Thursday, April 23, 2009

Devolution

"So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved." Acts 2:46-47

"But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ." 2 Cor 11:3

"Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen;" Rev 2:4-5


"Remember from where you have fallen," and make no mistake we have fallen. Man attained his peak at Creation and has been falling ever since. Many would have us believe that each day we draw closer to the perfection of the species as the human mind continues to evolve. True we heap up knowledge and our discoveries upon the Tower of Knowledge that man has been building ever since he believed the lie that he could climb up to God on his own. Yet we don't know what to do with such knowledge. It's as if the progression of society has an inverse relationship with our understanding. Each new discovery leads to a new way of avoiding true growth. We are withdrawing further and further into our own self-centered worlds with less and less of an excuse to reach out to the world around us. Our world today is better connected than it has ever been. I have the ability to communicate, through this very venue to thousands of people across the globe. With my cell phone I can call someone thousands of miles away from the middle of nowhere. There is an unfathomable amount of information at my fingertips all neatly organized for my by the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia. Yet Harpers reported that, although the average number of words in the written vocabulary of a 6-14 year old American child in 1945 was 25,000, in 2000 the same demographic held a written vocabulary of 10,000 words.

http://harpers.org/archive/2000/08/0066886

10th grade physics teaches us that any collection of matter follows a necessary trend from order to increasing disorder. The amount of entropy (simply, disorganization) increases with time. This is why ice melts and heat rises; energy as with matter moves in whatever direction equalizes the system with its surroundings. Over time the original state is impossible to discern from the current state because it's integrity has been so compromised. A glass of water is fundamentally different from a glass of ice and, unless it is rescued into a freezer, all ice is doomed to become water and all water to become vapor.

Granted, the science gets a bit sketchy when we try to apply the laws of thermodynamics to the human psyche. But understand that the human mind is inseparable from the human body. Our minds exist within the physical confines of our brains. As our bodies degrade so do our minds, such that, usually, an 87 year old mind is fundamentally different from a 17 year old mind. Our bodies are decomposing from the moment we are born as we break down from a complex organism to more simple elements. Collectively, we are following the same pattern, where we started as a perfect society we are breaking down into simpler elements indiscernible from the original organism. Each generation carries genetic imperfections forward as the organization of our DNA is corrupted by mistakes in transcription and translation.

But this degradation is not quick enough to account for the rapid devolution of the human psyche. We have galloped along down the road leading from Perfection to Entropy on a horse called Selfish Indulgence, or more broadly "Sin" (ooh everyone liked that one). Sin pollutes our minds and undermines our moral navigation by severing the connection between our Moral Compass, our eternal spirit and our corporeal mind. We are not only blind and deaf but Sin rewires our telegraph lines so we now receive only polluted information.

As we continue to heap up knowledge and attempt to understand it based on faulty observations and misleading experiences, we pile mistaken assumption on mistaken assumption until the Tower is as fundamentally different from the Truth as a glass of water is from a hydrogen atom.

The state of things is bad enough without considering how sin has polluted the church and corrupted the purity of the gospel found there. Selfish Indulgence, Pride, and Fear have infected the Body of Christ and the infection is spreading, largely unchecked, to the vital organs. If ever there was a time when the people of God needed to turn to the Great Physician it is today, and tomorrow, and each day until He steps in an corrects the mistakes Himself and restores Perfection to the Fallen.

2 comments:

  1. "We have galloped along down the road leading from Perfection to Entropy on a horse called Selfish Indulgence..." You LOVED that line, didn't you? :0) I think it's great! Although you're entirely too smart for me. I had to use my dictionary a couple times! Preach it, sistah! Love you!

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  2. They just come to me...and no, I'm not. I had to google the second law of thermodynamics to make sure I wasn't stating it incorrectly, and maybe I am!

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