BiblicalInsights.net

     The following quotations are taken from Ravi Zacharius’ book, Deliver Us From Evil.  In this book, Zacharius shows how the postmodern mind strips humanity of decency by eliminating objective standards of right and wrong.  Secularism has impacted our society in three ways:  (1) denuding the world of a sense of transcendence (eliminate God from the thinking of people); (2) rendering Scripture irrelevant; and (3) reducing human kind to nothing more than matter (absence of spirit or soul).  “Secularism’s primary target is Christianity” (p. 52, 53). 
     “Secularism strips humanity of decency because it strips it of common sense first by denuding the mind” (p. 63).
     “Shame or remorse or society’s disapproval is powerless today to induce a desire to change, because the ideas that shape our culture make shame a hangover of an antiquated religious world-view” (p. 64).
     “Shame is to the moral health of a society what pain is to the body.  It is the sense of shame that provides an indicator to the mind” (p. 64). 
     “How pitiful is the condition we have reached if we smother that sense of shame that was a part of society’s  scanner system to detect wrongdoing and deal with it” (p. 65).
     “To raise a child without shame is to raise one with no immune system against evil” (p. 66).
     “Secularization–the silencing of the supernatural–brings about an eerie silence” (p. 67). 
     Where there is no spiritual sense of the holy, which comes directly from God, there is no conscience of the unholy.  This lack of conscience centered in one’s belief in God and His holy Will, results in  no compass for the soul, no moral direction for life.  The sense of shame is the direct result of knowledge of the holy.  Where there is no knowledge of the holy, the profane mind rules.  This reprobate (corrupt) mind (Rom. 1:28) produces all manner of evil.  Listen to the words of the apostle Paul, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not covenient (fit, acceptable to God, DS).  Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, debate (strife-DS); deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them” (Rom. 1:28-32).  Take heed, whenever a reprobate mind rules in the land and a sense of shame is destroyed, evil abounds!