Living With a Ruined Mind
When we choose not to deal with God, then our minds have to go to work. We need to find ways to convince ourselves that God doesn’t exist or God doesn’t matter.
We have worked on this in our country with some interesting mental gymnastics. In the public square, we attempt to follow a strict Darwinian evolution model, for example, and desperately hold on to natural selection and random mutation as the sole mechanisms for the development of life. However, this position is becoming more and more difficult to defend.
Origins of life research (“abiogenesis”) provides an impossible scenario for a strict view of Darwinian evolution to work. You see, in order for natural selection and random mutation to occur in the first place, you need something to select from; something to mutate. The apparent necessity of an outside agent of some kind getting the ball rolling is simply dismissed as something beyond the scope of discussion.
Those who do believe in God may also be tempted to follow viewpoints that may be more about themselves than about God’s desire, focusing on what they want, not what God wants.
One of the interesting attempts to cloud our thinking about God today is to is question the validity of God’s Word. When Bible scholars go out of their way to try to show the Bible doesn’t mean what it says it means, always look for a possible “conflict of interest,” from their lives.
The most common and controversial issue today where some contemporary Bible scholars attempt to undo a clear overall message from Scripture is supporting sexual fulfillment outside of a male/ female marriage. Whether the issue is same-sex sexuality or sexuality outside of marriage between men and women, they have taken a position contrary to traditional “sex between a man and woman within a marriage covenant.”
Scholars can choose to say the teachings of the Bible are out dated because the Bible falls strongly on the male/female marriage side, and indeed some scholars simply declare the Bible irrelevant to the matter in question. They say the Bible writers couldn’t comprehend an issue this complex.
The challenge of taking this position on the Bible in general is that it places a person outside of the scope of traditional Christianity. Christians claim God is the source of the Bible. God is certainly capable of knowing about situations we face in life today, having inspired Bible writers to address similar situations.
Once our choices turn us away from God, then our thinking goes to work. Deceiving ourselves in order to get what we want is not a difficult task. We are experts at it. Self-worship and deception are a great match.
What are some other issues upheld by traditional Christian morality that are being challenged today?
