Greta wrote:
You ask how one should respond to a distressed teen asking about God. I suggest giving her an honest and sincere answer.
In other words, pass the buck. Admit that you don’t know. Now the student is stuck with finding people who can respond intelligently including if there is a Source for creation, why isn’t it widely known?
When considering the "problems" of secular education, let's first consider religious mind control through history. A personal example: my mother was unusually bright but when she displayed it at her convent school the nuns, in her words, "beat me black and blue". These were not secularists, but nuns.
You don’t seem to appreciate the difference between secularism and the essence of religion. You are describing secularized religion which is expression of the Great Beast much like politics. You cannot expect any more from secularized religion than you can from politics. Both are governed by the same hypocrisy.
Secularized religion as with politics tells people what to think and do. The essence of religion and Christianity for example is concerned with what we ARE in relation to re-birth. I doubt you could find one person who could explain the difference between proselytizing and Christian love.
I’ve read that the first thing to be lost as societies become secularized is the inner sense of scale. Everything is put on the same level. As above, so below has no meaning in relation to religion. It is all considered the same and even insulting to raise the idea of objective quality. So who suffers: the students of course who have not yet lost their sense of scale and seek understanding from adults who have already lost it.
Some in the church, like Nick, seem to rue religion's slight loss of control over "secular" society. Today religion is only massively dominant rather than ubiquitous - as was the case in "the good old days". "Secular society" is largely a myth, at least as regards the west. Evidence? The percentage of theists running our governments and the consider all of the commonsense things that should be done. eg. dying with dignity, but cannot due to those religious "representatives".
All this means is that you are unaware even theoretically of the difference between secularism and the essence of religion. The sad thing is that many schools are governed by the same ignorance for some reason called intelligence which can only serve to prevent awakening to objective purpose..
-- Updated Fri Jan 06, 2017 7:26 pm to add the following --
Renee wrote:
You are saying, there is a purpose, there has got to be a purpose, because the perfect being that put the world into motion can't have created something without a puprose.
I don't see a necessary connection there. A perfect being COULD and CAN have created a universe with no purpose.
Give me a reason why perfect being would create imperfection.
Biassed reasosing. One might say "students turn to drugs because despite being religious, they still have no sense of purpose", and be just as likely to be right or wrong as your biassed claim.
Like Greta you are only aware of secularized religious expression. For the student drawn to awakening the Great Beast as well as other forms of religious idolatry are just as meaningless. Of course some become hooked on drugs through societal pressures but the point is that many truly gifted students attracted to what it means to be human give up and turn to drugs. Now that is tragic.
Aside from all this, you admit that you don't know what the purpose is, despite being sure that there is one.
Well. If you don't know what it is, how different is it from not having one? Maybe this gives you hope that one day you'll learn what the purpose is? Well, good luck, I don't mean this sarcastically, but sincerely. You'll need it.
Over the years and through the efforts of some exceptional people I have acquired an intellectual appreciation for what I believe universal purpose including human life within it is. It satisfies a need in me I would never impose on others. A person lacking objective purpose but needing to experience it is like a lost soul. It is a sad condition to be in. My advantage is knowing the importance and meaning of the Socratic axiom to “know thyself.” A person sees that they don’t and that is the beginning. Of course a student isn’t strong enough to battle both peer pressure and mixed up educators so they begin to become defined by the Great Beast. If that isn’t a good reason to start drinking, I don’t know what is.
Man would like to be an egoist and cannot. This is the most striking characteristic of his wretchedness and the source of his greatness." Simone Weil....Gravity and Grace