https://www.npr.org/2018/06/16/618217795/teaching-children-to-ask-the-big-questions-without-religion
This NPR story caught my attention the other day and I had to
dig up the link and transcript and have another look. It's about parents that
want to wrestle with the 'big questions'... apart from religion.
They want to discuss love and compassion and yet not restrict
these ideas to a religious framework or one that approaches such questions with
a degree of certainty.
Of course as Christians we understand that God is love and in
terms of human relationships love is both an emotion and an ethical commitment
in which we place the interests of another above ourselves.
And yet why would we do this? Why would anyone? As Christians
we can answer that.
An evolutionary worldview cannot. If the perpetuation of species
and survival of the fittest are the mechanisms and imperatives of biology, then
love is not love. It's a largely self-serving instinct at best and thus it
cannot be 'love' unless we re-define the term. And compassion is not only
empirically and ethically meaningless it could be argued it is a corruption, a
violation of the cosmological imperative... which is to propagate your species
and utilise resources in an efficient manner. Let the weak die. Isn't that the
moral thing to do?
Couldn't emotions such as love and compassion be viewed as
something of a bad side effect from mankind's earlier attempts to form and find
meaning to existence? But clearly in this scientific age, this era in which
science defines all... we should know better. Right? Compassion and love are
aberrations and hindrances to the species. The quest for meaning is itself
meaningless.
Of course these parents know there's more to life and human
existence than such cold and calculated concepts and thus they show themselves
condemned. They flirt with spirituality and ethics even though they have
embraced a secular philosophy that cannot account for them.
Right and wrong? What do these terms even mean? They have
abandoned objective principles or the idea of intrinsic truths, let alone any
kind of understanding of God. Rejecting the idea of a God who speaks and who
has the power to issue imperatives based on His holiness and character, let
alone his prerogative as Creator to make His will known.
Life and death? Why are these troubling 'big questions'?
Apart from the existence of a God, what do they mean? What can they possibly
mean? Obviously these folks cannot hope to know and if they do make knowledge
claims, once again the evolutionary philosophy of secularism must govern such
inquiries. Life and death are essentially meaningless and one cannot hope to
attach any kind of significance to them. It would seem the answer to the 'big
questions' is to learn to shut them out and no longer ask them. Men revert to
being little more than beasts.
As far as who we
are? I'm afraid they can't even account for what
we are let alone who or...why.
Sadly they're left with a secular version of Joel Osteen's
fraudulent 'Your Best Life Now'. All of their ethics and principles have
nothing to do with right or wrong but instead focus very simply on results.
Drugs, drinking and crime aren't wrong per se. How can they be? They're only
wrong because they will harm your life, shorten it or lessen its quality.
It's no wonder Behaviorism is so popular. Rather than wrestle
with the questions that lie at the heart of what man is and why he does what he
does, it just seeks to manipulate the external factors and treat symptoms. But
to what end?
What an empty existence.
These parents want their children to have rich, fulfilling
and liberated lives. Why? Why be content with the mundane, the life and
aspirations of the middle class? That's the values they're emulating and yet
why should I or their kids embrace such thinking? It's not very compelling.
I suspect they have no answer apart from some empty hope of
having an impact on society or being remembered.
We are told there are lots of ways to raise children to be
moral...
Really, is that so? Morality then is not a 'big question',
but an opinion, a social convention, something subjective and malleable.
That's the answer, the conclusion to their worldview. There are no big questions. The only big
question is why do people still think such things as 'big questions' exist at
all.
Here's why. The answer is simple.
Because secularism is in the end an untenable philosophy, one
that cannot be lived out. No one is able to actually live by its precepts and
follow through on its conclusions. The results are too terrible to contemplate
and though they keep telling themselves this is how it has to be... they don't
really believe it.
A couple of generations ago these young parents would raise
their kids within the framework of a semi-Christianised Western Liberalism. And
yet clearly many people, if not most, were not actual Christians. They did not
possess a Biblical faith and so when the chips were down, being at heart
unbelievers they all too easily succumbed to immorality, in the raising of
their children, in their marriages, in their work, in their social
relationships, in their politics and in their hopes and dreams.
When pressed, since the principles were but a veneer they were
all too easily abandoned. Some Christians celebrate this reality, that there
was an outward veneer of morality and worldview and thus lament that it is
rapidly disappearing in our own day.
The present reality is disturbing, cruel and because
wickedness abounds sometimes it feels like love is growing cold. I know it has
in my own heart.
And yet, there is a positive to the present. It is more
honest.
Even though these parents are fools and they are raising
their children to be the same, they won't have to be unconverted to get
converted. In some ways the Gospel can (humanly speaking) prove more effective
with people like that than with the children of the veneer. The latter are
sometimes the hardest group to deal with. The veneer is something Christians
often celebrate and wish to return to. They view it as a positive, something
that helped to bring people to faith.
I think the opposite is true. I think the Christian veneer
that dominated the West for centuries created the conditions which have brought
us to the tragedy of today. It helped to gloss over sin and obscure truth and
though the present is awful to contemplate I don't miss the removing of what
was in the end an empty profession.