Dr Paul Allen

Image via Wikipedia For a century and a half secular humanist scholars predicted the demise of religion, which Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud dismissed respectively as the opiate of the people, and a mental illness. But the materialistic utopia never materialized. Instead, people have awakened to “spirituality.” Not God but materialistic secular humanism is  dead . One of the Death of God theologians, David Miller (whom we did not read in class) later gave the game away. In his book,  The New Polytheism  (1974) ,  he made the shocking claim that “at the death of God we would see the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.”  The Postmodern deconstructionist, Mark Taylor, observed that “the 21st century will be dominated by religion in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago.” A secular literature conference in 2006 boasted the title  God is Undead: Post-Secular Notions in Contemporary Literature and Theory  and included a lecture entitled “Secularism in

Image via Wikipedia Oh the cruel trick fate played on Nietzsche . Christians aren’t apt to afford compassion to the man who coined the phrase “ God is dead .” Nevertheless my heart goes out to him. The man who some say is the father of Nazism , existentialism, and modern relativism is the victim of one of the cruel ironies of history. The core of Nietzsche’s ethic was what he called the “ will to power ”. He bemoaned the baleful influence of Christianity which he claimed promoted a “herd morality .” The “will to power” was a rejection of herd morality, a bald affirmation of individual autonomy so radical as to be indifferent to the autonomy of others. It was an ethical Darwinism , survival of, indeed conquest by, the fittest. The good news is that this “will to power,” the elevation of self, has caught on like wildfire. The bad news is that this bold, defiant ethic has spread so wide, infecting even the church, that it has become the morality of choice among the herd. Just as rock