What shall the righteous do?
Culture - God marginalized in 20th century, so what drives our culture?
Enables and affirms whatever we choose to do. Culture is a term that is now fluid enough to bring together all of the contradictions with which we choose to live.
Definition
"Effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential situations that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives."
Should life be coherent? Should culture be coherent?
Well, do you want the answers to these questions to be coherent?
People living with contradictions struggle with the meaning of coherence.
Daniel Yelkelovich-
"A genuine cultural revolution is one where there is a decisive break from the shared values of the past, particularly with those that deal with the questions about purpose & nature of life"
Yet fundamental questions remain unanswered.
When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything. - Chesterton
Taking away the anchor of truth is the beginning of the end.
So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.
-Malcolm Muggeridge
The foundation of our thinking has changed. Ohio State University built the first "post modern" building. The building was designed was "no purpose in mind". Stairs went nowhere, random pillars. The architect was quoted as saying "Life is capricious. If life is random and without meaning, why shouldn't our buildings be the same?".
Ravi asked, "Did he do the same with the foundation?"
We can be fooled on the infrastructure of reality, but not the foundations of reality.
1) Eternity- we have a yearning and longing to live. Worship, not love, brings meaning. Created for something beyond our short, physical existence. Redefines existence.
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence: the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves: the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
-The Weight of Glory, paragraph 6
Lose dimension of time, you'll live pragmatically, (only in the moment) and we aren't designed to live that way.
2) Morality - No point of reference anymore. No absolutes. Redefines our essence.
Truth can be propositionally stated. The law of non-contradiction. Open minded leads to close hearted.
We need a moral center. What we have tolerated is now being celebrated.
3) Accountability "It is public scandal that gives offense; it is no sin to sin in secret." -French Dramatist, Moyer
Redefines our conscience
4) Charity-
Have we progressed? One on one, concessions are made and recognition of something lost.
Culture has collapsed. Yet, community is still longed for. Coherence is still sought
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