Spoiler alert:
This post is not suitable for your children and grandchildren. It may be disturbing if you are a secular humanist or an atheist, especially if you are under 30 years old. As they say “Parental supervision is recommended”.
Here goes.
We live in a world that is increasingly secular. This is especially true in the more “sophisticated” countries ……think Europe. Things are less secular in the “third world”. In his book “The God Delusion” Dawkins tells us that the really smart people are atheists…….and he has the numbers to prove it.
So…… I’ve been thinking about “what is the difference between Christians and our secular friends and neighbors”. I think that the difference boils down to hope.
For the Christian, I have heard it said that “we know how it ends”. It ends in paradise, living in a close relationship with a creator who loves us deeply. It ends with us living in a place where we just fit in, a place that we were specifically designed for. It ends in a place where we will finally…….. for the first time in our lives……. be completely satisfied.
In a word, we believe that a loving father…….the one who created us……the one who loves us just as any parent does…….. has us covered.
More and more though, the secular humanist, the atheist, also knows how it ends…… though most don’t think it through to its logical conclusion. The population of earth will double in 60 years to about 15 billion. The earth can only produce enough food to feed about 10 billion (and that is only if we all become vegans). The earth will continue to warm and Florida will flood. Our oceans will fill with trash and contaminated fish. Our groundwater will dry up. Southern California, the great plains and all of the other currently irrigated deserts of the world (the places that produce most of our food) will return to their natural states. And so it ends………with overpopulation, inadequate food supply, lack of clean water, starvation, drug resistant bacteria, pandemic, contaminated air, global warming, flooding, weather related catastrophes, widespread extinction, mass migration, wars over resources, and more…………all of this in spite of our best efforts as a species. Current science tiptoes around the fact that these things are, from a practical perspective, unavoidable….. that we are past the “tipping point”. And, believe it or not……… the horrors described above are the “best possible case scenario”. If you want the “worst possible case”, it could be something like instant sterilization of the planet by nuclear holocaust……or even worse………lingering death in a soup of nuclear contamination or some other form of contamination (carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, fracked groundwater, micro-plastics………you choose) . For the secular humanist, the best possible outcome is global pandemic…………to die before “it all hits the fan”. But where does this leave his children……… her grandchildren?
The secular humanist will say that some (as yet unknown) technological breakthrough will save us. But this is a pretty thin reed……..and time is running out.
So……what is the difference between the Christian and the secular humanist?
I think it is the difference between hope and dispair. I hate to put words into the other guy’s mouth…….and to make broad generalizations. But, if you look around us, the angry people demonstrating in our cities are disproportionately secular. The people singing in our churches are disproportionately Christian. More and more, it seems as though the Christians are happy and hopeful, and the secular humanists are unhappy and worried about the future.
I can’t blame either of them.