“…ever learning, and never coming to the knowledge of the truth…”
This quote is a part of a larger passage in which St. Paul describes the characteristics of the culture that will welcome the end of the age. For the most part, the people it describes will all be glad to see the church go and be done with those pesky people who refuse to buy into their way of thinking.
The great assumption, of course, is that they are thinking. Talk about a leap of faith—wow, that may be even too much of a stretch for my imagination. Being spoon-fed pablum and regurgitating it now qualifies as learning, but it is hardly an education. The ironic part is that the woke generation has disregarded the quintessential electronic truism of their time—garbage in, garbage out.
I’ve heard people mock their old-fashioned teachers for saying that they would not always have a calculator in their pocket. Of course, now they do. However, this does not negate the wisdom of the teacher. Is knowing how to use a calculator the same as knowing how to calculate? In the same vein, is knowing how to summon Google the same as being knowledgeable?
I suppose it is. Provided, of course, that a person is willing to let Google do their thinking. We’ve all read the new and approved tagline to every bit of news that informs us that—”this is what you need to know”.
Is it really? Who determines what we need to know? And how do they reach that conclusion? I’ll leave that for you to ponder, that is if you’re old-fashioned enough to still do such things.
Now someone will say that it is the way of the world for each new generation to think that they have discovered something new under the sun and for their elders to decry it. There is some truth to that. However, that is not to say one is right simply because it seems new and is popularly hailed by its proponents as progressive.
The key to progressivism is that it must progress toward something better.
My generation laughed at preachers who warned against allowing television into the home. It was such a gigantic leap of technological progress. Some of those same people aren’t laughing anymore—nothing throws a wrench into human progress like elders being right.
The problem is not the existence of television or computers. It is the substitution of programming for education. Garbage in, garbage out.
Maranatha
Comments