Test-Tube Superstition

Karakia, Anyone?

Intellectual deceit and rampant hypocrisy crowd the modern Western stage.  Unbelief is not just a nasty termagant, it is also replete with intellectual dishonesty.  Take, for example, the militant insistence that New Zealand be a secular nation.  Religion, we are told, is replete with myths, lies, and deceits.  The only truth is secular truth--which apparently means truth which can be observed and experimentally proven in a test-tube.

But at the same time, and out of the same mouths (albeit from the other side) there is an enthusiastic celebration of spirituality.  In our country this has become institutionalised in the employing of Maori to incant and pray at all public events and gatherings.  In fact, it is pretty well acknowledged now that no event would be a happening at all, were it not accompanied by Maori prayers, or incantations (karakia), or traditional animist chants to invoke the Maori pantheon of gods.  No formal school opening, no commissioning of a public project, no opening of a New Zealand embassy anywhere around the world would be the real deal without an effusive display and contribution from Maori spiritualism.

Apparently Unbelieving secularism has fallen prey to the rationalist-irrationalist dichotomy.  In the end, the rationalist becomes the superstitious irrationalist. 

This is not just a New Zealand failing.
  It is common throughout the secularist West.  Glorifying in materialism, the West is slavering more and more over "spirituality".  Pantheism has been described by Ross Douthat as Hollywood's religion of choice  for over a generation.  So, it's not just the folly of New Zealand we are dealing with here.  We, apparently, are in salubrious company. 

Take Avatar as an example.  Jonah Goldberg pans the unoriginal aspects of the script:

Heroic noble savages are tied together by a spiritual Gaia-like life force and must fend off the evil, white, land rapists, with the aid of a white man who has been reborn as one of the natives.  This was an old idea when I first saw A Man Called Horse thirty years ago.  Indeed, the "genius" of the film wasn't to offer a controversial narrative about environmental spiritualism.  The genius was in finding a way to peddle precisely the sort of New Age propaganda Hollywood (and, for that matter, the public schools) have been peddling for nearly half a century now.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p. 259.]

But here is the clanger:

When conservatives panned the unoriginality of James Cameron's script--tellingly, a script he had written twenty years earlier--defenders of the film went ballistic about the inability of conservatives to appreciate spirituality.  This is a hard charge to take seriously from the same quarter that routinely mocks religious believers for being, well, believers.  

I love having conversations with people who deride organized religion as so much superstition and magic, but who don't have any problem with superstition and magic when it is disorganized. (Ibid.)

Quite.

New Zealand is officially a secular country.  No established religions here.  The state knows so much about all religions it knows that none are true.  It is officially and formally certain of this as absolute fact.  So, in the same breath, but out of the other side of the mouth, it has institutionalised animist Maori spirituality in all its civic and official proceedings.  

We venture to say that no government school would proscribe any teacher invoking Gaia or the Maori pantheon of atua in any classroom.  Ah--and here is the rub--were a teacher to invoke the Lord Jesus Christ vented spleen would be splattered all over the walls.  Behold the wonders of intellectual deceit and rampant hypocrisy on display. 

But there is a deeper truth at work here.  The offence taken over the Lord is due to His reality--which is why He is so intimidating and threatening to the Unbelieving establishment and its Commentariat.  The palpable reality of the King of kings is already known to all men (Romans 1: 19).  It is the febrile repression of this truth which leads Unbelief to celebrate spirituality in any other form but the truth--be it animistic, pantheistic, or mythical. 

What makes this even more derisory is that such antics are coming from folk who are at the same time professing to be atheistic or agnostic.  It has been stated truthfully: "the fool says in his heart there is no God." (Psalm 14:1)  Never mind.  Let's just have a Maori karakia so we secularists can all feel better. 

If it's deceitful stuff and hypocritical nonsense you want, can you find a more vivid, tangible display?