The Spirit of Our Times

The German word zeitgeist describes the spirit of a period of history, the status of society and where it’s heading.

Consider where our culture is at today, in the 21st century United States. What is the spirit of our times; what are the ideals and philosophies driving us forward?

I’m no cultural expert, but I do have finger to the pulse of the culture – I’m a public speaker, a news junkie, an entrepreneur, a technologist, a congregation leader, an avid reader of subjects ranging from science to technology to religion. Through these mediums, one can sense the spirit of our times.

As I see it, the spirit of our times is:

• Increasingly secular, if not atheist. Science is pitted as the enemy of religion and faith in public discourse and in Hollywood media. People of faith are portrayed as ignorant weirdo bigots, unwilling to progress with the times.
  
  This, despite many of the scientific pioneers of the West being devout religious men, including Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Faraday, Mendel, and a host of others. Likewise for medicine, with many hospitals founded and staffed by devout men and women of faith.
  
  In the past, science has not been the enemy of faith. Why now?
   
• Antagonistic towards religion. Despising forms of absolute morality, especially the Judeo-Christian perspective. The only morality permitted is the relativistic, make-up-my-own-as-I-go morality which is regarded as no worse than the the respected, detailed moral systems that produced Western Civilization.
    
• Irreverent of human life. Lovers of abortion; making it quick, easy, and legal to murder an unborn child for almost any reason.
  
  Worse still, recent undercover investigation revealed that Planned Parenthood, a leading abortion provider in the United States, actually profits from taking whole unborn children, extracting and killing them, then selling their body parts to the highest bidder, roughly $120,000 month for one local Planned Parenthood operation.
  
  
  
  What great irreverence of life! That we’re willing to not only abort an unborn child for almost any reason at almost any point in the pregnancy, but we’re also profiteering off the human remains of the bloody butchery.
   
• Suppresses the proliferation of life. The spirit of our times regards the traditional life-creating family of a man and a woman as passé, and instead amplifies as equal the non-traditional unions which are unable to produce life.
  
  Despite nature’s central role for women in childbearing and rearing, being a female homemaker today is frowned upon. Career equality with men is amplified instead, resulting in an a generation with much education and skill, but little wisdom. A low birth rate, a high abortion rate, and the amplification of alternative lifestyles that do not produce life has resulted in dozens of nations experiencing a decline in population.
  
   
• Cheapens human rights. The founders of the United States wrote that “man is endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights”, ascribing a divine origin to human rights.
  
  By contrast, today’s “social justice warriors” remove the divine origin from human rights and reassign that role to government, create new rights out of thin air, dole them out to whomever demands them, and demonize as backwards bigots those who question the newly-minted “rights.”
   
• Celebrates drunkenness and foolishness by favoring the legalization of drugs and downplaying -- often ignoring! --the societal side effects of a healthy and productive population now seeking to get high on marijuana and other illicit drugs. It seems to me the public favoring drug legalization is in part a result of a media which glorifies drug usage.
  
  
  
  It is difficult to imagine a mother of 4 getting high in front of her kids. Hard to imagine the destructive effect that would have on a family. And yet, it’s already legal in several US states and will likely push through the remaining states within the next 5 years.
   
• Covertly despises Israel. Because Israel is a symbol of traditional values and the source of the hated Judeo-Christian morality, the one that birthed both Judaism and Christianity, the spirit of the times produces a double standard that singles out Israel and the Jews, resulting in anti-Semitism veiled as political activism.
  
  This happens on an individual, societal, and national levels.
  
  Individual: last month, after pressure from the anti-Semitic BDS movement, a Jewish music artist was disinvited from a multi-national music festival unless he issued a public statement defaming Israel.
  
  National: the UN repeatedly singles out Israel and condemns the world’s only Jewish state for human rights violations. Meanwhile, the UN remains silent on real human rights violations in North Korea and among the Palestinian terror groups; revealing a double-standard against Jews, a classic anti-Semitic play:
  
  
  
  Societal: it happens through old fashioned anti-Semitism, veiled today as anti-Zionism. I didn’t have to search too hard to find this top-rated commented on the above video of the Israeli Prime Minister:
  
  
   
  And again on the international level:
  
  

  After negotiations, in Zionist regime they said they had no more concern about Iran for next 25 years; I’d say: pic.twitter.com/dBA7oAbFPX

  — Ayatolla Khamenei (@khamenei_ir), Iranian Supreme Leader September 9, 2015

  
   
• Increasingly lazy; promoting a weak work ethic through government handouts and assistance. The welfare system in the United States has grown unruly and gargantuan – costing citizens nearly $680,000,000,000 (Six-hundred eighty billion dollars) in 2013 alone.
  
  
  
  For many struggling families, especially those broken homes with absent fathers and single mothers, this reliance on the government has produced a perverse incentive in which it is more cost effective to receive heaps of government welfare than to attempt to work for a living.

