Contempt For Praise Of God

The pluralism that characterizes modern Western culture threatens the activity of praising God. Those who engage in praise are made to feel as if they are out of date and out of touch with reality. However, a life of praise is the best counterattack to the pressures of a pluralistic society. Praise of God is continually threatened at all points. There are head-on attacks which try to eliminate it physically or to shame it into silence. There are numerous subtle ways in which it is discredited, undermined, or made to seem unfashionable or childish or ridiculously unreal. Among the threats there are some that are especially dangerous to the roots of praise. Perhaps the chief among these is the atmosphere of suspicion in which we live. Just because we live in such an open society, with free spread of all sorts of beliefs, theories and world views, we tend to be more wary of wholeheartedly adopting any of them. At present the "conventional" wisdom of our society is certainly not that o…