Dr Paul Allen

Mariinsky Hospital (with monument to Fyodor Dostoyevsky), Moscow. Dostoyevsky was born here. The statue was erected in 1918, one of the few surviving monuments of early Soviet monumental propaganda. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In The Brothers Karamazov , Fyodor Dostoyevsky 's Grand Inquisitor offers this insight into fallen human nature: "So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship." Though the Grand Inquisitor falls far short as a reliable guide to theology, at this point he is surely correct. Human beings are profoundly religious—even when we do not know ourselves to be—and humans incessantly seek an object of worship. Yet, human beings are also sinners, and thus our worship is, more often than not, grounded in our own paganism of personal preference. As John Calvin profoundly explained, the fallen human heart is an "idol-making factory," always producing new idols for worship and vener...

Karl Marx 1882 (edited) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Writing in a very different revolutionary era, Karl Marx declared that the modern age would sweep all conventional morality and political structures aside in a complete transformation of values. In his memorable words, “all that is solid melts into air.” We are in the age of the advanced meltdown of those values. What Marx promised is now happening before our eyes. What can explain it? A witness to the collapse of Marx’s revolution, that great Russian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , explained it with four simple words: “Men have forgotten God .” And so they have. Nothing else can explain the great shift in worldview we are witnessing. The word for the process that is driving this shift of worldview in the West is secularization. In the context of the late modern age, secularization is fully evident even where we thought it was absent — in the United States of America . For decades, the conventional wisdom held that Europe was b...