Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: Men Have Forgotten God

Men have forgotten God: The West has, in recent years, bestowed upon itself an immense weight of suffering from financial crisis, lack of ethics, health and a variety of political crisis. Traditional values, respect for the elderly, tradition, the family and faith has been scrapped from the public narrative.

Front and center is the atheist materialist world view that deems the physical dimension as the only true existence. With physical wealth as the only value, the rich fight to own it all with no regard for the afterlife.

Materialism is preached to the young at universities and schools as God is proclaimed dead and our culture left without answers for the big questions of of life, writes historian of comparative religions and author, Hanne Nabintu Herland.

In parallel, depression, the meaninglessness of life and spiritual depravation engulfs so many, with little cultural knowledge of how to grapple with inner demons. The knowledge about how we did this before, is lost.

Yet, it is still worth remembering that the current suffering might produce something genuine.

Just look to Russia where the poverty of atheist Communism almost killed the respect for its historical culture, yet from this very repression of human diversity came the massive Russian revival that currently sweeps the East. Of which we, by the way, hear so little in the Western media.

Forced upon the Russian people was the Marxist world view, at center of it a remarkably harsh attitude of hatred towards traditional religion. In the Soviet Union, people were not in any way free to believe as they pleased, but were forced to adhere to an atheist tyranny that denied them religious freedoms. The spoken goal was to eradicate religion and old traditions all together. They were also told that God is dead.

Christian Orthodoxy experienced a massive revival in the Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union precisely under the tyranny of atheism under the Communist decades.

Today over 70 % of the Russian population adhere to the Orthodox Christian faith, maybe the most underreported revival in our time.