THE DEATH OF MODERN SECULARISM

According to the modernist (atheism, humanism, evolutionism), the only reality or truth is physical. Spiritual or moral reality is non-existent. According to the postmodernist, all truth claims are mere human inventions. Consequently, reality is either non-existent or unknowable.

When these two came together, they produced the perfect storm of modern secularism (MS), which believes that truth and justice have no independent reality. At best, they are no more than ideas that evolve as society evolves. Consequently, justice doesn’t truly exist. It is merely a concept we need to keep society going.

If you listen closely to what people say, you will see indications of MS all around you. For example, the pastor preached that because perfect love casts out fear, as the Apostle John had written, we shouldn’t listen to the hate-mongers who warn us about Muslim refugees.

Afterwards, I asked her whether or not we should listen to those who warn about swine flu, the bubonic plague, or radiation leaks. Well, of course, that was a different matter, but why? Plagues and radiation leaks come up on the radar of the secularist, but a group victimized by the West does not. A different set of rules applies here. This reflects MS’ leftist leaning that there are groups who are worthy of preferential treatment. Just look at Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s demand that the courts give preferential treatment to people of color!

Forget the ideal of color-blind justice! And why not forget if, for MS, “justice” is no more than a social construct. It is an institution to be manipulated according to need and ideology.

To the pastor, I brought up the fact that only 1% of asylum seekers that President Obama has brought over were Christians, as opposed to 99% Muslims, most of whom, according to surveys, want to impose shariah law. Without dealing with the threatening implications of this disparity, the pastor interjected that we have to be equally concerned about all groups of people.

I didn’t bring up the obvious fact that the huge imbalance among asylum grantees did not reflect equal concern. Nor did I mention verses that require love to begin with our own households – both spiritual and biological. Instead, I objected that:

·       “Muslims refuse to integrate. The Koran even prohibits them from being friends with non-Muslims (Koran Surahs 3:27; 5:54; 60:1; 60:4), except to deceive to promote Islam.”

She fired back that it is all a matter of interpretation. I responded:

·       “Some things are so clear that they are no longer a matter of our personal interpretation. When the police pull me over for driving 50 MPH in a 25 MPH zone, I cannot claim that it’s all just a matter of interpretation. “25 MPH” means just what it says. I cannot say that I thought it was only a suggestion or a ballpark figure.”

I could have mentioned how the Muslim authorities interpret their Koran on the subject of friendship. One commentator writes (www.koranqa.com; fatwa 59879):

·       “Undoubtedly the Muslim is obliged to hate the enemies of Allaah and to disavow them, because this is the way of the Messengers and their followers.

·       “Based on this, it is not permissible for a Muslim to feel any love in his heart towards the enemies of Allaah who are in fact his enemies too…”

·       “But if a Muslim treats them with kindness and gentleness in the hope that they will become Muslim and will believe, there is nothing wrong with that, because it comes under the heading of opening their hearts to Islam. But if he despairs of them becoming Muslim, then he should treat them accordingly.”

However, the pastor continued:

·       “The Bible also includes such verses. You cannot just point the finger at Islam.”

I challenged her to provide just one such verse. She responded that Jesus claimed that He came with a sword to separate families.

I responded that this verse was a far cry from instructing us to not have non-Christian friends. Instead, Jesus had been pointing to the impact we would have on others, even friends, as His children. He was preparing us for the fact that we would be hated:

·       “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.” (John 15:18-20)

The pastor was struggling to come up with another verse, but she was rescued by the intervention an onlooker.

Why was she so ready to equate with Christianity and Islam, the Bible with the Koran – two sets of very different teachings, one highly violent, the other peaceful? She had embraced the prevailing worldview, MS, which eliminates the possibility of discerning any real differences.

In opposition to multi-culturalism, which holds that we cannot judge other cultures, wisdom requires discernment and making critical distinctions. Wisdom requires us to distinguish the victim from the victimizer and to treat them appropriately. It requires us to distinguish the student who is struggling to learn from the one who is disrupting the others. We also need the wisdom to discern real help from enablement, genocide from self-defense, and the innocent from the guilty.

However, MS is slowly eroding away the principles essential for the advancement of society. MS refuses to see and to even acknowledge the basic principles of justice – that there are truly the innocent and the guilty. How does MS do this? It denies the existence of objective moral absolutes. This relegates justice and truth to mere evolving human creations.

