Getting up and leaving
Some of us were upset by this 2016 Pew Poll that reported that 49% of people who’v e left the church no longer believe in God or miracles (and would you believe it” They’ve found corn in Kansas!). That also means that 51% still do, but that wasn’t in the headline.
There are all sorts of reasons for leaving the church. I left out of youthful laziness, and by the time I was ready to come back, my church had joined the Far Left Crazy. But along the way I learned that you don’t need a building to have a church–just people gathered together in Jesus’ name.
But oh, those replacement beliefs! “We’re too smart to believe in God! We’ve been to college!”
Like a bunch of mummified corpses dancing at a New Year’s ball…
I think you may have said even more than you meant consciously when you gave Joe Collidge a major in Nothing Studies. Students have been taught to want nothing in the sense that the madman in a Chesterton short story meant it. (I can’t remember whether it was in a Father Brown story or a Gabriel Gale story.) In the story, some people encounter him and ask him what he wants. He replies: “I want nothing. … I want nothing. … I want NOTHING.” Father Brown (or Gabriel Gale?) is shaken and after the man leaves he explains that the man’s first response was a simple bit of politeness, i.e., he doesn’t want anything of the group. The second response was more general, i.e., he doesn’t have a desire for things. But the third response was dangerous, i.e., he wants there to BE nothing. He demands that there be nothing. And he’s likely to destroy everything in order for there to be nothing. (Or as Karl Marx would say, “Everything that exist must be destroyed.”)
Joe and his contemporaries have been taught to mean the third response, even while repudiating the first and second responses. They’re taught to grasp after things as their due but to want there to be nothing outside themselves and their things. It may seem to be a contradictory position, but note how many of the things they grasp after are destructive things, both of others and of their own selves.
Our culture is in deadly trouble.
Why haven’t people noticed what they’re getting for their tuition dollars?