Every morning when I work on the blog and answer my emails I also listen to the news and a sports talk radio show. Yes, I do it at the same time and today it really hit me how our reality gets twisted. Jerry Seinfeld used to talk about the “bizzarro world” and we are living it. So today I listened to someone who has been President of the United States for five years talking as if he walked into the Whitehouse this morning and realized life is a mess. Here is a person that wanted to fundamentally transform the country and now that he has done it he acts as if the problems that have arisen just mean he hasn’t done what he has done enough. Also there seems to be a belief that we can alter reality by simply not using certain words. The word that the politicos don’t want to hear used anymore for this week is “redistribution”. It used ot be that if you used a word 5 times in a day it “became yours” as my teachers used to say, and became part of your vocabulary. In the bizarro world if you don’t say it for awhile it simply looses its power and the reality behind the word can’t be expressed. So CNN bans the word “foreign” and the White House bans the word “redistribution”. In other words, by the improper use of words, or the proper use of the wrong word we can define reality. Notice that you can lie at will and then go back and say that you were misunderstood. If you beleive that you are smarter than everyone else and you have a better understanding of what reality is then you are free to lie. This reminded me of a letter that Herman Sasse wrote a long time ago. Check this out.
Truly, it is a frightening revolution in the spiritual life of the west that has been accomplished here, frightening in that on the one hand the progress of modern culture rests on it, and on the other hand that it must go with it. It is frightening that the European man of the last 250 years is convinced that he has been the first to recognize the reality of the world and of man, when he has forsaken the great reality of life. He believes that the God of the Bible, as the judge of the entire world, that the wrath of God, the last Judgment, and that eternal damnation is a figment of the imagination. He comes as the man who actually cleaned up these fantasies. He does not notice that he actually exchanged living reality for a paper theory. He thinks the great realities of life, the living God, the sin of man, and the divine judgment are mere theories. And he thinks his theories, his made-up god that does not create or judge, and what is more, his idea of a man who is no longer a sinner and does not need grace is reality. Goethe anticipated this strange event, the exchange of life’s realities for theories about life, and he pointed to it with the penetrating word: “We have studied ourselves out of life.” That is the deep, intellectual, spiritual distress of the modern world. They have exchanged the great reality to which the Biblical revelation points for paper theories. In reality, the men of our time, so proud of their sense of reality, live in an illusion. Hermann Sasse
