I was reading a book recently on the West’s continued decline into paganism and a wholesale rejection of biblical Christianity. In it the author quoted another thinker whose words bear repeating:

All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. The less they may have of stringent Sate Government, the more they must have of individual self-government. The less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint. Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the Word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bibe, or by the bayonet. It may do for other countries and other governments to talk about the Sate supporting religion. Here, under our own free institutions, it is Religion which must support the State (Robert C. Winthrop’s Address to the MA Bible Society, Boston, 28 May 1849).

What Winthrop understood is that it’s Christ or chaos. If the Holy Spirit does not control a man, a demonic spirit will. Neutrality is a myth. As Dylan quippied, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody. It may the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”

I was reading earlier and an atheistic scientist seemed to be celebrating the idea that he was just pure matter, only chemicals:

[The] sciences owe their spectacular progress to the assumption that all the processes of life can be interpreted finally as simply physical and chemical ones. Many of them have been imitated in the laboratory test-tube. The actions of enzymes, hormones, nucleic acids, complex proteins, and other substances concerned with the processes of life in general, so far as science can analyze them, follow the same laws that govern all the lifeless universe. To many the conclusion is now obvious that man, like every other living thing , is only a material mechanism, extraordinarily complex but no different in his basic nature from any other piece of machinery. This conception readily solves the dilemma of man’s dual nature by denying that the intangible mental and spiritual side of him really exists at all (Edmund W. Sinnott, The Biology of the Spirit (New York: The Viking Press, 1955), p. 7.

How encouraging, dear reader, you’re a “material mechanism” who is “no different . . . . from any other piece of machinery.” This sort of folly parading as wisdom is pride and drivel, not science. Why would a person write a book with a thesis that men are machines? If they’re machines, why write books? Blah, blah, blah.

Shakespeare’s great soliloquies in Macbeth and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are the results of matter in motion, eh? Beethoven’s 9th is just random collocations of sound waves, eh? Okay, Edmund; you can sit down now and go back to emitting carbon dioxide.

The stuff that passes for depth is truly astounding. Rather than admitting what is obvious, rather than humbling oneself under the mighty hand of God, the secularists profess to be wise and reveal their seemingly endless folly.

There is another way, dear reader. It’s the way of redemption and truth:

The Value of Wisdom

2 My son, if you receive my words
    and treasure up my commandments with you,
² making your ear attentive to wisdom
    and inclining your heart to understanding;
³ yes, if you call out for insight
    and raise your voice for understanding,
⁴ if you seek it like silver
    and search for it as for hidden treasures,
⁵ then you will understand the fear of the Lord
    and find the knowledge of God.
⁶ For the Lord gives wisdom;
    from his mouth come knowledge and understanding;
⁷ he stores up sound wisdom for the upright;
    he is a shield to those who walk in integrity,
⁸ guarding the paths of justice
    and watching over the way of his saints.
⁹ Then you will understand righteousness and justice
    and equity, every good path;
¹⁰ for wisdom will come into your heart,
    and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul;
¹¹ discretion will watch over you,
    understanding will guard you,
¹² delivering you from the way of evil,
    from men of perverted speech,
¹³ who forsake the paths of uprightness
    to walk in the ways of darkness,
¹⁴ who rejoice in doing evil
    and delight in the perverseness of evil,
¹⁵ men whose paths are crooked,
    and who are devious in their ways (Proverbs 2:1-15, ESV).