Debauchery

In the popular, BBC murder mystery series Broadchurch, the mystery is who in this lovely little seaside town could have murdered a child. The local detective, Eli Miller, is dubious that anyone from the town could’ve done it. This is a tight knit community of good people. She says, “We don’t have these problems.” In response, Detective Inspector, Alec Hardy argues with her.

Hardy: Anybody’s capable of murder, given the right circumstances.

Miller: Most people have moral compasses.

Hardy: Compasses break.

Tim Keller adds: “The fictional detective inspector is telling us exactly what the Bible says. You must not be in denial about your capacity for evil. You will do some really bad things in your life that will utterly shock you, unless you get ahold of this particular truth from the Bible. Blame shifting is therefore one of the most dangerous things that you can do.”

When government officials in the state of Georgia decided to streamline the licensing process by allowing drivers to upload their own photos, they didn’t anticipate the unintended consequences. But recently, they decided to be a bit more, er, explicit in their instructions.

A recent Facebook post from the Georgia Department of Driver Services read, “Attention, lovely people of the digital era. Please take pictures with your clothes on when submitting them for your Digital Driver’s License and IDs.”

Because social media is often a domain for memes and practical jokes, people questioned whether the need for such clarification was warranted, but officials insisted they had indeed received a significant number of photos where the subjects were in various stages of undress. “It’s real, and it’s insane,” read one official response.

Still, the people responded with jokes and asked for more instructions: One wrote, “How much clothing? I feel like y’all are asking a lot in a vague way.” Others said, “I have questions … Enough to raid the fridge at midnight? Enough for a trip to Walmart? Brooks Brothers’ suit?”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In our social media age people expose every detail of life for wide consumption, but that's not how God intended us to live. Some things should remain private.

Legend has it that G. K. Chesterton, the famous philosopher/theologian, was asked by a newspaper reporter what was wrong with the world. He skipped over all the expected answers. He said nothing about corrupt politicians or ancient rivalries between warring nations, or the greed of the rich and the covetousness of the poor. He left aside street crime and unjust laws and inadequate education. Environmental degradation and population growth overwhelming the earth’s carrying capacity were not on his radar. Neither were the structural evils that burgeoned as wickedness became engrained in society and its institutions in ever more complex ways.

What’s wrong with the world? As the story goes, Chesterton responded with just two words: “I am.”

His answer is unlikely to be popular with a generation schooled to cultivate self-esteem, to pursue its passions and chase self-fulfillment first and foremost. ... (But) maybe there is something to Chesterton’s answer after all. In fact, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was fond of saying that original sin—the idea that every one of us is born a sinner and will manifest that sinfulness in his or her life—is the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically verified. Everyone, whether a criminal or a saint, sins. Insofar as that dismal verdict is true, it’s hardly surprising that there is a great deal wrong with the world.

Modern society has made sex easy and emptied it of its God given meaning. Sex has been redefined as a self-determined commodity that results in frustration and despair.

Author Jonathan Grant argues that this has occurred in five phases:

1. The separation of sex from procreation (through contraception)

2. Then the separation of sex from marriage (with the rise of cohabitation)

3. Then the separation of sex from partnership (as sex becomes temporary and recreational)

4. Next the separation of sex from another person (through the explosion of online pornography)

5. Finally, the separation of sex from our own bodies (through questioning the very categories of “male” and “female.”)

In making sex so easy and individualistic, we have cheapened it and thereby emptied it of its power. We tried to make it simpler, and we ended up making it smaller.

A Lutheran church has stood at 400 S Logan Street in Denver since the early 1900s, but as of recently it has become unoccupied. In April of 2017, the church was reopened as a place of worship for the followers of a brand-new religion: “Elevationism,” dedicated to the spiritual benefits of cannabis.

It’s only fitting that the home of the International Church of Cannabis is in Denver, a city that is literally a mile high. The church’s overgrown, antiquated exterior is in striking contrast with its flamboyant technicolor interior, complete with a huge “WEED” sign, rows of pews to smoke on, and a neon rainbow mural on the ceiling.

Elevationism does not have any specific dogma, nor does it require conversion from other religions, so long as its adherents recognize cannabis as a sacrament.

The church was opened on April 20 (420 is a popular code for marijuana) and recently launched BEYOND, a fully immersive, meditative experience with projection mapping, laser lights, and sound. BEYOND begins with a nine-minute guided meditation and contemplative journey through the wisdom of the ages, followed by a 25-minute psychedelic light show set to your favorite classic rock songs.

At some point in the stretch of days between the start of the pandemic’s third year and the feared launch of World War III, a new phrase entered the zeitgeist, a mysterious harbinger of an age to come: people are going “goblin mode.”

The term embraces the comforts of (laziness): spending the day in bed watching [the TV] on mute while scrolling endlessly through social media, pouring the end of a bag of chips in your mouth; downing Eggo waffles over the sink because you can’t be bothered to put them on a plate. Leaving the house in your pajamas and socks only to get a single Diet Coke from the bodega.

