Today, many people are wondering if ISIS will ultimately destroy Western civilization. But before I address that question, we need to take a little journey to discover what Western culture has done to itself.
Beginning with the Age of Reason in the 17th century, Western culture built itself on the foundation of human reason and objective truth.
In the 1960s, however, Western culture underwent a radical transformation. A new way of looking at reality—focusing on the inner, subjective experience instead of objective truth—profoundly affected the Baby Boomer generation.
In 1967, Dr. Timothy Leary toured the U.S., speaking on college campuses with a psychedelic light-and-sound presentation called “The Death of the Mind.” He urged students to experiment with LSD, start their own psychedelic religions, turn off their rational minds, and reach out to the universe with chemical-altered feelings to “turn on, tune in and drop out.”
Most boomers will remember the summer of 1967 as the Summer of Love, with huge gatherings in cities across the United States and Canada. Years later, Time magazine said that the overriding theme of the Summer of Love was “trust your feelings.”
Ten years later, the message was blasted into our collective consciousness with the release of George Lucas’ blockbuster movie, Star Wars. In the film, the wise mentor Obi Wan Kenobi instructs young Luke Skywalker to “trust your feelings.”
Baby Boomers then taught that “trust your feelings” message to their children and grandchildren. So now, young people are even more divorced from rational thinking than their parents were—a feeling-based worldview pervades our culture.
Fast-forward to today, when those children and grandchildren are now in power. They are members of Congress, governors and even the president. They use their feelings to make decisions on factual matters that require logic and rational thinking.
We feel bad for the poor, so instead of creating a rational program to provide them with employment and therefore dignity, we dole out billions, nay trillions of dollars in the form of welfare credit cards by which they can buy alcohol, marijuana, or whatever they may “feel” they need. This reliance on feelings has created dependency, irresponsibility, fraud and victimhood, to say nothing of trillions of dollars in debt.
Take this whole issue of dealing with a group of murderous, bloodthirsty savages who call themselves the “Islamic State.” Our “trust your feelings” politicians rush to the television cameras explaining that those people are not really Islamic.
But the thugs of ISIS say that they are the true Islam. And furthermore, they say that their beheadings come as a direct order from their religious book, which they say their god gave them. To them, this is logical and rational.
In accordance with their logic, they will do a whole lot of killing through their foot soldiers and sleeper cells in Western countries, including the United States. They have no emotional investment in these decisions, only clear-cut facts.
When Western politicians who make decisions based upon “trust your feelings” meet the cold reality of radical Islamist logic, hands-down the Islamists will win—that is unless we begin to change either our worldview, or replace our current “feelings” politicians with logical, rational ones.
Back to my question, will ISIS destroy Western civilization? The answer is no—Western foolishness will destroy Western civilization. The instrument used for that destruction notwithstanding.
In these columns I have been raising the alarm louder and louder, but unless this warning is heeded in 2014, 2016, and every election thereafter, I’m afraid our Western civilization as we know it will go down the tubes.
Michael Youssef, Ph.D., is the founder and president of Leading the Way with Dr. Michael Youssef, a worldwide ministry that leads the way for people living in spiritual darkness to discover the light of Christ through the creative use of media and on-the-ground ministry teams. Youssef was born in Egypt.
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