This is part 2 of a commentary on this essay about the  American Cultural Revolution aka the Great Awokening.  (Part 1 here). This one is mostly about the fact there are different religions.

***

The essay gets much right, but also much wrong.  Analogizing progressivism to a new religion that is in the process of taking over from the old makes sense.  Its wrong to say that progressivism and Christianity are just the same.  Progress is a religion that has no connection to God.  It doesn’t give people real meaning.   That is its weakness.   Its more dangerous that way though.  It has to be more frenzied and more destructive to make up for it.

The essay is wrong to say that Christianity mostly worked by somehow convincing people they were sinners.  Wanting to be more real and less messed up than you are is real.

The essay says that (Christian) religion is founded on the idea that you make a free conscious choice to believe so when she realized that most everyone with Muslim parents in Muslim countries grows up Muslim, she realized free will and therefore Christianity was false and therefore made a free conscious choice to become an atheist.  I got a fit of the giggles.  Oh my.

Still, the existence of other religions is something no religion has a very good explanation for.  The usual method is just that they are deceptions of the devil.  That doesn’t stand up to any time spent with sincere and worthy adherents of those religions.  They have real piety, real values, real religious power, and none of it completely separable from their beliefs and practices.

We come closest.  Baptism for the dead, the belief in continued progress after this life, and the belief in line upon line and God revealing truths in a way adapted to  local circumstances–all those help.

Even us, though, I don’t think we have a full answer.  Because God seems remarkably insouciant about the existence of these other religions.  Even in the West, the Great Apostasy went on for a loooong time.

Some beliefs and practices are better than others.  It is better to be closer to the loving God.  At the same time, even if one set of beliefs and practices is generally better, in a fallen world of opportunity cost, obtaining the good of one set of practices usually means you can’t obtain the goods of the others.  Even if your practices are better on net, there are still things you are missing out on.

Jacob said , “Behold, great and marvelous are the works of the Lord. How unsearchable are the depths of the mysteries of him; and it is impossible that man should find out all his ways.”