Conceit and Decay

There is an important linkage between our human tendency to defame and belittle God through our conceptualizations, and the tendency--as reported in the Genesis account of the generation of Noah--for us to undergo moral decay.  We can see this in the Bible's account of that generation--if we are willing to wonder if it is more than just an origin-myth.

Genesis reports: "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (6:5, KJV).  The King James rendition is about as close as one can get to calling the persons of that generation pure evil; "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."

Even in the KJV, however, Jesus presents a somewhat different picture: "For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that No'e entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away" (Matthew 28:38-39).  It would be difficult to maintain that Jesus' picture is one of people whose hearts harbored thoughts of "only evil continually"; perhaps if they spent their waning days abducting, raping, torturing, and killing--but "marrying and giving in marriage"?

And this is where we must decide if we are going to presume that the Bible begins with origin-myths, or not.  A purely wicked era of pure evil, as the KJV seems to want to relate--how can we learn anything from that, or pretend that it ever existed?  Did generations really pass in those days without--as the most obvious examples--a shred of marital or parental care?  We might as well be asked to believe in the mythiest of myths (humanity spawned by centaurs, to take a rather tame example) than be asked to glean lessons from mythical generations of people fundamentally alien to the common human experience.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, the generation of Noah was all too typical of the common human experience.  Translators differ as to the particulars, but God's general condemnation of the "heart" of that generation is attended by references to human hearts "conceiving" or "scheming".  That is to say, it is not that the inclination to evil permeated every tendency of those persons, but that it was present from the first in all of their conceptualizations.  Their very thought life was evil, and it poisoned everything about their culture and their world.

So I say again, there is an important linkage between our human tendency to defame and belittle God through our conceptualizations, and the tendency--as reported in the Genesis account of the generation of Noah--for us to undergo moral decay.  We do not think rightly about God and his expression through Creation, and it is certain that in some measure we never will.  While instances of us thinking wrongly about God and instances of us behaving badly toward our neighbors are just that--instances--still they are fundamentally different.  We can catch ourselves in bad behavior and apologize and seek to make amends.  We can even apologize to God for transgressions against him--as we view such transgressions.

Our tendency to think wrongly about God, however, is far more pernicious.  Such wrong thinking--inevitably attended by great presumption--becomes the very basis on which we found our standards of right and wrong.  We do the most hideous things because we believe God tells us to.  I know that at this moment I am saying something that seems ridiculously obvious, but I might reply that the point was not so obvious for Jesus to have left unspoken: "yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service" (John 16:2).

It is not merely the tendency toward evil that drives us into downward spirals of moral decay; for this we require also the tendency to conceive of an existence--more properly, a succession of momentarily-fashioned existences defined by our own conceits--in which our ever-worse behavior is understandable to us--perhaps even justifiable to us.  We define our own universes, and we assign to our conceptions of God their places in those universes.

What I am describing is common to humanity--now and in Noah's time.  The only thing any of us can ever do about our thought-lives--lives that attend our thoughts because they are our thoughts--is to fall back on trust in the God who fathered us.  On the parent who loves us.  "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" (Matthew 7:11).