Harrrison Bergeron and Matrix

You love righteousness and hate wickedness; therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy. (Psalm 45:7)

          Sometimes, I think an official website might be useful. I’m not sure who would be responsible for it, but it would contain the official lists:

• All that is considered good
• All that was good within the last six months but is now considered either unhealthy or sick
• All that was good within the past year but is now considered nearly wicked
• All that is considered wicked
• All that was wicked within the last six months but is now considered either sick or unhealthy
• All that was wicked within the last year but is now considered alternative
• All that has within the past week become good.
• All that must be tolerated
• All that must no longer be tolerated

These lists should be updated daily and those that are likely to move from one list to another flagged, because that’s how quickly things change when people get to make those rules. I might be exaggerating a little, but not much. Things I have predicted in this regard, and been told adamantly that they would “never happen” have happened and are happening.

If inclusivity is the goal, if we must make the world into a place where everyone feels safe and welcome, there are only two choices. One is depicted in Kurt Vonnegut’s story Harrison Bergeron, people were artificially or mechanically reduced to equality. Anyone who was better than the standard was shackled, blinkered, or subjected to stimuli that made it impossible to perform above that standard. That required that the standard be so low that no one could fail. The other is a form of something like depicted in Matrix. In that story, people lived virtual lives. In such a life, what would be the problem with allowing serial killers to murder unimpeded, or to be given the challenge of someone who could never quite stop them? Pick your form of evil, if it’s only happening in your imagination, what’s to stop you? You aren’t actually doing evil. You would have no real victims no matter how many times or how badly you harmed them.

Fortunately, those are the sorts of universes described in the Bible. There, the universe was designed and created by a loving God, who set physical and moral laws for the benefit of the created beings. When people violate those physical and moral laws, they are considered wicked. Of course, I’m not referring to things like people flying, because people who fly are obeying laws of physics, otherwise they wouldn’t fly. But for a society to throw away standards that naturally and physically allow it to exist in favor of standards that do not naturally or physically allow it to exist is suicide. That’s why murder can only be American’s national sport in fiction and why relying on people’s beneficence with regard to procreation is dangerous, as is accepting a culture in which children are considered props and extras for the parent’s starring role in the drama in which the parent is the star.

Loving righteousness and hating wickedness, while praised in Scripture, only has value when what is righteous and what is wickedness doesn’t work like fashion trends.