We may share a few articles on Facebook. We may drop a few outrage tweets, sign a couple petitions, perhaps even email a government official. We get angry, scratch our heads and then, well, just do those same things all over again. Meanwhile, blood is still spilt and an intact liver just went for $75.
Our Own Gods
Now we have seven videos, and in case you haven’t figured it out, most people don’t seem to care.
We still want them to care, and we still take immediate action. Keep reading, sharing, tweeting and emailing. Keep calling this what it is. And get ready for the long-haul, because nightmares like this don’t change overnight.
Beyond our immediate actions, which are necessary, there is the upstream warfare for the human soul, which is also necessary. In fact, it’s our abdication—or past incompetence—in that part of the river which has led to this trickling down of sewage, recognized in part as our general ambivalence toward butchered babies. Something else, at some other point, has captured the American soul, and therefore, something else has formed our imaginations.
Secularism is the all-caps title for what that something is. It means life reconstructed with the contrived absence of God. More specifically, it’s what Charles Taylor calls “expressive individualism,” and most of us have bought in, to some degree. It’s that way of seeing the world that believes, as Taylor writes,
each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from the outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority. (A Secular Age, 475)
In other words, we are our own gods, and we want everyone to know it. Whether it means our sexuality, or our sense of fashion, or the stickers we put on the back of our cars, we get to define who we are. Everyone is screaming at everyone else to take notice at how different they are from the others screaming. That’s the Kool-aid we’ve been served, and everybody’s been drinking.
