world said nothing when between 9,000 and 40,000 civilians died in the 2016-17 campaign against ISIS in Mosul. That involved Muslims (the Iraqi Army with American support) killing Muslims. But Gaza is not merely a slaughter but also a humiliation, the reduction of Hamas, and the displacement of most of the Gaza population. Muslims can accept Muslims killing Muslims, but they can’t abide Jews humiliating Muslims.

plus these depressing numbers,

Support for Israel among American Christians varies with religious commitment: Committed evangelicals and conservative Catholics were steadfast supporters of the Jewish state—until recently. “As of late 2021, only 33.6% of young Evangelicals under 30 support Israel, compared to 67.9% in 2018. At the same time, in 2021, 24.3% of young Evangelicals said they support the Palestinians, compared to only 5% three years before,” according to a recent book by Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin cited by The Jerusalem Post.

and this one,

Religion and its carrier wave, traditional culture, offer mortal individuals the hope that some trace of their personhood will survive their physical demise. Whether one expects an eternal reward singing psalms in heaven, or hopes to live on in the hearts of one’s countrymen, the prospect of immortality is what makes mortality tolerable. Of all living creatures, only human beings are sentient of their mortality. “Death is a mocking fate which awaits us all, a trauma of human helplessness which disturbs our existential serenity. It is an absurdity which undoes all of man’s rational planning, his dreams and hopes,” wrote R. Joseph Soloveitchik about the parah adumah, the purification ritual for contamination from a human corpse.

much more to read beyond this,

Nietzsche’s “horrors of existence” haunt the post-Christian world, which has rejected the past and abandoned the future by refusing to have children. It can find purpose only in the concoction of identity in the present, and it does this with the obsessiveness of religious fanatics. That is what explains such anomalies as “Queers for Palestine,” a label that first appeared in a 5,000-person march in Berlin in 2019. At a Jan. 6 event near Wellesley College, “Transgender Palestinian poet and activist Yaffa … queer Palestinian-American performance artist Juliet Olivier, and queer Palestinian-American author and activist Hannah Moushabeck spoke about how indigenous peoples around the world were queer before colonists brought homophobia to their societies.”

RTWDT.