Where do I start? I've got several thoughts in my mind which I would like to get off my chest. They are in no way well thought through, polished pieces of genius, but mere rough sketches of my thoughts, recorded for posterity's sake, and they are as follows:
- Our culture today waves very eagerly, values which were once built on Biblical truths, but now are divorced from their roots. When you look at the attempts to justify how these values are self-sufficient, you see through the folly of their wisdom, and all you have left is merely an empty, hollow shell of flimsy morality. Take for example the value of a human life.The Bible teaches that man and woman were created with different roles, and declared them to be 'very good'. What you see here is a case where our worth as human beings are not dependent on the roles we play, or the skills we have, but rather on the external existence of someone from which our value is derived - both man and woman are declared to be 'very good', and that statement is backed by the death of Jesus on the Cross. However, when you deny the possibility of an external source of our value, ie God, the only other way you have to derive value is from within the system, and that may be many things, eg. possessions, skills, status, etc. Now, as a brief aside, worth is not a self-supporting concept. It is a relationship dependent concept, meaning that worth, or value, must come from somewhere. However, when you begin to work from within the system, your value as a human inadvertently begins to get tied-up with what you have or what you do, allowing the existence of a social hierarchy where one group of humans are legitimately superior to another group, given the proper context. Here is where the cheek of the human race can be seen: we loudly declare that all humans are equal, since we deny the idea that any one group of humans are superior to another, yet at the same time boldly deny the God from whom our equal value is derived from. We want the gifts, but not the Giver.
- Our culture, in the attempt to avoid considering the harsh possibility that there is a creator God who holds us responsible for our actions, have very cleverly announced that all 'truth' is truth. This is my other contention with our modern culture. If, for example A=>(G=H), and B=>(G=/=H), logically, one would conclude that A and B both cannot be true at the same time. However, our wisdom of today is like a child standing before the dessert tray deciding between red velvet, chocolate, or butter cake. She can't decide which one is best, so she eats all. At the same time. In the 'logic', or 'illogic' of this Zeitgeist, you can both be an elephant, and not be an elephant, all at the same time. This, in my opinion, is a cop-out from any and all earnest discussion. I fear that such an outlook to life may be a bigger disservice to our society as a whole, since if there is no longer any objective measure of truth, then the only way left to make sense of this reality is by using our own individual experience as a yardstick. As we turn to gaze deeper within ourselves for the validation of reality, we will inadvertently be increasingly isolated from people around us, since no other validation of reality matters any longer except our own. Academia will crumble, as the opinions of those who have spent years dedicating their life to better understand a single subject matter will now be as valuable as the thoughts of the clinically insane bum who lives under the bridge on the same matter. Perhaps I am merely naysaying, but perhaps I may be right. Who knows?
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