"How Can We Use Our Knowledge to Heal Our Broken World?"
... the massive influx of impressions is so great; surprising, barbaric, and violent things press so overpoweringly--"balled up into hideous clumps"--win the youthful soul; that it can save itself only by taking recourse in premeditated stupidity.
--Friedrich Nietzsche
(By stupidity Nietzsche meant cultural anesthetic)
If you haven't figured it out by now everything is broken, you and I broke nations, broken cultures, broken societies, broken churches and families and individuals, and on top of that everything else in our world suffers the debility of sin, broken everything eventually. That is a cutting edge to our lives and we struggle against it.
God of course knew from the instant he created the cosmos that we would be dealing with these curses (often blessings). We are all shaped by the story of scripture and God knows intimately what will be hard and our suffering as well he has full knowledge of. He also knows what we will do with what we have.
Loving all of this brokenness is hard!
It is overwhelming!
Disengagement seems to be the hallmark of modern life. Why? We are all so overwhelmed by technology, media, and our choices to keep up that we just disengage. And when we disengage we retreat into our own bubble, our own lives and shut out church and the people and things in society that we need and that need us.
The Enlightenment fooled us into believing that the more we know, the more knowledge we have the better life will be. But that has shown itself to be just another illusion of our fallen world. We can know everything all day long yet that is not what makes us whole or happy.
"Here's the basic situation. On the one hand: the Web, satellite cable TV, PalmPilot, DVD, Ethernet--Virtual Environments everywhere. On the other hand: cloning, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics--Virtual Beings everywhere. Someday, when people (or whatever they are) look back on our time, all this will appear as a single development, called something like "The Information Revolution," and the lesson of that revolution will have been this: what counts is the code. Silicon- or carbon-based. Artifact or animate. The difference between them is disappearing. This is not science fiction. This is really happening. Right now, in an Atlanta hospital, there is a quadriplegic with his brain directly wired to a computer. He can move the cursor with his thoughts.
The moving cursor doesn't really need explaining--it comes down to digital bytes and neurochemical spikes. What needs explaining is our equanimity in the face of staggering developments. How can we go about our business when things like this are happening? How can we just read the article, shake our heads, and turn the page? If creatures from outer space sent a diplomatic mission to the U.N., how long would it be before we were taking that in stride? Before Comedy Central send-ups were more entertaining than the actual creatures. About six months?
Soap-opera politics. The therapy industry. Online communities. Digital effects. Workshops for every workplace. Viagra, Prozac, Ritalin. Reality TV. Complete makeovers. Someday, it will be obvious that all the content on our information platforms converges on this theme: there is no important difference between fabrication and reality, between a chemical a pill introduces and one your body produces, between role-playing in marital therapy and playing your role as a spouse, between selling and making, campaigning and governing, expressing and existing. And that is why we moved on after September 11, after an event that seemed so enormous, so horrific, so stark, that even the great blob of virtuality that is our public culture would be unable to absorb it. But it could. It has. Here's how... Our minds are the product of total immersion in a daily experience saturated with fabrications to a degree unprecedented in human history. People have never had to cope with so much stuff, so many choices. In kind and number.
From the article:
Harper's Magazine, April, 2002, by Thomas de Zengotita
We have sold our souls to our own inventions, to our self-serving technology. They numb us, we have no choice but to be numb.
When Mom said to be careful what you put into your mind she knew what the end result could be. But at that time my mother said that there were no computers. Yet in this numbing overwhelming oppressive world we have created for ourselves Christ remains sovereign and supreme. God's Truth is still the TRUTH!!
But selfishly we have decided to cast aside Truth as God has presented it for Toxic Expressive Individualism and moral relativism. Makes us feel like we are in control right? No one moral authority is better than anyone else's so we have this blame culture that is nose-diving to violence as the only way to prove they are right or righteous.
We ignore God or pretend he is thinking like we think.
I was with a few people recently who did nothing but complain about masks and vaccines and our moral failures as a nation, blame, blame blame. But...they did not offer to do anything to make the world a better place.
We cannot just curse the darkness.
We must take responsibility for the way things are. We are part of this world and this culture, we do not live in a vacuum. Yet our sinful natures tell us to take no responsibility and to blame everyone else. The Spiritual War that rages around us is deeply involved.
Ephesians 6:12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places...
We are constantly tempted to rebel and most of us take the bait.
Christ called us to be the Salt & the Light because those are things that affect the environment. We don't curse the darkness we look for reasons to turn on the light. In our "whatever" culture we are the ones that step forward in love hope and forgiveness. You see what we have done is to casually disregard other people and their community thereby cutting ourselves off from what God has intended, we think we then have no responsibility.
This separation we have bought into through our technology is no different than what Adam/Eve hides from God. Our hiding does not change our hearts' desires. Václav Havel, the Czech playwright who became president of his nation argued, “The secret of man is the secret of his responsibility.”
We are all responsible for what we have in front of us now in America.
What will we do with what we know???