Secularism

Dependency

Who could possibly be more compassionate for a sick child than the mother of that child?  Who could be of better service to the land than the farmer who owns it?  And would you really go to an electrician for a heart transplant?  What I’m getting at here is the power of, and truth found in intimate association; whether it be the interaction between individuals, or those associations of man with the world and its wealth of knowledge.  It is no mere coincidence that Christ proclaimed “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  But as with all associations, the quality of such relies upon the dependency between those associations.  The woman, as mother, is biologically and psychologically linked to the child.  The farmer is fully dependent for his family’s stability and health upon the land he stewards daily.  The doctor, through his intensive and exhaustive training of the knowledge of medicine, is best suited to perform such a difficult operation as a heart transplant.  They all realize and live out dependencies, and in so doing are transformed by them.

We embrace such attributes as virtues, yet as a society we propel ourselves – through increasingly larger communities and complexities of social structure – into a world where personal, second-person interactions are relegated to second-class status.  While we proclaim our structures as aids to understanding and improved personal relationships, the truth of the matter is that we understand less of each other now than at any time in history.  What we have gained is empirical.  What we have lost is communicative, spiritual, and transformative.  Without a lengthy, intimate experience, a source of knowledge between one person and another is not much more than a sympathy, or a “There but for the grace of God go I.” rationalization.  Modern society claims intimacy through its social structure and embraces the concept of mankind as of one body, but sets goals that move mankind away from constant, personal interaction and into impersonal limitations and suspicious inclinations. Continue reading The Rights of Evil – Part 3.

Secular Ideology & Christian Ideology

Secular man views society as the common discipline of respect for one another’s existence, and the right to be within the society through the birth of their physical form into the physical world.  (If you’re not born you’re not equal.)  The foundation of their society is equality; that word that we all believe we have the definition of, at least until matters of well-being and preferences are considered as part of the interactional discourse between humans. Then the term equality becomes that quality of existence that is always just around the corner of any disparity between us.  Equality, in truth, is much more abstract than faith; but it appears more real because of its deceptive value.  In our attempt to quantify and thus use equality for the well-being of society, we do so through human law, or the reliance upon mankind as the sole judge of the moral nature of himself.  Think of it as athletes scoring their own performances in a competition.  How well do you think that would work?

Christian man views society as a singular body with a diversity of gifts.  Respect for those gifts permits the free exercise or equality of the individual within the society.  Faith is the catalyst that leaves all judgment to God and relies upon His love to define their law.  Christianity states that evil exists as an entity – Satan – who seduces mankind to oppose God’s will, and manifests that opposition in what the Christian calls sin.  But if man could not be deceived by Satan, could Satan be evil?  It appears to me that it takes two to tango, does it not.

So, the Christian looks without to find meaning, and the secularist looks within to find meaning.

Man recognizes two forms of evil; natural evil and moral evil; the evil without and the evil within. Continue reading The Rights of Evil – Part 2.

One of the things I have learned so much about in the last few years, and have been presented with its depth as of late, and yet I am still lacking in good comprehension of such a difficult subject, is the nature of evil and man’s role in it.  So, with a recent event that took place shortly after my return from my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela via the Way of St. James, I have decided to take this subject matter on and leave it to God as to what I contemplate and write down here.

As it has turned out, this essay is becoming exceedingly long, as evil is not a simple matter of right and wrong, but rather a matter of intent, and intent can be a mystery to even the most learned of us.  As such, I am posting this essay in segments with the hope that before my posts catch up with where I am in completing this essay, I will have come to some fair balance of understanding of evil.  Should I not, well, who does understand evil in all of its complexities and forms?  At the least I shall have carried my mind to the root of evil, and even the knowledge that the root of evil manifests itself in all of the forms of roots – the tuberous, the aerial, the fine mass of hair-like roots, the propagative, and the stilt-type – I can say I’ve given it all due consideration. Continue reading The Rights of Evil – Part 1.