Monday, June 5, 2017
551 - Standards and Reason
Spirituality
Column No. 551
June 6, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
What I’m saying is: the Bible already told us so.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) credits Mark Bauerlein’s recent First Things article (link), "The Internet isn't Broken."
June 6, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Standards and Reason
By
Bob Walters
May the words of my
mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock
and my Redeemer. – Psalm 19:14
My now
nearly-10-years-deceased friend, pastor and Christian mentor Russ Blowers used
to start his sermons with that gentle, humble scriptural meditation.
The
preceding 13 verses of this truly beautiful psalm of David declare the “glory of the Lord” and describe how the
heavens “pour forth speech”
proclaiming the “work of His hands.”
It is from this “speech spoken by the
heavens” that David begs God to help him to hear and be warned of his own
human errors and faults; that his own words (verse 14) would be pleasing in
God’s sight.
Words, it would seem, matter.
Moving
ahead to Jesus in Matthew 12:22-37, the Pharisees dismissively accuse Jesus of
being the devil himself, driving out demons “as only Beelezbub” (sometimes understood as Satan, other times a
conglomeration of evil spirits) could. Jesus fired back with great wisdom and
reason about the Kingdom of God, how God handles blasphemy against him (Jesus)
and against the Holy Spirit, and describes the evidence of good and evil
contained in words. Jesus ends it in verse 37, telling the Pharisees “…by your words you will be acquitted, and by
your words you will be condemned.”
Words
continue to matter.
There are
hundreds of verses throughout the Bible about being careful with words (Matthew
12:36), being slow to speak (James 1:19), praying with considered patience and
discernment before reacting or speaking (Proverbs 12:18), and the evil snares
attendant to a loose tongue (Proverbs 13:3). Want to see more? Just Google “What does the Bible say about
the power of words.”
That will
keep you busy for days.
But … let’s
move past David and Jesus and on up to a modern fellow named Evan
Williams. Heard of him? He invented Twitter, perhaps history’s greatest
enabler and repository of un-careful, hasty, ill-considered and far-reaching
words, reaction and speech. The
43-year-old billionaire – considering Twitter’s unfiltered morass of human
neural firings – lamented, “I think the Internet is broken,” to a New York Times reporter who opined that
Twitter “is a hive of trolling and abuse that seems unable to stop.”
The
hyper-progressive Williams predictably (and disparagingly) apologizes for the
role Twitter played and is playing in recent politics (Trump, etc.), but
recognizes that Twitter’s overall problem is bigger than that. Williams originally – naively and errantly, it
turns out – thought that if everyone could “speak freely,” the world would
“automatically be a better place.” What he
has learned is that when gatekeepers of standards and reason are absent, as on
Twitter, fallen human minds rapidly spew undiscerning words. Truth becomes a
victim of faulty opinions, and life becomes worse, not better.
What I’m saying is: the Bible already told us so.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) credits Mark Bauerlein’s recent First Things article (link), "The Internet isn't Broken."
0 comments:
Post a Comment