Daniel Jupp PhD., is an English political commentator who posts on jupplandia@substack.com. I am an admirer of his brilliant analysis of our culture. He claims to be an atheist but his honesty compels him to make the case for the importance of Christianity in our lives. His post on September 2, 2026, entitled BUILDING A SOCIETY POSSESSED BY DEMONS, reminds me of Dostoevsky’s novel from which he derives his title. I share it with you and commend his blogposts.

I suppose the difference between myself and many other atheists is not that I have any belief or faith, it is that as a cultural and social conservative it seems to me that all human beings and all societies require a faith system, a meta-narrative about reality, life, death and the way we should behave, and that the absence of a faith system is disastrous and unsustainable.

Individuals can in many cases muddle along confined to a limited, materialist understanding of the cosmos. It’s not very pleasant, and it’s not something that signals greater insight or brilliance, since I think many atheists actually get to their position on a basis of a feeling, just as much as many believers do.

Societies cannot ‘muddle along’ without a belief system. If they abandon one God, another takes his place. If they reject a religious faith, a secular belief system that may well be more fanatical becomes dominant instead. Either an alien religion that is more aggressive wins, or an extreme political ideology offers meaning in exchange for belief in it, instead. We are seeing both these effects in modern western society.

The formal arguments for atheism tend to be reductive, arrogant and rather simplistic, appealing to reductive, arrogant and rather simplistic people, the kind of people produced in a factory line by modern universities full of ideas which are just as evidence free and often considerably more malign than even the most obscure points of theology.

I’ve found many atheists are in fact rigidly orthodox, narrow minded bigots, especially professional atheists, and are people possessed of an unwarranted sense of intellectual superiority simply because they have made a choice on a single topic that is, in secular societies, more dominant than its opposite. Rather like progressive leftists, they display all of the personal and ideological characteristics they claim to abhor and reject. And it’s not surprising then that there is a great deal of overlap, politically, between the ardent atheist and the radical progressive.

Atheism becomes just another smug orthodoxy of the modern era, focused on sneering at and tearing down what our ancestors built and cared about, a destructive cultural vandalism that doesn’t fulfill any of the utopian promises of greater rationality, greater freedom of conscience, and greater individual liberty it pretends to represent. The performative atheist is more often simply a nihilist, or a dishonest assistant of the capture of our culture by rival and alien theologies of far more malign nature than our own discarded beliefs.

For any cultural conservative, it’s clear that western civilization had at one stage built a society of enviable merit, and that this society, this civilization, achieved more than any other towards the real betterment of mankind and the real improvement of the human condition…..a success that other societies did not achieve, and that other belief systems, secular or religious, have not equaled. A fair record of western civilization shows far more good than bad, far more of benefit than detriment, and achievements that were both material and moral which contemporary critics demean, slander and deny. It also shows Christianity, the moral lessons, social effects, and behavioral and social conditioning derived from Christian ethics, as integral to this success.

In a purely material or mechanistic understanding of the cosmos, Man has little significance, either at an individual level or even on the level of our entire species. For all that an atheist like Richard Dawkins can talk about the wonders of the universe just as much as a religious person can, for all that my eyes and brain as an atheist can look at a scene in nature with the same respect for the beauty of creation that a believer may possess, for all that Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox can talk about the mind boggling immensity of the universe in reverential tones, the human being and the universe deprived of a God IS deprived of a sense of meaning too.

Even if atheism is right, even if a scientific, mechanistic understanding of the universe where forces act remorselessly in ways determined by physics and where life is generated by accident and chance rather than by design and intent is true, it is not a comforting truth. Parts of the end result can be beautiful, and Dawkins in particular seems to have an ironically religious feeling of awe when discussing the operation of evolution and the natural adaptations of animal life, but the blind self generated cosmos that works like a self created machine is, for most of us, a cold and abstract universe to live in. If the immensity of space is deliberate, it is a wondrous feat, a spectacular enchantment. If it is an explosion birthed from nothing, it is much more likely to be viewed negatively, in an emotional way, as an immensity within which we are spectacularly insignificant.

The psychological difference between the universe was created so that creatures such as you could exist, and the universe is an accident in which you are just one of the smallest random specks in an emptiness beyond your comprehension, is, to paraphrase the inarticulate Brian Cox talking about the universe, ‘really, really big’. The ultimate expression of what a truly mechanistic vision means comes not in science or religion, but in fiction. HP Lovecraft’s creation of a genre of ‘cosmic horror’ expresses an awareness of just how pitiless, meaningless and worthless existence becomes if we fully embrace and live the idea that there is no God and the universe doesn’t care about anything.

