I was caught between the lukewarm and the deists and the atheists and the fundamentalists and the humanists. I was half hippy, half redneck, half preppy, half nerd, half metalhead. I say there were many “halves” because what this modernist input and media blast does is make you confused. That is the state of most people today, especially if your main hobby is screen staring.

Jesus cures a demoniac who has this problem of a fragmented identity. The person says, “I am Legion” which means, “We are many.” The story of this Legion dude in the Bible never made sense until I started examining my own thoughts and worldview once I got out of the fog of modernism. Then I realized, “I was Legion.” No wonder I was so off-centered. Legion is a story about someone who has too many forces struggling for control in his head. It’s actually shocking to read the two lines of dialogue from Legion in light of my own life, because I had a similar reaction of anger and revolt when someone approached me about making Jesus my personal savior. I didn’t use the same words, but pretty close.

“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me!”

Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “Legion is my name. There are many of us.” (Mark 5:1-20)

This is exactly the same condition of our heads today drowning in media. Anyone that has a visceral reaction of anger to the name of Jesus is in this state. The funny thing is that Jesus heals. Savior means “healer”. And he does heal. He heals people of mental problems and anxiety issues a million times a day. But the modernist teaching cannot admit that. In fact, psychology, which is intended to heal, purposefully avoids any talk of Jesus. Western medicine in general has the same allergic reaction to the name Jesus. I can’t help but wonder if the updated translation of Modernism is Legion.

There are all kinds of external voices from TV and TikTok leasing space in our head. They are Legion. And if the media is sponsored and paid for, you can bet it is not borrowing ideas from Christ. You can tell if a show is Christian, because the production quality is usually bad and nearly unwatchable. This is not surprising because fireworks and glamor is the polar opposite of Jesus. Well, on TV anyway. Once you meet him, then it flips completely. But the goal of any image or sound the emits from your radio, television, or internet is to keep you distracted, to keep you divided, and to keep you watching. The more you watch, the more ideas are planted into your head. If only you could track this history of grooming your thoughts that’s been done for you, compliments of Hollywood writers. It’s not unreasonable to say that the idea that abortion is not killing a human probably came from an episode of Felicity that you watched college.

In my first attempt to escape the madness of the crowd, I leaned secular because I felt that those were the non-hypocrites. Only the religious people were crazy. That’s what I told myself.

Upon further review, like an instant replay in football, which took twenty years, I have come to understand with glaring clarity that I leaned secular because of eighteen years of heavy schooling on the humanist doctrine. I was drinking from that vine, like every other public school child, like the pods in the Matrix. We were being kept alive in a vat of sugar water with re-runs of The Cosby Show and Night Court. (Through those two shows alone we learned a valuable lesson: we thought Bill Cosby was the upstanding citizen and John Larroquette was the pervert, only to wake up twenty years later and find out it was the opposite. But let me leave that path into the woods right there, before I get lost.)

All the while, the truth of Christ was there for the finding, but it was buried under hours upon hours of youth sports and late-night math assignments and writing reports, which all boiled down to despair, in the form of party-til-you-puke. The message of Christ barely stood a chance, and yet somehow it still emerged. His light is the one thing that cannot be extinguished. Somehow it finds a way to reach people, despite massive attempts to stifle and kill it off. He finds us when we aren’t even looking for him.

The end result of this anti-spiritual education was to slowly but surely kill off God in our lives. This isn’t hidden or a conspiracy, it’s plainly stated in the writings and manifestos of the founders of modern education.

The problem is that if you do try to kill God, you don’t kill God. You wound the child. How? If you tell a child there is no God, he has no meaning for existence. So he must invent one. Kids recognize this meaninglessness early on. They are more aware of this loss than adults are, and you can observe when the light is going dim in middle-school age children. Unless the child has a hobby or goal or sport or some kind of self-invented worth, the loss of God will be felt early and often. For those that have some kind of meaning without God, it will soon fade and need a replacement. Sports and Pokemon will turn into the pursuit of money or sex or mental escape. The search begins, and it never ends. With the onslaught of tech and screens distracting the mind, the searching starts even earlier now, as non-believing indoctrinated parents don’t even have a badly formed concept of God to offer their children, but even that is better than nothing.

The promise of a utopia through social justice sounds great and is a worthy goal, but there is a flaw with this as a standalone solution for finding meaning in life. The problem is that it doesn’t strike the heart or address anything related to the needs of the soul. If you deny the soul, you can never get over these issues with the ultimate questions. That is the whole problem with humanism and socialism; these are philosophies that can score some points for finding meaning, but they are shooting the ball at the wrong basket.

This is the whole reason why Jesus continues to win hearts and minds. With Jesus there is a plan for all things, and authority, and a reason, and it allows for suffering to make sense, at least to some degree. But these other philosophies that lack God are a team with no coach and no plan, other than a constant “progress.” It leads to chaos, because an endless search means you are always lost. Even if you hit a goal, you immediately need a new goal. Why? Because the heart and soul are restless and aimless without God. Ships need both a rudder and a sail. The attempt to indoctrinate us away from God may seem to work for a while but eventually leads us directly back to God. “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.” (CCC 27)

The spiritual death that these education reformers aimed for succeeded in my life, but they failed to bring about the utopia, unless a massive problem of broken homes, drug abuse, isolation, and identity crises is what they had in mind. If it was, then mission accomplished. The greatest period of wealth generation and higher education in human history has already happened, yet the utopia is nowhere near. Yes, we need to work for a better world, but with the soul denied and God excluded from our lives, that better world will never arrive because we have to invent new enemies and problems to solve. We cannot be satisfied.

I was fully won over to the side of Dewey and the other educators that sought my spiritual death. I even wanted to see the spiritual death happen in everyone else, which is what you want in disciples. You want dedication so that they too will convert others. This is the essence of evangelization. It’s a kind of sales. First you get the person to trust, to believe in your goodness and authority, then once they are interested and seeking, you set the hook. It’s fishing. This is why the metaphor of St. Peter being “fishers of men” makes so much sense. Communists and Fascists and Humanists also go fishing for men, but they do it through public schools instead of the pulpit.

When something encroached on the culture of secular humanism, I reacted exactly like Christians or Muslims or Jews reacted when a film or book blatantly mocked their religion. Apparently, I considered movies and literature of modern culture sacred in some way. It’s the great flattening of our age, where there is confusion about what is sacred and what is not. This is the “spiritual but not religious” era where you’ll hear “everything is sacred” and as soon as you hear that, you know that nothing is sacred. If everything is sacred, nothing can be set apart as sacred, hence the flattening. This is the same problem with treating every news story as a conflagration. Sooner or later you realize that none of the bated-breath urgency of the internet people matters at all and that they are merely hysterical and addicted to news. If every news story is earth-shattering, no news story is earth-shattering. In the same way, the claim that all places are sacred rots the floor out and collapses everything into the profane, because when everything is sacred, there is nothing sacred. It’s a neverending string of days with a vanilla cone, eaten by oneself, with artificial sweetener. What the “spiritual but not religious” crowd fails to understand is that that the reason altars and churches were ever built was to create places that are set apart from the rest of the world, to celebrate what is sacred, together with others.

The religion of individualism demands flatness and the collapse of the spiritual into the material. The spiritual is reduced to nature, and is therefore no longer spiritual, because the true meaning of spiritual means beyond nature, beyond this universe, beyond the senses. Humanism cannot allow for that transcendence, otherwise its own dogma falls apart.

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