Hi Hikikomori,
First welcome and I do hope you find this site to be a place of community and you will find the discussions you have here both stimulating, and I hope that despite disagreements you might have with members they still manage to build you up, and God uses it to guide into all truth and into being the full human being you were meant to be (and of course, we probably have significant areas of disagreement of how that exactly works out
). Now following this I hope to give some points of clarification (possibly illumination, but you may disagree, so I hope you will bear with me with some forbearance and charity
) and take what I write (and likely fail in many areas ) as whatever it is worth to aid in future dialogues and conversations.
(The following is a bit of a somewhat necessary overview of history)
Firstly, the view you articulate is is common in the West, however it derives from the Enlightenment, which driven by political/social reasons (particularly the French and American revolutions) revived and asserted the ancient Epicurean view of reality that had been influencing aspects of European/Western thought since Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered Lucretius’s great poem De Rerum Natura in an obscure European monastery in 1417, and came to full flower with Enlightenment thinkers, for instance Giordani Bruno, Montaigne, Galileo, Bacon, Hobbes, Newton, Hume and not least Thomas Jefferson who famously proclaimed, 'I am an Epicurean' (and it is one that should be taken seriously, as despite Jefferson' attempt to have his cake and eat it by also noting his admiration for Epicteus, a first-century Stoic, and of course Jesus Himself, both these later figures were subjected to Jefferson's own rather heavy-handed attempts to de-contextualize them and present the cleaned-up results in a way that sustained his other agendas rather then undermining them, as left to themselves they might have done.) But this helpfully gets to the point, that Epicureanism asserted that God or the gods (if they exist at all) are far removed for the world, and exist (if they do) in a distant heaven, and don't get involved in the present world (or even past one), the world itself is moving under it's own steam, rather then divine action, developing and transforming according to their own energy, their innate 'swerve' (clinamen, a crucial Epicurean term) and the survival of the fittest, Darwinism before Darwin. And human society likewise should be able to order itself from within without need or reference to divine authority or guide, whether via kings, priests, the universe or anything else. The Enlightenment essentially declared that God or the gods are banished away from the world, and humans and their societies would move under their own steam (and it just so happened that human society had come of age in the west, opening a new saeculum or age, as both revolutions formally stated (and indeed of which the American dollar bill continues to declare to this very day), which of course made it a moral imperative to take this view to the rest of humanity, thus under-girding the resulting imperialism, which continues today with the West attempts to export democracy believing it will lead to happy and free liberal western democratic states like us (which of course God in this world-view had nothing to say to).
The outcome of this, among other things, was the severely downgraded terms such as religion to something that functions within the narrative and world-view of this new Epicureanism, namely religion was now, uniquely in human history, a private thing where a person got in contact with that faraway God or gods, and could go to that faraway heaven/spiritual state if they wished, but that it had no impact on the world or how it was run. This is shown in the French revolution attempting to remove all religion (or rivals
) and continues as an underlying imperative in France to this day as indicated by the banning of Muslim head-scarves, and of course is enshrined (an apt word) in the church/state divide in the American Constitution, asserting you could have your religion, but you had better not bring it into public life and challenge the 'true' religion/ideology/world-view. Of course this underlies an irony, that the act of downgrading the word/meaning of religion was because Enlightenment Epicureanism was asserting itself as the defining world-view/ideology for now on, which is incidentally why the West right now has such a hard time dealing with the Middle East, because they don't accept such a world-view or understand how we altered the term religion and such, but that is besides the point here
.
Now the post-modern critique has somewhat muddled the waters by reacting and denying that any big narratives exist, and showing the myth of modernism progress to utopia is just that, a myth, however beyond a critique it has little to sustain itself as a view on it'so own. It's own assertion that for instance that there is no absolute world-view or narrative is itself an absolute assertion, and asserts an overriding narrative and world-view over and against all others, which is self-contradictory. Which has lead to the various interesting situations we find ourselves now, where post-modernist sentiments/critiques exist within a still overriding Enlightenment/modernism world-view framework, of the world/universe and human society running under it's own steam and God and the gods (if they exist at all) being somewhere else, in some non-material realm somewhere.
