: JConline : Worldviews

Worldviews

A worldview is the basis of all of our beliefs. We react to our changing life based on our fundamental beliefs. It gives the framework for understanding life.

According to Charles Colson A worldview must answer three questions:

• Where did we come from?
• What is wrong with society?
• What should we do to fix it?

Everyone has a worldview - but they may not realize it.

Many famous worldviews have shaped our societies on earth:

Nietzche was a German philosopher and proclaimed that God was dead. That meant the death of morality. He viewed Christianity as a hoax for the weakminded and a threat to the strong minded. He looked forward to the days when a race of superhumans would rid the planet of the weakness.

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.

Utopianism says humans are naturally Good - and only social influences make us evil.

If we can create the right social and economic structure, we can usher in an age of harmony and prosperity.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) proclaimed that the government has duty to fix the social and economic structure such that the good can emerge.

"All is God", "All is one" and "All is well".

The New Age concept of God is impersonal, usually described as Force, Energy, Essence, Consciousness, Vibration, Principle, or Being.

Our significant learning comes from withdrawal from the world, looking within, getting in touch with our real selves, the divine within. Hinduism, Buddhism and New Age share a distrust of reason.

Sin is merely ignorance of the true nature of reality. We need enlightenment, not repentance.

We die only to be reborn in a continuous cycle of rebirth - reincarnation.

In this worldview the focus tends to be on self, how we can improve ourselves, rather than on how we can know God, and better serve him and others.

Communism

Communism is a society without money, without a state, without property and without social classes. People come together to carry out a project or to respond to some need of the human community but without the possibility of their collective activity taking the form of an enterprise that involves wages and the exchange of its products.

"from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs"

Postmodernism denies all truth claims. Truth is determined by oneself. We all create our own reality.

"all principles are preferences - and only preferences."

Postmodernism rejects boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid distinctions.

Naturalism proclaims that nature is all that exist, that life arose from a chance collision of atoms, evolving eventually into human life.

As the name implies, this tendency consists essentially in looking upon nature as the one original and fundamental source of all that exists, and in attempting to explain everything in terms of nature. Either the limits of nature are also the limits of existing reality, or at least the first cause, if its existence is found necessary, has nothing to do with the working of natural agencies.

Christianity proclaims everything is created by God. (Creation)

We are born into sin - and all fall short of the Glory of God. (The Fall)

If we ask, we are saved by grace - but in asking we are transformed and compelled to reach others to accept Christ. (Redemption)

click here for more