0:00:00 - 0:00:21 So one idea in the gospel is that things are interrelated and uh a whole lot of things are coupled. And when you turn one up, you turn a bunch of others up. When you turn one down, you turn a bunch of others down. And I'm gonna talk a lot more about that in the near future. But I wanted to bring up one 0:00:21 - 0:00:45 specific facet of this. So briefly, if you check out He oh Ephesians, I was gonna say Hebrews Ephesians 418, it says, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart. There's a lot of richness to that 0:00:45 - 0:01:08 verse. I don't have time to go into it or the context or go into the very many other references that similarly illustrate this principle of coupling uh in the specific context of one's understanding, not just of right and wrong, but of everything. So it turns out that our understanding comes from God 0:01:08 - 0:01:33 . And the closer we are to Him, the more He quickens our understanding and our mind and our heart are amplified in their ability to do their job. So as we turn away from God in the plain obvious things that we know that we understand the daily small opportunities to be as, as good as we can imagine someone 0:01:33 - 0:01:59 being or to be anything less than that, all of those have a cumulative effect on what we understand and what we feel on the intensity of those aspects and also on the, the quality, the character of those things. And so our relationship to God, for example, uh significantly affects the feelings that we 0:01:59 - 0:02:21 feel and how intensely whether those are good or whether they're not. And as far as our understanding, it informs everything what we can think about the problems we can solve how rich our thought patterns are, how complicated of situations we can make sense of and how quickly and to what end and on and 0:02:21 - 0:02:43 on and on, you could describe this at infinitum. This is just real brief. I'm just giving you a little slice. So it turns out, um I saw this probably two weeks ago. It was the first chance I had to say something about it. I saw a news article new survey came out and said something like 20% of uh school 0:02:42 - 0:03:08 age Children K through 12. I'm not exactly sure what this is just high school. It would be a little weird if they asked this to elementary school, but school kids, 20% said that they identified as something other than uh normal gender sexual preferences. Um So as awkward as that is to say, it's easier 0:03:08 - 0:03:36 and faster and more clear than reading off the alphabet and whatever numbers and special characters have been added to that acronym 20%. So, let's suppose hypothetically that um oh, I don't know, we had a uh a, a neighborhood of farmers and all of a sudden one day, uh a, a single farmer decided that 0:03:35 - 0:04:01 um he no longer believed that planting seeds would yield a crop. Ok, fine. But it turns out that because of the community and how tight knit they are, they had this program where they'd group together the proceeds of their, of their harvest every year and equally apportion what they brought in according 0:04:01 - 0:04:24 to the needs of the people. So conveniently, this farmer who decided to go contrary to everything obvious about how farming works was completely insulated from the consequences of that absurdity. And since he had a whole lot of time on his hands, since he didn't have to farm anymore, and he was still 0:04:24 - 0:04:44 getting basically the same output as someone who worked really hard at that, he began to spread his message. And at first people thought, well, this is so absurd. It won't go very far. Um We don't really like conflict. We'll just sort of let him have his way. We're not archaic, like the old school farmers 0:04:43 - 0:05:04 who would have just run this guy out of town. Well, all of a sudden he picks up another person who decides to disavow farming and pretty soon it doesn't take very long. It goes slowly at first and then happens all at once. A significant chunk of farmers are no longer producing, they're just taking because 0:05:04 - 0:05:30 the ideas that they've adopted are destructive enough that they completely preclude making the bare equivalent, the bare minimum contribution to society to sustain oneself. So, you know, along the way, uh these farmers who decided not to farm anymore, they were pretty unhappy. People. In fact, from time 0:05:30 - 0:05:52 to time, some of them would decide to end their lives. And the other ones, you know, they like to have parades and celebrate the fact that they were farmers, former farmers. Um but uh deep down inside, they were pretty miserable and what they did with their lives showed it. So at some point, the rest 0:05:52 - 0:06:14 of the farmers have to acknowledge that this is not an innocuous life choice. It has an impact and that probably is going to happen around the time that either their whole community collapses because their traditional way of doing things required people putting in enough productive work that there was 0:06:14 - 0:06:36 actually a harvest, a net harvest, a surplus. Unfortunately, it was that very surplus that fueled the absurdity because you couldn't get away with this if people were living closer to the soil, so to speak, tighter loop of feedback. But even if they don't notice their, their um well being and their wealth 0:06:36 - 0:07:04 decreasing because now there's this huge uh anchor on their productivity, maybe they'll start to pay attention once their kids decide to disavow farming as well. I don't know. Call me crazy. But one of the things that everyone needs to understand now I'm zooming back out as hard as it might be to believe 0:07:03 - 0:07:25 that everything is falling apart and that this is a terminal decline, which I promise you that both of those things are true. As hard as that might be to believe. You need to understand if someone can stare at the sun and say it's dark outside. There's really no limit to the absurdities that they're 0:07:25 - 0:07:56 willing to embrace. And furthermore, the more overt the obvious lie is the more absurd on its face, the belief is, the more you can guarantee they are losing the ability to detect the absurdity and that just fuels all of this. It's a, it's a downward spiral. Do you get what I'm saying? Because that's 0:07:56 - 0:08:26 where we are. 20% is one in five. It's just gonna keep growing. Unfortunately, that is not a random statistic across males and females. This is much more prominent among females. And not surprisingly, we're seeing the uh number of young girls causing self harm to explode. It's exploding. Not so much 0:08:26 - 0:08:47 with young boys. Uh The, it seems like boys are self-destructing their lives later in life as they become men and they're making very bad choices about how to earn a living, for example. Well, on that cheery note, see you.