The Enlightenment and/or the Age of Science promised
liberation from God, but delivered moral confusion. Western philosophers like
Kant and Voltaire believed reason could replace religion, freeing man from
superstition and leading to a more rational ordered society. Instead, we are
left arguing over whether men can get pregnant.
The enlightenment assumed that reason is a neutral unbiased
tool, capable of guiding humanity towards truth without ideological influence,
but Frederick Nietzsche saw through this claim. He noted that reason is not
independent of human drives; it is shaped by them. What people call rational
argument is often just instinct in disguise.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues that philosophers
do not discover truth, they justify their temperament. In this manner some of
the most horrid evil can be justified under the banner of ‘justice’,
‘tolerance’ or ‘progress’.
Every human drive or more accurately desire, wants to be
master and it bends reason to serve that aim. The Bible has repeatedly shown
this. Man is a slave to his desires and man strives against God by his nature.
The phrase "the carnal mind is enmity against God" comes from Romans
8:7, indicating that the natural, human mindset is inherently hostile to God,
rebellious, and unable to submit to His laws. This state of "enmity"
means it is an active enemy of God, focused solely on worldly desires, which
leads to spiritual death
The enlightenment believed it had escaped dogma. It believed
it had finally broken a chain of almost a millennia of unnecessary wars fought
mostly on the basis of earthly manmade religions that had nothing to do with
the God of the Bible. The ideas of the Enlightenment not only pervaded 17th and
18th century Europe but its godless influence had a profound effect on America
and its founding fathers like Jefferson and Franklin.
By the 19th century Nietzsche saw that The Enlightenment had
only replaced one set of dogmas with another. Instead of blasphemy against God,
there are penalties for speech that offends protected classes. Instead of a
shared pursuit of truth, expression is filtered through political correctness.
Instead of holy wars, we see ideological purges. This helps explain why
ideologies that claim to be rational so often become tyrannical. We saw this in
the Nazi’s Third Reich. We saw it in Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ and we
see it today in radical Leftist/Marxist agendas and even in the blind
allegiances to the persons of Trump and Conservative figures.
Even systems that present themselves as scientific, like
communism, do not arise from detached reason. They emerge from a desire to
rule, then dress themselves in the language of inevitability and logic. But
Nietzsche's deeper critique cuts deeply against this assumption by the
intellectually arrogant and ‘educated’. He argued that enlightenment ‘morality’
is Christianity without God.
Man attempted to keep the moral framework while discarding
its foundation. In the absence of God man is let loose to his worst and most
base desires and evil.
"If there is no God, everything is permitted" ~
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov.
The Bible states in 1 Corinthians 6:12 and 10:23 that
"everything is permissible," but Paul immediately counters this by
saying "not everything is beneficial" or constructive. While
Christians are free from the law due to Christ’s work on the cross, this
freedom is not a license to sin, but a call to love, using discernment to
choose actions that glorify God. A man without God or Christ is cut loose from
any restraint. Evil reigns supreme.
What we learn from the Bible and realize after watching 300
years of the effects of the Enlightenment is simple but striking. Values like
equality, universal dignity, and compassion were not born from reason alone.
They were inherited from Christianity and the Judeo/Christian ethic, then
reframed as self-evident truths. The enlightenment severed these values from
their metaphysical and spiritual roots while expecting them to hold meaning and
sway over people’s behaviors.
Much to modern society’s chagrin, this has been a massive
and horrible failure. It is like cutting down a tree and expecting the fruit to
keep growing. This is the source of much of our modern confusion and is why
things are so horribly confused and upside-down.
We live in a world where the language and morality of
Christianity remain, but its grounding has absolutely been annihilated. Even
many of our conservative evangelical and formerly biblical churches have been
amputated from their Biblical foundations and would be unrecognizable even to
Christian brethren of only a hundred years ago. We have business structured,
Enlightenment influenced congregations cutoff from their apostolic roots.
Nietzsche saw where this leads. When God dies, the structure
of meaning built around them begins to collapse. In the case of American
Christianity and even Christian evangelicalism it has already imploded under
the weight of their own hubris and theological errors trying to chase after a
secular scientific world. The church has tried so hard to appease a godless
science-based society, it has lost itself. We are to be in the world but not of
it. Therefore, the last anchor or mooring to morality has been cut loose to the
storm of godlessness.
As believers, we should be set apart from the world. This is
the meaning of being holy and living a holy, righteous life—to be set apart. We
are not to engage in the godless activities the world promotes, nor are we to
retain the corrupt mind that the world creates. Rather, we are to conform
ourselves, and our minds, to that of Christ
Romans 12:2 ~ Do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what
is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
You cannot discard metaphysics, abandon Godly spirituality, weaken objective truth, and elevate skepticism without consequences. The result is nihilism, not dramatic collapse, but a slow drift as we have seen since the Enlightenment. Because of this we all now live in a world where people no longer believe deeply enough in anything to anchor their lives. Decades before the catastrophes of the 20th century, Nietzsche saw this trajectory clearly. The enlightenment did not end belief, it changed its form, and in doing so, made it less stable, less honest, and more dangerous. That is why we now live in such a dangerous world.
America has become the summation of Englightenment philosophy. Financially, morally and spiritually bankrupt. Untethered to objective morality and true reason. Therefore, a land of immorality, chaos and godlessness. To this end we will reap the storm of what we have sown.
We abandon God and in so doing we abandon an anchor to true
morality. Our society is now only a morass of subjective immorality and chaos.
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