We live in an age of willful deception. Deception that extends to the foundations of our modern social arrangement. We congratulate ourselves, slap ourselves on the back, while looking down on our benighted forebears. We have come so far!The first deception concerns what is called freedom of religion. We continually preen ourselves about the freedom we think we have, the freedom to believe whatever we want or indeed to believe nothing at all. And then our tolerance. Aren't we tolerant. Our Western societies are by far the most tolerant to have ever existed. We make room for differences of opinion and differences of belief without penalizing those who think or believe differently from ourselves.At least, these are the myths around which our society is structured. But they simply don't hold water. Freedom of religion turns out to be freedom from religion, or even worse: carte blanche for secular religion, the religion of humanity, to establish itself as a de facto public faith, allowing of no rivals. Case in point: if Christians stand up and demand that their religious beliefs find reflection in public life, they find themselves beaten down by the charge of intolerance.And that is the other deception. The requirement of tolerance turns out to be something quite different than advertised. Tolerance turns out to mean indifference toward religion and indeed any form of objective truth. In fact, it means the in-tolerance of objective truth. The only thing we are to be tolerant of, it turns out, is radical subjectivism. But then we find ourselves engaged in a free-for-all of opinions seeking power, the better to impose themselves on other opinions.The war against truth, against reality, against objective standards and values, continues unabated and seems to be nearing its peak. But truth and reality have a nasty habit of avenging themselves on the false and the delusional. Stahl's book provides a dose of just such truth and reality. It is a salutary antidote to that calamitous trend. Written when these matters were just beginning to establish their hegemony across Western civilization, it reads as if it could have been written today. And the solutions it offers are likewise every bit as relevant as they were in 1847 and 1855 and 1856, when it was written.
