A WELL-MEANING, CULTURAL ATHEISM

The POMO will not compartmentalize life while his parents' chief goal in child-rearing is the creation of an automaton with formatted body, mind and spirit. The POMO cringes when expected to compartmentalize his life. I have listened to hundreds of students express as much to me, to each other, and to their parents. They write it in their essays. They talk about it at lunchtime. They etch it on their skins. They express it in their clothing. In their insomnia. In their boredom. The POMO aspires that all compartments of life be a fluid one and only one. Ultimately, this is what a POMO means when he speaks of being genuine or true or honest or authentic. How authentic is it to express truth in Newtonian terminology when Newton's simplicity denies the extraordinary complexity of the universe we now know? The POMO believes that most, if not all, of life's categories are artificially imposed, propping up a very artificial system he is told is reality. As artificial, those categories are hampering to the pursuit of an successful and enjoyable life that desires above all things to exist in harmony with itself and with the world around it.

The fundamental confusion of the Modern Christian’s logical (doctrinal) position is that God (as absolute) is to be seriously considered in one area of reality but not in another. For example, many Christian schools teach students that an object returns to the ground because of gravity, yet in a “spiritual” sense (though functionally impractical) because God wills it (if they ever get around to saying that). But that reality is not sensible. Newton argued that, because God wills it, an object will return to the ground and that, if gravity works, it works because God wills it. Natural law and supernatural law are not to be divorced if both are to make sense. Natural law exists in a practical and predictable form upon which men can project material results because God is already there willing natural law to work.

On one hand, the Modern Christian mindset demands exhaustive and logical, physical knowledge of the universe in a way that it does not expect exhaustive and logical knowledge of the “spiritual” world. The result is that blatant, logical glitches in “spiritual” truth pockmark the Christian faith and become the logical reasoning of a totalitarian subculture.

I encourage you to compare and contrast the levels of consistency you expect from scientific knowledge and church doctrine, respectively. You will find more often than not that the tendency is either to speak haphazardly about spiritual things but to speak with precision about physical things or to speak with precision about theoretically spiritual things that do not make one iota of difference in this world and to speak theoretically with precision about physical things that make no difference in this world. Either way, you have a bifurcation of spirit and matter, where it is either the world or the spirit that matters at any one time in any one place. This dual expectation is an arbitrary value shift which is as equally atheistic as a “totally” atheistic position, because God is to be barred from where it truly and effectively matters.

The POMO is different. He tends to speak haphazardly about spiritual things AND physical things because his is one world. The sincerity with which he combines both worlds into one is the absurdity against which the Modern revolts. That absurdity (which the Modern does not so easily recognize) is the POMO parodying Modern culture.