Religious Ideas have lost Social Significance in the West

In the old days when the ‘gods’ were someone else the knowledge of what we were did not frighten us but now that we are ‘gods’ ourselves we bear the knowledge for ourselves.

You are free in our time to say that God does not exist. You are free to say that he exists and that he is evil. You are free to say that he would like to exist if he could.

You may talk of God as a mystification or a metaphor. You may boil him down with gallons of long words or boil him down to the rags of metaphysics. And it is not merely that nobody punishes but nobody protests.

But if you speak of God as a reason for changing one’s conduct then the modern world will stop you somehow if it can.

We are long past talking about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It is now thought irreverent to be a believer.

This has happened in the last 30-50yrs alerting us to the path we have entered into.

Our choices now are only going to become more and more difficult and the defense of your belief based on your belief in God is going to be harder to sustain.

How did this come about?

1. The mindset/mood of Secularization

Secularization is a process where religious ideas and religious institutions and interpretations have lost their social significance because God is an encumbrance.

In other words even if you must claim to be a religious person in a secularized society that is alright so long as you don’t bring those ideas about in our social institutions and in public debate. Keep those ideas private.

I want this world not to have meaning because a meaningless world frees me to my own erotic and to my own political pursuits. -Huxley

Because

Once you find out that there is no superior wisdom, no superior cause, it is liberating if not exhilarating. -Steven J. Gul

When religious ideas and institutions and interpretations have lost their social significance and man becomes the pure measure of all things shame as a real response is being removed.

There is nothing sacred anymore.

That’s why psychological theorists today are addressing this whole issue of shame and guilt again trying to put it in the context of the modern mindset, which has jettisoned absolutes but is unable to expel the sense of shame and guilt within.

If secularization is allowed its logical outlooking it makes life unlivable because it eradicates that legitimate sense of shame that God has put into your heart and mine.

Ethics and Morality can only make sense with a Creator in the picture.