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Even if you are not a secular person, the secular age can “thin out” (secularize) faith until it is seen as simply one more choice in life—along with job, recreation, hobbies, politics—rather than as the comprehensive framework that determines all life choices.3
there was a growing opinion among Chinese social scientists that the Christian idea of transcendence was the historic basis for the concepts of human rights and equality.
He argues that science cannot provide the means by which to judge whether its technological inventions are good or bad for human beings. To do that, we must know what a good human person is, and science cannot adjudicate morality or define such a thing.10 Social sciences may be able to tell us what human life is but not what it ought to be.
None of this denies that science and reason are sources of enormous and irreplaceable good for human society. The point is rather that science alone cannot serve as a guide for human society.
“scientific knowledge [is] inapplicable” to the “central aspects of human life” including hope, love, beauty, honor, suffering, and virtue.23
forgiveness was a concept that assumed moral responsibility and many other things that scientific psychology could not speak to.
Mozart’s Requiem relies on the Christian understanding of death, judgment, and afterlife for its stunning grandeur.
If you are being swept up in joy and wonder by a work of art, it will impoverish you to remind yourself that this feeling is simply a chemical reaction that helped your ancestors find food and escape predators, and nothing more.
It may make us feel quite small and even unimportant before it, and yet also hope filled and unworried about the things that usually make us anxious.
Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times about experiences like this that leave people feeling in the middle “between godliness and godlessness” because they seem to lead to the conclusion that there is something beyond the material, seen world.39 Philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly call the experience “The Whoosh.”
How unfair of me to request that God provides me with such an experience in order for me to believe?
How do I come to the same conclusion without such an experience?
To what greatness do I owe the introduction of CBA in my life to bring me to this point where I am now?
Nickel and Dimed,
“morass” of solipsism.
Secularization, he writes, “mainly erodes . . . the taken-for-granted, moderate faiths that trade on being mainstream and established.”67 Therefore, the very “liberal, moderate” forms of religion that most secular people think are the most likely to survive will not. Conservative religious bodies, by contrast, have a very high retention rate of their children, and they convert more than they lose.68
Broadway hit The Book of Mormon the main characters are missionaries with traditional views, but in the end they come to regard the stories of their scripture as only metaphors which lead us to love and make the world a better place.
The other reason to keep reading is a personal one. You may find that the descriptions of “fullness” and other such intuitions resonate with your own experience. But what if they don’t? You may say, “I feel no need for God in my life.” Faith, however, is not produced strictly by emotional need, nor should it be. Many of the secular thinkers we have cited have rather reluctantly moved toward religion not out of emotional need but because faith in God makes more sense of life than nonbelief. As
In other words, if you are experiencing unquiet and dissatisfaction in your life, they may be signs of a need for God that is there but which is not recognized as such.
It depicts nonbelief as the result of a quest for truth and the courage to face life as it is.
To move from religion to secularism is not so much a loss of faith as a shift into a new set of beliefs and into a new community of faith, one that draws the lines between orthodoxy and heresy in different places.
This is similar to CS Lewis' observation (or was it in JI or Case For God?) that picking and choosing parts of scriptures to believe in make you omnipotent. I need to go back and find that highlight
French philosopher René Descartes,
All of us have things we believe—including things we would sacrifice and even die for—that cannot be proven.
What would I die for? yes to save mankind. But to save your own child? Horrifiic thoughts.
So reason and proof must start with faith in reason and belief in some particular concept of proof.
both the statement “there is no supernatural reality beyond this world” and the statement “there is a transcendent reality beyond this world” are philosophical, not scientific, propositions. Neither can be empirically proven in such a way that no rational person can doubt.17 To state that there is no God or that there is a God, then, necessarily entails faith. And so the declaration that science is the only arbiter of truth is not itself a scientific finding. It is a belief.
