Friday, June 15, 2007

"When people stop believing in God ..."

At NRO's The Corner today, Jonah Goldberg quotes himself from an article he wrote last year. He comments several times today about "secular religion," making, among others, this point:
.... According to Voegelin, you cannot eliminate the religious instinct. "When God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place." Translation: When you rely on science and technology to do God's job, it won't be long before you worship science as a god. Marxism, the apotheosis of progressivism, purged the divine and replaced it with materialism. For the Marxist, proclaimed Voegelin, "Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come." For many people today, the steam engine has been replaced by the embryonic stem cell as the promise of the realm to come.
I once knew someone who had lost his faith in God, but replaced it with faith in cryogenics, believing that his immortality could be insured by freezing his body until a cure could be found for whatever killed him. The statement "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything" is commonly attributed to Chesterton. If he didn't say it, he should have. It seems to be true.

National Review: The terms of debate

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