Madness: “Enlightenment” that denies God
What does it mean to be human? It’s not a simple question, but it is one we need to consider as we enter begin to raise a new generation. Millennials are entering an unfamiliar stage of life, one that, in the past, meant heterosexual marriage, monogamy, and procreation. While there are some millennials who are following this ancient path, there are many who are many who reject history’s standards of normality. Much of this generational shift has arisen with the exaltation of new-age human politics. As humanity has gotten more individual, and less communal, human sexuality and existence are no longer objectively definable.
If we are going to discuss these things with a holistic lens, we have to start by going to the root of these issues. While many people believe that all these modernistic ideas came out of nowhere, it seems to me to be a progression that has taken centuries to fully develop. It started with the hubristic enlightenment—a new way of thinking that sought to remove God from human progress (or at least to place human intuition on the same level as godly wisdom). New philosophers sought to remove the creator of the Universe from their theories, and their influence reached far and wide. This way of thinking became normal and, combined with record-breaking prosperity, eventually led to the sexual revolution in the West. Human relationships were suddenly reduced to meaningless pleasurable interactions by new-age Epicureans. Before long, we were faced with the results of Roe v. Wade, a court case that legally redefined what humanity is within the womb. Within a matter of decades, we saw a spike in homosexuality openly promoted in media, literature, and society. Now we are faced with a legion of men and women who believe that they are not men nor women—so much so that they are undergoing medical procedures to make their fantasies their reality. There are even men and women who insist that they are not their given age, or even given species.
As we can see, as soon as we remove our identity from that of the Creator, we begin to lose understanding of what our identity is (or at least, what it is supposed to be). People don’t want to see humanity the way Christ sees humanity (people with souls), but selfishly prefer to see humanity as a rational and indefinable animal. When the West began to support the human will above God’s will, the Church (which had been the pillar of Western culture and morality since the very beginning) began to face a new type of persecution—suffocation. In other words, Christians’ bodies aren’t being killed in the West, but their ideologies are. The things that people would once die for are being slowly asphyxiated by the same system that says you can be left-handed if you believe you are; that you can be six years old or sixty years old depending on the day; and that a girl can have a penis. Unfortunately, there are many churches who have fallen to these belief systems and have begun to preach what the world preaches. Millennials are now less-inclined to have children, and the ones who are, are failing to teach their children about what it means to be “male,” “female,” and even “human.” We have seen a massive rise in school shootings, suicides, depression, anxiety, teenage pregnancy, divorce and scads of other horrific things. Pornography is now available to virtually everyone, contraception is completely normalized, and there is no societal pressure to not have premarital sex. When will the millennial generation wake up and realize that they worship chaos and that chaos is failing them?
The pridefully enlightened who (ironically) favored “reason,” fell to madness once they removed God from their lives. As much as the community of “enlightenment” despises the Church, the Church is the one and only place that can properly explain what a human is—not only physically but spiritually. The Church is also the only place truly recognizes the value of human life. While modernists claim to support humanity, they only support it to the extent that they feel like supporting it. There is no inherent worth to human life (which will die off anyway), only a strange and unfounded biological duty. Traditional Christians, on the other hand, support humanity out of divine duty. We see human as souls as well as bodies—souls and bodies that have value because they bear the image of the Creator who loves them. This love is the most rational love, and the authority of the Church is the most rational authority. Like a good parent it does not allow for individual lies to become individual truths, rather, it reveals and guides us toward the ultimate Truth—the only Truth that is truly enlightened.