I have re-discovered yet another glaringly-obvious truism: There is no serendipity with God. If you do not seek him, you will not find him. “Seek and you shall find,” it says repeatedly in the Bible; but never the reverse.
Serendipity is defined as “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for”.
And it seems to me that we cannot find God, nor even seek him, without a sense of sin. (More specifically, a sense of our own sinfulness. Everyone believes in the sinfulness of others, or at least certain others.)
If we cannot or choose not to see ourselves as sinners, then we will not find God because we will not see any reason to look for him.
This truth, I believe, is the real reason for the collapse of Christianity in the modern western world. Our sense of sinfulness has been washed away by our sense of victimhood and our belief in therapy as a substitute for morality.*
The victimhood cult became a thing when we re-codified the concept of justice. The Greek philosophical and Judeo-Christian sense of justice meant acting justly toward others.
The modern cults of identity politics and self esteem have redefined justice (actually reoriented it 180 degrees) from “treating others fairly” into “treating me fairly: ensuring that I and my group get what we deserve.” This melds the comfortable enjoyment of moral indignation and freedom from personal responsibility for, well, anything.
The therapy cult was best explained by Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and described elsewhere (by me) as PABGoo, short for “People Are Basically Good”. This gave pseudo-scientific cover for the (very French) proverb “to understand all is to forgive all”. It serves as the basis for the “he had a tough childhood” criminal defense, as well as the all-purpose “I just need rehab” defense for politicians and other celebrities caught in flagrante delicto (Latin for “with their pants down”).
Oversimplified, I know. Much else is involved, and I surely over-emphasize the newness of all this. But there it is: the darkest elements of human nature liberated by the combination of positivist “social science” and effective concentration.
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*There is at least one other path to seeking God: despair. Seeing the world spiraling into a moral calamity, and having lost all faith in human god-substitutes (Marxism, scientism, political liberalism, libertarianism, etc.), many go seeking God as the only Hope for a broken humanity. But people who are able to see the hopelessness of human-built reality are unlikely to continue nursing the sense of sinlessness in themselves. This dual awakening, to sin and to hopelessness, was my own path. Now that I think about it, I suspect there may be many others.
O Ben Finiti 