Karl G. Jung pointed out in his Modern Man in Search of a Soul that Man is naturally religious and when he throws religion out the window, it will promptly return via the back door in the form of a fanatical cult or a totalitarian ideology.

Giambattista Vico, the 18th century philosopher of history and civilizations who fully understood and explained the connection between myth and religion, points out in his New Science (1730) that the burial of the dead, hinting at belief in an after life by primitive man, is concrete proof of some archaic form of religion, what he considers a sine qua non (together with language and the institution of marriage) for the beginning of any kind of primordial civilized society.

Indeed, religion and atheism (see Lucretius' De Rerum Natura) have been around from time immemorial, but it is only with the arrival of nihilism in the 20th century that we witness the political installation and practice of the religion-less State, to wit Nazi Germany; a State which descends into the cult of self-worship or race worship, not too dissimilar from that of the ancient Romans worshipping goddess Rome, or the Soviet Union worshipping an ideology called Marxism and conceiving any religion as poisonous to the body politic, a rival ideology of sort. We know quite well the nefarious fruits of those social experiments. Indeed, it is by their fruits that the wolves in sheep's clothing are best known.

We ought to remember and reflect on those fruits which are only a few decades old, or sooner or later those wolves shall return. In some way they have already showed their ugly face once again in Kosovo only a few years ago. Some of them are now at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

Christianity comes to Europe via the Middle East but, as hinted above, however, there were in Europe native archaic religions going back to the Stone Age. Moreover, as Klaus Held points out in his essay on the origins of European culture, never was religion so discussed in ancient Greece as when science and democracy were making their debut in the 4th century BC. Perhaps the best example to support this assertion is Plato's Euthyphro. There we read about Socrates and Euthyphro discussing the nature of holiness. After some debating back and forth they finally come to agree that the holy is what all the gods agree in approving. Socrates however, true to form, follows with another more penetrating question: "Is the holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy"? At first Euthyphro misses the point of the question. For this is the question of the "reasonableness" of the gods (or God as the case may be). To ask the same question in a slightly
different way: "Would absolutely anything the gods approved of, be holy just because they approve of it, or are they bound to approve of only what is holy"? Which is to say, are they free to approve or disapprove or are they bound by reason just as humans are?

As Nietzsche well grasped, with that penetrating question Socrates has discovered the basic dilemma of the relationship between religion and morality. The dilemma is basically this: either goodness cannot be explained simply by reference to what the gods want, or else it is an empty tautology to assert that "the gods are good." In that case the praise of the gods is simply power-worship.

For us moderns the question may be put thus: is Aquinas right in his faith in reason that leads him to found his theology on the scaffolding of Aristotelian rationality? With that question we arrive at the statement of the US founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Which is to say, it is universally evident to reason that human rights are universal and inalienable, independent of agreements among men or among gods. If God created us human creatures with reason, She expects us to use it as a way of reaching the truth, and the truth shall make us free. Even God, if She respects truth, cannot let a Lucifer out of hell, the angel who said "evil be thou my god" (see Milton's Paradise Lost).

Moreover, was Aquinas right in pointing out that Truth can be distinguished as scientific, religious, and philosophical but it neverthless remains one and indivisible? Perhaps the most important point of his Summa is that religious faith cannot contradict reason; when it does, then we have separated truths and we may be dealing with a fanatical cult of sort leading to falsehood.

By the 12th century the Olympian and Nordic gods have dwindled to one God and Western civilization is entirely monotheistic and Biblical. The Enlightenment however begins the work of God’s liquidation culminating with Nietzsche's madman shout: "God is dead" at the end of the 19th century. Leibnitz basically poses the same dilemma as Socrates when he writes that: "Those who believe that God has established good and evil by an arbitrary decree.... deprive God of the designation "good": for what cause could one have to praise him for what he does, if in doing something quite different he would have done equally well?"

The problem here, as Nietzsche and others within a Christian Western Civilization also saw quite well, is that Socrates really believes that "knowledge is virtue," and that by merely discussing the virtues and clarifying their essence, one is then bound to become a virtuous person. Plato, who is actually the one who presents Socrates to us, is more skeptical. He posits the irrational in the human soul which needs to be rained in (see the image of the charioteer and the two winged horses in The Phaedrus). He had observed the likes of Critias, Charmides and even Alcibiades, converse at length with Socrates and then go off and become elitist sophists, corrupt people who use language not as a means to a sincere dialogue aiming at truth, but as a tool to control and manipulate others. They were the precursors of Machiavelli and his philosophy, still alive and well within Western Civilization.

PART ONE
PART TWO