Wonder why the world appears to be going bonkers?

An old pagan expression goes, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Since there’s just the one God, and He doesn’t hold petty grudges like Zeus or Odin, this needs a little revision. But then it will explain with scientific precision the rejection of reason we’re seeing unfold today.

How’s this? (Less poetic, but truer):

Whoever peevishly flouts God’s grace and stubbornly refuses divine help will notice certain consequences. Not because God is vengeful, but because the world has an orderly structure. And self-destructive behavior, kept up long enough, destroys the self.

Keep hitting yourself in the temple with that ball-peen hammer, and pretty soon it will cave in. That won’t be God’s “revenge” or even His punishment. It’s just what happens. If it didn’t, then we wouldn’t live in a lawful universe.

Then SCIENCE wouldn’t work and as Bill Nye helpfully warns us, that would be very, very bad. Since he doesn’t actually believe in an orderly universe, or a free mind with free will, Nye doesn’t even know why science does work. He looks at its technical benefits with the same clueless wonder as natives who belong to a cargo cult. But he has no idea why the plane lands, or where the cargo really comes from. He just builds little pious shrines to it.

Unsaved, We can be a Cancer on the Planet

Without God’s constant grace, and our willingness to work with it, we revert to our earlier state. Which is fallen, but fiendishly smart. That’s a hellish combination.

An unsaved human species can be what environmentalists say: a cancer on the planet. Every post-Christian society that has tried to live without God’s law has proven that pretty quickly. How long did it take the French Revolution to go from sweet Reason to mass executions? From high-flown declarations of human rights to genocide in the Vendée? Not even four years.

How long did it take the Bolsheviks in Russia to go from closing its churches to shooting or starving unarmed political opponents by the thousands? Not even that long.

The Nazis took power in 1933. It wasn’t even four years before they were murdering handicapped infants, allegedly to save a few thousand Reichsmarks. To spend, of course, on costly and wasteful wars.

The U.S. took only nine years from passing the Civil Rights Act to accepting Roe v. Wade.

In 1964, the U.S. passed the Civil Rights Act, which finally granted full human rights to every citizen of the country. You might say that this act finally made our country fully Christian. If so, it was our churches’ swan song, their last hurrah. Because within just nine years, our country calmly accepted Roe v. Wade. That judicial fiat, supported at first by both political parties, enslaved every human child from the moment of conception, right up through birth. It’s almost as if our nation felt that with the end of segregation and legal racism, our evil quotient had fallen, so we moved to overcompensate. We are a can-do country, after all!

The scientific principle of entropy states that without a constant influx of energy from outside itself, every system tends toward chaos. To put this in visual terms: Drop food coloring in a bathtub. It won’t hold its shape, but gradually dissolves all through the water.

Just so, as St. Augustine observed, our bodies and brains are made of simple matter, the dust of the earth. Without God’s constant care, they collapse back into the dust. When man fell, we turned off the supply of order from above. When Christ redeemed us, He repaired that broken connection. But any soul can switch it off again. It’s as easy as sin.

Apostasy Can Move Mountains

And souls working together in a mass rejection of God can move mountains. They can turn them into molehills. They can take a great civilization … and reduce its cities to rubble. They can shatter the most basic unit of social order, the family, into shards of self-seeking, adolescent adults and neglected, untutored children. Then the godless State can remake them in its image, starting with pre-school, right up through their B.A.s in Gender Studies from Jesuit universities.

Souls working together in a mass rejection of God can move mountains. They can turn them into molehills.

We can accomplish a lot, when we put our minds to it. Just look at the Armenian genocide. Or Planned Parenthood’s baby parts business. We’re clever little monkeys, if a tad cannibalistic.

The upshot? Without God’s help we don’t just slide into hell in the next life. We go almost immediately insane and decide to dig our own hell here and now. We invent elaborate earth movers to clear away the forests, knock down the ancient libraries and temples. We harness our engineering prowess to dig its vast and fathomless chambers. We consult with medical ethicists and pain management specialists to invent its exquisite tortures. Then we march there, enthusiastically, shoving our neighbors aside to get to the head of the line.

Jesus: The Olive in Our Martini?

Liberal Christianity has always whispered us this tempting message: That Jesus is just a bonus. He takes our glittering intellects, our earnest good will, our basically wonderful selves and makes them … just a little bit better. He’s the cherry on the sundae, the whipped cream on the cake.

He doesn’t so much step in and save us as look deep down within us, and see how fantastic we already are. Then He recognizes that, and affirms us. He pats us on the back, gives us a thumbs-up, then beams Himself up to heaven, like Captain Kirk going back to the Enterprise.

Maybe, just maybe, this is the reason that God is letting our society’s elites go so starkly insane before our eyes. That He’s letting our churches liquidate themselves, one by one. That He watches patiently as the nicest, richest, most beautiful places to live on earth, like Sweden and Norway and Holland, fill themselves up with fanatical Dark Age cultists, while euthanizing their children. God is willing to be our meat and drink, our bread and wine. But He won’t be the olive in our martini.