Tuesday, May 18, 2010

The Drive for Pleasure

One of the most powerful and persuasive lines from Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias's work is his conclusion on the state of man and his drive for SOMETHING. It goes something like this:

"the drive for power or the drive for pleasure - Hitler or Hugh Hefner."

Hugh Hefner is every bit more impactful to the world's morals and mores than Adolf Hitler could ever have dreamt. This article from Commentary magazine yields some telling moments as to the shaping of Hugh Hefner and his desire to drive out Puritan morality. He has been overwhelingly successful - and how far worse off are we all.

A sexual pervert for a grandfather drew Hugh to a stunning conclusion.

When Hugh found out years later that Grandpa was a pervert, he blamed the puritanical sexual tyranny that twisted good people into sad deformity.



Later, a fiance who cheated on him while he sought to remain chaste shook him badly.

Then one day Millie confessed in tears that she had slept with another man. Hefner was shattered. He forgave her, they married, but his faith in romance and female virtue was never the same.

Such are the direction posts in life. Apres moi, le deluge.


Maranatha!

The Moral Lives of Babies

I read this article in the New York Times about two weeks ago and was as fascinated as Albert Mohler, Jr. was. His conclusions and mine are similar. Infants are made in the Image of God and are endowed with a vastly undeveloped - yet innate - sense of right and wrong. I commend this link to you here: http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100512/the-moral-life-of-babies-and-the-ideological-life-of-adults/index.html

The actual NYT article is linked here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html


It is dismaying but humorous to read the scientists struggling take on the origins of this moral sense - in infants. Of course, they HAVE to defend evolution or lose their research funding, but you can just see that they've opened a window to the human soul and they are fascinated by its implications. They suggest and hint at a supernatural "cause" for this "blueprint" of morality - but they cannot bring themselves to do more than suggest it. "GOD DID IT" is shouting at them in their work, but their research funding won't allow them to go with their intuitions.

Kind of like when Jesus did a miracle, it was seen by all, but His opponents had to come up with a convoluted explanation for it - up to and including blasphemy. Deny the miracle or deny the cause of the miracle, one or the other. Same with the moral sense of babies. Fascinating stuff.


Maranatha!