The Apostate Society.

Western society has become secular and in many countries we no longer have a majority of our citizens believing in religion. There are several questions we should address in relation to this, they are:

1. Why has this happened?
2. Has it affected our society for better for worse or has it made no difference.
3. Does it give us an advantage or leave us at a disadvantage when dealing with those who have a religious conviction.

In all history there have been those who hoped that the scriptures and the religious teachers were wrong and that they would never be expected to account for their actions. It took science to begin to give them the courage to finally speak out. Science through men like Galileo and Newton showed that the Earth was not the centre of creation and that the universe functioned according to a set of mathematical principles like some sort of giant clockwork machine. It was Darwin who gave them the final authority to begin the systematic attacks on religious thought and belief that have continued to this day and resulted in moves to even ban religion from being taught in schools. Philosophers such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard exalted human thought above all else in creation but it was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who first proclaimed in 1886 that “God is dead”. These pronouncements and scientific discoveries should have convinced everyone that life on Earth was just a freak accident and nothing more; except for one startling item, they were predicted in the Bible. I will cover that subject as a later blog topic.

The consequences of the pronouncements of these men made atheism acceptable as an alternative belief system and enabled the rise to power of atheists, men who despised religion. Men like Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Idi Amin and Pol Pot became acceptable national leaders who were not bound by any belief in absolutes of right or wrong. Millions died at the hands of these despots but generally society still does not place the blame on secularism but simply on the whim of the individual, because to accept that it was apostatised anti-religious attitudes that caused the problem would be to give credence to religious fundamentals. Hitler even bragged that he had “freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality” history shows us the result of that freedom.

The apostate west has an attitude that regards anyone with a religious conviction as at least a little strange but generally harmless. This opinion has flourished because the Judeo-Christian basis of western society is one of tolerance and forgiveness. This leaves the west totally unprepared to handle those people whose beliefs do not place a value on human existence. The religions that were the basis of western society provided the initial legal system where theft, murder and similar offences were outlawed because that was the Biblical mandate. Living under these laws has made the west complacent about religious tolerances and as society has become more secular it has rationalised attitudes to some laws such as adultery and sodomy. The west is now at a considerable disadvantage in understanding almost any religion and this has left it vulnerable to all manner of extremists, cultists and fanatics.

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