Thoughts on the State of our Culture
(1/26/2018)
Secular Culture
For well over a century a kind of secular orthodoxy has
settled into the culture. The
results of this atheistic religion are occurring every day, continue to be
counted, but some have already been tallied. For one, we can look at the body count during the last century.
Millions of children have been aborted
all over the world with our own country being no small contributor to those
numbers and fifty to one hundred million people have been killed under the
godless ideologies of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Friedrich Nietzsche, an atheist, warned us in the nineteenth
century that if we killed God by casting him out of our lives, we would loose
the moral foundation that the Christian Faith had brought. His prediction has proven true, and in
the twentieth century mankind certainly paid the price.
What has the secularist view of “progressive illumination afforded by unaided reason” brought
us? I believe it has brought us more
efficient ways to kill the unwanted, but it has not brought a curbing of the
desire to kill. For all of our
scientific breakthroughs, for all of our pride in what we called settled
science, we have failed to solve the problem of the evil desires of the
heart. Secularism has not given us
the why to life, ultimate purpose, meaning, or hope for the
future. We must ask then, have the
secularist been correct in their prediction that we can do very nicely without
a personal God and the transcendent leverage and restraint his commands place
upon individuals and society? In
the Bible, God says, “All that hate me,
love death”. The twentieth
century checked that box. To
return to Nietzsche, he contemplated the consequences of God’s departure from
our world. What would that world look
like? Here is what he said:
“You will never pray again, never
adore again, never again rest in endless trust. You deny yourself any stopping before ultimate wisdom, ultimate
goodness, and ultimate power while unharnessing your thoughts. There is no avenger for you, no
eventual improver, there is no reason for what happens, no love in what will
happen, no resting place for your heart where it has only to find and not seek.
You will resist any ultimate peace; you will only want the eternal recurrence
of war and peace. But if you want
to renounce this, who will give you the strength? This is the horrifying price when we have finally “unchained this earth from its sun.”
Secularists want us to believe we are doing very nicely and making
progress. “We certainly have more
work to do, but making progress.” Even
Nietzsche knew that you couldn’t have it both ways. You cannot knock out the props of ultimate transcendent
authority, especially one whose moral standard of living speaks to the issues
of the heart and expect business to go on as usual. You cannot reject an objective standard of living and still
preserve the society that it founded. Each generation will loose the moral fabric discovered or
invented by the previous one. The
wheel of moral appropriateness and acceptability will have to be re-invented
over and over again. When there is
no personal Creator or God, there is no received objective law or moral code
for living individually or collectively in society.
No personal God and no objective law are the foundational
presuppositions of the secular culture, and when we impose these in the public
square, our educational system, our political and social institutions, and our
entertainment and informational spheres, we eventually loose the ability to
have shared meanings of words and institutions, shared values, and shared hopes
for the future. The secular map by
which we were told we might understand and navigate life and live in this world
would allow us to push God to the margins. He would no longer be needed to help us understand life. They told us religion was a crutch and
we should feel sorry for the unenlightened that still ordered their lives by
creation myths. Science and man’s
reason were all we would need. As a
secular culture we have built a pretty solid, may I say settled, belief that
religion is at best only for the private spheres of our lives and thus are the
days of Isaiah repeated in our time. During his days it was said, “Justice is turned back, righteousness stands
afar off, for truth has stumbled in the public squares, uprightness cannot
enter in, truth is lacking and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey”.
This is the result of the
politically correct views held by most of our educators and political leaders. This is secular orthodoxy.
The Myth of Neutrality
We have for years been hard at work airbrushing religion
out-of-sight and out-of-mind. This
airbrushing began with the myth that education is a non-ideological or
philosophical activity and “neutral” with regards to morality. This was sleight of hand on the part of
liberal educators who wanted to hide from the public the true goal they had for
American education. That goal was
to use the “myth of neutrality” to recreate America ideologically and morally
in their own atheistic image.
Their goal was anything but neutral!
Education is by nature a religious activity as it deals with
making decisions on what is right and wrong. The relationship between leaders i.e. our governing
authorities and those they lead, the laws that we as a country should live by
and our relationship with other countries, are all inherently morally driven. Whether we were created or just happened
to get here by evolution is a life-changing question. When evolution or materialism speaks, all they can say is there
is no right and wrong. No evil. Things just happen without purpose or
meaning. Hitler and Stalin just
were.
When we study artwork from the past, we ask; who painted this,
when did they paint it, what was the history of the painter, and what was his
purpose for the painting? This knowledge can make the painting
explode with meaning. What happens
if we airbrush this information away? All that is left to do is to analyze the paint and observe
the patterns. Men can then read
anything they want into what they see.
If an art teacher left out this information, might I say suppress this, they
would be accused of incompetence. Can
you really teach about this world, mankind and the behavior of people without
mentioning their Creator, the author of all? Is that really being neutral? Does that make the topic neutral or in fact does this not
just impose on the subject and student a new set of values or prejudices? Is it not true that in trying to rid
ourselves of one religion (Christianity), we have merely invented and imposed another
(Secular Humanism)?
There must be some bread to offer that exceeds the stones of
the cold explanations and expectations of philosophical and scientific materialism.
The plea to be true to one another
sounds hopeless in the absence of joy, hope, love, light, peace and forgiveness,
which can only come from God. When
we reject the spirit of God that gives them, we are left to try and produce them
with merely physical and scientific means, but science comes up short. Evolution gives us no reason for love,
meaning, or purpose. In it we are
merely a complex accumulation of atoms and energy, produced by the pixie dust
of chance, driven by chemical reactions making us think we have a will that can
change things.
We live in a changing world, bewildered, as things seem to
spiral out of control and beyond our understanding. This is all we are left with when the sea of faith has
withdrawn. When we suppress the
knowledge of God, we are like fish stranded at low tide on the beach. This is where scientific materialism
would leave us. How will we endure
until the tide returns? Someone has asked the question, “Can a man or society
or nation live without God?” We
have gotten our answer in the bloody 20th century, and man’s actions continue
to confirm the answer in the 21st. No!
Has not life, the good and the bad, taught us that there are
things beyond our senses and scientific discovery? Are we merely complex chemical
reactions driven by our DNA without true wills, or is it now time to lay this
sacred cow of science to rest and face the consequences of that belief? Did a personal Creator make us or are we
an accident of the universe? How
you answer will prove to be life changing. This question and its answer is the foundation of all
education, in fact, our answer will drive all the conclusions we hold
concerning our origins, our final destiny, our beliefs concerning a purpose and
meaning of life, and our concept of a moral standard, which enlightens and
guides us in relating to others.
I hope you are beginning to see that the content of our
children’s education and the presuppositions, which undergird it, is critical
to their staying consistent in belief and practice with Christianity. What they are made to hear and what they
are forbidden to hear, wherever they receive education, will mold their
ideology or worldview. They will
be affected forever. Education is
never neutral; it always has an agenda. It either recognizes God or ignores him. Most teachers want to give their
students the best education possible, but who decides what is best? Will not this be dependent on what is
considered to be “truth”, and who decides what truth may be taught? The Bible says in Psalm 101:3: “I will not set before my eyes anything that
is worthless.” An education
that ignores God and teaches that he is a myth is less than worthless; it is
dangerous!
If I may be so bold, I present for your consideration the proposition
that the best education acknowledges the truth that: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Our children must be in an
educational environment that first begins with: there is a Lord God, and he is
not the state or myself. My
friends we are a long ways from the 50’s…we must protect our children
accordingly.
Shawn
