After reading the Molnar pieces assigned for this week, I really resonated with the Secularized Religion and Man-God chapters. I found these chapters especially eye opening as it refers to the religiosity of our society and how we view the world today. Molnar talks a lot about the idea of pantheism in that everything and everyone becomes raised to the highest standard of existence. In more simpler terms it is that God is replaced and made into a secular idea that suits the goal of the individual. God in the original religious sense was held to the highest existence because of His all-knowing, perfect essence that encompasses Him. He forced man to acknowledge his inferiority in the universe and that his time on Earth is limited with the hope of achieving salvation and to allow his soul to prosper and live on for eternity in heaven. However, the progressive and utopian seek to take God out of the picture and replace him with man. When one replaces themselves with God there is no higher being; man is the highest being and he becomes the center of the universe with all-knowing and perfect power.
This is where society has been led astray. There is no differentiation between good and evil without God. Molnar cited Bishop Robinson in this chapter as saying “nothing can be intrinsically bad”. This also explains much of our current turn of events in the world in that people like to play God or genuinely think they are above the laws of God and nature. The utopian and the progressive believe science will fill the void of God in our society and that science has all the answers. Some food for thought, how could science fulfill the same role as God when science is a man-made entity?
One reply on “Blog 5”
It is an interesting dynamic as we have learned how the church and religion have played a huge role on intellectuals that is where they originated back in history. Although religion has played a huge role in their background there is contradiction from a progresive point of view as progressives seek to try and take God out of the picture and replace it with the individual as you stated. It is interesting how their origins come from religion however, they seem to be disregarding religion and taking a whole new approach. I suppose that this is not exclusive to intellectuals in the sense where people evolve and what they may have believed in the past might not line up with their current beliefs but, it is still something that I feel is worth pointing out as something to think about. Something else you touched on that also caught my attention is how progressives believe that science will fill the void of God in our society and how science has all the answers. This takes us back to the discussion we had in class a couple weeks ago when we talked about CCD and how not all intellectuals follow the values of CCD. The ones that do are the ones whose line of work is more technical and requires reason for all of their claims. Therefore, it is safe to say that progressives and CCD do hand in hand as they both tend to advocate and use science to make their claims.