To one degree or another we’ve all been infected by SSD. But whether a person realizes he or she has been infected is quite another matter, and this is what makes SSD so difficult to cure. Whereas atheism is easy to spot, dualism is more subtle, like an unrealized parasite in the gut. While atheism is viewed as an enemy, dualism is our bedfellow, as common as a twenty-dollar bill. Kids don’t just catch it in public schools. They catch it in church, and in unwatchful Christian schools.
Let me present my case,
starting with the disappearance of wholism. I'm starting here because to understand the bane of dualism, we must understand
the wane of wholism.
Allan Bloom, who was not a Christian, wrote a book in the
‘80s, titled, The Closing of the American
Mind. Bloom taught at Cornell
University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, and the University of
Chicago. In his book, Bloom observed the following:
"In the United States,
practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united
the simple and the sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and—as the very
model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to
the rest of Western art, the greatest works of which were in one way or another
responsive to the Bible—provided access to the seriousness of books. With its
gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book is
disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest
aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise—as
priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success
are all that they can imagine. Contrary to what is commonly thought, without
the book even the idea of the whole is lost.”
I would be hard pressed to come up with one paragraph that
explains the problem better than this one. We have lost the very idea of the whole of things. With the wane of the "total book," [the
Bible] the idea of the whole is lost.
Dualism is the bane of the wane.
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