Worldvyoublog is a site about basic perspectives. Here the posts focus on what people think and why they think it; what people believe in the West and why they believe it. It deals with responses to these basic questions and how to seek a way past cynicism, apathy, hopelessness, and despair.
Perhaps these issues don’t concern you much. As I once read in someone else’s blog, many people just go along in life as if they will live pretty much forever, avoiding the deeper issues of what it means as they go about living and making things work from day to day. Mortality and life’s fragility are better left alone till we have to face them.
They thus arrive in mid-life or even old-age with a lot of unsolved questions and little mental, emotional, and spiritual preparation as they near D-Day. This blog explores why we are who we are, and the predominant trends in the West. It contrasts responses to these issues among the most significant worldviews operative within and beneath our culture and society. If this is an area of life that concerns and interests you, you may find something to chew on here. I sincerely hope so and wish you a good visit. If you choose to follow the conversation, you are most welcome.
What People Say
I once had God in a box. He seemed to fit nicely inside. I had this nice, clean way of describing him and doing my business with Him. It seemed to work pretty well, most of the time. But then His arm popped out and wouldn’t go back in, no matter how hard I worked at twisting it, pinning it, or flipping it around. Then I had a great idea! I needed a new, bigger box – so I found one, and I finally crammed His vagrant arm inside, along with my nice, neat first box. It’s OK – two boxes works, with the first one inside the second one. But in a little while out popped an arm and a leg! And no matter how I try to adjust the new box, it will no longer do. Try another, yet bigger box! Works for a while, but then … How many boxes do I need, like a Chinese puzzle, before I understand that no box will be big enough?
VJM Mar. 26, 2005
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress … Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Frederick Douglass, former slave and American abolitionist
“The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. It has become fashionable today to say that, for better or worse, we live in “the post-Christian age.” Certainly the forms of our thinking and language have already ceased to be Christian, but to my eye the substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past. Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco-Roman antiquity or to the Orient. It is rooted in, and indefensible apart from, Judeo-Christian teleology. The fact that Communists [and liberal Progressives and Socialists and Greens] share it merely helps to show what can be demonstrated on many other grounds: that Marxism, like Islam, is a Judeo-Christian heresy. We continue today, as we have lived for about 1700 years, very largely in a context of Christian axioms.”
Francis A. Schaeffer, “Pollution and the Death of Man,” in “The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, a Christian Worldview. Volume 5: A Christian View of the West,” p. 63.
World.V.You 