Pagan America Quotes

“Abortion advocates, in our post-Christian society, no longer care, if they ever did, about the science of human development. All they care about is unfettered desire and power, which is to say neopagan self-worship. Some abortion activists tacitly admit as much.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“When the tacit, and at times explicit, message from the mainstream culture is that the infirm and depressed are a burden to society, the “right to die” becomes by implication a “duty to die.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“The liberalization of euthanasia also works in another direction: giving doctors more leeway to kill their patients. In late 2020, the Dutch government issued new rules clarifying that doctors may give sedatives to dementia patients without their knowledge or consent before euthanizing them.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Euthanasia for infants—that is, infanticide—was eventually approved for babies up to a year old so long as the parents consented. Belgium changed its euthanasia law in 2014, abolishing all age limits, including for children, becoming the first country in the world to do so.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Behind these lethal banalities lurk the interests of state-run medicine.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“obvious problem that in a country where health care is socialized, the state might find that it has an interest in pitching euthanasia to the elderly, the infirm, or the indigent. Even without explicitly targeting them, a system that removes all social stigma attached to suicide and encourages ailing and desperate people to give up”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“But consent is a flimsy basis for a limited regime of euthanasia, for the simple reason that consent can be manufactured. Once the manufacture of consent has been mastered, a euthanasia regime ostensibly founded on “human rights” can be usurped by those who wish to use it for other purposes, like social engineering or economics.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Having justified euthanasia on the basis that individuals have a “right” to end their physical or mental suffering by choosing death, the state has forfeited the ability to define what counts as suffering worthy of such a remedy.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“In the absence of Christianity, suicide and euthanasia become, perhaps, the ultimate and extreme (if mistaken) vindication of human choice and human dignity: my life is mine, and I can end it when I want to. In this way, individual liberty is reduced to a kind of death cult, at best. At worst, in the hands of the state it gradually becomes a tool for the eradication of unwanted citizens.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“The practice is not permitted anywhere in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. Indeed, the establishment of a government euthanasia program as part of a national health care system is far too dystopian and barbaric for poorer countries of what used to be called the Third World. It is even too barbaric for communist dictatorships like China and North Korea. Those regimes might kill their people with impunity, denying them a basic right to life. But they are not so depraved as to confer on their people a basic right to suicide.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Indeed, in early 2024 the government expanded MAID to allow Canadians to be killed for exclusively mental health reasons, including substance abuse disorders.13 Plans are in the works eventually to offer euthanasia to “mature minors,” which means Canada would join Belgium and the Netherlands in a triumvirate of the most liberal suicide regimes on the planet.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“The refrain from euthanasia advocates, over and over, was that vulnerable people would not be allowed or even encouraged to seek death as a solution to nonmedical problems, or out of desperation, or because the national health care system could not give them proper care. But it happened all the same, just as critics said it would.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Because Canada has a government health care system that, like all such systems, rations care to some degree, the question of euthanasia as a substitute for actual medical care was a point of contention ahead of the 2019 reform that opened MAID to non-terminally ill patients.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Other news reports told of Canadians facing homelessness or credit card debt, or requesting help with disabilities, only to be offered euthanasia instead by Canada’s national health system. The country’s Department of Veterans Affairs was prolific in this regard, recommending euthanasia to veterans struggling with depression and PTSD, and in one case suggesting euthanasia to a former Paralympian in response to repeated requests for a home wheelchair ramp. “Madam, if you are really so desperate, we can give you medical assistance in dying now,” the caseworker allegedly said.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“the scale of Canada’s euthanasia and assisted suicide program is staggering. For comparison, California legalized assisted suicide in 2016, the same year Canada passed the first version of its Medical Assistance in Dying program. Canada and California have similar populations, about 40 million. In 2021, just 486 people in California committed suicide under the state program. In Canada, the death toll was more than 10,000,”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Suicide, at least as depicted by Simons and the Canadian government, is not tragic or shameful, but beautiful, dignified, brave, idyllic. And more than that: it is sacred, holy. It is, in this telling, the closest thing you can get to a sacrament in a post-Christian society.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“The argument, as we have seen, is an old one. Today it is disguised by the outward trappings of tongue-in-cheek occultism, or therapeutic witchcraft, or climate change activism, or a fervent belief in “the science,” or some form of transgenderism or transhumanism. But the substance of these belief systems has an ancient pedigree that stretches all the way back to the Garden and the serpent and the Fall, when a very real, literal Satan made his famous claim about the tree and the fruit that would echo down the eons: “You will not die. You will be like God.” And if man can become like God, then what is to say man cannot become God—or at least a god?”