Hope has been in decline everywhere you look

On average, around 130 people per day commit suicide. Drug overdoses account for 300 deaths per day. Murders only 60 deaths a day, but the number is rising rapidly. All three of these are at all-time records.

At the other end of life, abortions take roughly 1,600 lives a day, although that number is falling. What do all these have in common? The absence of hope.

Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, pro-abortion groups have started to vandalize and threaten those supporting life and promising much more after the decision. A group called “Jane’s Revenge,” named after the “Jane Roe” of the Roe decision, has already claimed credit for an attack on our local congressman’s office and an adjoining Right to Life center (after vandalizing a nearby home by mistake. When you’re fighting for a righteous cause, what’s a little collateral damage?). Rep. Tim Walberg is forthrightly pro-life and therefore is considered a legitimate target. Mobs gather outside the homes of Supreme Court judges. A “Night of Rage” was promised, although, since these are left-wing rioters, the mayhem will be mostly peaceful. Another loss of hope.

The climate catastrophe looms in our near future. Another few parts/million of CO2 in the atmosphere caused by you and up goes the temperature, the sea level, droughts, floods, hurricanes and forest fires, and down go the glaciers, the polar bears and us. But, if we follow the draconian solutions proposed by climate alarmists, we can shiver in our unheated home while we starve to death from being unable to drive to the nearest grocery store to buy un-affordable groceries. We’re beginning to get a taste of that now. Either way, it’s a bleak and hopeless future.

Everywhere you look, certainly since I’ve reached the age of sentience, hope has been in decline. Life was sunny, filled with optimism and hope back in those long-ago 1950s. God was in His Heaven, and if everything wasn’t all right in the world, we were on our way to fixing what needed fixing.

Then came the ’60s. Vietnam. Assassinations. Riots. Sexual revolution. Time Magazine put its finger on the problem with its April 6, 1966, cover, asking “Is God Dead?” Nietzsche had answered the question nearly a century earlier, “God is dead … and we have killed Him.”

Nietzsche certainly didn’t mean the God of all the universe was dead. That was, and is, preposterous. What he was pointing out is steadily declining faith, making God irrelevant to our lives, both public and private. In other words, as far as an ever-increasing number of persons was concerned, God might as well be dead.

Once God is out of your life, I submit, hope goes with it. What is there to look forward to? I once had a student during a class discussion about ultimate things speak up and say emphatically she believed in science.

“Science” has “proved” there is no God — just materialism and necessity as effect inexorably follows cause. Life can have no purpose beyond eating and reproducing. Now we know reproducing is going to destroy the planet, so we’d better stop that. Eating has also become problematic, both for us individually and for the planet. No hope — not even much fun.

So what’s left for Godless individuals and societies? We’re very big on sex these days, in any combinations you like, just so long as the other parties agree and no babies result. Lives are lived by philosophical asceticism and practical hedonism. Bumper sticker morality prevails and politics substitutes for God.

Sooner or later, if you haven’t killed yourself beforehand, you get older, sicker and dead. Only despair accompanies that journey.

The God who is not dead, who cannot be dead, will not save you from getting older, sicker and dying. But he will save you from despair. It is perfectly fine to live a good life, following the wishes of God, after which you get to do it forever. That, my friends, is hope!

Charles Milliken is a professor emeritus after 22 years of teaching economics and related subjects at Siena Heights University. He can be reached at milliken.charles@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Charles Milliken: Hope has been in decline everywhere you look