More of the Same?

May 26, 2024

I heard a proposition the other day that said something like, “Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should do it.”

Over several occasions, I have pondered that statement. This morning, I started to make a Biblical connection overlaying that truism.

Could we, perhaps, but should we?

My thinking went back to the story in Genesis about Adam and Eve, the Temptation, and the Fall from Grace.

As I have written before, linguists have discovered the phrase “the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil” is actually slightly different. It was the Tree of the knowledge of “good/evil,” which transposed means “the knowledge of everything.” That discovery provides for a more consistent understanding which follows throughout the Bible record. For example, the first incident that immediately comes to mind is the Tower of Babel.

In that story, Mankind realized they could develop technical knowledge, applying their new found ability to their project to build a Stairway to Heaven. From that point God realized that Mankind would not stop there, continuing down the path of following their own thinking instead of seeking His. Humanity had begun traveling down the technological pathway which would develop into further ways to supplant God’s plan. We predestined ourselves to travel further and further from God, relying on an proudly atheistic approach to life and love and living. Where else could Society be expected to go?

Nevertheless, I see in this Modern Era, many examples that could be considered applications to that maxim, “Can we, but should we?”

The recent movie, “Oppenheimer” actually poses that same question in the quote, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

This, of course, was not building a stairway to heaven but a road to Oblivion, a self-perpetuating Madness, and an endless race to the End of Mankind. Yes. Everywhere Man goes, we bring death with us. For example, the Space Race has simply become another wing of the Arms Race. Could we, but should we?

Or, take the destruction of the Environment, which eventually will make humans extinct. (Natural Selection, as I understand it, will convert this earthen Paradise into a habitat only for cockroaches and similar species.) The several Industrial Revolutions…Could we, but should we?

The A.I. onslaught… Can we? Yes. But should we?

Throughout time immemorial, we have used our knowledge of everything just as much — if not mostly — for evil as for the good. Even the comic, the usually unserious Steven Colbert, has questioned the mentality of spending millions of dollars researching why mice prefer pushing the button for drugs instead of the one for food, why aren’t we spending all those dollars in the honorable quest researching for a cure for Cancer?

We have a penchant for ignorance and short-sightedness. Yet, as blind as we are we insist on racing down an unknowable pathway, in the dark, barefoot, and impetuously turning this way and that so confident that we possess a great light to penetrate the deep darkness up ahead.

But we don’t.

Unless we can bring ourselves to admit that, we are condemning ourselves and deserve the consequences of our overly confident self-righteousness…

“There is a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death.” — Proverbs 14: 12.

“… the light makes everything visible. This is why it is said, ‘Awake, O sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will give you light.’ So be careful how you live. Don’t live like fools, but like those who are wise.” — Ephesians 5:14–15.

“…God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” — John 3:17.

“Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved.” — Romans 10:13.