October 11, 2009
Dear People Whom God Loves,
RELIGION IN A NEW CULTURE I
I just started reading a long and dense book entitled A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.
One sentence caught my eye. He reminded me that in the year 1500, it was almost impossible not to believe in God. In the year 2000, believing or not believing in God is an option. We now have a choice to believe or not believe.
This reminds me that we must present our belief in God and many other religious beliefs in a new way. We live in a different culture now. God is what God is but the way we present our belief must be in a manner that is credible to people who live in our culture.
A major player in this change is science. Where previously it was thought that God directly caused various natural things (like disasters), we now know that there are purely natural causes for them. We now know that God doesn’t cause things like hurricanes and floods to punish people. What we tended to do was to attribute directly to God whatever we could not explain. This was called: the God of the gaps. As science grows, many things which we could not explain are now explained. We see remnants of this in the legal language “Acts of God” to refer to such disasters.
If we don’t have a new religious story about God, we will find ourselves talking credibly to fewer and fewer people. This would make religion increasingly meaningless to people.
As I learn more and digest it, I will be writing more.
Smile, God Loves You,
Father Clay
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