A story earlier this month in the New York Times reported that “the number of undergraduate philosophy majors is ballooning” at American universities.

“Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal,” the Times article informed. “The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers. On many campuses, debate over modern issues like war and technology is emphasized over the study of classic ancient texts.”

Of course, this makes perfect sense for a post-Christian society that, having rejected biblical revelation, must seek rationalistic systems to explain away everything bad that’s going on, in the process exulting themselves for their “superior knowledge.”

As Jordan explains it, “You go around in human wisdom, and human philosophy, and human viewpoint, and it’s all positive toward man and negative toward God. The viewpoint of the world’s religious system is the same way. Man says, ‘We’re going to work it out; we’re gonna get the answer. We’re going to fix it; we’ll have our wise ideas and we’ll go on,’ and God says that human wisdom is foolishness.”

The Apostle Paul warns in Colossians 2:8, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”

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Just as the Dalai Lama journeyed to the U.S. last week to extol the virtues of compassion in pat phrases like “Be kind,” Pope Benedict is here this week to go to places like the United Nations and urge a return to morals and ethics, blah, blah, blah— no matter what a person’s religious preference.

Benedict reminds me of Constantine, who promoted Christianity for its positive “social effects” on the citizenry, fully assimilating it with paganism to ensure its painless adoption.

As R. Dawson Barlow writes in his 2005 book The Apostasy of the Christian Church, “Constantine saw in the Christian religion a deep-seated morality and a strong, moral work ethic which he thought could cement the Roman Empire together. . . Eventually, this led to his declaration that Christianity was to be the ‘State Religion’ . . . Never had the Christian church seen such phenomenal growth. But this growth was not healthy.

“It brought into the ‘Christian’ community a plethora of pagan traditions, heathen practices and filled its ranks with ‘baptized’ heathens. Becoming a ‘Christian’ ceased to be a matter of believing the gospel of Christ, and evolved into a wise political move for people who wanted to improve their chances of cultural/political advancements. Simply put, being a Christian became an ‘in’ thing.

“It was during this period that scores of non-biblical and scores of anti-biblical doctrines and practices were introduced into Christendom (e.g. prayers for the dead, veneration of angels and dead believers, later promoted to the status of saints, etc.). This was the historical period when the implementation of graven images crept into the Christian ‘religion.’ ”

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Writing specifically on the tremendous influence of pagan Greek philosophy (bordering on an obsession with Aristotle, Socrates, etc.) upon “church fathers” such as Constantine, Barlow relates this classic quote from Sir Robert Anderson:

“What the Old Testament Scriptures were to the writers of the New Testament is what the writings of the Greek philosophers and the cults of classic paganism were to the church fathers.”