A pretty accurate summary of the disease, Mr Sellick. Although I cannot (of course) agree with your concept of a cure.

"I have the feeling that something new and awful is on the horizon the likes of which have never been seen before. There is unpitying violence that is beyond the bounds of what we can imagine."

You could well be correct, in that the upsurge of bread-and-circus pointlessness in our popular culture has its roots in the loosening of religion's traditional hold over us. Not forgetting, of course, that the same religion was an extremely powerful tool of the State, wherever it was sufficiently strong.

The inability of governments to impose their will through religion is a factor absent from your musings, though also significant in my view. During the Elizabethan era in England, for example, you could be branded a criminal and punished, simply for failing to attend church.

Whichever way you address it, the absence of religion has created a licence for us to act and think for ourselves. And the result - that we turn out to be imperfect specimens with collectively poor judgment - is less than pretty.

But as the cliche tells us, the genie cannot be returned to the bottle.

"The missionary activity of the church must be an activity of retrieval of orthodoxy and a cleansing of the ruins of modernity and the false piety that it inspired."

Re-inventing God for public consumption (which is what I imagine missiology to be) will not work, simply because telling lies has never formed a stable foundation for any society for any length of time.

I genuinely sympathize with those who still believe that a return to the blindness of faith will somehow cure society's ills. Regrettably, the only real choice remains either electing to live in a cocoon of well-meaning fabrication, or accepting that living with the truth of nihilism is not particularly nice, and simply getting on with it by ourselves.

Altogether a clear-eyed summary of the existential realities, though, even if the evangelistic nostrum is doomed to fail.

Dear Peter,

A large part of the world has not found it necessary to subscribe to any form of Christianity. When we think that there are possibly billions of planets capable of supporting intelligent life we can also realise that it is improbable that any of the other planets have adopted the Christian mumbojumbo.

You wrote: In other words late modern man, unlike his predecessors cannot see order in nature, cannot see it as the work of an intentional creator. Nature is now pure mechanism. This makes any quest for meaning in nature impossible. It also means that we can no longer talk about nature as the good creation of a benign God; talk about God's plan in this respect is now no longer possible.

There is great order in nature. Nature follows the laws of physics and chemistry. Organisms have very complicated reactions, and the power of the human mind has found out much about that order through science.

Belief in miracles, in eternal life, in human virgin births and the other mumbojumbo associated with Christianity denies order. Somehow the natural order of the universe is not enough and we must also have a big Daddy in the sky who must set things right by denying death for the followers of mumbojumbo and ignoring the natural laws by causing an occasional miracle which is contrary to them.

There is no meaning in nature if by meaning you mean that there must must be a creation story like that in the Bible, the Rainbow Serpent and other creation of tribal minds. However, we can love each other, care for each and appreciate being alive without your mumbojumbo.

Dear Peter

Have you heard of Neville Goddard? His understanding of the Bible sheds light on the 'mumbojumbo' we hear in the churches today.

Nothing is what it appears to be and everything is not what it seems to be. :-) Enjoy!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Goddard>

Lily McRobert

Dear John or Lily,

The following reminds me of your remark.

Whenever all the world declares fair "fair,"
There is foul.
Whenever all the world declares good "good,"
There is ill.

The above is attributed to Lao-tzu. It's from a book called "World Poetry" which has verse from antiquity to the present.

I was unable to access the url you cited.

Looks like Goddard was wrong when he said, “To desire a state is to have it.”, david f...

URLs don't work with carets at the ends, try:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Goddard

"In other words late modern man, unlike his predecessors cannot see order in nature, "

No, unlike religion, science has revealed the true order in nature, which was incomprehensible to earlier generations, so they resorted to religion.

"When Christianity spread across the ancient world the old idols and gods were easily toppled because they were exposed as projections of human fear and desire."

No, Christianity, like Communism, spread across the world because of the totalitarian institutions that supported and proselytised the religion, the pagans who were essentially tolerant, had no defence against theocracy. Also many 'pagans' held more rational views of the Cosmos than the fairy tale nonsense promoted by the so-called "Abrahamic Religions".

Pericles,

Agreed, the product is well past its 'use by date'.