A Peek into four White Crow Books

God’s Magic
The Dark Star
Many Mansions
Lychgate

World Madness and Nihilism go Hand-in-Hand

The madness, craziness, and turmoil we see in the world today seems to have slowly developed in line with the growth of mass communication during the twentieth century, reaching an unimagined deep crater in recent years. As Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding (Sir Hugh Dowding, 1882 – 1970), put it in his 1960 book, God’s Magic, “The problem of world chaos is linked very closely with the chaos in the mind of humanity.” Dowding is considered by many as the man most responsible for Great Britain’s victory in the 1940 Battle of Britain during World War II.  “Man insists on looking outward for causes instead of looking inward.  As with the individual, so with a nation.  An individual who has an unquiet spirit will have an unquiet environment.”

Dowding concluded that the “hereafter” offered by religion is much too vague and “deliberately wooly,” so much so that it makes absolutely no sense to the ordinary person.
“The result is that when the time does approach the man is frightened.  He fears death.  And when he wakes up on the other side he often won’t believe he is dead because he feels so much the same as he did before he died.”

As Dowding further viewed it, the belief in the survival of consciousness at death is at the core of all concerns and issues facing humankind and the remedy for the ills of the world are to be found in accepting the “overwhelming evidence” that conscious personal existence continues beyond the grave.  The wise man, he said, “will demand to know as much as possible about his future state.  If he believes that he will be snuffed out like a candle, he should believe it because he has carefully examined and deliberately rejected the alternatives, and not because it is the most comfortable thing for a selfish materialist to believe.”

Dowding’s conclusions were based on his extensive investigation into psychic matters. “My assertion is that a man who will study what has been made available to us by ancient and modern revelation can build up for himself a picture of the Scheme of the Universe and of the Progress of Humanity, which is perfectly acceptable to a rational intelligence – making allowance, of course, for the fact that there are certain aspects of multidimensional life which are quite outside the scope of our three-dimensional brains,” he explained his view. 

The major obstacle to such a progressive view, Dowding believed, is the fact that existential and philosophical issues are off limits to most politicians and journalists. If they espouse the predominant materialistic view of science, they are simply endorsing nihilism and reaffirming that life has no purpose.  The only way that life has real purpose is if there is a “larger life” beyond this one, but that means the politicians and journalists have to tread somewhat in very controversial religious territory with its conflicting dogmas and doctrines. Political correctness prevents the politicians from getting into such areas, while the journalists fear that they will appear unintelligent by discussing such unscientific matters. 
 
As for the oft-heard advice that we should “live in the moment” and not concern ourselves with what might come or not come after death, Dowding countered that the person who has the conviction that he will live on after death in a meaningful way will enrich his life.  “If and when he accepts the overwhelming evidence that conscious personal existence does continue beyond the grave, he will wish to treat his continuing life as a whole, and modify in thought, word and deed the natural and instinctive expression of his personality so as to accord with a long-term policy, instead of thinking only of the little period which he spends on earth,” he wrote.  “This is my definition of Religion, and indeed Religion in its widest sense is desperately needed today.” 

Without a belief in survival, Dowding saw little motivation for soldiers to risk their lives. “This truly is a fearful idea that man must live and die, then cease,” he stated. “[It] seems useless to fight to save those who are in any case doomed to oblivion ... to give their lives to save the next batch of cannon fodder.” – MET