Our readings in this series are from the book, Understanding the Times Here is a brief excerpt from page 50:
“The secularist believes in some unseen, unknown, and ultimate truth or good, the attainment of which he hopes for earnestly, believes in passionately, and orders his life by routines and disciplines to achieve. It doesn’t matter that the good he seeks is a material one – a world of equal justice, say, or fair distribution of resources, or scientific and technology solutions to all our ills. These are as much unseen realities as the Christian’s vision of heaven and the Kingdom.
“Or the secularist’s hoped-for good may be merely more personal – a quiet retirement in comfy surroundings, without a care in the world. This too, however, is but a vision, an unseen but longed-for prospect which commands his devotion, fuels his hope, and dictates his conduct.
“Whatever the good he seeks, the secularist believes this is what he must devote his life to attaining. He disciplines his daily activities accordingly, fixing in his imagination the vision of what the as-yet-unseen good life will look like once he has achieved it. The material cosmos may be all the secularist has to work with, but he approaches his particular vision of that cosmos, and his place in it, as an enterprise of faith, ordered by disciplines and rites, in the devoted pursuit of an unseen idea of what is true or good, which he is determined to achieve. And secularists today are the most fervent, unbending, determined, and ubiquitous proponents of their worldview, having captured all the major bully pulpits of the land to proclaim and inculcate their religious vision and way of life.”
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T. M. Moore
