The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Why Me? Paradise Lost: Part 2

3 February 2010

Volume 12, Issue 5

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Myth: a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, typically involving supernatural beings or events.

Our human world builds its society based upon myths. Of course we have now redefined many of them in terms of the myth of science, for the most part to justify our philosophy or religion, many times both. Some of our myths are as old as human language; some are quite modern. To become a myth means that there is something believable about the story. The power of that appeal to truth, greatly contributes to the longevity of the myth.

Old myths in someway touch the deeper soul of humanity; their appeal is many times based upon an unspoken or unknown truth, perhaps even an absolute truth that transcends humanity and life itself. New myths do not stand that test of time as well, and if they lose their basic tenants through corruption and exaggeration, they cease to be myths, or even wise fairy tales.

The creation account in the Bible’s book of Genesis fits our definition of myth. The written record is attributed to Moses, but the oral tradition basically goes back to the creation of it all, and specifically through the development of a human society on earth from a couple we call Adam and Eve, created by God, in his image.

A modern myth is the demise of the earth and everything upon it via the mechanism of global warming caused by man induced greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, but not limited just to that form of hot air. Recent emails that report that the basic assumptions of the myth were manufactured to support a religious bias, have hurt the myth’s plausibility by many who were and are skeptical not only of the underlying truth of the myth, but also the integrity of the proponents.

Just this week, further skepticism has developed because the UN Global Warming comprehensive report was based on the science, not in peer reviewed literature, but a popular magazine and a master’s thesis. Furthermore the author of the UN report also authored a novel about the sexual exploits of a well-known global warming expert’s exploits as he traveled the world promoting an agenda of?

This week we look at the old myth found in Genesis Chapter 2 and 3, on how sin entered into the human species. The basis of this myth is that all life, as well as all creation was created not by a god, but the God, who gave us a written testimony of his existence and his plan for an age in which we now live. We find that testimony in a Book we call the Bible

There are those who today say they don’t believe this myth, but they replace it with another newer myth, which states there is no god, nothing beyond the natural, and everything can be explained by human understanding alone. This is not truth but simply a myth substitution of another atheistic religion, but also implies strongly that their revelation is based upon the a priori deduction that the present also applies to the past, and the future as well.

In Genesis God places the innocent man and woman in a garden we generally call Eden. In the garden among other things, God has placed a tree of eternal life and a tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve is tempted by the serpent, who is generally called the devil or Satan, to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and then she convinces Adam to do the same.

Here the great teachers of the Bible find it important that Satan tempted Eve to eat the fruit first, and thereby imply that the woman was in someway a weaker human being. This of course denies at least the truth of the world in which we now live, that it is man who is the weaker vessel and hence he was such an easy mark that the devil never thought that causing Adam to sin was a challenge at all, and that the future of “The Fall of Man” necessarily came through the woman.

For example, in a man based fall scenario the conversation would go something much like this:

Adam: Eve, you should taste this fruit I found in the garden, its taste is better than anything I have ever eaten.

Eve: It looks delicious all right, from which tree did you get it?

Adam: Hum, it was a nice tree, not all that big, so I thought it might taste OK, it is no big deal but it was the one that God implied was not good for us.

Eve: You did what? Forget it! Over your now dead body I will not eat it. Immediately throw those fruits away and this evening when God comes to talk with us, I will ask him to forgive your unpardonable sin.

So you see if the Devil would have tempted Adam, the whole Bible would have ended there and none of us would have the problems we face daily in this lost and dying world.

We see in this brief dialog the roots of the two myths we described at the beginning of this article. In the first myth we see that through The Fall, mortality entered the human race, and knowing good and evil, mankind would fulfill his understanding of evil, but could not achieve his own righteousness. The whole Bible, Old and New Testaments is a witness of how not only the wages of evil, but also the provision of God through the covenant of grace, created in Genesis 3:21 and further described in Genesis 15 and fulfilled through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the gospels of the New Testament.

By our global warming myth we see that sin is really no big deal, just some falling short of our own standards that we can correct if we all work together for the common good, thereby showing God that we are capable by ourselves to save the world and all the creatures, alone by our enlightened good works.

In modern western culture we trace this myth of sin pretty much back to Saint Augustine. Both Calvin and Luther gave us what historically has been called Total Depravity. This essentially means that we humans can really do no good thing except by the grace of God alone, and even those good works do not justify us before a God whoalone is totally holy and righteous. Through this concept the justification for human righteousness must come from God alone through Jesus Christ alone.

