I was listening to a Ted Talk the other day that I found
extremely interesting. It was titled, “Why you think you’re right – even when
you’re wrong”. The speaker, Julie Galef, was making the point that we believe
certain things dogmatically because of our worldview and that occasionally this
worldview should be questioned. After all, how do you know if your worldview is
right or not?
Topics like this make me nervous in general. Not because I’m
scared to question my beliefs, but because I’m concerned for the worldview of
the speaker. Questions that invite you to examine your worldview and its
accuracy can lead you down a long and complicated path filled with
non-committal answers and a haze between right and wrong. Haziness between
right and wrong is never good because how then do we base our morals? How do we
plant our feet firmly on a ground that’s consistently changing by the picking apart of ourselves?
This is the age that we live in. It’s an age that invites
you to question everything you believe and to dissect it all accordingly. To
not do this is to render yourself backwards and close-minded. But I think
that’s wrong. And lest you also put me in the “backwards and close-minded and
500 years ago” camp, let me explain myself.
There was a certain time in which people believed things
without thinking much about them. We didn’t have to. Certain bedrock
institutions of society didn’t make it necessary for us to question what we
believed. Most people believed in God and went to church on Sunday. If you
didn’t go to church on Sunday, it’s very likely that you were the oddball of
your town. Homosexual marriage was not even a question because homosexuality
was condemned, no questions asked. If you had a child out of wedlock, which
didn’t happen that often because The Pill had not yet been invented and most
people were too afraid to have sex before they were married (afraid of God or
their mother or an unplanned pregnancy – you pick) you went somewhere else and
hid out until the baby was born. Abortions weren’t as common because medical
technology had not advanced that far. No one worried about pornography being a
huge issue because to get a copy of something pornographic took a great deal of
time and effort and most men weren’t willing to go through that trouble.
Embryonic cell research wasn’t really a matter of ethics because that
technology hadn’t been invented. Welfare wasn’t as big of an issue because not
that many people were on it; churches and family members took care of you if
you were down on your luck. The list goes on and on. And so many people didn’t
have a hard time with the debates on certain moral issues because those
options didn’t exist.
But, alas, they exist now and so we must use our brains and
our hearts to determine what’s right and what’s wrong. And that comes to my
issue. As Christians, we know certain things are wrong not just because of what
we’ve been taught but because of what we read in the Bible. We know it’s wrong
to have sex outside of marriage. We know gay marriage is wrong. And we know
abortion is wrong because God references life in the womb as being a precious
thing. And so there we have our moral stance. But what happens when we start to
question it? What happens when we try to gray out the black and white areas of
our lives?
It is the tendency of my generation and, in theory, the one
preceding it, to reject anything that is traditional in favor of anything
modern. We like to follow the “anything goes” trend. We mock and deride those
with “old-fashioned” traditional values and look instead towards those who
don’t seem to have any values at all. And this is where my generation sits. Not
wanting to seem overly harsh and judgmental, we eschew traditional thinking
because it’s seen as precisely that: harsh and judgmental. And now we have so
shunned standards and ethics and morality of any kind that we are to the point
where we don’t really believe in anything.
You see, the interesting thing about morals and standards is
that they don’t change precisely because that’s what they are. They are a set
of heart rules, for lack of a better term, and those stay the same. They don’t
change with time and they stand up to scrutiny and suspicion. When you take
away from those heart rules and repeatedly tear them down and take them apart,
they don’t change, but you do. In fact you are the only thing that changes –
what’s written in stone stays in stone.
If you find that your heart rules have changed drastically
over time and if one day you decide something is right and the next day it’s
suddenly wrong without whim or reason, then perhaps it’s time to check your
heart. There is, after all, a great sense of relief in knowing that Jesus
Christ never changes - He most certainly is unshakeable - and that if we
believe in Him, we won’t either.
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