January 17, 2015

In Their Own Words XXVII: Cheapened and Debased Existence


“Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people’s interests into account, who’s dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality.”  – Steven Pinker, Cognitive Scientist


I guess I should start my two part commentary on this quote by asking a few questions.

What gives things their value?
What makes things beautiful?
What makes things moral or ethical?
Who measures these things?

Is it possible that the observer or the measure of these things affect the value, beauty or morality of that which is being evaluated?

It is nearly always the assumption of the atheist or non-believer that true unadulterated ideas of justice, knowledge and morality can be truly grasped and understood absent of God. The above quote proves this. Steve Pinker is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author. He is also Harvard College Professor. He is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. According to an issue of Salon magazine, He is also a proud atheist along with his wife. (1)

It never seems to sink in that things like knowledge can only be grasped in a relative way without an objective/absolute knowledge/truth source. True knowledge and true justice can only be understood as such in a perfectly moral context…associated to a perfectly moral and just God. In an absence of God or an ultimate Moral Law Giver, who supplies the gauge for morality? Who could? What is left after God that is cognizant and able make a judgment like this? Man is all that is left. So I ask you, is man really the measure by which you want you morality and justice defined. I cringe at the thought and so should you.

Man becomes the definer of what is moral, what is just, what is beautiful. Therein lies the problem. These things are therefore defined by a capricious ever wayward and sinful being.

Job 5:7 ~ “Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.”

Galatians 5:17 ~ “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.”

Romans 3:10-11 ~ “As it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.

In other words, when sinful men meet a fallen world, sparks fly. There’s something about man born into the world that inevitably leads to trouble. Mankind and their thinking is infamously fickle and unreliable when it is absent an unconditional love towards others. Even in their redeemed state man will struggle in sin and cannot fully think clearly and righteously. Man needs a closely intertwined relationship with God if he wants any hope of making an even remotely moral decision. If this relationship with God is compromised in any way, man quickly falls by the wayside and digresses from true moral thinking and true knowledge and wisdom. Why? Because the fear of God and understanding of biblical precepts is the beginning of true knowledge and wisdom. The man who leaves God behind like the atheist then uses the gauge of the culture and society to measure their morality, their baseline of knowledge and what they consider is beautiful.

The farther the society itself is from God the worse or more inaccurate the measure of these things. I believe this is why we still have some modicum or illusion of morality in society but as more and more of society falls away from Christianity, the more morals begin to wander into an amoral desert. This once Christian nation still has residual morality floating around its system. I believe this is due to some of its foundations being rooted in the God of the Bible and Biblical principles. As time goes on and more and more people apostatize from the One True God, the more we begin to see the underlying moral fabric of the United States dissolve to immorality.

That is why the new measure of beauty is an image of perverted sexuality, not just aesthetic /moral beauty. It isn’t an issue of aesthetics as it is an issue of: What can your beauty or handsomeness do for me. People are things to be cherished not objects on display, objects to be controlled or owned, objects to be used and discarded. Therefore beauty and people’s beautiful character are nothing more than a commodity to be traded or bartered withn today. Many will claim they are “moral” but are in reality self-serving and self-seeking. Marriages are not even institutions of selfless love, many are institutions of selfish love and that is why more than half of marriages today end in divorce. People want to know why so many marriages are failing. I pretty much just told you why. People enter into a Godly covenant….without God.

Marriages without God then become nothing more than sociocultural contracts. It is God that keeps the marriage together when the garbage hits the fan. No God, no restraint. No restraint…failed marriage and divorce. A wandering eye then leads to a suffocating lie. At the point of departure from God men and women become products not people. This is the new measure of beauty when we deviate from God and make sinful wayward man the measure of value. We become nothing more than demoralized or devalued merchandise. We saw the same in the Old and New Testament when people abandoned a proper understanding of God.

Jeremiah 23:14 ~ “But in the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing: they commit adultery and walk in lies; they strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one turns from his evil; all of them have become like Sodom to me, and its inhabitants like Gomorrah.”

1 Corinthians 5:1-2 ~ “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.

[Concluded in Next Post]

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