Human Life, Victim of Postmodernism

Many people recognize what Jews and Christians have posited: the human being is an integrated physical and spiritual whole. No model of human life is sustainable that diminishes or ignores either part of the human, or seeks to bifurcate the integrity of human beings.

But today the West denies the Creator who imagined, designed and made us in this wholistic fashion. As a result, Western intelligentsia, in their ignorance, divide human beings into two separated, unrelated parts. Both postmoderns and moderns force a dichotomy of human life into the physical and spiritual. Each claims their preferred half of the human reality defines all of the human. They discard the other half, thus impoverishing both the individual and the larger society.

Pagan humanism, the religion of moderns, defines humans in physical terms. Man is reduced to a machine or an animal, a body without a soul or spirit.

Pagan animism, the postmodern religion, defines humans in spiritual terms. Postmoderns deny the reality of the body. Man is a ghost. Gender identity is constructed out of one’s imagination.

In either case, the God deniers are dichotomists, reducing the human being to either a physical body or a ghost.

What happens when God is pushed out of society? The death of God leads irrevocably to the death of man, first in terms of his transcendent nature and then in his physical reality.

First, the death of God leads to the death of man as the imago Dei. It leads to the end of the concept of the integrated human being. If God is dead, then man is dead! There is no transcendent human being, no transcendent masculine or feminine.

Second, if God is dead, then man must die! Lévi-Strauss captured this lamentable loss of respect for human life in his 1966 book, The Savage Mind: “I believe the ultimate goal of the human sciences to be not to constitute, but to dissolve man.” (pg. 247) A society that abandons its belief in the transcendent nature of human beings will inevitably move toward the murder, suicide and annihilation of individuals and whole communities. It will lead to multiple modes of death in multiple categories of human life.

Abortion (the unborn baby)
Infanticide (the born child)
“Mercy killing” (the infirmed)
“Death with dignity” (the elderly)
Homicide (killing another human)
Suicide (killing the self)
Gendercide (killing females)

John N. Gray summarizes in Straw Dogs:

Homo rapiens [sic] is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving … Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around …The earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

The postmoderns, neo-pagans, are in practice the new barbarians.

Nancy Pearcey has written a fine article on the implications of the death of God leading to the death of man. It was Judeo-Christian Theism that led to the concept of universal human rights. Postmoderns (and moderns) have no foundation for human rights.