At either extreme of the reality we inhabit-at the smallest organisms level of a virus or a plague and at the largest scale level of the vast gaps between worlds-humanity becomes irrelevant, morality becomes meaningless, and life becomes purposeless. There is no beauty, even evolutionary beauty, that a Dawkins can ascribe to a virus of replicating acellular infectious agents eating the flesh of a living innocent, nor would we find much beauty in our Earth being pummeled by extinction event meteorites or the forces of a black hole being applied to our solar system while we, briefly, inhabit it. The end point of the mechanistic universe is the understanding that your entire planet, your entire species, and with a more particular yet even more crushing certainty your entire life, means nothing.

The only human minds that can fully accommodate this kind of ‘truth’, outside of fictional literature, are insane ones. The only human beings who live by a full realization of mechanistic meaninglessness are the most evil human beings.

Because if you live out this throneless universe deprived of gods, you live out the behavior of monsters. In reality, most people thankfully act as if lives have meaning and purpose, and as if something prevents us from committing vile acts even where our actions are unobserved or our chances of human punishment are slight. We act as if a God might judge our actions, even when we don’t formally believe that such a God is possible. We act as if certain behaviors denote the monstrous and the unforgivable, the evil and the demonic, even if we don’t think a divine judgement awaits us or a human judgement will find us.

But this can change. This is changing.

It is possible to construct a society of demons, and this is what we are doing.

Demons act fully on the mechanistic consciousness. They emerge when societal taboos are abandoned. They emerge when extreme ideologies flourish. They emerge when people stop acting as if a God might judge them, and they emerge when people start acting as if they are the God judging others. A Demon is a perfect solipsist, for whom all external reality, including other people, exists solely by his or her perception, and solely for his or her enjoyment, profit or disposal. Nothing outside the Demon’s wants has meaning or value, and even his or her professed political or religious affiliations are simply the vehicles best suited for the delivery of their most loathsome desires.

The deliberate torture, murder, or sexual exploitation of children should always qualify for the label of demonic, should always suggest to us an act by which the person acting loses their own claim to sanity or humanity. We apply demonic to actions which are innately and fundamentally inhuman, to acts where insanity and evil are essentially the same, and where no context, no excuse, and no circumstance can mitigate the deserved revulsion the act occasions.

And we are producing more and more people capable of such acts, and more and more people capable of defending and agreeing with those who perform them. There is a serious issue now where frankly millions of people seem to be evil and insane enough to side with demonic behavior. And I do think this issue relates to religion.

When we abandoned our God, we invited in demons, and now a significant percentage of our population are, for want of a less supernatural term, possessed.

This is not a purely political issue. It is a moral and spiritual degeneracy at work.

My father was an atheist, just like me. I have never known a more moral man. I have never known anyone else live so much as if his actions could be judged at some point in a court where no human error exists. He could give a good accounting of himself in any weighing of the scales of good and evil. He acted as though his actions would be counted and weighed by a judge incapable of error and immune to deception.

Some people can intellectually act as if there is no God and rationally think that death ends a life with nothing after, and still hold themselves to a very high standard of moral excellence. But I believe these people are rare.

Many other people cannot. Many other people, when the culturally inherited belief system is gone, would be driven mad in a depressive sense without a framework of meaning beyond the merely mechanistic, and the terrible irony is that these people will embrace outward facing, violent madness and evil if it gives them a sense of meaning beyond themselves. They will listen to the darkest whisper in preference to the eternal silence. They will embrace the most blood soaked foreign cult. They will make a religion of their science and a science of their hypocrisy. They will tell themselves that evil is good, destruction is creation, and orthodox fanaticism is rebellious free thinking.

They will find meaning for themselves, meaning to hoard and accumulate, even if every coin of it is a false currency built on lies. They might decide that physical characteristics of identity like race or gender deserve their absolute loyalty, where sanity, decency and old moral standards do not.

They will welcome demonic possession, and call it an awakening.

How else can we accurately describe what is happening in a society where the most basic and fundamental moral realities aren’t accessible or dominant anymore, and where Islamic terrorists can live stream their rapes, tortures and bestial murders of women and children and receive the support and sympathy of much of the modern world?

We can know that when we replaced wonder and morality with mechanism and relativism, when we stopped insisting on certain moral truths and boundaries, the psychological effect on western consciousness was analogous to the effect that an open border has on crime and justice in objective reality. In both cases the lowering of the traditional defense is a welcoming of evil and insanity. In both cases innocents suffer while liars assert that the damage isn’t real.