Now that was a long, and definitely generalised and simplified, overview of things to bring me to the point. The world-view (religion as many people other then us in the West, and anyone prior to the 18th century would have understood that term) so many in the West inhabit remains this post-Enlightenment Epureanism (modernism/secularism etc), with usually some post-modernistic tweaks. But this narrative and world-view doesn't accommodate others, rather it's very key assertions deny the truth of all other narratives and world-views as being true, they can function in a private capacity, but they can't speak outside this and must submit or at least conform to the Epicurean concept of reality. Of course the same is true of all world-views, all make exclusive claims to what reality, meaning and life is etc, but that is the point at hand. The narrative of post-Enlightenment pluralism hold (like all world-views by their nature) all others to be thereby essentially false in their key claims, as their narrative of reality is in conflict with it's own.
A useful illustration of this the famous analogy of the elephant and the blind men that is often used to support pluralism ideas. Where you have a set of three or four blind men each touching an aspect of the elephant, trunk, tail, leg etc, and thinking they have understood it, but misunderstanding the point that they all get only part of the elephant. However this picture portrays the heart of the problem, because it asserts that this Enlightenment based world-view (with it post-modernist inclusions) knows that what these blind men seek is an elephant, that it is the one with the privileged point of view to see what the reality of the situation, while all the other religions/philosophies are blind only understand parts right, but misunderstand what the real reality of the situations. This analogy can from a Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Hindu or Buddhist perspective just as it can the post-Enlightenment world-view perspective, but it underlines to point that this assertion does not accept all other views as true. It asserts it's narrative and world-view as the real truth, of which God, gods, the universe, life and ourselves and our conduct is to be understood, all other word-views are allowed only in so much as they conform to this overall view (they are blind men), and since their key views and world-view narrative claims on reality disagree with the popular modernist/post-modernist fusion, it declares them to be actually false and not true.
This essentially Epicurean view the West operates under is in opposition to say Pantheism of Hinduism etc, in which the universe is seen as identical with God, it goes through continual cycles and people are governed by karma, so what happens to you, and what class you are born is governed by previous actions, and the ultimate aim it so loss yourself and merge with the universe and escape the karmic wheel of constant rebirth. Or of that of monotheistic theism (of which Judeo-Christianity is most definitely part) that God is other then creation, but is the unconditioned cause of reality, or everything that is, for the beginning to the end of time, and is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, and giving it actuality, and is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all, yet is though transcendent also within and intimately involved with the world. Terms such as supernaturalism and naturalism as understood now have no place in the monotheistic world-view, and are impositions of the post-Enlightenment world-view (that of a distant God making strange 'interventions' from outside into His creation). It also positions that the creation is good, but something has gone wrong with it, and that God is committed to putting to working through things to put things to rights, and the story of the gospels is the claim that this has happened, climaxing in Jesus resurrection, which is putting forward the assertion that this is how God becomes King and puts the world to rights. And that the new creation that begins with the resurrection is the beginning and foretaste of what will happen to the whole universe, all will be set free from what oppresses it. including the ultimate anti-creation force of death.
There is much more to be said, but this is probably to much as it is (O_O an understatement as I've just gone over it, I hope you managed to hang in a read it
), I hope this might have helped in even a little way of understanding how world-views are by their nature all exclusive, and we all choose by either default or investigation (and I would assert the guiding revelation of God
) one in which we will live, and order our lives, believes and values by. All world-views are in constant dialogue with each other, but in the end only one (or none, but not all) are true, and everyone will knowingly or otherwise follow the view of one overriding world-view narrative over another.
I hope God blesses you deeply as you search yourself for what is truth, and I hope it reveals to you who and what He really is, and opens your eyes to what the Truth really is. And in the meantime, I hope you have a great time on the site, and truly find your time here to be an inspiring, enriching and most importantly a loving experience. Welcome and good fortune