The summary of this gospel can be described as follows:

The whole Bible is about a specific contextual written revelation of Jesus, the son of God, born in human flesh, lived a sinless life, was crucified and died as a propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of mankind on a cross, was buried and then was resurrected on the third day, and ascended into heaven, where he will return in power at the end of this age.

In the proper Biblical context, God’s active righteous sacrifice becomes our passive righteousness. By that is meant that anything that we attempt to do to save ourselves from ourselves has already been completed and we have to accept that completed work as the basis of what is defined as salvation. The proper term is called justification, meaning that God justifies us, by his grace alone. In that light we are then freed to become the children of God by a legal adoption of this love. This adoption allows us to do works of praise, in which religious legal striving is not just replaced but washed away.

Now all humans without a specific revelation of the Christian justification of Jesus Christ, as a propitiatory sacrifice to stand in lieu of God’s righteous judgment, believe the myth that we are basically good, and that all that is required for us to succeed in this world is to not do anything really bad, try somewhat to do good things, and we will be rewarded not only in this life, but in any life to come.

So the question becomes which myth is the fictional myth and which myth is based upon reality. The logic behind the Christian myth is, if it is based on truth, nothing else matters. The good person myth is based on the illusion of human inherit goodness and good things happen to good people, then if this turns out to be just a figment of our imagination we are in a deep eternal hot spot. Just because we say we don’t believe in sin and hell, doesn’t create that reality, because if we really could create reality we would not face the struggles we all face in this time.

I just erased my great mistake in this myth of looking at human total depravity when it comes to things of eternal value. That mistake was an attempt to appeal to history as a basis for continuing this discussion. In this inch or so of words was a little discussion of Martin Luther’s concept of original sin. There is no need to appeal to history because the myths of today are just way too dumbed-down to make history relevant.

Where should we begin, in our century, to discuss the myth that things are getting collectively better every day? Surely the myth that we believe that the collective is superior to the individual is really just a living illustration of how isolated and individually lonely we have become.

When you look at this nation their really is no representation of the people themselves. From the conservative side of the spectrum the most reasonable spokesman is really a woman who lives in Wasilla, Alaska and communicates with the outside world from her Facebook page. The man filling that role lives in Connecticut, works in New York City, probably became a Mormon because he had exhausted all other possibilities, and with help, writes numerous books with the intellectual content of a fifth grader with ADD (attention deficit disorder).

On the other side politically you have an extremely intelligent specialist, which his followers many times “forget he is black” or “a negro who doesn’t always talk like one.” But from his specialist training we are finding out, he currently does not possess the necessary skills to lead anything but a progressive community organizing campaign. Probably from his twenty years in urban Christianity he also seems to believe that his words create reality, for there seems to be no other reason for his endless parade of crafted speeches. So for at least the next three years the President of the United States of America is in an OJT (on the job training) program, where he has surrounded himself with people who share his same worldview, but many times a more radical skill set.

Now into this world, which before this Great Recession economically ran with consumer spending occupying over seventy percent of the nation’s GDP (gross domestic product), and also fueled the economies of the rest of the world. We are told that all will soon be better. This of course will all happen as the real worker pool has greatly diminished both in numbers and true earning potential, while at the same time their access to debt financing, to buy even the same as before, has disappeared. Now this is not a myth you want to believe in. Concisely, the myth that we could do no wrong has been truly demonstrated to be wrong, like in false.

Furthermore, if defined in only material terms, the myth that our children and grandchildren are going to be better off than we are, is probably false. That reality does not come from myth that continued material economic growth can continue forever, but rather the reality of the demonstrable science of energetics, which finds its roots in the natural laws of thermodynamics.

True science is such an ugly thing in this world in which we live, for many times it tells us things we don’t want to hear. It has a tendency to change myths we would like to believe, into illusions of magic. Magic dust becomes the hocus pocus of simple sound byte explanations of complex problems, while the emperor has no clothes, and then continues to create the myth that the devil is not real, we don’t know right from wrong, and this myth of material prosperity really is all there is.

But God came in the cool of the evening and made garments of skin to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve, the evidence that the covenant of God’s grace through Jesus Christ alone is not a myth for those who through faith can now believe. This is the basis of our hope to conquer our mystical myths and live in the reality of truth. That truth is that mankind does not live by stuff alone, but prospers in the knowledge of God, a blessing way beyond temporal things