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How do you begin your day? Do you thank God for another day to have opportunities to make a positive difference at your workplace or just in an individual’s life? Or, are you guilty of saying, ‘Good Lord! It’s another day!’ and roll over for a few more snoozes? Soon enough, one day you won’t be getting up. We’re told in the Good Book our life is but a vapor.
Read moreThe Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in his seminal work, A Secular Age, poses a brilliant question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, the year 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000, many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?” Over the next 800 pages, Taylor provides a three-part answer to the question. First, He argues that in the pre-modern world, people instinctively viewed the cosmos and their place in it as an unquestionable artifact of a magnificent creation of God. The natural world, it was believed, was forever giving evidence of Supernatural interactions in the earthly realm, evidenced through events in the natural order: storms, floods, droughts, pestilence, and “exceptional fertility and flourishing.” All of these things inescapably pointed to the supernatural world and God, who actively directed them. Second, the existence of society itself bespeaks the existence of God. Structured society, it was believed, was not possible without understanding that the cooperative gatherings of people all working for the greater good of society itself were only possible if those societies were interwoven with and tethered by a supernatural reality anchoring cities, towns, and parishes in a centralized Higher Authority. Third, in 1500, people acknowledged that they lived in an enchanted world. That is, people believed that the barrier between the spiritual world and the earthly world was porous, allowing the actions of spiritual beings to manifest themselves in people’s everyday lives. Almost all people believed that spirits and demons alike not only existed but were actively bringing about particular states of affairs, both good and evil. It is this third part of the answer to Taylor’s question that I would like to expand upon here as an introduction, of sorts, to the next several articles that look into what are termed the modern-day claims of religious experience. No doubt, these three answers to Taylor’s question are interrelated by common thread of belief in God. That is, seeing God’s existence in the cosmos, in the infrastructures of society, and the belief of living in an enchanted world all point to a society that all but unanimously believed in God. As people moved away from these beliefs and toward a secular worldview, the natural consequences of secularization became their opposites: the belief that the cosmos has always existed, that man alone is the authoritative anchor of all society, and that people live in a disenchanted world where God does not exist. In other words, where pre-modern man believed in the living God, modern-day society asks the question, Is God dead? I agree with Taylor on most points. However, I do question his blanket statement that people today consider themselves to be living in a disenchanted world. Sure enough, a compelling argument can be made that the modern Western world is very much secular in belief and nature and has little use for the likes of angels and demons, let alone God. Even so, in America, an impressive majority of people ( as high as 68%) claim Christianity as their faith. To be sure, a lower percentage of the population today are believers than in the year 1500. And there is an even greater decrease in the number of those who believe in an enchanted world, even among modern- day Christians. I say this because it is important to understand that there are people, many people in fact, who still believe that we live in a world enchanted by the supernatural: a world in which the veil between the natural and the supernatural is very porous. Why do they believe that? More often than not, it is because they have, at one time or another, in some form or another, experienced the enchantment of this world firsthand. These interactions between the natural and the supernatural are simply called “Religious Experiences,” and they stand as additional sources of evidence for the existence of God and the truthfulness of Christianity. After all, if God exists and if God is not dead, then we should listen to what those who have religious experiences have to say. If God exists and if God is not dead, then we should expect the God who created mankind with the active and particular ability to experience the supernatural to want to interact with those whom He so created. Christians hold that man was created “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen 1:26). That is, man was created with a dual nature: a material body and an immaterial soul. However, it is the soul or spiritual aspect of man that is in the likeness and image of God. Even so, it is not that God, who is a pure spirit (cf John 4:24), looks like man, but that mankind shares a likeness with God; we might say it is a similitude. And that similitude with God by virtue of our spiritual soul, allows the veil between the natural and the supernatural to be porous and facilitates religious experiences. Christians speak of the “mingling” of God and man in Jesus and the “mingling” of men and God in Christ (cf John 17). Religious experiences, then, should be viewed as meaningful realities of that mingling.
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DEAR ABBY: My husband and I married 20 years ago. We have a blended family of eight kids, but it’s just us now. Our kids are scattered across the country. Over all these 20 years, we have never taken a vacation just for us. We have always visited family.
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DEAR ABBY: My child “Logan” is the product of a sexual assault. He has located his father and formed a relationship with him. Logan didn’t know the circumstances of his conception at the time he contacted his father. He has now been made fully aware by our family as to what occurred.
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DEAR ABBY: I’ve been married to my husband for two months. I haven’t told anyone I’m married except my close friends and family. Someone recently messaged me about my husband, stating that he has Asperger’s. They know my name and have my phone number. I don’t know who this person is or why they would tell me this now.
Read moreI just ordered new business cards, and I look refreshed. But maybe that’s because I used my ten-year-old retouched photo instead of a current one.
Read moreIn 1859, Charles Darwin changed how people viewed themselves and their place in the universe by setting forth his theory of evolution in his famous work, On the Origin of Species. Darwin proposed that all living creatures, including man, are descendants of some ancient primordial form of life that developed and differentiated through a selection mechanism. Darwin theorized that mutations occur within any given species, creating slight changes over time. Most often, these mutations are not beneficial and are not passed on to the next generation, while other mutations are deemed detrimental and are therefore considered a hindrance. On rare occasions, however, these mutations do provide an advantage to the species, and it is the natural selection of these advantageous traits that Darwin termed natural selection. In his own words, he wrote, “I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.” According to Darwin, natural selection becomes the driving force behind simple primordial species becoming more and more advanced through successive generations, eventually evolving into completely different and new species altogether. This is how Darwin proposed man’s descent from a gooey blob in a warm little pond over thousands of generations. However, it is important to note that the key to Darwinian evolution is time; lots of it! Evolutionists argue that given enough time, almost anything is possible, including the evolution of human beings. The probabilities, it is argued, are endless—given enough time.
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