What is the Doctrine of Materialism?

A new find...Thomas Brewton:

Getting a handle on the philosophical doctrine of materialism is key to understanding the sharp divergence of society today from the Judeo-Christian founding principles of our nation. Socialist sects, from American liberalism to Lenin’s Soviet Union, reject God and look to the material structure of government to solve all problems.

Emails from readers and comments posted on The View From 1776 website suggest that philosophical materialism is not a widely understood concept.

The word materialism suggests to most people an obsession with money and consumer items - high-priced automobiles, McMansions, the latest gadgets, exotic vacations, and so forth.

As used in The View From 1776, however, the term materialism refers to the philosophical doctrine that rose to dominate Western civilization in the 19th century.

Philosophical materialism is opposed to spirituality. It is the rejection of God, spiritual religion, and the idea of eternal moral truth.

Materialism means that the only reality, the only causes for what goes on in the world, are physical things and forces that can be detected by the human senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Liberal-socialists call this scientific. Everything else, such as religion and moral codes, is dismissed as ignorant superstition from a pre-scientific age.

Thus there is no God, no human soul, no spiritual dimension to life. Individual humans are adrift in the cosmos, at the mercy of external, material forces, from which they can be saved only by the superior knowledge and brain-power of liberal-socialist intellectuals. ...

The rest... here.

The fatal mistake of modernism too... the great fallacy about how man knows what he knows.

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