My next conversation made this painfully clear. She was a sensitive and caring woman. These are qualities that I greatly admire.

She admitted that she was totally comfortable with the sermon. After challenging her, she responded with passion:

·       “I don’t feel comfortable with what you are saying. You are making hateful divisions among the religions. You are pitting us against them. You are saying that you are better than they are. You are looking down on them and marginalizing them. I cannot go along with any of this.”

Of course, I wasn’t saying these things, but she accurately discerned that I was drawing out some differences between Islam and Christianity. I asked her whether we should have pitted ourselves against Hitler. She could not answer this question directly, but insisted that love could conquer all, even in the case of Hitler.

This is what justice looks like on the streets of MS. It has now become non-existent in the minds of many. It has been eliminated by an overly indulgent form of “love.”

How did this happen? First, the concept of justice has been overturned in favor of pragmatism, what works, what bring desired results, even at the expense of the innocent. This means that we cannot judge in any objective sense. Meanwhile, she was judging me!

Second, many atheists/materialists deny the existence of freewill, and if freewill doesn’t exist, then we couldn’t have acted other than the way that the forces had determined we would act. It also means that we are not deserving of punishment or even criticism.

Third, even if MS does acknowledge freewill, it is only a mere shadow of what we usually regard as freewill. Instead, we are overwhelmingly products of our upbringing, culture, and genetics – nature and nurture. Once again, we are pre-programmed to do what we do. Judging individuals and cultures is therefore regarded as unfair.

Yes, MS is self-contradictory. While it claims that judging is unfair, it is just as judgmental as most other belief systems. However, only a coherent worldview can provide a compelling vision to inspire a nation and human thriving. Meanwhile, MS has left us vulnerable to every pathogen. Oops, there I go judging again. After all, I am suggesting the forbidden – that humanity is somehow superior to the pathogens.

Nevertheless, I did grieve after these conversations – not that I had said the wrong things, but if I was going to offend, perhaps I should have allowed the centrality of the Gospel to offend. God lead me!

ISIS, Transcendence, and the Failures of the West and the Church

It might not simply be a taste for blood and sex that draws thousands of Westerners to ISIS. It might also be that ISIS offers them a commodity that has become increasingly  discredited in the West – transcendence and a higher reason for being.

In support of this point, writer Janie B. Cheaney offers these affirmative quotations to explain the attractiveness of ISIS:

• “[A] yearning for a transcendent cause that liberal society can have trouble satisfying,” wrote Ross Douthat in The New York Times.

• “His discontent … is driven by ideas, and by the human needs those ideas seek to satiate,” observed Charlie Cooke at National Review.

• “The Islamic State not only has the romance of revolution and the promise of action and power, but also religious and apocalyptic appeal,” concluded Michael Brendan Dougherty of The Week.

• “Because it gives meaning to life,” Michael Ledeen summed up on his own blog. (World Mag, Oct. 4, 2014, 22) 

According to the videos aired in the West, these jihadists seem to celebrate the fact that they are faithfully serving Allah by doing the “right thing.”

Several years ago, I attended an interfaith conference at a local liberal church, where I was surprised to see a 15 year-old waiting expectantly for the conference to begin. Intrigued, I asked him why he had come:

• I want to hear what the Imam says.

I asked him, “Why the Imam? Why not also the Rabbi and the Pastor?” His answer saddened me:

• I have some Muslims in my family. They take their faith seriously.

What an indictment of the church! What has happened to us that we reflect our Lord so lamely?

However, this is also an indictment of Western society. Cheaney puts it this way:

• The West has spent the last two centuries chasing true belief from the main stage of public life. Pluralism, our highest communal value, requires no one to believe anything that would render anyone else’s beliefs invalid.

It is worse than that! Pluralism – also called “religious pluralism” or “multi-culturalism” – claims that, since everything is relative and there is no religious or cultural truth – we cannot say that one religion or culture is more true than another. In fact, judging one religion better than another is now labelled “arrogant,” “imperialistic” and “chauvinistic,” especially in Western media and the university. No one wants to be labeled a “narrow-minded bigot,” and so Christians have been marginalized, silenced, and made to feel ashamed of their faith.

