Post-Sanity America
Toward the end of his life, I got to know William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist. He was a faithful Catholic, but very skeptical—or realistic—about man’s openness to revelation. He once wrote that if God
were to suddenly appear atop the Chrysler Building at the stroke of noon amid thunder and lightning after darkening the sun and then causing it to slash the incredulous sky with fiery figure eights and Immelmanns by way of showing its “Creator I.D.” before demanding we be kind to one another “or else,” for a time most who witnessed this would instantly “believe,” though soon enough they would doubt their own senses, citing “mass hallucination” or perhaps “wishful thinking on a stupefying scale,”….
Revelation, whether as recorded in Scripture, or in history (as in Marian apparitions), or even in those odd moments where it seems as if some ineffable spirit is tugging at one’s sleeve, is weirdly (when you think about it) simply ignored or brushed aside.
Reason is unlikely, these days, to lead to belief either, because, as I wrote in these pages recently, it is impossible to reason with people for whom reason has no purchase. Indeed, one could, if one wished, write a book cataloging the inanity of the world in which we live: “And lo, they will deny the child’s humanity in the womb, deeming the child’s heartbeat a manufactured product of the patriarchy.” And, “Verily, I say unto you, take no counsel from those who say, ‘I lack biological training, and hence cannot define a woman, but, surely, men can become pregnant.’” Or “Trust not him who sharpens the surgeon’s scalpel or funds the pharmacist’s remedy and mutilates the child for the benefit of invented pronouns.”
We truly live amidst a generation of vipers who have feasted on hallucinogenic mice.
see also
A Bigoted Politician, an Angry Journalist and a Confused Church, by David Robertson, AP Australia:
Secular politicians and journalists in Australia abuse conservatives, advise them on theology, and cancel them; meanwhile well-meaning Christians want to keep bible-based ethics out of the public square.
‘Jesus Has Left the Building’: Scotland’s Secular Slide—and Signs of Hope, by Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, TGC
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