Wrestling with a fallen world

This world is being distracted.

It is being duped, lulled to sleep, taken captive.

I’ve known this is true for almost as long as I’ve been alive. I know it because I see it in my own life.

But lately, it’s really bothering me.

I used to wonder how people could be so comfortable in the camps of agnosticism, skepticism, and atheism. Why the mass of men is content to relegate thinking on both physics and metaphysics to university lecture halls and the occasional conversation with a friend who is just as (un)informed then they are. If someone doesn’t know their eternal destiny, how can they rest until they know?

Part of the answer to this question must lie in the fact that this generation has been inoculated against wonder. More specifically, we’ve traded wonder for science because we nonsensically assume that the two cannot peaceably coexist.

Broad-sweeping statements introduced from childhood told us that science explains the world around us – explains our very selves. We can now describe many of the processes of deoxyribonucleic acid and meteorology, plate tectonics and photosynthesis.

But there’s so much we still don’t know about basically everything.

And even if we did, how would our ability to describe the world around us with some degree of certainty make it any less wondrous?

Look at where this attitude has taken us.

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First, consider the popular causes of the most recent decades.

The causes in vogue are notably devoid of human interest, by which I mean interest in human beings as individuals. Causes may care very much about humanity in general and very little about the individuals its logical conclusions may impact.

Two chief examples come to mind. The first is what I describe as Earth-worship. Can you imagine if all the television and radio commercials, PSAs, bumper stickers, marketing, tele-thons, fundraisers, celebrity endorsements, legislation, and other Earth-centered activities in North America and Europe had as their subject Allah or Cthulhu?

I honestly don’t say this as a matter of ridicule. The merits of recycling, climate change, and saving the Anacostia are subjects for another day. Rather, consider the sheer number of people who have adopted environmentalism as a priority, whether in word or deed. As in the church, I am sure that the green movement is composed of both true believers and those who attend the proverbial services – or at least buy energy-efficient light bulbs – to make themselves feel better. And isn’t the fundamental result of this movement a false sense of empowerment – I/You/We Can Save The Earth, as if the planet is permanent, which even the most secular science cannot corroborate; and whether it is or not, that man has the power to save.

What a disturbing twist on the concept of redemption.

The second movement is the great and almost worldwide interest in building an impenetrable barrier between religion and government. To be clear, I am not talking about the “separation of church and state” in the sense Jefferson understood and used the term. I’m talking about the mindset that any argument from absolutes is rejected out of hand in both governance and policymaking… despite the premise of absolute truth being necessarily for the adoption of any meaningful morality. This movement is particularly mind-boggling if you know the history of the twentieth century. If you want to see the ultimate separation of God and state, study Stalin’s Russia, look carefully at Hitler’s Germany.

Ravi Zacharias summarized it well. “In God’s economy, we are meant to love people and use things. Naturalism ends up loving things and using people.”

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When we aren't caught up in causes, we settle into distractions.

Distractions come in all shapes and sizes. My blackberry, my (new) cell phone, my laptop all come to mind as evidence of the technocracy under which the developed world seems to live. But people do eventually tire of the artificial – or, at least, are forced to recognize creation. Even the crackberry addict occasionally catches a sunset, a flower in bloom, some nexus with the natural world. But in most cases, the causes and influences in his or her life have conspired to dull any sort of reaction to the beauty they encounter.

There’s a reason for that.

Tremendous responsibility comes with the knowledge that we, like the world around us, were created. When you consider the amazingly unique nature not just of human beings, but the world in which we live, a sense of unmitigated horror must creep into the unbelieving mind. The implications of the preposterous notion that the world was created specifically to be inhabitable by people, with all their physical, biological, aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual needs, are significant. If the unspeakable beauty of the world, from its deep oceans and starry skies to the miracles of birth and music, is at least in some sense for us, then we have both an insatiable curiosity and a responsibility to search out the why.

So we have been taught to not ask.

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To the believer, the why is glorious. But to the proud and believer alike, the why is life-shattering, because it demands the trade of all causes generated within the self for the cause of Another.

Oh, that God would wake us up, and teach us how to rouse those around us from their slumber.