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“The ultimate purpose of N.I.C.E., then, is not to improve the lives of Britons by making things more efficient or improving material conditions, but to create an omnipotent god from the substance of man that will rule over them all, that will enslave them, for eternity. Hence the final terminus of the materialism espoused by the logical positivists—who must eventually lose all sense of right and wrong, or even that there is such a thing as right and wrong—is that in time they will cease to be men at all. This is what Lewis meant by “the abolition of man,” that by “stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void.” But even in the void, says Lewis, the Conditioners will act— motivated by nothing but their own emotions and desires”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“declared his intention to download her personality into cyberspace so she can live forever.26 That’s ultimately what these people mean when they say they’re “making God.” They mean they’re making machines they think can cheat death, enabling them to live forever, to become like God.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“For Rothblatt and his ilk, the transgender movement is only partly about gender and sex. It’s really just the first step in a larger scheme to transcend all physical limits, including the physical body. In their view, human flesh and the givenness of the created order are obstacles to be overcome, which technology will soon enable us to do.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Even more to the point, transgender billionaire and outspoken technocrat Martine (formerly Martin) Rothblatt wrote an entire book in 2011 about how transgenderism is “the onramp to transhumanism,” which he says is a “transreligion” called Terasem.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“It is common today to hear techno-futurists and billionaire trans-humanists muse about the potential of technology to help mankind—or least the extremely wealthy—slip the surly bonds of aging and even death by “uploading” memories to a digital cloud and using AI to recreate consciousness. Billionaire investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, who sees “the vector of our civilization” in terms of a choice between “anarcho-primitivism or optimalism/transhumanism,” has talked about “life extension” technologies that could make possible what he calls “genomic reincarnation,” in which a person’s sequenced DNA could in theory be synthesized and printed out into a new body, “like a clone, but it is you in a different time.”23 And of course there are the billionaire enthusiasts like Elon Musk who see a future in which technology is fused with human biology in some kind of brain-machine interface, or Mark Zuckerberg, who dreams of replacing physical society with a virtual “Metaverse.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“This might be science fiction, but the ideas here are not outlandish— at least in the sense that this way of talking is almost indistinguishable from, say, the utopian futurist speeches of Yuval Harari at the World Economic Forum.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Lewis does not use the term, but Filostrato is what today we would call a transhumanist. He thinks the things that most offend the dignity of man are “birth and breeding and death,” and wants to find a way that “man can live without any of the three.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“The scientific materialism of the Satanic Temple, Lewis would say, will eventually lead not to objective truth but to subjective madness, a state of mind where nothing can be true and all motive and action is driven merely by emotion or insensate impulse. An entire society given over to this way of thinking, he concludes, is in the process of committing suicide. Along the way, though, it will indulge in much cruelty and violence in the name of objectivism and rationalism, perpetrated by experts”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“C. S. Lewis would have immediately understood the Satanic Temple’s obsession with rationalism, materialism, and a “scientific understanding of the world.” It was the subject of his slim 1943 book The Abolition of Man,”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“more liberal and rationalist expression of Satanism, in which Satan is nothing more than a literary archetype used to promote a materialist philosophy that espouses egalitarianism, social justice, and the separation of church and state. Above all, this new version of the occult is militantly secularist, animated by hostility to the presence of religion in the public square, and especially to the presence of Christianity.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“perhaps the fullest realization of Lewis’s “Materialist Magician” is to be found in the Satanic Temple, founded in 2012 by two men who describe themselves as “nontheistic Satanists” and for whom the invocation of Satan is really just a radical affirmation of a materialist, rationalist philosophy that amounts in the end to an elaborate form of self-worship.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Here, then, is a real-world glimpse of Lewis’s “Materialist Magician.” Bennett and Hansend and millions of others have managed to “emotionalise and mythologise” their understanding of science so that seeking out Hecate or Odin or any other blood-drenched demon from the pagan past is transformed into a kind of therapeutic spiritual practice. Seen in this light, such a practice need not undermine a fundamentally materialist worldview, or open the mind to “belief in the Enemy” (Screwtape’s term for God).”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“When a teenager in Austin calls upon Hecate, she is doing more than affirming her identity or tapping into her inner peace or communing with nature. She is calling on a demon. If one believes that demons are real, one must assume the demon hears her call. It might well be the case, however, that a being like Hecate would very much prefer her young acolyte to think in purely postmodern, naturalist, self-affirming terms, and practice witchcraft while leaving intact a fundamentally materialist and rationalist worldview. C. S. Lewis predicted and described this phenomena precisely in his 1942 epistolatory novel, The Screwtape Letters,”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come