The title says it all, pretty much.
Christians should altogether stop saying "heathen" or "pagan" - since nowadays they don't exist - not really.
Aside from the fact that both words originally meant something like rustics or country dwellers; ancient pagans and heathens were typically highly religious people; people who believed in the gods, the world of spirit, survival of the soul after death, and objective morality.
As such, pagans and heathens bear near-zero resemblance to the great mass of not-Christians in the Western and developed world today.
Nowadays, most people (including most self-identified Christians of whatever church or denomination) are this-worldly, materialist atheists.
They/ we deny the reality or importance of the world of spirit; and believe that the universe of everything was/is not created - but instead arose and continued as a product of the operation of objective "scientific" factors that are alike indifferent to Humankind and each Man.
Nothing like modern materialist-atheists (i.e. like nearly all of us) was to be found in the ancient world.
What is now normal, is something relatively new - merely several generations old.
And the fact that there is no generally accepted term for almost-everybody-alive-now; is indirect evidence of how taken-for-granted this world-view has become.
We need to adopt a new term to refer to this new kind of person, this new phenomenon; but to equate modern this-worldly, un-religious, aspiritual, anti-Christians with heathens and pagans, is just wrong.
3 comments:
I know you will be very familiar with the C.S. Lewis quote, but perhaps it's worth quoting anyway: "When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, “Would that she were.” For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin."
@M - It is reasonable to assume that most of the good ideas on this blog have been stolen - and often from CS Lewis!
...Not that CSL would approve of my theology, however!
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