Church bells herald crisis of faith

It was a stressfree week spent lazing around in my friend Daud Haiderrsquos bookcrammed apartment with bay windows tucked away from the main street I would wake up to grey mornings the mistladen air creating a vaporous hazeIt was cold and wet in Berlin almost melancholic Mozartrsquos Adagio or Beethovenrsquos Sonata would have been apt for such mornings but all that I got to hear was the peeling of the neighbourhood church bells If that was a call to the faithful to fill the pews it was a wasted effortThe church with a neoGothic faccedilade wore a desolate look its windows shuttered and yard littered with ochre leaves turning a dull brown The lichencovered flagstone pathway had not been tread upon for ages A strange almost eerie silence hung heavy The M Club across the street with slyly winking tawdry fairy lights in velvetscreened windows rudely mocked at this relic of faithIn his celebrated September 2006 lecture on lsquoFaith Reason and the Universityrsquo at Regensburg Pope Benedict XVI had passionately defended faith while elaborating on the ldquoprofound encounter of faith and reasonhellip an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religionrdquo That encounter the Pope said gave ldquorise to two principles which are crucialrdquo today as faith rapidly yields space to scornful scepticism disguised as reasonldquoFirst only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion Hence the human sciences such as history psychology sociology and philosophy attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity A second point which is important for our reflections is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of god making it appear an unscientific or prescientific question Consequently we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason one which needs to be questionedrdquoWhat the Pope said nearly a decade ago is much more relevant today than it was then Reason and faith are not mutually exclusive nor does science negate god It is intellectual laziness if not dishonesty mdash both made fashionable by new age Left radicalism pretentious liberalism and outrageously amoral libertarianism the grotesque meacutenage agrave trois of our times mdash that leads to the repudiation of faith and rejection of godIncreasingly faithless Europe cannot but eventually morph into Eurabia Switzerland may have banned the minaret France may have banished the burqa and centreright Germans may be rallying against Islamism but these are at best feeble attempts at building a dyke after Europe has been flooded by Islam Neither lsquogenuine enlightenmentrsquo nor the lsquoradius of science and reasonrsquo finds a resonance among immigrant believers who stand out in sharp contrast to native nonbelieversIronically those who have abandoned god and faith have not embraced either science or reason They have given themselves to gay abandon literally and metaphoricallyIn 1921 Rabindranath Tagore had encountered Germans ldquofrustrated by military defeat economic disaster and political chaosrdquo Almost a century later German soldiers prefer teddies over guns the German economy is the strongest in Europe and German politics is all about staid and boring stabilityYet the lsquolightrsquo that eluded Germans when Tagore was feted by ldquoa multitude of people expecting a light from the Eastrdquo seems to have remained elusive Nothing else would explain the selfflagellation of a Christian nation whose President said that Islam is a ldquopart of Germanyrdquo adding almost as an afterthought ldquolike Christianity and JudaismrdquoEmpty churches and the twicefirebombed synagogue of Berlin fly in the face of that halfhearted assertion The Turks who were brought in to help with Germanyrsquos postWar reconstruction were inspired by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Latter day Muslim immigrants especially those who have sought shelter in Germany claiming lsquopersecutionrsquo at home are inspired by the zealotry of Mohammed Atta who embarked upon his villainous mission from this countryRealisation of sorts is gradually beginning to seep in as middleaged Germans look around in amazement at a country they increasingly find difficult to identify as their own Young Germans are irritated though not necessarily concerned An opinion poll showed more than a third of the natives believed their country was ldquooverrun by foreignersrdquo who had inveigled their way in for Germanyrsquos famed social benefitsThat had prompted Chancellor Angela Merkel to admit the first German leader to do so that attempts to build a multicultural society had ldquoutterly failedrdquo Bogus talk of building a lsquomultikultirsquo utopia has proved to be so much hot air mdash just that and no more although the Chancellor a politician with an eye to potential voters was less acerbic with her choice of wordsAddressing young members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union she said ldquoAt the beginning of the 1960s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country We kidded ourselves a while we said lsquoThey wonrsquot stay sometime they will be gonersquo But this isnrsquot the realityhellip The approach to build a multicultural society and to live sidebyside and to enjoy each other has failed utterly failedrdquoThis failure is evident in country after country across Europe Londonistan which now has lsquoShariarsquoh Enforced Herersquo zones is written about and heard of other cities are fast sliding in that direction Berlin is witnessing a proliferation of mosques Not all of them are used for preaching the lsquoreligion of peacersquoThe plaintive pealing of church bells tells Christendomrsquos sad storyThe writer is a senior journalist based in the National Capital Region His Twitter handle is KanchanGupta