  “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.”

  To further the laziness, the fringes of the technology community has begun to advocate Basic Income: the idea that the government should just pay us all a basic income for doing nothing. No need to work!
  
  If the spirit of our times despises work and a hard work ethic, it’s no surprise, then, to see a socialist running for the 2016 US Presidential ticket, promising “free” government-supplied handouts as a key platform initiative in his run for the head office of the United States.
   
• Considers nothing holy. Sacredness, holiness, and the beauty of something sanctified – set apart for a higher purpose – is lost through the irreverent spirit of our times. The internet has produced an irreverent and mean-spirited people. I stumbled on a great example of this while writing this post: the 2nd Google image search result for Declaration of Independence is a defaced image with a hand-drawn penis over it, with “faggot” scrawled over the top. (Thanks, Reddit!)
  
  Nothing is sacred because the spirit of our times says morality doesn’t exist. Holiness is a superstitious idea from ancient fools with no place in the modern world. And while irreverence isn’t a new problem, it is amplified today via the internet.
    
• Feigns goodness but practices wickedness.
  • Social justice has become the term post-religious people use to make themselves feel better about living a life separated from God.
     
  • Social justice warriors fight for an ever-increasing number of newly minted "rights" which are granted not by the divine – as the US founders asserted in the Declaration of Independence – but are manufactured by the very ones demanding them. They are warriors for faux rights imagined by a lawless society aiming to justify its rebellion against God.
     
  • Hating downwards (poor, minorities) is passé, but hating upwards (wealthy, police, authority, God) is in vogue. Social justice warriors in self-righteous rants harp on eliminating downwards hate, meanwhile they practice and glorify upwards hate.
      
• Unwilling to confront actual evil. The spirit of our times says morality is subjective, and thus, real evil doesn’t exist. Because evil doesn’t exist, there’s nothing to stand against.
  
  A person with no moral compass and nothing to stand against – what is such a person to do?
  
  Instead of confronting real evils – such as Iran’s fanatical ayatollah who openly calls for the murder of  all the world’s Jews – people busy themselves fighting make-believe evils like carbon emissions and income inequality.
    
• Contemptuous of the wealthy; covetous. Those who have worked hard to build their wealth are demonized as “the 1%”, a conspiratorial-like, faceless cabal who by devious means extract the wealth of the world from the rest of us. They hoard and flaunt their wealth over the have-nots, and are unwilling to pay their fair share of taxes.
  
  Meanwhile, no one can define what “fair share” actually amounts to, everyone wants the other guy to share his wealth, but no one wants to share their own wealth. The media harps on about the perceived evil of income inequality, resulting in hatred and contempt upwards; covetousness.
   
• Promotes sensuality through the normalization of promiscuity, pornography, and homosexuality. Through print, television, and movie media, sexual deviancy is normalized, while those who see these as great moral failures are demonized as backward bigots who need to mind their own business.
   
• Hates discourse and suppresses opposition. Are you pro-life? The media labels you anti-choice and against women; Sexist. Are you a supporter of the traditional family, a life-creating man and woman with their children? Your label is Intolerant and Homophobe.
  
  Once one of the 7 Demon Labels has been applied – Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Intolerant, Racist, Bigot, or SIXHIRB – no discourse nor engagement is required with you, you intolerant bigot! Just label and demonize, and voila, you’ve suppress your opposition without having to engage the subject matter.
  
  This effective form of the ancient practice of societal shaming has resulted in people unable to speak and act their conscience for fear of being shamed and their names dragged through the mud. After all, who wants to be called a bigot?
   
• Despises law and societal order through the demonization of the police force. Riots and year-long protests arise because a policeman shot and killed a law-breaking thug, yet one is not allowed to speak this reality for fear of being labeled a racist.
  
  
  Riots in Ferguson, Missouri. A fair trial and a jury of peers found the police officer who shot a man in self-defense to be innocent of crimes. Even so, the protestors turned violent, characterized by looting of businesses and destruction of property.
    
• Loving the obscene; our magazines and media are covered in sexualized, objectified women, with banners of gossip, obscenities, and sensationalist garbage that slanders public figures.

A write this not as a complaint – I feel utterly blessed to live in this age.

Rather, I write this because it’s helpful to understand where we are today. To survey the obstacles and figure out where we need to go. Only then can we move forward, beyond the so-called progressive – better called regressive – agenda of the spirit of our times.

The spirit of our times is increasingly secular, hates discourse, loves the obscene, promotes sensuality, despises work and covets the possessions of those who work, is unwilling to confront evil, feigns goodness, considers nothing holy, celebrates drunkenness, hates Israel and the Jews, cheapens human rights, and does not revere human life.

This is how I see the spirit of our times, the zeitgeist of 2015. How do you see it? Sound off in the comments.