However, by purging such religious truth claims from educated society, the West has paid a great price. Not only can it not speak convincingly against ISIS, it can no longer hold up a better portrait of transcendence for our hungry and deluded youth. Cheaney therefore writes:

• The poverty of pluralism becomes apparent when rootless young Muslim men find transcendent meaning in slaughtering infidels… It fulfills a need that won’t be satisfied at any bargaining table. It will have to be fought and defeated.

However, how can we fight against this ideology if we do not have one to hold up in place of Jihad. Cheaney therefore observes:

• But faith can only be fought with faith, and Western culture has undercut itself… It picked the juicy low-hanging fruits of Christianity [like love, justice, equality, and forgiveness] while disregarding the Son who shines on them, valued the comforts but discounted the Comforter.

Oddly, this is something that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ex-Muslim, ex-Dutch Parliamentarian, and atheist, seems to understand better than most Western intellectuals and even Christians:

• The Christianity of love and tolerance remains one of the West’s most powerful antidotes to the Islam of hate and intolerance. Ex-Muslims find Jesus Christ to be a more attractive and humane figure than Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

• I have a theory that most Muslims are in search of a redemptive God. They believe that there is a higher power and that this higher power is the provider of morality, giving them a compass to help them distinguish between good and bad.  Many Muslims are seeking a God or a concept of God that in my view meets the description of the Christian God.  Instead they find Allah. They find Allah mainly because many are born in Muslim families where Allah has been the reigning deity for generations… (p. 239)

• The Christian leaders now wasting their time and resources on a futile exercise of interfaith dialogue with the self-appointed leaders of Islam should redirect their efforts to converting as many Muslims as possible to Christianity, introducing them to a God who rejects Holy War and who has sent his son to die for all sinners out of a love for mankind… The Vatican and all the established Protestant churches of northern Europe believed naively that interfaith dialogue would magically bring Islam into the fold of Western civilization. It has not happened, and it will not happen…. To help ground these people in Western society, the West needs the Christian churches to get active again in propagating their faith. It needs Christian schools, Christian volunteers, the Christian message… The churches should do all in their power to win this battle for the souls of humans in search of a compassionate God, who now find that a fierce Allah is closer to hand. (Nomad, pp. 247, 249, 250, 251)

We all need the Transcendent. Since the West marginalizes it, the pilgrim will just go elsewhere, even in the gutter, to find it. Oddly, it is an atheist that sees this more clearly than the rest of us.

Religion in the Public Schools: A Dialogue with an Atheist

 An atheist challenged me to a dialogue. He understandably complained that a student shouldn't have to "experience any religious activity." However, I countered by pointing out that there are many "religious" activities that Christians are coerced into:

I think that you well illustrate the pushes and pulls that are now tearing at the fabric of our society, the consensus that had once held this nation together. I think that we are seeing its fragmentation, and I don’t think that there are any simple answers. Every values group wants to impose its own values, and wants to see the removal of the values of the “opposition.”

What’s the answer? I think that you appropriately used the example of Islam to point out that we’d all resent a teacher pushing Islam in the public schools. However, we could make the same case regarding the pushing of National Socialism, Communism, Cannibalism, or Pedophilia – belief systems that we wouldn’t ordinarily call “religious.” Nevertheless, their imposition still presents the exact same issues as the imposition of Islam.

Now, let’s add some other belief systems to our equation - Materialism, Multiculturalism, Moral-relativism, Religious-pluralism, Secular Humanism and Naturalism. These represent values-orientations – religions – and not facts. The values-clarification exercises – an extension of moral-relativism – teach the students that there are no right or wrong answers. Rather, it’s just a matter of clarifying your beliefs and understanding those of others.

Materialism makes the counter-factual assumption that our material world is all that there is, while Secular Humanism assumes that the human being is the end-all and be-all of all existence. I suspect that you would deny that these latter “isms” are religious in nature. However, others would regard these just as much as an unwanted and religious imposition as you would Islam.

In fact, we can take our analysis even one step further. Any selection of textbooks, teachers or even classrooms reflects our religion or worldview. Any time we make a ruling, our worldviews are in view. Therefore, our problems and conflicts extend far deeper than differences presented by Judaism, Islam or Christianity. We are facing a Western crisis in terms of the conflict of our worldviews.

Consequently, it is too facile and misleading to think that our problems will be solved by merely eliminating the “religions” from the public sphere.