#7 This is excellent, but I completely disagree with this..no really, I do!
Devout Muslims can see (as Luther, Calvin, and others could not) the long-term consequences of the Reformation and its consequent secularism: a marginalization of the Word of God, except as an increasingly distant cultural echoâas the âmelancholy, long, withdrawing roarâ of the once full âSea of faith,â in Matthew Arnoldâs precisely diagnostic words.
I think we have just passed through another stage where we are free to decide if we want religion based on its spiritual merit, rather than because "we are heretics" if we do not.
You can choose the pagan lifestyle - but at some point, if you are smart, you start to see the wisdom in Christianity - not because you will go to hell - but because it makes sense.
I think this generation is beginning to understand Christianity as it was once understood: faith, hope, charity, forgiveness, sin and redemption... rather than as the Santa Claus that we pray to for presents.
I liken it to the civil rights movement. The idea of civil rights - is a good one. Jessie Jackson came and perverted it to a point where it is a joke - special rights for minorities at the expense of whites- unrecognizable from the good intentions of its foundings. But the concept of civil rights is still as good as it always was. The foundation of the idea is solid. It's the better way.
And so I see that with Christianity. Perhaps we had to be free to fall to the depths of paganism to which we have fallen to once again understand that concepts of sin/sinners and redemption that Jesus taught to us. Only, now, we do it entirely of our own free will - not because the State makes us do so. |