Does it strike anyone besides myself ironic that yesterday's terrorist attack in France occurred during the celebration of Bastille Day, which is the commemoration of the storming of the Bastille and the commencement of the French Revolution? Occurring on the heels of the American Revolution, the French Revolution had two glaring differences. First, it was not a representative republic that French Revolutionaries spawned, but a pure democracy. Second, unlike our Founding Fathers who believed representative government could only succeed among a moral and religious people, the French believed in man's innate goodness and the need to unshackle the French people from all moral and religious restraints.
The French Revolution was an all-out war on the Christian Faith, which was blamed for all the perceived evils of Christian Europe. The French Revolutionaries believed, as the Philosopher Jean Jacque Rousseau insisted, that if man was freed from the restraints of Christian civilization he would revert to the natural goodness of his savage state. All would be well with the world, thanks to the collective good will and inherent virtue of an unrestrained and irreligious people.
Of course, history proved that the removal of Christianity from French society and the French's erroneous belief in the inherent goodness of man didn't produce the expected heaven on earth, but hell on earth instead. The French Revolution quickly sank into one of the bloodiest and most abhorrent events in all of human history. Even many of the original revolutionaries, who gleefully sent the French aristocracy to the guillotine, ended up with their heads in the guillotine's basket as well. As one of them, Madame Roland exclaimed before her execution, "O Liberty! What crimes are committed in your name!”
It has been astutely observed that the Christian doctrine of original sin is a truth empirically proven by all of recorded human history. No matter how many times man attempts to create his own heaven on earth, it always quickly disintegrates into hell on earth. Still, despite all the evidence to the contrary, French gullibility in the innate goodness of man has continued unabated since the days of the French Revolution.
Do you remember the 2005 riots in Paris by Muslim youth. The French government responded by insisting that there was nothing evil about them, but simply misunderstandings that could be easily solved at roadside cafes by negotiators nibbling on cheese and sipping wine. Well, the Religion of the Sword is showing its bloody blade in France today, having graduated from the destruction of property in the fiery riots of 2005 to the human carnage of horrific terrorist attacks in Nice yesterday and in Paris last November. This monstrous evil has been allowed to grow unabated to such monstrous proportions because of the French refusal to believe in evil at all.
Edmund Burke once said, “The only thing necessary for the triumphant of evil is for good men to do nothing.” If evil is not opposed, evil will take the world. But how can evil be defeated in a world today that no longer even believes in its existence, much less its danger? If you ask me, all I can say is “au revoir” to such a gullible world populated by people blinded to the bloody blade of evil now being wielded throughout the earth.