“Goblin mode” first appeared on Twitter as early as 2009, but according to Google Trends “goblin mode” started to rise in popularity in early February 2022. “Goblin mode is kind of the opposite of trying to better yourself,” says Juniper, who declined to share her last name. “I think that’s the kind of energy that we’re giving going into 2022 – everyone’s just kind of wild and insane right now.”

But as the pandemic wears on endlessly, and the chaos of current events worsens, people feel cheated by the system and have rejected such goals. On TikTok, #goblinmode is rising in popularity. “I love barely holding on to my sanity and making awful selfish choices and participating in unhealthy habits and coping mechanisms,” said another with 325,000 views.

Many people tweeting about goblin mode have characterized it as an almost spiritual-level embrace of our most debased tendencies. Call it a vibe shift or a logical progression into nihilism after years of pandemic induced disappointment, but goblin mode is here to stay. And why shouldn’t it? Who were we trying to impress, anyway?

Possible Preaching Angle:

The world seems to be unraveling as people give themselves over to apathy, selfishness, and hopelessness. Let’s remember “the hope we have” (1 Pet. 3:15) and “shine as lights in a dark world” (Phil. 2:15) and keep up self-discipline and godly behavior while we wait for the Lord’s return (Phil. 3:20).

Peter Townshend is a singer, songwriter, and co-founder and leader of the rock band The Who. For over 50 years the band has been widely considered as one of the most influential and important rock bands of all time, selling over 100 million records worldwide. In an interview in The New York Times on his life and accomplishments, Townshend is honest about the meaning, or lack of, of his life’s work and the work of other notable rock musicians:

The massive question was: Who are we? What is our function? What is our worth? Are we disenfranchised, or are we able to take society over and guide it? Are we against the establishment? Are we being used by it? Are we artists, or are we entertainers?

Townshend admits that rock music has provided no substantial answers to the needs and questions of recent generations:

Rock ’n’ roll was a celebration of congregation. A celebration of irresponsibility. But we don’t have the brains to answer the question of what it was that rock ’n’ roll tried to start and has failed to finish.

What we were hoping to do was to create a system by which we gathered in order to hear music that in some way served the spiritual needs of the audience. It didn’t work out that way. We abandoned our parents’ church, and we haven’t replaced it with anything solid and substantial. But I do still believe in it. I do believe, for example, that if I were to go to an Ariana Grande concert — this iconic girl who … rose up after the massacre at her concert in Manchester with dignity and beauty — that I would feel something of that earlier positivity and sense of community.

Speaking to The Times, Richard Dawkins said he fears the removal of religion would be a bad idea for society because it would give people “license to do really bad things.” He likened the importance of a higher power informing our morality to the presence of surveillance cameras to prevent shoplifting, warning people would feel free to commit crimes if the need to obey the “divine spy camera in the sky, reading their every thought” was removed. He said, “People may feel free to do bad things because they feel God is no longer watching them.”

The Oxford University fellow recalled an experiment that had been set up in a University coffee shop by his former pupil, Melissa Bateson, at the University of Newcastle which allowed students to pay for their hot drinks via an “honesty box.” The price list was displayed on the wall and was decorated with either floral imagery or a pair of staring eyes depending on the week. Bateson published her findings in a paper, saying: “people paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed.”

Dawkins concluded that “whether irrational or not, it does, unfortunately, seem plausible that if somebody sincerely believes God is watching his every move, he might be more likely to be good. I must say I hate that idea. I want to believe that humans are better than that. I'd like to believe I'm honest whether anyone is watching or not.”

Walt Whitman, one of the greatest of American poets writes in, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" of his capacity for evil:

I am he who knew what it was to be evil,

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,

Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,

Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,

The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting, ...

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Joe Walsh, the lead guitarist for the band Eagle's, was asked to describe the worst part of success:

The worst part of success is that a lot of things come along with it that you didn't really know you were gonna get in the package. There are distractions: Money, drugs, women, partying. You get a royalty check, and you go get a new car, and then you party, and then you get high—and then you forget what got you there in the first place. It's all ego stuff. When you're young it's really easy to lose your perspective, which I did, really losing sight of who I was. I started believing I was who everybody thought I was—which was a crazy rock star. You know "Life's Been Good," that story. It took me away from working at my craft. Me and a lot of the guys I ran with, we were just party monsters, and it was a real challenge to stay alive and end up on the other end of it.

The interviewer then asked, "So many of your friends from that era—like Keith Moon and John Belushi—didn't make it. What do you think caused you to survive it?" "Don't know," replied Walsh. "I wonder every day. People often ask me if I believe in God and I kinda have to, because I'm still here. I had not planned on living this long, and here I am."

People magazine once undertook a part-serious, part-tongue-in-cheek survey of its readers on the subject of sin. The results were published as a "Sindex," with each sin rated by a sin coefficient. The outcome is both amusing and instructive. Sins like murder, child abuse, and spying against one's country were rated the worst sins in ascending order, with smoking, swearing, and illegal videotaping far down the list. Parking in a handicapped spot was rated surprising high, whereas unmarried live-togethers got off lightly. Cutting in front of someone in line was deemed worse than divorce or capital punishment. Predictably, corporate sin was not mentioned at all. The survey concluded, "Overall, readers said they commit about 4.64 sins a month."

