Losing Touch with Reality ~ BENEATH THE SURFACE with PAUL MURANO

By: Paul Murano – March. 2021

The first amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the federal government from establishing a particular religious denomination as the state religion. Eventually, this notion became known as separation of church and state.

Despite the fact that “separation” is not a Constitutional concept, the founding fathers believed religious denominations should remain distinct from the state, and the state should never interfere with their practice.

The big fallacy of our age is that agnosticism, which in practice is lived out as atheism, is the neutral world view, and must be the default mode of public policy in free countries. This fallacy holds that God is something added onto reality, rather than Reality itself. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Never did the founders ever imagine that such a separation of church and state could be interpreted as a separation of God and state. The reason is simple. Most of them understood, at least intuitively, that God is Reality, with a capital R. The idea of separating public policy from God would have been inexplicable to the founders, since it means separating the mind from Reality.

Such a surrender of logic and reason, as has been seen in our post-Christian culture, has resulted in utter confusion as to who and what we are in the world. Actually, insanity is now the norm with regard to sex, gender, and human dignity.

Today’s culture of confusion is a culture of arrogance. It shows how far modern man has turned to himself as the measure of all things. Rather than looking externally for definition and the moral compass that gives meaning, direction, and purpose to all things, modern post-Christian man creates his own meaning, defines his own purpose, and makes his own code of morality.

The result is insanity. Rather than submitting to Reality, people are defining themselves as their disordered desires dictate. So, if a woman identifies as a man, she’s a man. If a boy says he’s a girl, his parents are apt to declare he’s now a girl. If a pregnant woman wants her baby, she declares it a baby. If she doesn’t, the baby is a merely a product of conception or a mass of cells. There is little understanding of the marital meaning of the body, without which none of us would exist.

Further, Reality is Trinitarian – as Lover, Beloved, and Love. It is the exemplar of the family, which is father, mother, and child – the foundation of society and every civilization. The more we reflect triadic relational love, the more real we are.

Separating God from society leads to great confusion, self-abuse, and a disdain for truth. It leads directly to a culture of death that cannot be sustained for too much longer. The Communist Chinese know this. The Islamists know this. And most pertinently, the devil knows this.

Like a painting exists only at the pleasure of the artist, and receives fully its meaning from him, so too do we derive our reality from God. Therefore, while separating civil governance from church affairs is a Constitutional mandate, separating God from state is, literally, insanity.

Paul is producer and host of Beneath the Surface video and radio podcasts, teaches philosophy & theology, is a staff writer/producer for St. Michael’s Media. He’s also a singer-songwriter-musician. See his website at Paulmurano.com and E-mail him at PJDM@aol.com.