Hi Billy,
On Apr 18, 2012, at 11:02 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> It does seem that the view, "all religions are different paths to the same
> God,"
> has triumphed in America -for now, anyway. This view has a corollary,
> that the scriptures of all the world's religions teach essentially the same
> thing.
> Baha'i religion, Theosophy, and Uni-Universalism make this teaching central
> to their worldviews. Which is where --precisely-- this idea entered our
> culture,
> starting in the late 19th century / first decade of the 20th century.
One writer I know calls it "moral therapeutic deism."
Moralistic therapeutic deism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
He describes it as a disease of the church (what our friend Ross Douthat would
call a 'heresy' :-). However, I think it is actually America's de-facto civil
religion. Even the New Atheists are among its most fervent subscribers.
Just about everybody in our culture implicitly assumes:
- universal right and wrong ("moral")
- personal happiness as the definitive metric, if not the highest value
("therapeutic")
- an orderly universe susceptible to rational inquiry (*'deism")
It is a great challenge for orthodox Christianity to articulate how and why we
differ from that consensus in positive ways, not just negative ones.
-- Ernie P.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
