Well done, dear sister. We are dealing, then, with a culture in which a preponderance of members are spiritually sick.
The particularities of this condition range from outright denial of spiritual reality to spiritual corruption including ghosts, seances, talking with the dead, reincarnation and hubris (the belief that one is god). Scientology, Mohammedism and other primitive religions yield similar spiritual sickness.
The denial of absolute reality is symptomatic of all of these diseased conditions. Your discussion is precisely on point. The rejection of absolute truth is the denial of reality. Solving this cultural condition is not complicated but it is difficult.
We must DEMAND that false doctrines be ended. Humanism, communism, collectivism, progressivism are false and malicious and must be ended. Accomplishing this requires a fanatical commitment to the truth.
Until we are willing to demand and require an end to the corruption of truth it will continue. This was my concern in my first post.
We cannot engage progressives and agnostic intellectuals in rational discourse. They are not rational because they deny the ground of rational thought, the reality of God. If they do not know Him we must witness to them until they acknowledge Him. We must never debate with them.
We know the Truth. The Truth has set us free. We must witness to our condition with every soul who has not yet met the living God.
Dear brother in Christ, I absolutely affirm your first statement. The second, however, seems problematical to me.
The solution to the raging cultural condition of existence in untruth is difficult because it is complicated. It's complicated because of the plethora of different ways people can go wrong, once they're off "the God-standard."
You wrote, "We cannot engage progressives and agnostic intellectuals in rational discourse." Well, all I can say about that is from personal experience. On that basis, the statement is correct. As Eric Voegelin has pointed out, "debate" between persons who do not acknowledge a common ground of Reality are doomed from the outset. Or to put the matter another way, people who do not live in the same reality are unlikely to agree about much. Or again: People who live in First Reality do not understand people who live in a Second Reality; and vice versa. They do not even speak the same language.
Which I think is the basic point of what Heraclitus was saying, that there are two basic kinds of people: those who recognize that "the Logos is One and common" and is the very order of being itself; and those sleepers who reject the Logos, and thus withdraw into their own inner worlds, as if dreaming. [Logos is the ancient Greek word for word, truth, story, design — Koine words are remarkably "compact" compared to English, which is a "relentlessly denotative language."]
Thus it seems to me there are those who are on the "God-standard," and those who are not. Needless to say, the two camps are not exactly "eye-to-eye" on anything. They simply do not stand on the same ground, rationally or morally.
So "debates" between such parties inevitably tend to be "all heat and no light."
So if you can't get anywhere with such people with reason, with good-faith public debate, with rational persuasion, what do you do?
What you're left with is witness, just as you say, dear Amos. Your witness may not do a thing for people who refuse to be persuaded. But it might be of great help to others, those not yet thoroughly indoctrinated into such life- and reason-denying ideologies.
And of course, that witness must be of our Lord, Jesus Christ — Who is the Son of God, the Word of God Alpha and Omega, Who was God, and was with God in the Beginning, by and for Whom all Creation heavenly and earthly was made.... That witness preeminently must take the form of living in His Law, in His Love.
Other than that, I don't have a clue what to do about the fact that, nowadays, we are building a Tower of Babel [Babble] in the Public Square.
Or so it seems to me FWIW.
Thank you so much, dear brother in Christ, for your kind words, and for your excellent essay/post!