I’m currently working on my upcoming new international best-selling book, and the chapter I’m currently obsessing over is on secularism. In my research and study, the title of an article caught my attention: “Is That All There Is? Secularism and its discontents.” Published in the print edition of The New Yorker Magazine in 2011, it wasn’t quite what I expected because it’s written by a committed secularist admitting secularism has its challenges, but by golly, he ain’t giving up secularism! The reason I’m addressing secularism in the book is because it’s a lie, and the most pernicious enemy of Christianity and liberty in our time. There are numerous reasons for this on a societal and personal level, but I will only briefly address the personal level here.
The secular believe they are not “religious” therefore neutral regarding ultimate issues, and because they are not “religious” think they don’t need faith. Their definition of faith, however, is fallacious and biased, something along the lines of what Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, declared, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Faith is basically wishful thinking, and not “scientific,” as if science can answer questions of meaning. That would be known as a category error; science and philosophy do two different things. The bias is specifically anti-supernatural because secularists are naturalists or materialists, i.e., the material is all there is. Even if they are not philosophically materialists, they are practical atheists. Believing they’re “scientific,” we religious appear to believe in myths and fairy tales. They are every bit as “religious” as the religious.
The fact is, there is no such thing as an un-believer. One of my pet peeves is referring to certain people as believers and others as unbelievers; even Christians do this, all the time. The word believer is biblical, but it’s a word we need to retire in our secular age. Using it allows the “unbeliever,” the secularist, to live in the illusion they don’t require faith just like every “believer.” All human beings by the nature of their finite created existence are believers and live by faith; the issue is what or who they believe in. In other words, they are just as religious as any Christian, and require faith like any Christian. Therefore, I encourage all Christians to refer to people either as Christians or non-Christians, not believers and unbelievers. I know getting people to do this is a Sisyphean task, but alas, rolling boulders fruitlessly up hills is something I can’t help but doing.
James Wood, the author of the piece, most definitely a non-Christian, gives us a good example how a secular person does this. He refers to “Both atheists and believers . . .” Ergo, atheists don’t have to believe anything. It’s almost comical how ridiculous the contrast is. Atheists believe without the slightest evidence all material reality basically created itself, something came from nothing. Talk about a leap of faith! This is why it’s so important in our secular age to stop using believer and unbeliever, not only because it’s a distortion and inaccurate, but because it allows atheists like Wood, and his readers, to think they are somehow beyond any need for faith. It’s why so many atheists (and there are not many) can be so arrogant toward the weak who they see needing the crutch of faith.
You’ll see throughout the piece something secularists are especially good at, begging the question. Most people use this phrase today to mean raise the question, but it is a logical fallacy meaning to assume the premise as the conclusion, a form of circular reasoning. A great example of this is early in the piece when he lays his cards on the table claiming, “God is dead, and cannot be reimposed on existence.” The bald assertion is never defended, just asserted as if it didn’t need to be defended. That is an article of faith. He obviously doesn’t understand his fundamental faith commitments, or that they are faith commitments. After all, he’s an un-believer. We should not let him think that.
He does more question begging later in the piece. Speaking of tormented metaphysical questions that remain, he asserts they “cannot be answered by secularism any more effectively than by religion.” Really? The stunning ignorance of such an assertion is breathtaking and utterly predictable, just assumed to be true. The secularists who read The New Yorker wouldn’t even blink at it because they’ve likely never met someone whose life has been utterly transformed by their relationship with the risen Lord Jesus, like, for example, Claire Dooley. I listened to an interview of this young women this week telling her story of being rescued from atheism on the Side B Stories podcast.
Remember stories like this are happening all over the world in every nation every day as Jesus builds his church, and the reason is because Christianity is true. It isn’t true because it works, it works because it’s true. Lies and wishful thinking don’t transform lives or civilizations, truth does, and the one who declared, he is “the way and the truth and the life.”
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