When pagans conduct their pursuit of the perfectibility of man as they conceive him.

From Christianity Survives Perversion and COVID by Conrad Black.

The secularists have enjoyed such a long sequence of official victories, from, in President Ronald Reagan’s words, “expel[ling] God from our children’s classrooms,” to banishing references to the Almighty with the fervor of pest exterminators (the steady gains of the pro-life advocates being the only fly in this ointment), some of them must have imagined that they had finally killed the practice of the Christian faith. Numbers were diminished this Easter from what I remember, but it’s clear that everyone except the atheists understand that we are all sinners, and the failings of the clergy—those people bold enough to try to intercede between the terrestrial world we all know and the great beyond and hereafter that is a matter of speculation and much skepticism—are regrettable and in recent years have often been tragic and criminal. But they are failures of the practice of the faith, not of the faith itself.

The greatest danger of atheism is that in the expulsion of God from our minds and consciousnesses, a vacuum will be created that will inevitably be filled by ambitious men. It was one thing for Alexander the Great and Julius and Augustus Caesar to accept partial deification; none of them was an atheist. We saw with Robespierre and Hitler and Stalin what happens when pagans occupy the area of the human consciousness formerly inhabited by religious faith and conduct their pursuit of the perfectibility of man as they conceive him.

Christians are chastened and disappointed but not dispirited. It was not acceptable for a former Fox News commentator to say that Dr. Anthony Fauci reminded her of the Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengele, but Fauci has shown us the perils of “following the science.” Faith is logical but elusive; it will not be stamped out and there must be more to the world than the thin gruel of the atheists, or even the ambitious scientists.