The Secret Battle of Ideas About God by Dr. Jeff Myers

Author:Dr. Jeff Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian apologetics;Summit ministries;Christian worldview;Biblical worldview;Defending your faith;Apologetics;Christian apologetics books;Apologetics bible study;Worldview books
Publisher: David C. Cook
Published: 2017-06-13T21:06:33+00:00

Conflict Is “Out There,” but It’s Also “In Here”

The word conflict comes from the Latin for “strike together.” Every conflict starts as an idea virus that then spreads out of control. Adolf Hitler took the idea virus of racial purity and turned Germany into a death factory. A similar thing happened as Joseph Stalin took the idea virus of Communist revolution and liquidated millions by shooting, starvation, and slave labor.

Yet the Nazi and Communist crimes took place in view of millions of people who could have stepped in but instead chose to remain uninvolved. Why didn’t they do something? The uncomfortable answer to that question is the key to grasping how conflict does its destructive work. Nazi and Communist leaders got away with mass murder because citizens either didn’t see where those ideas would lead or hesitated to step in before threats and intimidation from secret police and their informers made it impossible.

Conflict arises when we view ourselves in ways that diminish the value of others. It is human nature to assert our own purity by comparing ourselves with those whose deeds are demonstrably worse: I am not as bad as “those people,” so therefore I am good. From there, it’s a short step to The world would be better off without “them.” A spirit of self-righteousness precedes every act of great evil.

Terrorist groups, for example, define their identity in a way that diminishes the value of others: We are oppressed by degenerate governments. Join our righteous cause and bring the infidels to their knees. Inspired by having something to live for, along with a clear sense of who the enemy is, idealistic recruits pledge their allegiance to the ideas that spawn terrorism.

What terrorists do on a large scale happens on a small scale every day of our lives. Just as the tiny, harmless-looking Ebola virus can penetrate skin abrasions too small to be seen by the human eye, the virus of conflict seeps in and causes us to feel angry. The president of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, has said the anger epidemic is “more flamboyant, more self-righteous, and more theatrical than anger at other times in our history.” 5 We have become, Wood concluded, “a culture that celebrates anger.” 6

Obviously, there’s a difference between being angry at others and causing their deaths. Flipping someone the bird in traffic is not the moral equivalent of beheading them. Yet this doesn’t get us off the hook. Murder carries a judgment, Jesus said, but “everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” as well (Matt. 5:22). In his reply to an early twentieth-century inquiry about what’s wrong with the world, English writer and philosopher G. K. Chesterton got straight to the truth: “I am. Yours truly, G. K. Chesterton.” 7

Human conflict runs so deep that some people have given up hope. Physicist Stephen Hawking suggests that our only salvation is to colonize other planets so humanity can’t kill itself off all at once.

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