Modernity and its impact on man

koot van wyk    Seoul   South Korea 26 December 2008


Man was created to live in harmony with each other and with God in the garden of Eden. Satan or Lucifer was a minor test on a tree somewhere in the garden.

As long as Adam and Eve abide with the continual Revelation of God to them day by day and as long as they are satisfied with the memory of the past, namely, remembering the sweet communion with God yesterday, things were fine.


But then came the inroad from modernity in the form of Satan on the tree, suggesting to Eve to consider enlarging her knowledge. The desire for modernity was born. Eve took the fruit.


The Old Testament era from Adam to Noah lived with sharp memories of God's revelation and of the terrible results of sin. They lived long, had good IQ's, good genes and were brilliant. Whether dinosaurs were part of their "brilliant" scientific gene-manipulation schemes shortly before the Flood in 2523 BCE, we do not know.


The ark was built with mathematical skill and good engineering. Noah lived during the days of Abraham after the Flood, to pass on the Revelation of God to him to live by.

Abraham passed on the knowledge to his posterity until Joseph had it. He passed it on to the predecessors of Moses and Jochebed the mother of Moses read the history from papyrus scrolls or velums in her own day or heard it from a teacher in Egypt while Israel was in slavery.


When Moses spent with his mother 12 years, she taught him all of the history of God with man. When Moses wrote Genesis in 1460 BCE, his knowledge were scanty, but sufficient about the past history. He could record down what they knew. The Holy Spirit helped him to fill the gaps and keep consistency. The chronology indicates that their sources were reliable and consistent. It was scientific enough to go through as history.


Every time the Israelites desired to be like their neighbors around them, it was a call to modernity. The argument was: there is nothing wrong with modernity, it is what you make with it.

The argument is an old one.

The technological explosion of the twentieth century has changed the reality of humans from humans that lived before.

Reality was now atomized or fragmentized. Fragments of knowledge were broken up in smaller fragments and that was broken up in still small fragments. As Hugo von Hofmannsthal said: "Words swam around me" and his concept could not grap it.

What happen then, is that modern man, could grasp modernity well, or some people could but in the process, since modernity's search-engine of data is very big and the Bible's search-engine is equally or surpassingly big, two search-engines came in contrast with each other.

Modernity and the past were in conflict. Even those who still cling to the past, do so with shared reality with modernity. Even if they are fundamentalists or biblicists they are still using TV's, see Ads, use the computer, use the cellular phone, play video games, read manga etc.

Modernity is by some better understood than the past or Bible.

Language of Modernity (all the terminology) took up nearly all the space in their brains so that the past is borderlined, marginalized and even shifted out.

Spectrum readers' comments on Creationism and their comments on other ethical values displays this human disaster for them: sold out to modernity.

God has chosen the Bible to reveal Himself to man, not cellular phones, not TV, not newspapers, not Manga, not computers, only the Bible.


Since reality is atomized and since words are atoms flying around humans, conceptualization is very problematic, especially conceptualization of the Bible and its past. The result is that with the language of the eyes, ears, touch, taste, smell, and memory their being are composed.

People become what they desire to be sold out to.

The Spectrum commentators on Creationism are not believing people and are not praying at all, if so hardly at all. One person was insisting in Spectrum 2008 that SDA's must follow Anglicans and apologize to Darwin.

When the data goes through the senses and memory filters it fills up the being of man. Man's ontology comes into being. When ontology is filled up it spills over in epistemology or thoughts. When epistemology is filled up it spills over in methodology or manner of how you do something or not do something. When the methodology is filled up it spills over in deontology which is the article, book, comment, sermon, thought, poem, art, opinion, dissertation, conversation of the human.

When you then see a very critical statement against the Word of God or a doctrine of the Bible or against a Bible supported faith of someone, then you need to go back through this complex engine to search for the root of the problem somewhere in the adaptation, accommodation, integration of that critic with modernity at the cost of a knowledge of the past necessary for our survival in the world to come, the Bible.

For those who are still young and wonder to experiment with true faith or liberal ideas, just this:


1. Two men sat behind bars

   The one saw mud

   The other one stars .... (Ian Hartley, my teacher)

2. An African wisdom goes like this:

"It is very dangerous to try to stand up on two running horses at the same time".



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