Have you at times thought the world is simply gone off the deep end? Are things happening that make no sense, at least based upon how you’ve always understood the world?
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #88 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
Contemporary culture seems bent upon embracing ideas, attitudes, values, and practices earlier cultures considered lacking in common sense. I call this phenomenon a celebration of irrationality.
It goes right to worldview. What you believe about God, life, and truth determines how you evaluate and what ideas, attitudes, values, and practices you embrace.
The prime reason contemporary culture celebrates irrationality is that the current cultural zeitgeist, or spirit of the age jettisoned the idea of moral absolutes for moral relativism.
“There is no truth.” No God, but no truth. Or, we hear, “It may be true for you but not true for me.”
Since we can know nothing for sure, we cannot believe anything for sure.
The result is an increase in moral depravity—overall cultural degradation, death of conscience—rage in the streets, mass shooters, loss of meaning of life—with a consequent uptick in nihilism, loss of definition of happiness and contentment—American society possesses more material abundance, is healthier, and lives longer than any society in history, yet we are the most unhappy, loss of common purpose, common cause, common sense.
The outcomes of this morally relativistic zeitgeist are many and all of them are negative:
- Anxiety – uncertainty, fear, national mental health crisis, increasing youth suicides.
- Abortion – icy indifference toward human life. If children are an inconvenience, just get rid of them. Kill off our future. It’s heartless, ruthless, senseless.
- “Woke” ideology – In name of tolerance yields intolerance. It promotes racism, lawlessness, victimhood, cancel culture, suppression free speech, neurotic self-righteousness, totalitarian attitudes. Yet universities, entertainment, corporations, and now government are embracing it. It’s dangerous, because it kills everything it touches.
- LGBTQ+ – gender fluidity, which does not actually exist, yet we embrace it. Utter pronoun nuttiness. The LGBTQ+ “movement” decries Creator God, denies science and biology, and destroys humanity.
- Substance Abuse – now a fentanyl epidemic, with narcotics becoming more toxic every year, and yet we keep wanting more to fill the emptiness within. It does not work, and it is irrational, but we keep hammering ourselves with hard drugs.
- Debt – In the late 1980s, we legalized commercial gambling, and now, worse by far, we’ve decriminalized and are now promoting sports gambling, the worst kind of gambling.
And in Washington, DC, we run up the National Debt to (at this moment) over $31.8T. We spend beyond our means and we spend beyond other peoples’ means (our children and grandchildren).
There’s no piper to be paid, no reckoning, or so we choose to believe. It’s irrational.
Our culture cannot sustain itself indefinitely with this kind of pell-mell rush to celebrate irrationality, to bury ourselves.
So, what do we do?
Scripture says, “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth” (Eph. 6:13-14).
In the face of untruth, Christians share truth and the Truth. In the face of irrationality, Christians share the rationality of biblical teaching.
Stand firm with the belt of truth.
Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Download an episode for your friends. For more Christian commentary, check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com.
And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2023
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