[Nick Danger]

The problem, I think, is that as one reads the material, one infers or understands the following, which is fully articulated later:...

That I agree with 100%. I've posted on that subject myself, and I agree that it has a lot to do with why things seem to be going to Hell.

I tend to view the cause of that problem as a failure by theologians to transmit basic religious truth in a way that people with running water and electricity will universally accept. Religion is the vessel that carries and transmits the ideas that cause "emotional depth, depth of values and personal development." There is an element of faith in all of those things, and faith is the province of religion. It is a critical function in the maintenance of civilized order, and our current lack of it is absolutely at the bottom of what's wrong.

We see too often that people with substantial intelligence and wit, but zero values -- Clinton, to pick one -- rise to great heights in our society and are wildly cheered by millions even as they flout what used to be society's strongest taboos. Here's a middle-aged married man getting blow jobs in the White House from a 20-something intern, and people are cheering about this. "What a delightful rogue he is," chortles the press. "What a thong-flashing seductress she is," say the TV producers. We can only shake our heads in sorrow that it's come to this.

It's easy to condemn the occasional miscreant, but I have trouble condemning tens of millions at a stroke. That to me indicates process failure, and in this case the process that failed was the one that is supposed to transmit the society's values. We had trusted our theologians to build and maintain this process, but they failed us. Too many people see religion as snake oil for an illiterate peasantry of a bygone age, something they can safely ignore now that we scientifically understand thunder and lightning.

Now we're finding out that people can't safely ignore it, it's essential to the maintenance of a civilized order that these values be inculcated in human beings from the ground up. Otherwise the place fills up with people like Clinton, and people who admire Clinton.

I think people are becoming dimly aware of this, but I still don't see the theologians preparing anything for them. To me, this is a serious problem that needs fixing.

[Mortimer Snavely]

I'm a Bible believing, but not particularly religious, Christian. I'm more interested in morality than theology. There are plenty of Christians who, if I had children, I would not allow my children to associate with. There are plenty of atheists to whom I would entrust my life. One reason why I don't participate in church based activities is that they use religious euphoria as a thought reforming device there: is a pronounced tendency to treat the Bible as a magical text, a series of incantations, if you will. From an anthropological standpoint the Bible has become a totemic device possessing supernatural power in and of itself. In this mental state, it is supposed that to achieve material success, all one has to do is imagine the best of all possible outcomes to establish it in the "spiritual" realm, and then act as if those things have already happened to manifest it in the physical world, all the while repeating Bible verses imagined to support that belief. When religious solutions to financial problems fail to have effect, suddenly we find ourselves in a very malevolent universe that revolves around the impoverished "unspiritual" individual, with no other purpose but to make that person poor while everyone else gets rich. That is insane.

A lot of this has to do with the philosophical environment in which the Church finds itself these days. For a better perspective on that, read Francis Schaeffer, particularly The God Who Is There. Schaeffer understood that the spiritual realm is the here and now. As he put it roughly, there are certain things the Bible tells us not to do. Beyond that, everything else is spiritual. When that's understood, suddenly the pysical world is purged of ghosts and malevolence, and is able to be comprehended fearlessly.

Basically, these days I am not particularly interested in further dissemination of fundamentalist Evangelical religious enthusiasm. I am interested in what Schaeffer called "pre-evangelization," which essentially is getting people to understand that two and two always make four, that fire is hot, water is wet, and that rocks are hard. It involves getting people to understand that existence exists, that words have meaning, and the profoundly negative consequences of believing that such is not the case. He called this "blowing the roof off." Without this, Christianity becomes a word which is able to elicit certain moods and connotations in the individual, and nothing else.