Do you know who you are and where you are going? The person with a postmodern mindset does not really know where they are and who they are, says Ravi Zacharias, one of this century’s noted thinkers and writers.
Everyone it seems is asking ‘what does it mean to be human…?’
Our twentieth century, far from being notable for scientific skepticism, is one of the most credulous eras in all history. It is not that people believe in nothing – which would be bad enough – but that they believe in anything – which is really terrible, said Malcolm Muggeridge.
Our culture no longer has a point of reference.
This denial of absolutes has had profound effects on all spheres of human life. The profound decline in trust between individuals, and corporations is a glaring example.
People who have always believed in absolute moral values and in a Creator God who loves them and has their best interests in mind have been seduced and brainwashed into believing anything but the truth, and the devastation is only beginning to unfurl as the years go by.
Marx and Kierkegaard were two key voices of the twentieth century. The curious thing is that though Marx purported to have an infallible scientific key to history, almost all his prophecies have failed to happen. On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s forecasts have been fulfilled to a remarkable degree. Take for instance his profound sense that if men lost the isolation, the separateness, which awareness of the presence of God alone can give, they would soon find themselves irretrievably part of a collectivity with only mass communications to shape their hopes, formulate their values and arrange their thinking . . .
What has secularism to do with this, you may well ask.
Figure 1 What do you really mean by Secularism?
First of all let us see what people believe in the present day and age.
Do you recognize yourself and your friend’s beliefs reflected in this poem, called the Modern Thinker’s Creed, by Steve Turner?
We believe in Marx, Freud, and Darwin We believe everything is OK as long as you don’t hurt anyone to the best of your definition of hurt, and to the best of your knowledge.
We believe in sex before, during, and after marriage. We believe in the therapy of sin. We believe that adultery is fun. We believe that sodomy’s OK. We believe that taboos are taboo.
We believe that everything’s getting better despite evidence to the contrary. The evidence must be investigated And you can prove anything with evidence.
We believe there’s something in horoscopes UFO’s and bent spoons. Jesus was a good man just like Buddha, Muhammed, and ourselves. He was a good moral teacher though we think His good morals were bad.
We believe that all religions are basically the same-at least the one that we read was. They all believe in love and goodness. They only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.
We believe that after death comes the Nothing. Because when you ask the dead what happens they say nothing. If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then its compulsory heaven for all excepting perhaps Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Kahn
We believe in Masters and Johnson. What’s selected is average. What’s average is normal. What’s normal is good.
We believe in total disarmament. We believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed. Americans should beat their guns into tractors. And the Russians would be sure to follow.
We believe that man is essentially good. It’s only his behavior that lets him down. This is the fault of society. Society is the fault of conditions. Conditions are the fault of society.
We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him. Reality will adapt accordingly. The universe will readjust. History will alter. We believe that there is no absolute truth excepting the truth that there is no absolute truth.
We believe in the rejection of creeds, and the flowering of individual thought.
If chance be the Father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky and when you hear
State of Emergency! Sniper Kills Ten! Troops on Rampage! Whites go Looting! Bomb Blasts School! It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.
I heard this today from Ravi Zacharias, and thought I would share it here. It parodies the polemic often heard today by residents of America’s [and other so called ‘developed’ worlds] Institutes of Higher Education, who have been raised in the last few decades under the State sanctioned beliefs of Secularism, and if they believe in God at all, it is one that effectively has one man blowing himself and others up to gain a sexual Paradise, while another is meditation on his navel to attain his version of such, through the annihilation of desire.
What were the steps in this slow decline of our morals, trust and security?
-
Rejection of the beneficial transcendent moral authority of the Bible, which provides liberty with its necessary limits, with the immutable holy Creator as God.
-
Increasing acceptance of the objectively baseless morality of secularism, which promotes everyone doing what it right in his own eyes (contra. Deut. 12:8), resulting in the most morally confused generation America and other so called developed nations has ever raised, open to the ever morphing degrees of immorality, with gaining carnal pleasures, possessions and prestige being exalted, and leaders who “by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.” (Romans 16:18).
This paradigmatic change may be seen to have manifestly begun with the 60’s sexual revolution, which the Left sees as a success, while we reap the fruits of its corruption. In no small part is the role played by new age philosophies [old wine in new bottles, exported from their lands of origin where they have failed miserably for centuries] which are contradictory at their very core.
I feel that Secularism has played a large role in the present mess we all find ourselves in.
Malcom wrote this poignant summary “So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.”
But Jesus does save sinners.
I do not know much about the author, British journalist Steve Turner, but he has some other Christian poems, such as this excerpt,
If Jesus was thirty today they wouldn’t really care about the public ministry, they’d be too busy investigating His finances and trying to prove He had Church or Mafia connections. The miracles would be explained by an eminent and controversial magician, His claims to be God’s Son recognised as excellent examples of Spoken English and immediately incorporated into the O-Level syllabus, His sinless perfection considered by moral philosophers as, OK, but a bit repressive.
If Jesus was thirty-one today He’d be the fly in everyone’s ointment- the sort of controversial person who stands no chance of eminence. Communists would expel Him, capitalists would exploit Him or have Him smeared by people who know a thing or two about God. Doctors would accuse Him of quackery, soldiers would accuse Him of cowardice, and theologians would take Him aside and try to persuade Him of His non-existence.
If Jesus was thirty-two today we’d have to end it all. Heretic, fundamentalist, literalist, puritan, pacifist, non-conformist, we’d take Him away and quietly end the argument. But the argument would rumble in the ground at the end of three days and would break out and walk around as though death was some bug, saying ‘I am the resurrection and the life… No man cometh to the Father but by me’. While the magicians researched new explanations and the semanticists wondered exactly what He meant by ‘I’ and ‘No man’ there would be those who stand around amused, asking for something called proof.
Ask yourself whom you would rather believe, the Creator God who gave us His very own life to purchase our freedom from the guilt, shame and power of sin, or fancy stories designed for itching ears which ought to have known better.
If you need any further prodding consider this classic rebuttal of the modern secularist thinker by Malcolm Muggeridge:
The greatest artists, saints, philosophers and, until quite recent times, scientists, through the Christian centuries, . . . have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid, and that the great drama of the Incarnation which embodies it, is indeed the master-drama of our existence.
To suppose that these distinguished believers were all credulous fools whose folly and credulity in holding such beliefs has now been finally exposed, would seem to me untenable; and anyway I’d rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr Johnson, Blake and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw.
{Vintage Muggeridge, ed. Geoffrey Barlow, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985, 32-33}
Love, power and a sound mind 