It is assumed, not proven, that a God beyond our reason could not exist—and therefore we conclude that he doesn’t exist.
it wasn’t true that their reasoning had undermined their faith. Instead it was that a new kind of faith, one in the power of human reason and ability to comprehend the depths of things, had displaced an older, more self-effacing kind of faith.
unanswerable contradiction or error in the believer’s scriptures of choice.
we are saved only by undeserved grace, not by our moral character,
Does B believe this?
if there was an infinite God, a finite mind should be able to evaluate his motives and plans.
We should have as many good reasons for what we believe as possible.
In A Brief History of Thought Luc Ferry tells the story of how the Christian faith grew and supplanted classical Greco-Roman culture and pagan thought in the West.
Today's secular humanist view of the equality of man comes from christianity. Greeks viewed hierarchy of man much like caste system before christianity spread.
Love was required to redirect the human person away from self-centeredness toward serving God and others.
Nietzsche’s point is this. If you say you don’t believe in God but you do believe in the rights of every person and the requirement to care for all the weak and the poor, then you are still holding on to Christian beliefs, whether you will admit it or not.
This is kind of what i am trying so hard to explain but can never find the fight words.
Peter Watson details how Nietzsche’s views were important inspirations in the twentieth century to totalitarian figures of both the Left and Right, of both Nazism and Stalinism.70
He proposes that since “the grave is [life’s only] goal, perhaps it’s ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously.” It should be enough to simply take life as it comes and enjoy it as much as we can. Many want more than that. They want a reason to believe that our lives “matter from the outside.”2 That is, they want their lives to be connected to something beyond their mere pleasures and comforts, to be significant of something higher. That, Nagel says, is asking too much. Why torture ourselves?
If the Meaning of life exists, then we are not free to create that meaning for ourselves. So Harvard scientist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that there simply is no meaning to life but that this fact “though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating. . . .
Liberating? Or justifying laissez-faire mentality?
L.I.T. Tarassenko liked this
“Don’t think about the person [you] want to be, just be that person.”21 Don’t try to find the meaning of life—just create your own meaning.
Secular point of view
loving your family even to your own hurt and death is not absurd at all. It is what gives life meaning.
Yet they are neither modern people struggling with a lack of purpose nor postmodern people who feel they are free to forge the meanings that they prefer.
secular writer explains that he used to be a Christian but he is no longer. “It is true I do not have an absolute purpose in life—I am not dedicated to ‘glorifying God’ anymore. But I find creating my own purpose thrilling. I am the author of a novel, and the book is my life. The freedom is exhilarating. . . . Life is as happy and meaningful as you make it.”
There are two questions to ask those who take this remarkably sunny approach to a meaningless universe. Is this a cogent, consistent position? And does it work, practically, for living your life?
the “life is what you make it” view “seems troublingly narcissistic.
We are not fully free to impose our meanings on life. Rather we must honor life by discovering a meaning that fits in with the world as it is.
We defined “meaning” as having both a purpose and the assurance that you are serving some good beyond yourself.
The meanings that secular people have are not discovered but rather created. They are not objectively “there.” They are subjective and wholly dependent on our feelings. You may determine to live for political change or the establishment of a happy family, and these can definitely serve as energizing goals. However, I want to argue that such created meanings are much more fragile and thin than discovered meanings. Specifically, discovered meaning is more rational, communal, and durable than created meaning.
There is a kind of shallow, temporary peace that modern people can get from not thinking too much about their situation, but Christianity can give a deep peace and meaning that come from making yourself as aware and as mindful of your beliefs as possible.
we are happy only if we make our meaning in life something greater than our happiness.
finding meaning in life could be done only if we rejected individualism.
individualism undermines individual happiness. We need “devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable.
individualistic created meaning leads inevitably to a “soft relativism,” because, it is thought, no one should challenge the meanings or values of anyone else as being wrong. And this in turn leads to what he calls “extraordinary inarticulacy” about what our society’s ideals should be.
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