January 12, 2015

Cliff's Edge

Calling them bomb detectors, a British contractor pawned off $20 American novelty golf-ball locators on the post-Saddam Iraqi government at $27,000 each, for a total of $55 million.

We’re not to judge, but how can we not marvel at such depravity? After all, how many people will get killed or maimed while this contractor (probably an educated family man) ogles his bank account?

But humans weren’t supposed to be like this now. We were to have, by now, morally advanced. The great hope of the Enlightenment was progress. Once we shed the shackles of faith and superstition, reason and science were to put humans on the path to perfection. Newton’s Principia, Fahrenheit’s thermometer, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Maxwell’s equations—these were evidences that humanity was progressing toward scientific, economic, and moral nirvana.

Though some, like Friederich Nietzsche, warned against the prevailing winds of optimism, he was drowned out by sentiments like this: “Tomorrow,” said a December 31, 1899, New York Times editorial, “we enter upon the last year of a century that is marked by greater progress in all that pertains to the material well-being and enlightenment of mankind than in all the previous history of the race.”

Or this by Charles Kingsley: “The railroad, Cunard’s liners, and the electric telegraph are . . . signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us . . . the ordering and creating God.” According to Hans Koning: “Men and women, more than ever before or since, felt at home on earth and in control of their destiny.”

“It was paradise,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre of those years, “ . . . the miraculous era when cinema, radio, the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane were born. The earth seemed nearly conquered by the joint efforts of Western imperialism and technological promise.”

Nothing, it seemed, could stop us.

Nothing? Well, one event did somewhat damper the enthusiasm. It was called World War I. And if we didn’t get the message after that war, we certainly got it after World War II, the Holocaust, the Gulag, the atomic bomb, and the killing fields of Cambodia. And the message was: the human race is sick, evil, and corrupted. As Paul wrote before the Enlightenment: “There is no one who seeks God. . . . For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:11-23). Or as Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote after it: “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

We didn’t greet the opening of the twenty-first century with the optimism that our great-grandparents did the twentieth, did we? And no wonder: After all, just 15 percent through century 21 we’ve had September 11, ISIS beheadings on YouTube, and Ebola. (Oh, yes, according to the Enlightenment, humanity was going to eradicate all disease, as well as war.)

None of this should come as a surprise, at least not to anyone who takes seriously the scriptural description of the human condition and what the Word of God portends for the last days before the second coming of Jesus. “At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other. . . . Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold” (Matt. 24:10-12).There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then” (Dan. 12:1).Fallen! Fallen! is Babylon the Great! She has become a dwelling for demons and a haunt for every impure spirit, a haunt for every unclean bird, a haunt for every unclean and detestable animal” (Rev. 18:2). Things are going to get worse before lions and lambs lie down together.

We have made some progress. After all, it’s no mean feat creating enough atomic bombs to wipe out humanity a few times over. And surely we are clever enough to come up with even more effective means of killing. So, between the advancing technology of mass destruction, mixed with the morals of those who would pawn off golf-ball locators as bomb detectors, the future looks so bright, so hopeful, so great. Who needs the Second Coming? n

Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide. He is also featured on the site 1844madesimple.org.

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