Question 6.99
6.99 In your reflection you seem to infer that atheistic philosophy is by nature militant and combative. âŚ
Today, in the rich and powerful countries, the eclipse of God leads man toward practical materialism, disorderly or abusive consumption, and the creation of false moral norms. Material well-being and immediate satisfaction become the only reason for living. At the end of this process, it is no longer even about fighting God; Christ and the Father are ignored. The reason for this is obvious: God no longer interests anyone. He is dead, and his departure leaves us indifferent. We have passed from atheistic materialism to fluid âNew Ageâ thinking. Those in control of this world no longer think that they have to fight; they have reached another stage that consists essentially of creating the new man. Some researchers even speak about âtranshuman-ismâ, a technological process that would go âbeyondâ man the human being. What a proud illusion!
For the Church and for Christians, the danger therefore becomes still more menacing. Western man seems to have made up his mind; he has liberated himself from God; he lives without God. The new rule is to forget heaven so that man might be fully free and autonomous. But the death of God results in the burial of good, beauty, love, and truth; if the source no longer flows, if even that water is transformed by the mud of indifference, man collapses. Good becomes evil, beauty is ugly, love becomes the satisfaction of several primal sexual instincts, and truths are all relative. We should not be surprised, therefore, Benedict XVI said in 2008 in a Letter to the Diocese of Rome, that today we have doubts âabout the value of the human person, about the very meaning of truth and good, and ultimately about the goodness of lifeâ.
Modern atheism, the heir to an aggressive movement against God and Christianity, now seeks to ignore God so as to make the world ignorant of him. The laws of the Father, the message of the Gospel are hidden beneath mountains of clever tricks cynically designed to stupefy man. With consummate hypocrisy, the same ones who try to turn man away from his Creator arrogantly say: God does not care about our sufferings; he is absent; this earth is a valley of tears where each one can count only on himself. âŚ
Whether it is militant or still in the larval state, atheism always leads to the same consequences. Man is treated as an object, cut off from his spiritual roots and blinded by the artificial lights of material goods or achievements. Finally, all atheism seeks to change the very nature of man. The persecutions are no longer the ones in the concentration camps of the formerly Communist countries, those horrible prisons where my predecessor in Conakry, Archbishop Tchidimbo, had been isolated, tortured, and humiliated, not even having the right to celebrate Mass during the first five years of his detention. Now the persecution has acquired greater subtlety.
In the postmodern world, God has become a superfluous hypothesis, more and more detached from the different spheres of life. I think that people who want to keep the presence of God in their lives must be aware of the subtleties that can easily lead them toward practical atheism and the loss of the salt of faith; they, too, could become like the pagans of yore, those men âhaving no hope and without God in the worldâ described by Saint Paul for the Christians of Ephesus (Eph 2:12). Today we cannot be unaware of the way in which God is systematically cast back into the darkness; anaesthetized, men board a ship that leads them ever farther away from heaven.
The best example of the disappearance of the head-on battles of the past is still the Russian Orthodox Church. After so much violence, so much destruction, it is now at the center of the debates. Reversing the movement of insidious atheism that has carried off practically all of Western Europe, Orthodoxy has allowed the Russian nation to avoid the traps, so that now it is a country that makes significant room for God and faith.
Confronted with all these difficulties, it is necessary to return to the foundations of Christian hope and to declare that life on this earth is only part of our existence, which will be prolonged and completed in eternity. In season and out of season, the Church must recall that life cannot be summed up in terms of the satisfaction of material pleasures, without moral rules. At the end of a journey without God there is only the unhappiness of a child deprived of his parents. Yes, hope abides in God alone!