This has been quite the lengthy ordeal, and I fear that it has also been rather tedious reading. In print, all of those thoughts amount to a little over seventeen pages double spaced. They are a large part of my accumulated thoughts for the semester, mostly in response to reading Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, a weighty tome which was very insightful, but poorly written (my roommate and I agree that Taylor is greatly in need of an editor).
Muscling through page after page, I felt more like I was gleaning from the harvest than actually gaining a lot directly. Whether it was what I was meant to gain or not, reading Taylor's book spurred a lot of thoughts, things that I have passed through my mind before, but that I had never spent serious time contemplating.
There was a lot more that I wish had made its way into this essay (of course, that would have only made it longer), but there is so much more I could have said, so many more things that were churning about in my head: internet-constructed identities, marriage, absolute truth. However, I had a line of thinking I was following, and I decided it was better not to get too far off track. I think this issue of exclusive humanism is a major contributor to some of the major buzz-word topics in politics and religion today. Too seldom, people do not understand the true heart of issues or where they originated. A lot could be learned from a more careful exploration of motives and issues. Christians especially could benefit from understanding how the overarching Western worldview has shaped their thoughts. The statement remains true: "You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been."
No comments:
Post a Comment