Me:  Are you standing on Asia Prodigal?

 

Prodigal:  Yeah just look at this map of the world.  Thinking about different parts of the world.

 

Me:  I can share from a Polish writer today.

 

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, has an interesting point to make here.  Having found himself intellectually bullied and politically silenced, first under Nazism and then under Stalinism, Milosz had no doubt as to the ultimate source of despair and tyranny in the twentieth century.  In a remarkable essay entitled ”  The Discreet Charm of Nihilism,”  he pointed out that it was not religion, but its denial -above all, the denial of accountability in the sight of God–that lay at the root of the century’s oppressive totalitarianism.

Religion, opium for the people!  To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in afterlife.  And now we are witnessing a transformation.  A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.  The Marxist creed has now been inverted.  The true opium of modernity is the belief that there is no God, so that humans are free to do precisely as they please.

 

Matthew 6:23

But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.  If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

 

Jennifer Van Allen

www.theprodigalpig.com

www.faithincounseling.org