Indeed. It makes me heartsick, and it is futile in any case — for you are right, dear spirited, what ails our society is the spiritual disorder of individual souls, collectively expressing as a Zietgeist that rejects Reality in favor of utopian, even magical dream worlds. The obvious disorder (one is tempted to say insanity) in the public or political realm flows from precisely that disorder; i.e., the personal one.
It seems to me there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who are open the the transcendent ground of Being, and those who are closed to it. In other words, those who order their lives in God, and those who believe that God is irrelevant, that everything in the world "supervenes on the physical, or material," and thus is totally amenable to unaided human understanding and ultimately human control. The latter view utterly rejects the notions that man has a spiritual extension and direction, and that man is subject to existential limits of any kind.
Thus for this type of believer, there is no God, there is no Spirit; Man is the sole master of his own destiny. And thus, as you note, "For much too long now, Americans have been seeking meaning, purpose, and salvation in all the wrong places, resulting in growing fear, hopelessness, despair, anger, anxiety, cynicism, and disillusionment."
The error in this line of thinking is that man really is more than just a physical body. But since science cannot observe the "what is more than the physical" of man, it is stipulated that it doesn't exist. Reality is reduced to what man can measure. God is gone; the soul is gone; Nothing replaces them. Man loses the essential core of his own divinely-constituted human nature; he can no longer rise to the full stature of what God intended him to be — the imago Dei — and lapses into a state of subhuman animality. At physical death, man perishes absolutely into the abyss of the Nothing. Life itself is meaningless.
There's more to say on this subject, but I must run along for now: Hubby's chafing at the bit to get down to the Cape now....
Thank you for your outstanding essay/post re: Ecclesiastes and the general topic of vanity. There is vanity, and there is eternal Truth. A reading of Ecclesiastes is extraordinarily helpful in illuminating the difference.
Happy Independence Day, dear sister in Christ, and to ALL!
The point, that man is greater than the sum of his parts, can be made easily by breaking a man into his parts and then reassembling him.
Obviously the result of the exercise would be quite dead.
Thank you so much for your wonderful essay-posts.