Alien Nation

He was identified as 'Patient Zero' - the initial carrier of the AIDS HIV virus in the US.

His name was Gaetan Dugas, a French-Canadian airline steward. Before his death in 1984, Dugas estimated that he had had sexual liaisons with 2,500 partners in New York and Californian bathhouses, rest rooms, bars and motels. Even after he had been told by doctors that he had this fatal sexually-transmitted disease, he continued to infect dozens of partners. 'I've got gay cancer', he would tell them afterwards, perversely enjoying the merging of sex and death.

We may be tempted to dismiss Dugas simply as mentally deranged, one of those unfortunate sociopaths that life occasionally throws up. But let's pause and think of another possible way of looking at the situation.

Sez who?

If all morality is relative so that what is good for you isn't necessarily good for me, and it is directed only by the goal of gaining maximum personal happiness - then why not do what he did?

If there is no absolute right and wrong, and we are merely the products of blind, meaningless chance, coming from nowhere and going nowhere, then who is to say what is good or bad? Society perhaps? However, what is society but a collection of individuals who will eventually die? So why should I put the alleged wellbeing of society above my own wellbeing in terms of personal pleasure and fulfilment? We come up against what the Yale Law Professor Arthur Leff has termed 'The grand Sez Who?' He argues that if there is no God and so no transcendent source of value, then there is no universally accepted source of authority. It is every man and woman for himself. You may object: 'But I don't believe in God and yet I don't live like that.' That may well be true, but there is no compelling reason to offer to anyone else why they shouldn't. Except, perhaps that they might get caught and in the long term they will be unhappy if society descends into chaos. But that still doesn't provide a moral reason why not.

What's the problem?

A few years ago, Professor Christie Davies of Reading University carried out a study called 'Moralisation and Demoralisation' and charted the rise in crime and social disorder in Britain over the last 150 years. He showed that while housing conditions and poverty were far worse at the beginning of the 20th century than at the end, the reported incidence of serious crime was far less. He comments on the situation today in these terms: 'For the Left the villain is capitalism and for the Right it is welfare; both are ways of avoiding the conclusion that wicked and irresponsible choices are made by wicked and irresponsible individuals.' In others words, the problem at root is a moral one.

Little wonder then that we find ourselves in the midst of a moral crisis as diseased ideas are so easily spread by the 'New Class' through the media.

In his book 'The Abolition of Britain', the journalist Peter Hitchens helpfully gives several examples of this 'immorality dissemination' taking place through the popular 'soaps' which tend to attract the largest TV audiences: 'Brookside upset many viewers in its early days because the characters used too much bad language. Phil Redmond immediately toned it down. Yet the same programme has featured mercy-killing by suffocation, lesbian kissing and incest between brother and sister. As Anna Pukas wrote in The Express in 1997: "In Eastenders and Brookside, the taboos fell thick and fast. Drug addiction, male and female homosexuality, incest, child abuse - sometimes it seemed as though the writers had been told to churn out scripts on Perversion of the Month".' Hitchens then shrewdly adds: 'The pattern in all these events is the same. Behaviour which was once deviant is made to seem mainstream, or at least acceptable, and those who are unhappy about it are portrayed as narrow-minded, old-fashioned, prejudiced and wrong. The effect of this implicit propaganda upon public opinion has been enormous, causing many people to be ashamed of views they had held since their childhood and had thought until recently were normal.'

There is a deep moral problem in our society, a moral decay which extends to the very foundations. The Bible, however, would go even further and say that, at root, the problem is a spiritual one, and it is to the spiritual diagnosis by the apostle Paul that we turn in Romans 1.18ff.

The problem of judgement

Here Paul is describing his own world, but notice how remarkably similar it is to ours. He is painting in dark hues a world in a state of moral decay, indeed, any society which turns its back on its Maker and his laws, for the result is always the same, an initial gradual declension and eventually a rapid social slide into chaos. When Rome eventually fell to the Barbarian hordes, it was not because the opposing armies were militarily superior, it was because the Roman empire had become so morally flabby and internally weak, they were a pushover, with no will to fight, and with nothing to defend, save personal pleasure - certainly no principle. They were not the first civilisation to go that way and neither will they be the last.

But Paul's spiritual analysis goes even further than that. For not only is ours a world on the run from God, it is a world under the judgement of God: 'The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness' (verse 18).

This is God's measured and righteous judicial response to our arrogant and wilful declaration of UDI. We willingly take the Maker's gifts, but refuse to show him either the glory or gratitude: 'For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him' (verse 21a).

We are often fed the view that the great thinkers, who have shaped the modern world in its rejection of Christianity and the Christian heritage, have done so as a result of detached intellectual wrestling. So that, as a matter of intellectual integrity, the old order had to be overthrown. Nothing could be further from the truth. The key phrase is in verse 24 - the 'sinful desires of their hearts'.

In his book 'Intellectuals', Paul Johnson has shown that, whether it is Rousseau and his concern for individual freedom, or Karl Marx and his alleged concern for the workers, deep down they were driven by what can only be described as egocentric desires. The impulses came first and some form of justification of their ideas came second. He concluded: 'The belief seems to be spreading that intellectuals are no wiser as mentors, or worthier as exemplars, than the witch doctors or priests of old. I share that scepticism. A dozen people picked at random on the street are at heart as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as a cross-section of the intelligentsia. But I would go further. One of the principal lessons of our tragic (20th) century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed to improve the lot of humanity, is: beware intellectuals.'

It is in their wickedness that men suppress the truth, extolling what is perverse to be natural and claiming to be intellectually sophisticated and wise in the process. Such a state of affairs demands a reaction-justice, God's justice.

The signs of judgement

In verse 18 the present tense is used: 'The wrath of God is being revealed'. That it is being shown in that telling phrase repeated a number of times: 'God gave them over' (verse 24), 'He gave them over in their sinful desires' (verse 26), 'God gave them over to shameful lust'(verse 27), 'God gave them over to a depraved mind'(verse 28). In other words, the perversion is the punishment. God allows us to go our own way and suffer the consequences, personal and social, as we are sadly seeing today. But this is not simply retributive punishment, being given over to the prison of our own desires - the permissiveness which we foolishly mistake for freedom - it is in some measure restorative, the hope being that people will eventually recognise the folly and the destructive nature of living without God and his laws and so eventually turn to him for rescue. In fact this is the direction of Paul's argument up to Romans chapter three, demonstrating that we are all in the same needy boat and there is only one solution - Christ and the cross.

This article is taken from 'Alien Nation' by Melvin Tinker, published by Christian Focus. It is reprinted with permission.

Sez who?

What's the problem?

The problem of judgement

The signs of judgement

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