I was grimly amused and somewhat irritated by Richard Dawkins’ call at the recent so-called atheist “Reason Rally” in DC for Catholics to be mocked and ridiculed in public, as reported by Dena in her recent post to this site. The grim amusement arose from the irony inherent in a demagogue at a so-called “reason rally” calling for his “rational” comrades to abandon rational dialogue with their opponents in favour of ridicule, hatred and contempt. There is, however, nothing surprising about the contradiction. It is par for the course for those who idolize “Reason” (as they conceive it) as a god. After the rationalists of the French Revolution erected the goddess Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral in mockery of Christ and the Blessed Virgin, they then proceeded to treat their enemies with the hatred and contempt that led to the guillotine and the Great Terror. The madness of the Great Terror would re-emerge whenever so-called “Reason” received enough power to vent its spleen. The atheist “reason” of Marx would lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people in the madness of the Gulag, not to mention the tens of millions of people killed by the madness of Marxist “reason” in China, Cambodia and other “enlightened” places. Whilst talking about manifestations of “rationalist” madness we should not forget that other form of socialism, i.e. the National Socialism of Hitler and the Nazis, which led to the slaughter of the gas chambers. Perhaps we should also remind ourselves that all of these manifestations of “rational” madness shared a common hatred for the Catholic Church. As the French would say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Make no mistake about it, the irrational “reason” of the atheists leads to the Gullotine, the Gulag and the Gas Chamber.