Isms, Addictions & Culture

I started to write this blog and realized that it was waaaay too long.  There is a lot to cover so I have broken it up into parts.  I post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday so if you are interested, you can follow along and see where this particular adventure takes you…

I once heard someone justify a particularly blatant case of infidelity with the words: “Well, I believe God wants me to be happy.”  I remember thinking, “At any cost?” I suppose the response would have run something like, “Yeah, after all, He died for me.”  So He did. But the reasoning was off. In recently reading a book about the life of Dietrich Von Hildebrand who opposed two versions of wrong thinking known as Fascism and Socialism, I suspect he would have been equally at odds with some of the wrong thinking in our society today which do grave disservice to our nation and our world as a whole.

Some of the isms and addictions which have taken a hold of our culture might be headed under such titles as Humanism, Secularism, Commercialism, and Voyeurism.

Humanism is to make humanity God and to believe that the highest good is achieved through humanity’s willing it.  In other words, we are capable of making Heaven on earth if only we all got down to business and everyone acts nice.  This seems like a passive version of the thinking that led Nazi Germany to think that Aryans could, and should, take over the world and that leaders of nations know what’s best for everyone.  The individual good is subservient to the collective.  If that sounds scary – it should.  Humanity, even at its best, does not reach the heights that God’s revelation and grace can offer us. Eventually humanists get sick of waiting for everyone to toe the line and passive measures are abandoned. Humanists tend to lose their sense of humanity when playing God.  We have some noted humanists in the persons of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking. Many universities and even high schools and elementary schools are largely staffed by humanists and our government today is led by humanist philosophies. Humanists tend to plead that they have humanity’s greatest good in mind, but they forget, we are only human after all. It take a God to know what is best for us.