Wednesday, January 30, 2013

What's wrong with the world?

Here is the video blog with basically the same text posted below it.


Over the past couple of months I have seen many people and politicians make comments relating to the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Many people have simply expressed concern and wished the victims families, while others have gone on to lay the blame for the shooting in various places. Likely all of us who have been affected by the news have wondered why this happened, and questioned at least in part, “What went wrong to allow this to happen?” Some have blamed the easy availability of guns, some have blamed violence in the media, some have blamed the lack of proper mental healthcare and prevention, and others have been quick to point to the lack of a belief in God in the school system as at least a partial cause.
I am not trying here to answer why this particular tragedy happened, but rather why these types of tragedies are becoming more common and why I believe we should expect it to happen more not less in the future. Now before I get into the meat of this article, I want to warn you that I am going to be stating what I believe to be true about America and the world. So if you do not want to read about morality, culture, religion, God, and what is wrong with the world then please do not go any further. If you do not come here to read these types of deeper discussions, I am okay with that, but consider yourself for warned, no one is making you read further.

What is wrong with the world?


I am (and so are you!)
In the early 20th Century a newspaper in England asked some writers to respond to the question, to answer the “What is wrong with the world?” and author G.K. Chesterton had the shorted reply which was, “Dear Sirs, I am.” What Chesterton was reflecting is the Christian notion of the fallenness of humankind. That in spite of all of our good intentions we all have a tendency to do bad things. We all can be selfish, prideful, and hurtful, and if we are left to on our own these tendencies will over rule even our best intentions.
How many of us, when we hear the news or hear about a problem in the world first react with self-reflection about the ways you have failed? Jesus said in Matthew 7 that when we go to take a speck out of someone else's eye, we should we should first look in the mirror to see if we have a plank in our own eye. This sort of self-examination is unusual in our culture because we are regularly told that the problem is not our fault, but rather it is a societal, economic, or educational problem. Even when we do see a problem in ourselves, it is not our fault but rather we are simply products of our upbringing, class, or race. People are no longer evil, rather they just have a mental illness. The solution for guilt is not to repent and change, but to go to a counselor (or Oprah if you are really famous) to help you overcome your mental defect.

What is wrong with anything?

This leads to a the deeper question of how do we know when something is wrong in the first place. In the western world, right and wrong used to be defined by the Judeo-Christian moral code as expressed primarily in the Bible in places like the 10 commandments (Exodus 20). Morals were what God said was right, and we believed that because God created the world and us, that these rules reflected the way that things really should be. Even if you did not personally go to a Christian church, enough people in your community did to help set the standard for everyone.
For the vast majority of people now though this is not the case. Most people do not go to church now, and the dominant view of the world is not Christian, but rather a materialistic secularism. Although many people still claim to believe in God even if they do not attend church, if asked to describe God they often describe God in a very different way than Bible describes God. Further, when asked to define right and wrong, most people will have a vague notion that agrees with traditional Christian values, which is probably some left over values from previous generations, but in any place where traditional morals might infringe on something they want to do, their personal desires take priority over their claimed morals. In this case, they fall back to the modern notion that each individual can decide what is right for themselves.
For instance, most people will still claim that divorce in general is wrong, but very few people who want a divorce will claim it is wrong for them. Rather, personal happiness becomes a higher value than a commitment to a marriage.
Unfortunately, this is true even among many people claiming to be Christians and attending church regularly. The problem is many Christians do not really believe that God's rules are good and therefore they never take the time to even study them. We Christians are often viewed as hypocrites because we don't live up to what we say we believe, and I have seen this lived out time and again. If we claim that God has the best in mind for us, and then fail to even know what He says or try live up to what we say is best, then we show we do not really believe it ourselves. That is a pretty big log in your eye.

Rejecting God and rejecting good.

My conclusion is that our collective behavior shows that our culture has rejected the idea that God is active in the world. Therefore, we have also rejected the idea of a code right and wrong that everyone agrees upon. We look like the Hebrews did during the time of the judges when “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
So in looking for an answer to why such an event like killing of children in Newtown happened, I challenge you to ask yourself why it is even wrong. If your answer is simply, “of course it is wrong” or “because it is obvious,” then think about why it was not obvious to Adam Lanza. What could you say to stop the next Adam Lanza? If what is right and wrong is defined simply by my own feelings or what is obvious, then people like Adam Lanza will continue to kill and hurt others when they feel like it. In fact, if this is the way you determine right and wrong, you may be hurting others and justifying it and not even know it because you don't even have a standard outside of yourself by which to examine your own behavior.
So as you think about the bad stuff in the world, consider, how do you know what is really right and wrong and whether or not you are really a good person?
In a future post, I will try to make the case for that Christian morals really are good and are good for you.
God bless.