The Greek Philosopher Plato once proposed an image of several prisoners chained to the wall of a cave. Behind them was a fire which projected shadows onto the wall, caused by people and animals walking near the fire. For the prisoners what was projected on the wall was reality. Plato suggests that the Philosopher, the seeker of truth, is like a prisoner who has escaped the cave and views the people and creatures as they really are, not by shadows.
Recent actions by our government agencies, but the current social mind-set, seems to indicate that we are more like the prisoners chained to the wall, rather than the philosopher who seeks the truth. In this post-modern age our take on life tends more to the relative and external than of any depth. In recent years the Pew research foundation has shown less of a draw to religious or philosophical principles, as to what is described as being 'spiritual.'
Over the course of the last three or four decades our Church has talked a great deal of knowing our faith, and we have tomes of adult catechetical programs to prove it, but we failed to move peoples hearts. Sadly our culture is quite satisfied with shadows. Back in the seventies a sociologist (whose name I have forgotten) proposed that urban blight and crime takes hold because of broken windows. Neighbors get used to an abandoned building, broken windows, and criminal activity. This is the new normal. The same moral decay progresses in our faith.
Maybe our schools need to teach philosophy or the classics. The is a lot to be said about a Liberal Education curriculum. There is that truism about appreciating our past so as not to repeat the same mistakes in the future. Sort of like Lazarus we need to listen to the voice of Jesus, become unbound, and set free. And it is seeking the truth which will set us free.
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