Our Degenerate Culture There are two distinctive worldviews that are evident today, the Christian (Biblical) worldview and the Non-Biblical worldviews. I was raised under the Biblical model, and have adhered to its teachings in varying degrees over the years. Over the past twenty years, I have come to realize that the Bible is the only source of truth for living a meaningful life. Needless to say, as an avid reader in my younger years, and then as a university professor, the number of books that I have scanned, read, or gleaned from would run in the multi-hundreds. Each of these writings provided a partial picture of what I needed to know, but it was the Bible that captured my heart, and gave me the answers I needed. A number of books have been written in recent years that talk about our cultural condition in the United States, and where we are headed. I would suggest a few for your consideration: The Sensate Culture, by Harold Brown, 1996 Choice, by Sammy Tippit, 1998 Twilight’s Last Gleaming, by Robert Jeffress, 2011 Implosion, by Joel Rosenberg, 2012 A book of particular interest is The Sensate Culture, by Harold Brown (1996) which traces the roots of our cultural disintegration to the abandonment of the spiritual dimension. He builds upon the earlier work of Russian expatriate and scholar, Pitirim Sorokin who wrote The Crisis of Our Age (1941). What he has to say has great bearing on an understanding of where we are today, and why we are in such a state of decline. Three stages in the development of a culture are identified; 1) the Ideational which sees spiritual truth and values as virtually the only truth and values worthy of the name. God and the divine world are the highest and truest realities; 2) the Idealistic mentality represents a compromise between the ideational and sensate, leaning toward the ideational. While it rates spiritual truth and values above all others, it also appreciates the realities and values of the sensory world; and 3) the Sensate mentality which is the exact opposite of the ideational. It is interested only in those things, usually material in nature, that appeal to or affect the senses. The United States has moved from the ideational, to the idealistic, and to the sensate in its brief history. Brown sees western culture, of which we are a part, as being a late, degenerate sensate culture. One only has to look to the teaching of the Bible for evidence of where we are in the U.S.A., and our likely destination.
Posted on: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 00:02:18 +0000
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