"A Praying Life" (chapter 12)

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

By Paul E. Miller

 

Part 3: Learning to Ask Your Father

 

“Why Asking Is So Hard” - Chapter 12

 

Secularism

• Western culture is the most publicly atheistic culture that has ever existed.
• Western culture over the last 2 centuries is an anomaly from the rest of human history.
• The 18^th century Enlightenment is the birth of today’s secularism.
• Division of feelings and fact – prayer and religion are regarded as feelings.
• Popular culture has brought the secularism of the university classroom to the masses.
• Now prayer and religion are deemed by our culture to be better kept private; there is no place for religion in public or civic life.

 

The Power of the Enlightenment

• Before the enlightenment, prayer and science were not viewed as belonging in two separate spheres.
• The Christian worldview that God made a separate and orderly world gave birth to science.
• Secularism claims to have given us the gift of science, but in reality it was Christianity that gave us science.
• Almost all the Ivy League colleges and American universities began as Christian institutions. But the power of enlightenment secularism has driven Christianity from them.
• Orthodox Judaism survived the Babylonian Captivity and the Holocaust, but Enlightenment secularism has almost destroyed it.
• The Enlightenment mindset marginalizes prayer because it doesn’t permit God to connect with this world.
• You are allowed a personal, local deity as long as you keep him out of your science notes and don’t take him seriously.

 

The Modern Roots of Cynicism

• The Enlightenment doesn’t say that religion is not real. It defines it as not real. It is not even open for debate.
• Prayer is defined as phony, and then it begins to feel phony.
• When our young people encounter the secular world’s philosophy it is easy to say that God-talk is phony because it has been relegated to the not-real world by our culture.
• It is instinctive in our culture to keep faith and ‘reality’ separate, as if they are incompatible.
• Secularism is a cynical view of reality.
• Because it can’t adequately account for things like love and faith or measure them, it disregards them and separates them from the realm of ‘fact.’

 

A Child Prays in a Secular World

• Childlike faith has no problem joining prayer to the ‘real’ world.
• If a stream is the result of accidental natural forces, then it is just water, rocks, and dirt.
• If the stream=god, then you worship the stream god.
• But if God created the stream, then wonder and curiosity naturally flow into study (science).
• The secret to seeing God behind all things is to become like a little child again.
• Because it is my Father’s world, we can kneel by a stream and pray while doing a science experiment. It is a complete unity of thinking and feeling, physical and spiritual, public and personal.