City Of God 45

I am thinking this morning about modernity, and it's idiot offspring, post-modernity. We seem to have had for many years now this expectation that things are always going to get better, that they are always going to have to get better. Better technology, better health, better food, better homes, better living conditions, better work, better everything. Science and technology are really pushing it to the max and we are now getting the self-driving car, robots to do all our unpleasant work for us, robot sex-dolls, and better phones, microchip implants that will transform us into demi-borgs. There seems to be in our genetic structure an undying desire to be or at least to live in the illusion that we are gods or that we ought to be. No wonder, at least in the so-called Christian West, God has been dethroned, declared dead and nonexistent and now it's all about us. The shallow optimism of secular humanism, that states that we humans, us, those physically weak bipedal simians with big brains, are of inestimable value and worth, and all because we are human. What is so special about being human, that we should expect to live as gods on this planet? What makes us so special? I suppose I could say that I have more of a Christian-humanist take on things. I believe that we are special because God made us, loves us and sustains us. I could also add in here a Christian-humanist-pantheist perspective. Also the creatures of the earth, every single species that exists, and even the dirt, water, rocks, stones and the air that we breathe, all have infinite value, because these things, like us humans, are the handiwork of God. But God, they say, is dead, and religion is useless. So, they have reinvented spirituality, not to link us to the divine, but to help us all feel...divine. We can all be little gods and goddesses, each in our own right as we meditate and practice mindfulness and other bastardized Buddha-babble to our own selfish little enlightenment's content, and still go on thinking that we are better, healthier, more well, more content, more spiritual, but none of this is going to show worth a damn in our daily lives as we go about being as competitive, selfish and uncaring of others as ever before, but only with one little enhancement: we are now spiritual. This is where this post-modern, secular adaptation of ancient spiritual practices falls flat over and over again. Taking meditation, yoga and other practices and adapting them to the very self-centred secular lifestyle and enhancing us all as self-deluded little deities. I am going to posit here another idea. It wasn't just because of the hypocrisy of the churches and clergy that people have deserted Christianity. And it isn't only because the spiritual life of the church had long ago dried up. There was something else at work. I call this the ethos of selfishness. The main drive, the central focus and demand of the Christian, as well as other faiths is simply too much and too overwhelming and costly for the secular humanist mentality: the call to give your all to God, the Creator, and by extension to love and serve humanity and the planet. Too tall an order for the fragile but very stubborn selfishness of our species. And now that science has decided that we are all organic machinery, nothing more and nothing less, then someone please, pray-tell, inform me then of just what it is that makes humans so valuable, if the atheists of secular humanism are to be believed. In the meantime, people lived hollowed-out kinds of lives, that cannot be fulfilled simply through acquiring things, or money, or hedonistic pleasures or family life ad diversions. Unable to cope with the bottomless pit of hell that the kind of global capitalism that has been unleashed has turned our lives into (and this was all brought on by not the death, but the murder of God), and unwilling to dedicate their lives to that same God who isn't really dead, but waiting for us to return to him (and we will, even if we have to die first), we turn to do-it-yourself spirituality. We get all peaceful and mindful. Even science says that it works. But does it make us kinder? More compassionate? More caring? More generous? But those are virtues that only come with giving of ourselves, because love, and not self-enlightenment is the heart of true spirituality, and only those who truly love, and live love from their hearts are the people who are truly spiritual. God is love, and lives at the very core of our being, and whether or not you are a professing Christian, Muslim, Jew or Buddhist, or whatever, it is that heart of love that delights in the universe, and that reaches out in love to others that is going to save us in the end.