Pastor's sermons yesterday on avoiding the world's system of thought and actions, along with a conversation I had on "Through Gates of Splendor" yesterday came together overnight into what may be a realization about where the current world system is headed.
Leaving the theology of it all to Pastor, I have been an observer of the current world system professionally for 42 years.
Speaking of how the book or movie "Through Gates of Splendor" makes us cry as we identify with the families who went through that experience, I think of C.S. Lewis and many other great minds before him who said that reading teaches us empathy with vast numbers of people and events we will never know personally. That thought has often been given in history as one of the primary reasons for reading.
Today though, that kind of reading is often called "emotion porn." Today's cultural leaders believe we somehow read to bring excitement into dull lives. They say that crying over a life like Jim Elliott's is merely using his life as a cleansing experience to feel better about ourselves, like we can become heroic by identifying with him. That it is just another form of "cultural appropriation" like wearing blackface or dressing in Asian clothes when you are not Asian.
The same people who believe they can completely reinvent themselves several times in a lifetime think we are wrong for reading about the lives of others, real or fictional. The same people who play dystopian or futuristic video games the entire time they are home after work think it is wrong for us to read about history.
I am going to suggest that this is an effort to stop us from reading and transmitting our history between generations. To break our education system two ways: we won't be able to read and we won't even know there are vast amounts of history out there worth reading.
There is a philosophy out there called solipsism, the belief that I am alone in the universe, with everything and everyone around me only being products of my imagination and props in my own personal play.
People who believe that or some form of it are trying to influence us away from identifying with the lives of others or even being interested to know about them. The world has been pulling us away from reading for quite some time. Now they are trying to shame us about it.
This is not about readers and non-readers. We have some brilliant people at Tab who freely admit they are not readers. But what if none of us were? How long would it take to destroy our memory that any history came before us? Or making it theological in the end, how long would it take to eradicate our memory of our great cloud of witnesses?
I love to read. I also love history. We need to learn about those who made us free by protecting defending and perpetuating the word of God. There is no freedom outside Jesus Christ and the Constitution makes no sense without The Word which taught us The Law, who then enabled us to understand what freedom was.
Our Constitution is a document that must be read or the people that try to dissuade us from reading and learning history will be able to convince us that nearly anything is right or legal.