God Absent From the Western Mind

From an address by Archbishop Charles Chaput at the Fifth Symposium Rome: Priests and Laity on Mission:

Having said all this, we still face a problem. And here it is: God has never been more absent from the Western mind than he is today. Additionally, we live in an age when almost every scientific advance seems to be matched by some increase of cruelty in our entertainment, cynicism in our politics, ignorance of the past, consumer greed, little genocides posing as “rights” like the cult of abortion, and a basic confusion about what – if anything at all – it means to be “human.”

Science and technology give us power. Philosophers like Feuerbach and Nietzsche give us the language to deny God. The result, in the words of Henri De Lubac, is not atheism, but an anti-theism built on resentment.  In destroying God, man sees himself as “overthrowing an obstacle in order to gain his freedom.” The Christian understanding of human dignity claims that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Thomas Aquinas – whose feast we celebrate tomorrow – said that “In this [likeness to God] is man’s greatness, in this is man’s worth, in this he excels every creature.”  But this grounding in God is exactly what the modern spirit rejects.

(Via: Insight Scoop )