The Disappearance of Faith and Meaning T here was once a time, perhaps, when people felt themselves to be part of a cosmic order which offered a straight path to salvation, truth, or enlightenment. In that time before spiritual truth was relativized, God's love and mercy was extended to anyone, no matter what his or her circumstances, who fulfilled the necessary moral and religious duties. Almost every person could find in his or her own humanness the pre-condition of hope. Our situation in the post-modern era is that no religion seems absolute anymore.
All religious truths seem to be relativized.
In this situation, a life of faith and morality is no assurance of salvation. We lived with unnamed anxieties and guilt anyway. Although liberated from a Divine judgment, we are haunted by an existential guilt which refuses propitiation. Furthermore, there is no shared cultural myth, no unifying vision. The servitude to religious forms and strictures is quickly disappearing to be replaced only by a worship of the self or a compulsive escape from the self.