Possible Preaching Angles: Of course calculating our sins (according to our standards) is not this easy or precise. In the Bible, sin is not just a few bad acts that we do. It is a power that we are in (See Romans 3:9). As the writer Dorothy Sayers once said, "[Sin] is a deep interior dislocation at the very center of the human personality." The 20th century poet W.H. Auden called sin "The error bred in the bone."

In an interview for Rolling Stone, actor Jeff Bridges was asked what advice he wished he would have received at age 20. Bridges said:

I got the advice—I just didn't take it! My dad would say, "It's all about habit, Jeff. You gotta get into good habits." And I said, "No, Dad, you gotta live each moment. Live it as the first one and be fresh." And he says, "That's a wonderful thought, but that's not what we are. We are habitual creatures. It's about developing these grooves." As I age, I can see his point. What you practice, that's what you become.

A new study from New Zealand concluded that "young people who smoke [marijuana] for years run the risk of a significant and irreversible reduction in their IQ." An international team of researchers studied around 1,000 people who regularly used marijuana. The team assessed the drug users as children before they had started using pot, and then re-interviewed them over a 20 year period after the study participants had started smoking pot.

An article from the BBC summarized the results of the study:

They found that those who persistently used cannabis—smoking it at least four times a week year after year through their teens, 20s and, in some cases, their 30s—suffered a decline in their IQ. The more that people smoked, the greater the loss in IQ. The effect was most marked in those who started smoking cannabis as adolescents.

A researcher not associated with the study concluded, "It is of course part of folk-lore among young people that some heavy users of cannabis … seem to gradually lose their abilities and end up achieving much less than one would have anticipated. This study provides one explanation as to why this might be the case."

I imagine you're familiar with the phrase "ship of fools." It was a common medieval motif used in literature and art, especially religious satire. One such satire is Hieronymus Bosch's famous oil painting by the same name, which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris. [See an image of "Ship of Fools."] This marvelous work, which is filled with symbolism, shows ten people aboard a small vessel and two overboard swimming around it. It is a ship without a pilot (captain), and everyone onboard is too busy drinking, feasting, flirting, and singing to know where on earth the waves are pushing them.

They are fools because they are enjoying all the sensual pleasures of this world without knowing where it all leads. Atop the mast hangs a bunch of dangling carrots and a man is climbing up to reach them. Yet above the carrots we find a small but significant detail: a human skull. This is the thirteenth head in the painting, unlucky in every imaginable way. The idea is that these twelve fools, who think all is perfect, are sailing right to their demise. The only pilot on board, the only figure leading the way, is death.

God gives his commands for our good. For example, God forbids drunkenness. Studies into drunkenness among college students provide a glimpse into the harm that comes to people who are intoxicated. Sharon Jayson writes:

Students in [researcher Laina Bay-Cheng's] studies described alcohol as emboldening and said it offers "liquid courage," a phrase other researchers also have cited.

Drinking allows young women to "act out being sexually assertive, carefree, liberated," she says, and can be an excuse for their sexual behavior.

"If you have sex, you're a slut, and if you don't, you're a prude—but drinking allows you to do both," she says. "You can go out, get drunk, have sex and the next day say, 'I'm still a good girl.'"

[One Ohio University student who was interviewed] says she has observed that sentiment on campus. "'I was drunk so I hooked up with that guy.' 'I was drunk so I missed my class this morning.' 'I was drunk so I got in a fight.' If it's something they're not proud of, it gives them an excuse."

Researcher Mark Bellis of Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, England, collected statistics concerning 1,064 rock stars from the United States and Europe between the 1950s and the present. His conclusions suggest that, statistically, rock stars really do die younger than the general population. The average age at death for American rockers was 42; for Europeans, 35.

Partying, transportation accidents, and mental instability were the primary contributors to causes of death.

In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo Baggins passes on to Frodo a coveted ring.

Gollum, one of the original owners of the ring, was twisted and monstrous, but he had not always been so. The longer he possessed the ring, however, the more the ring distorted his body, mind, and soul. He so loved the ring that he referred to it as "my precious."

Bilbo Baggins steals the ring from Gollum. Bilbo does not fully appreciate the hold this ring has upon him until he attempts to turn it over to his cousin Frodo. Like Gollum, Bilbo has taken to referring to the ring as "my precious," and though he understands the danger and corrupting power of the ring, he is reluctant to let it go.

The ring, like sin, corrupts, ensnares, and even endangers the one that harbors it; and like sin, it is hard to relinquish.

Today, "freedom" seems to mean the right to abort one's child or to censor certain lofty ideas from the public schools while tolerating the filthiest of pornography as First Amendment-protected speech and press. Conviction in political leaders is seen as "extremism." It is thought better to consult the polls to arrive at a bottom-line consensus than to posit firm standards of right and wrong and challenge the nation to follow.