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Introduction

In our time we are confronted with different perceptions of reality and truth. The secular worldview is limited to the existing reality with its necessity. Examples are the rhythm of day and night, gravity, the inevitable finiteness of life and daily practice with its positive and negative events. Religions also experience this reality. They also assume that beyond this reality there is an invisible reality and that the life continues after death in a different form. The existing world will also be delivered from violence, disease and death. Hereby the dead will be resurrected and the people will live together in peace and prosperity in the restored world. According to the secular view this is not possible. It is assumed that through human efforts, with the help of technology and science, the world will continue to improve. The supporters of this think they are right for this by making a comparison with the past when people were economically worse off and had much less luxury. They also stated that if the economic living conditions became more favorable, people would get along better. Here there would be peace, tolerance, equal opportunities for people and freedom of opinion.

 

 

 

Secular church

Today we see how this works. New “elites and relationship networks” have emerged and have become a powerful tool. We see that in politics and in the media where the same people can give their opinion over and over, political barometers and the mocking / demonizing of people by columnists. Also, scientific research in February 2006, in Australia, showed that people in rural areas and less affluent than in the cities felt happier than those in the cities. This because of close social ties and the mutual help that people received from each other. In the cities this did not apply and people were much more independent.

 

Then the adherents of the "secular church" believed that people should be converted to secular thinking and that belief was a particular matter. In the 18th / 19th century, according to Uwe Brügmann, in “Bible and Christianity”, Volume 4: Commentaries 1979, a secular intellectual elite gradually emerged that felt superior to the simple believers. Supernatural phenomena and the existence of God have been questioned. This is because this would not have been (empirically) proven in the daily experienced reality. The people of the (secular) Enlightenment claimed that the mind is the only source of knowledge and that there is no divine revelation. They would liberate man from “his / her religious thinking and outdated worldview”. The real world is the world, as mentioned above, of the laws of nature. The church and theology also were influenced by this thinking and were going to do anything to be taken seriously. Miracles, for example, were questioned. Jesus could not have walked on water according to the laws of nature. The possibility that Jesus could cancel gravity was not thought of. In addition, a hoovercraft also floats over the water. The literal creation in Genesis became a beautiful story. Partly because of this, secularization continued and we see the consequences of the abandonment of the church in practice.

 

In fact, in the AD of January 28, 2006 and in the magazine Confessional of February 9, 2006, an article of God was in court. The 72-year-old ardent atheist Luigi Cascoli has taken the Catholic Church to court in the person of 75-year-old village priest Enrico Righie on charges of "abusing the people's credulity." Cascoli claims that the Christ of the Gospels is a fabrication based on the figure of John of Galam, a radical Jewish leader of the first century. He hates and despises the Catholic Church, which is holding back progress. That he is mistaken is evident from the fact that Jesus is also mentioned in non-biblical sources. These are the Jewish historian Flavius ​​Jospehus, the Roman historians Tacitius, Pliny and Suetonis, and the Jewish Talmud. On February 10 last, the news channel CNN reported that the judge had declared his charge that Jesus did not exist. Of course, the actions of the church can be criticized, but so are the ideologies that promised that they would offer a better perspective than the church and the Christian faith.

 

Spiritual worlds

Are believers out of date and less intelligent, as claimed by a Leiden professor? Or might the reverse also be possible? Whoever asks them: What's for coincidence and the big bang needed gets no answer, but the comment that this is just as silly a question as that of what's north of the North Pole. But this is not an explanation. In religion and even in Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, it holds that before creation, God was already the origin of everything. In practice it turned out that man had difficulty with his / her freedom and that creation has been disrupted up to the present time. It cannot be denied that human actions have brought many adverse consequences in addition to positive consequences. We see examples of this every day. For example, a skewed relationship between power and authority, scandals, perversion and a less safe and healthy planet.

 

Rabbi Adin Steinstaltz writes in an issue of the Institute for Jewish Studies, BethHaMidrash (The House of Interpretation) 12/25/2005, that the material world in which we live is only part of a vast system of worlds. Most of those worlds are essentially spiritual and of a different order from our world. That means that there are different life forms of being. All these worlds are interconnected. In our world we are subordinate to the physical, chemical and biological laws of nature and our consciousness is largely determined by psychic thought processes and emotions in the material world. Yet in addition to this thinking, influence and inspiration from the spiritual worlds is also possible. The secular vision and science deny this and are unable to make a connection with, for example, God. In addition to the social task, this is an important function for the church, which is evident from the current spiritual need in the west and in our country.

 

De Graaff

How did all this come about? Why have the revelations of God and the Christian faith been replaced by material thought processes and are people confined to the material world?

 

In his book Spinoza and the Crisis of Western Culture, 1977, the cultural theologian / preacher Dr. F. de Graaff gives a cause. He claims that the connection with the higher worlds and with God has become more difficult. Dark forces were increasingly able to partially close off the connection or spiritual revelation, partly due to the decline in the Church. For example, the Church failed to maintain unity in the Christian faith and prevent increasing godlessness including spiritual blindness. The Reformation was also unable to stop the decline. As a result, the emphasis is now much more on the here and now and the abstract sensory reality. The material has been given priority by many people who are also trapped in their own limited thinking and observations in this visible world. In this world only ideas and theories of the mind are valid, instead of inspirations from the spiritual worlds. Yet the connection between the above worlds has not yet been closed. The negative powers have not been given a chance for this. The church still exists. Religion has a much broader perception / vision of the said worlds than the secular vision which only focuses on the short existence in this world. It is understandable that this causes resistance for some. However, the questions and problems of our time have become so complicated that “the experts” also seem unable to resolve them.

 

Finally, some questions. Could there be more between heaven and earth after all? Are people of faith no longer of this time?

 

Please try to find an answer for yourself on the basis of the foregoing.

Are believers out of date? dr. H. Dubbelman