upon further reflection

Agood friend voiced an objection over last week’s article, stating that he was certain that his children would themselves resolutely object to my disparagement of the young, casting them as ill-informed entitled sycophants who knew nothing of any consequence. While disparagement and ridicule were neither my intent nor the direct object of my concern I certainly understand how anyone could have come away with that interpretation.

Good and Evil

While historical ignorance can neither be applied to the young in its entirety nor exclusively (such ignorance goes well beyond youthful exuberance and naiveté), the truth is that such ignorance of history is both widespread and endemic, especially among those who have been inculcated with prevailing secular ideologies entirely devoid of any belief in or knowledge of a power higher than man, to wit…God.

What ought to be asked is why? Why are so many so incomprehensively ignorant of even the most inconsequential yet seriously relevant historical facts? Why are so many so singularly focused and unnecessarily informed on the trivial and the mundane? Why do so many have an overriding sense of entitlement, screaming that the world owes them…something, everything, anything? Why do so few even care? Why do so few find time to give glory and honor to our Creator, to pray and reflect on all which God has given us?

It is perhaps the last question that is most important for if we were to consider precisely why such shallowness seems so pervasive within our society it would lead us to a rather obvious conclusion: we have fully if unwittingly subscribed to the secular creed of “eat, drink, and make merry for tomorrow we die. There is no God, no life beyond this one, no heaven, no hell. So live this earthly life to the fullest because that’s all there is folks.”

Influential philosophers have been pushing this narcotic for centuries and we have chewed the needle to the point that we no longer feel the prick. Thomas Hobbes promoted the idea that “Every man has a right to every thing…”, that man had no conscience, no sense of right or wrong, good or evil. “Whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is…[what] he for his part calleth good: and the object of his hate and aversion, evil;…for these words of good and evil…are ever used with relation to the person that useth them; there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves. The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions.”[1]

Hobbes believed that the natural state of man was war, man against man, and that “this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues. … Therefore, it followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a right to every thing; even to one another’s body.”[2]

But wait! There’s more…next week!

[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Book I, 1651.
[2] Ibid.