Supermarket of Ideas
“Taste and see that the Lord is good.”
When I hear atheists railing against religious instruction in public schools, I get angry. Why is it that they get to ram their atheistic ideology down everyone’s throat all week in a public school? They believe their ideas are neutral, but such a neutrality is impossible. You can’t educate without a worldview, and there is no such thing as a neutral worldview. Perhaps atheists should be forced to fund and staff their own schools.
An atheist believes the world is entirely physical. An atheist’s faith lies in rationality. Our “secular” culture is extremely pragmatic. We not only have great technology, we really do have great practical wisdom. The fact that I can type this in the middle of a World Heritage listed wilderness area, over 100km from the nearest capital city, and it can be read by people across the globe, is testimony to that. Not to mention the pacemaker that keeps me from exhaustion. But in a culture like ours, the entire spiritual realm is kept from sight.
This divide is not the way the world is made. Marriage, family, economics and business, ethics, education, politics, the arts… all are gifts from Christ, from the spiritual realm, via Christendom, to western culture. But God has been kicked out, and we wonder why our culture is coming to an end. For example, mental health funding is currently a hot topic in Australia. Everyone thinks the solution to our madness and despair is more money for counseling.
We are “doing what is right in our own eyes,” that is, fumbling around in the dark. Things that present themselves as solutions to our problems turn out to be even greater problems.
True progress requires the Word of God and the Spirit of God. How do we make tough decisions on new technologies? How about bioethics? Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. But what we should do cannot be decided by what is merely practical. Unwanted, unborn children are not practical. Old, sick people are not practical. Anyone in our way is not practical. Practicality is not where the real answers lie. A secular culture founded on atheism is bankrupt when it comes to the tough questions.
Where does that leave us? A tree is known by its fruit, and Christ has given the world the very best in every sphere: self-sacrifice, honor, integrity, innovation, wisdom, riches and even technology. Our problem is that we want the Word of God to be provable before we act on it.
God never works that way. We must submit first. The proof is in the eating, not on the sides of the packaging of the products on the shelves at the supermarket of ideas.
