Secularism

Faith is a divine presupposition, perhaps believed before the evidence related to a particular faith brand is found and evaluated.  During the course of wandering through life we sense the contradictions and paradoxes related to life experiences that seem to demand meaningful faith from us.  One of the ways we make sense of everything is to adopt a faith context.  Coming down on one side of the perceived information with contradictions and paradoxes we choose to believe in God.  Coming down on the other side we choose not to believe.  We may spend the rest of our lives collecting to memory that which we believe to be the feelings, reasons and evidences for our beliefs.  Either we believe there is a God, or we don’t.  If we do the story takes a different direction for our lives than if we don’t.  Both sides can be built intelligently once the basic presuppositions are known.  That does not mean that there will be agreement in the development of presuppositions by those devoted to the winning (acceptable) choices.  There are wide differences among persons taking any presuppositions.  The greatest problem for apologetics in any instance is likely to be found among the contenders for presuppositions we prefer.  Our greatest intellectual combatants are those choosing our own presupposition circles.  The liberals are at it with the conservatives, the traditionalists with the changers, the young with the old – and so the story goes and may play out to the advantage first of this context and later with another.  We encounter growing complexity.

In the Page for this date in the Junior series, David Brooks addresses the problems of the secularists in working through the intellectual base for projections: Past secular creeds were built on the 18^th-century enlightenment view of man as an autonomous, rational creature who could reason his way to virtue. The past half-century of cognitive science has shown that creature doesn’t exist.  We are not really rational animals: emotions play a central role in decision making. . . . Brooks argues that if secularism is to succeed in carrying the point of humanism it will have to do what persons have done in institutionalizing faith.  In simple perception the secularists will have to create its counter to the church/synagogue that accents the emotional needs of human beings – with agape love at the center leading to sacrificial service in the light of the dignity that God gives to all persons who choose it.  He then states: I suspect that over the next years secularism will change its face and become hotter and more consuming, less content with mere benevolence, and more responsive to the spiritual urge in each of us, the drive for self-transcendence, purity and sanctification.  My response to Brooks in his conclusion is that his summary is what the secularist must do to answer the transcendence of Christianity, but it can’t be done.  Secularism ends in death for the individual.  The only thing the person has relates to a few decades to draw from life whatever talents and availability afford to make a good life with what is available, follow a sensible course in using and being used in society; find current emotional and intellectual fulfillment beginning in family in a mutuality relating to love quotients; and, live in peace with decency toward all persons.  That is possible, and will end with the person’s last breath.  The humanist ends there – for the Christian it’s a beginning.

Why bother entering the list with competition to those believing in God, presuming that death doesn’t end matters for them?  Why take time in life to counter what is presumed by the secularist to be a superstition of God?  If the person of faith in God for the masses generally, wants to rest in a promise of something yonder, why work at the issue of spiritual abortion?  Why do so many secularists want to disassociate believers in God from faith?  This is especially significant when we discover how that faith makes dutiful citizens in love, service and peace.   The theoretical ideals of Christianity and responsible secularism for earth life experience are about the same.  The great issue becomes the matter of: After death, what?  For humanists, death is an animal experience that ends for all physical beings any meaning or life continuance.  For the Christian the appeal is not only for better earth life personal experience and management of meaning, but the blessed Hope.  Christians live honorably in faith’s mystery.  Human ideals are for all.