Posted by
Spin Cipher on Sunday, December 07, 2008 12:00:00 AM
My incredulity toward peoples' stated beliefs has been increasing in frequency and intensity. Someone will assert an absurdity I think can’t be topped; before the day is over, I hear something even more preposterous. I find myself squinting, "What do they see?” Someone will insist that the blackboard is white, that two plus two equals eight, that water isn’t wet, that evil is good or that good is evil.
A cursory review of current mental health statistics in the United States indicates an alarming epidemic. According to the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, anxiety disorder, a common form of mental illness, affects 40 million adults in the US age 18 and older. If mental illness were a contagious disease, we would be facing an apocalyptic pestilence. The numbers continue to skyrocket.
If you are starting to think “people have gone crazy,” be encouraged; at least you aren’t oblivious. A society’s systemic mental state will decay as its citizens become hostile toward principles of truth and moral absolutes. As a society grows more hostile toward truth, it will become more hostile toward people and institutions traditionally associated with absolute values and standards of truth.
When a nation abandons love for the truth, it will spiral into cultural insanity and eventual cultural demise. Insanity indicates late-stage deception. Cultural death always follows metastatic deception. How is it that the people of Germany, a nation possessing enough scientific and technological intelligence to field some of the most sophisticated military technology in history, could be deluded into following Adolph Hitler, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, into national ruin? Deception eventually left Germany in a heap of rubble.
History is replete with similar examples of megalomaniacs who rose to power on a throne of lies, out of a citizenry left defenseless by ambivalence toward the truth. During many years in professional and volunteer Church work, I have had counless opportunities to spend time with people who would be considered mentally ill. Not one of them possessed a healthy grasp of truth or reality.
Only nations whose citizens defend absolute moral standards and possess a love for truth will survive the tsunami of moral equivocation and situational ethics that is already undermining the nations.
Cultivate love for the truth! If you are unsure what is truth, join the quest. Do not relax your grip. Do not yield. The way that leads to individual and societal stability and longevity is narrow; few find it.