The entertainment world was hit with a suicide last week that appeared inconceivable to the secular minds that inhabit “Hollywood” and most of America. I wasn’t planning on writing anything about it because I have written about suicide here before and asked the question, “In What Kind of Culture Do 45,000 People a Year Commit Suicide?” A bankrupt secular culture—that’s what kind!
I recently finished a chapter on secularism in the book I’m currently working on, and I’ll quote myself: “Secularism is dead. It has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” That’s why I’m writing this post, and because of the quote below. I came across it in a book I’d read and it makes a stunning comparison showing us just how bankrupt secularism really is. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer for a bankrupt culture, and what every secular person is looking for whether they know it or not. It’s for you and me to share the good news, the great, glorious, wonderful news with them!
This suicide, like every one of them, is of course tragic on so many levels. Not just for his wife, but imagine what this does to his two biological children and stepdaughter. Ugh! It makes me so angry. This guy who had absolutely “everything” the American dream could offer abandoned his family and puts a bullet in his head. As I said in my previous post on this topic, I can’t “judge” the man because there but for the grace of God . . . . However, God calls us to discernment and to be wise about the ways of evil in our midst—to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and to call spades, spades. The spade I’m calling a dark ace is the modern world’s established religion of secularism, and how it destroys everything in its wake.
I read this in Nicole Mering’s book Awake Not Woke not long after I learned about the suicide, and it’s stunning, but didn’t surprise me at all:
Viktor Frankl contrasts the lack of neurosis and suicidal thoughts among the prisoners in Auschwitz with the growing phenomenon of suicidal thoughts from teens living with ease in modern Austria. “We are living in a society, either in terms of an affluent society or in terms of a welfare state. . . . These types of societies are out to satisfy each and every human need. Except for the one need, the most basic and fundamental need. . . . the need for meaning.” Suffering is intimately tied to meaning. Serial gratification is intimately bound up with despair.
And Frankl said this in 1979. I can’t think of a better description of modern American and Western culture than the pursuit of “serial gratification.” Think of the child who gets everything they want. If your objective is to create a monster, a little Varuca Salt, there is no better way to do it. This is happening on a societal level by a secular culture that believes what it sells, that true meaning and satisfaction can be found in this life if only . . . . fill in the blank. If only I was . . . .
- smart enough
- good looking enough
- thin enough
- rich enough
- tough enough
- sensitive enough
- sexy enough
- well-dressed enough
- well-read enough
- loved and accepted
- appreciated
- Etc.
If only I . . . .
- had a college degree
- had a bigger how
- owned a house
- had a nicer car
- had bigger muscles
- had a smaller behind
- had bigger breasts
- had a smaller nose
- had nicer hair
- was a great athlete
- had more money in the bank
- had a better position in the company
- had more respect among my peers
- was more well known in my profession
- travelled more
- had a better personality
- had a girlfriend
- had a boyfriend
- had a husband
- had a wife who really loved me
- had a husband who really love me
- had kids who weren’t spoiled rotten brats
- was rich and famous
- Etc.
Here’s the deal too many Christians really don’t grasp, and non-Christians can’t: Without Christ, nothing will ultimately deliver on what it promises. No person, no thing, no circumscance, no place, nothing. People get by well enough pretending it does, but they lie to themselves and others. Our lives are defined ultimately by one thing, our relationship to our Creator, and only in Christ, only in the gospel, can we be reconciled to Him and know true meaning and satisfaction, true joy and hope and purpose, true love, true gratitude, Truth itself. Blaise Pascal said it perfectly and succinctly:
There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.
We are the life raft in the dark and turbulent sea of secularism for our neighbors, and if they are willing, we can rescue them by introducing them to Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who told us 2,000 years ago:
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
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