The Coming of Age of Secularization in Today's Social Theory
"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, side ward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still traveling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves."
It has been further related that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang a requiem aeternam deo. Led out and quietened, he is said to have retorted each time: "what are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?" Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]
It was Aldous Huxley who said, "My ambition and pleasure is not to act but to understand" and somehow I cannot but seek, as many existentialist are doing, for answers to describe the days that we are locked in. These are the days of unquantifiable peril arising from the loss of meaning to life and the death of God. This is the idea that rule in our time. We are living in a secular world and many thanks to the world's religions especially today's Christianity which celebrates as it were, not the Resurrection but the crucifixion of the only meaning and hope that I see.
Life does not mean anything anymore but hedonism, the glorification of pleasure and self perpetuation. This is obviously the result of an equation without a value for God. We have succeeded in not only going to the moon, biotechnology, particle acceleration and what have you that we can safely say, Welcome to the age of the Man God. But the unwholesome liaisons with knowledge as glorified by science has brought into existence powerful machines and ideas which has succeeded in bringing about increasing loss of control of our lives as to totally obliterate the existentialist ideas of our independence. We are captive in our world and the idea of secularization has done nothing but rub insult upon injury driving us deeper and deeper into darkness, indeed hopelessness. Huxley's concern that "we are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early success of science, but in a rather grisly morning after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimportant or actually deteriorated ends" is a prophecy that has come to pass, indeed.
Godlessness is rife. It is almost more fashionable than the thong in the fashion lexicon of 21st Century life. Darwinism may have attacked the concept of God publicly but secretly people still know that the scientific world view of the world is essentially partial. It is not the full picture. But the allure of being without restraint, being able to gratify our desires stretches beyond the farthest horizon, even beyond the fringes of the galaxy itself. This is the heart of mankind and we are playing true to type. This is sad but in recent times I have found myself arguing more in favor of the existence of God to people with an evaporated capacity to conceptualize even the elementary idea of who He is not to talk of the salvation work which cost God his life. Instead sex and it expression including other base instincts in man has taken over. Bishops are now gay and Pastors profess to be atheist. Boys and girls who would have serious problem were they told to boil water have become prostitutes, murderer, ever ready to drive the blade even deeper into friends and foe alike. Immorality holds sway like the stench of a putrid corpse and thicker than a massive blizzard blitzing the senses and enslaving the soul. From the ancient to the child, the whole world feeds on it. It is easier to walk through a graveyard in the middle of the night than to go on the Internet, the TV or any other medium having mass appeal without suffering a significant assault of the highest kind. Our world which was built on values such as respect, loyalty, marriage, family, love, chivalry and godliness is coming apart at the seams like Ravi Zachariah commented and we have entered into a different world which short-change and destroy us.
Where do we go from here? Who can we turn to? But let God be true and everyman a liar, I know that my redeemer liveth and with my eyes and not another I will see Him. May the Lord redeem my soul and not suffer my body to see the corrosive power Godless corruption. May the name of the Lord be Praised!
