Taki's Mag

Blaise Pascal

Let’s start with the bad news: In honor of China’s economic rise, a Chinese-looking woman served as Christmas Grinch here in the States. The sourpuss teacher up in Nanuet ruined the Christmas spirit for a class full of seven- and eight-year-olds when she told them that there is no Santa Claus and that the presents under their trees did not come from the North Pole but were put there by their parents. It’s outrageous that a teacher would strip children of their innocence and demystify something as precious as Christmas.

The Brooklyn Museum makes its annual attack on Christian sensibilities with its disgusting exhibition whose name I will not mention. The show figures a video in which ants crawl over a bloody, crucified Jesus. The “auteur” behind this crap died of AIDS 20 years ago, but the museum’s director, one Arnold Lehman, includes it to show how trendy he is. He also went running to the feds once he lost 35 percent of its endowment in the stock market. My heart bleeds. He is the vile one who once featured a painting of the Virgin Mary made of elephant dung and pornographic photos. Not to worry. Most people involved with that outrage are dead or dying. The Almighty has a way of dealing with such scum.

Then there are those sports announcers who make fun every time a white professional football player—one of the rare college graduates who can read and write and play football—goes down on one knee and says a brief and silent prayer after scoring a touchdown. Imagine these blowhards if a Muslim—which many of the black football players are—did the same thing. They’d probably shut up in their soundproof booths in silent respect. They’d be scared shitless to make fun of them. When it comes to scorn, only Christians need apply. Many black footballers are ex-cons, but only Tim Tebow is singled out, and for being…a Christian. He is lampooned as a freak. Some freak. In the meantime, he has a long winning streak going for him, which drives the jerks in the booths nuts.

Our Lord Jesus Christ is the only man who is still hated after 2,000 years. This in itself does not prove his divinity, but it shows that his words and example haven’t dated. They still have an amazing power to provoke hatred as well as adoration. Hatred of Christ usually pretends to be directed at side targets like the institutional church or organized religion. But why would anyone object to a man preaching an innocuous message of benevolence? Many of his followers died under torture to bear witness to him after the Resurrection. These martyrs were Christianity’s principal human message in its infancy, deeply impressing and finally converting millions.

The four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as well as Paul’s epistles, portray the same recognizable man. Never have so many writers managed to convey the same impression of the same human being over and over again. Although the Gospels were written by non-professionals, they include more truth and power than Homer and Dante and Milton together. Their durability is all the more striking when one considers the secular world’s fads and fashions.

Pascal calculated the odds of eternal bliss and concluded that if one erroneously believes in God one loses nothing at the end; whereas if one correctly believes in God one gains everything, which is eternal bliss. Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and philosopher who figured out the odds, and I’m very happy he did. It means theological illiterates and shrill disbelievers are eternally damned. Publicity freaks such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris sit around and mope while I’m laughing all the way to church. People such as Dawkins have never engaged religion in a serious manner. They are shoddy self-proclaimed scholars who can only doubt and proclaim their doubts as proof of God and Christ’s absence. Give me a real scholar such as Pascal, who proved mathematically that one cannot go wrong by believing in God.

While 92 percent of Americans say they believe in God, only 35 percent in Britain do. No wonder England’s weather is so bad; even God at times plays favorites. Sophisticated Brits, especially Guardian readers, make fun of American mega-churches, but look what the C of E has done for Britain and then go find a quiet corner—if it’s possible in that bleak, overcrowded island—and cry. British churches lie empty and depressing, whereas American ones are thriving, happy places. In America the spirit of Jesus lives on, or at least is debated in the public arena. I don’t know of many places in America where one can stand up, insult Christianity, and announce the republic’s future demise through force of arms. So-called imams, those extremely ugly, hairy creatures, do that daily in Britain, then pick up their welfare checks and go to their miserable homes for pilaf. The Brits should wake up. Revert to being an English-speaking Christian nation and throw the bums out.

I wish all Taki’s Magazine readers a very happy Christmas.