Where God is not. . .

There is an old and wise parenting rule that when you leave your children alone and then hearing nothing, something bad is probably happening.  For this reason, parents are supposed to have eyes in the back of their heads and eyes that can see around corners and through walls.  Even then I am not sure it is enough and I am only thinking of the foolishness and reckless things my brother and I did as children.  We have the scars to prove it and, well, so did my parents (mental and emotional).  So if you are concerned with the distancing of God and of Christianity from the center stage of life in America and in most of the developed world, it is not unlike the children who are doing something they should not even though they are doing it quietly.

Dostoevsky is said to have quipped: "If there's no God, then everything is permitted."  Well, that is probably an understatement.  The presence of God is its own limiter against the stupidity and foolishness of the large size children we call adults.  None of us are immune from the need to be watched and absent the watcher there is surely no good coming of it.  As religion and, particularly, the Christian religion has become less a fixed doctrinal and moral identity and more fluid, the presence of God has also shifted away from life and into the hidden recesses of our thoughts and feelings.  He has become a mostly benign force with little particular role except as spectator and even then without the power to intervene.  So we are free to invent all kinds of foolish, stupid, dangerous, and evil nonsense and then to order out lives around this stuff as we once did God.  It does not make for a pretty picture.

The things that limit us from being consumed by the pursuit of desire and whim are not incidental to our lives and our lives together as a society.  They are keys to the ordering of what is good and right and wholesome.  Without such limits, there can be no discernment of what is good and right and wholesome.  We literally do not know the difference until it is too late.  This has become in our society the equivalent of the child who picks up a loaded gun and then begins to willy nilly press the trigger.  We have witnessed this absurdity over and over again.  Some of it is laughable -- like the nominee to the Supreme Court of the USA who has to defer the question of what is a woman because she does not know.  Did you get it?  She does not know.  Or it can be less laughable and more serious.  For example, when the government presumes that gender is a fluid identity that is left to the mind and heart of the individual and then puts in place mechanisms to let children make that decision -- complete with the lifelong consequences of their childhood choice.  Or it can be downright deadly.  Like when we cannot decide if the life in the womb is deserving of any protection or is subject to the whim of the one whose womb it is or we cannot decide if the life of the aged is equally ours to do with as we please.  Getting this wrong is death -- literally!

The most important take on the world in which we live is that we are no longer bound by any real or common idea of right and wrong, truth from fiction, fact from imagination.  We are undone by this lack of any common idea or ideals and so anything literally goes.  No one has the right to question or challenge what we have decided for ourselves and no one polices the consequences of those choices.  It is literally as Scripture says -- everyone does what is right in their own eyes.  That was a condemnation but it has become the noblest of virtues.  Except, of course, for those who do the right that society has arbitrarily decided is wrong.