RELIGION

religion

Religion

According to Sire, a worldview is a fundamental orientation of the heart that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presumptions, which we hold about the basic constructs of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live.

Sire provides a practical framework for understanding the differing worldviews. The Universe Next Door also provides a good understanding and resource for evaluating and examining competing worldviews. He addresses seven questions to provide the reader meaningful and consistent standards to evaluate each worldview.

Sire uses the above seven questions to develop readable summaries and introduction to the worldviews. He further defines theism, deism, naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, Eastern pantheistic monism, New Age and Postmodernism.

"Christian theism is primarily dependent on the concept of God, for theism holds that everything stems from him." (p44). God is good and the foundation of values. (p73). Theism is the standard for which all other worldviews are judged. Deism does not see the universe as fallen but rather as normal and do not see the God in the scriptures but rather in nature. "God is distant, foreign, alien." (p49).

In naturalism only "matter eternally exist and is all there is. God does not exist." (p61). The universe is seen as a closed system and the Creator is negated to nothingness.

"Nihilism is the negation of everything knowledge, ethics, beauty, reality. In nihilism, no statement has validity; nothing has meaning. Everything is gratuitous, de trop, that is, just there." (p87).

Existentialism holds that reality for humans appears as subjective and objective. "The first sort of being is the objective world the world of material. Of inexorable law, of cause and effect, of chronological, clock-ticking time, of flux, of mechanism." (p115). "The second sort of being is the subjective world the world of the mind, of consciousness, of awareness, of freedom, of stability." (p115).

"Pantheistic monism is distinguished from other Eastern worldviews by its monism; the notion that is only one impersonal element constitutes reality." (p144). Everything is good and everything is evil. All rationale appears circular. For the westerner, eastern pantheistic monism holds the promise of everlasting peace.

The New Age worldview is eclectic and not confined to one narrow viewpoint. Within New Age, the self is seen as the prime reality. "The core experience of the New Age is cosmic consciousness, in which ordinary categories of space, time, and morality tend to disappear." (p188).

Under Postmodernism, there is no truth about reality because it is hidden. "Truth is whatever we can get our colleagues (our community) to agree to." (p221). The power is within the narratives and language. Individual self is derived from the stories individuals tell about themselves.

Sire points out that we may be unaware of our own worldviews. Nevertheless, we display them within our behaviors. The Universe Next Door challenges today's Christian to re-exam their worldview. It offers an interesting discussion to a world that is otherwise unacknowledged or spoken about.

The competing worldviews are insidious. They have a way of infiltrating core Christian beliefs to the point of ...