The Birthing of Monsters

Copyright 2007 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The intellectual productivity of Americans and American enterprise remains potent as we move through the first decade of the 21^st Century. In our free society individuals continue to run with their dreams and there is no shortage of entrepreneurial vehicles for the inventive mind. There is also no shortage of start-up capital to fund those who have an idea they think might change the world. Who knows what might be the next innovation that, like the internet during the 1990’s, will propel the world’s richest nation to new heights?

The prospect of new frontiers yet unexplored is undeniably exciting to the popular mind in this country. In our collective national psyche the dynamic “American Experiment” will surely continue to bring about personal transformation in this new age.

Unfortunately while an emphasis on personal initiative, coupled with a highly developed free enterprise system, produces great opportunity for invention it also opens the door to forces we cannot control without the help of a strong moral compass. The problem is that a strong moral compass is one thing in very short supply in the United States today. As America’s moral decline not only continues but accelerates the stage is being set for the opening of a Pandora’s Box that may well breed some of Satan’s most potent tools in these last days. Take the fertile ground for invention that hyper-individualism makes possible, add to it the power of national wealth unparalleled in our history and combine it with the loss of moral absolutes and the stage is set for monsters to be birthed.

Look at some of the fields of applied science in which Americans are innovators today. Whether it is in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, nano-technology, or any number of other cutting-edge fields of scientific endeavor the potential exists for evil in the extreme. Take just the example of genetic engineering. Consider the ramifications of the power to manipulate human biology for personal gain. The debate over embryonic stem cell research is just the tip of the iceberg. What if it became possible to clone and grow human bodies with a slight genetic modification that enabled such bodies to be produced with a brain only capable of sustaining physical life? In a society with less and less of a grasp of the fact that all human beings are made in the image of God, with the dignity and value being made in that image implies, the day may come that we clone people just to harvest their organs for the “common good”. Why, if someone has no mind, should I not have his kidney or eyes or heart to extend my own life and improve its quality? In a culture that has endorsed the ending of over 40 million lives through legal abortion since 1973 who is to say what will become morally acceptable as profit-driven applied science continues to push the outside of the envelope of the possible?

Such dark potentialities exist with other technologies as well. Artificial intelligence? Imagine “thinking weapons” that literally leave nowhere to hide, even for non-combatants. Nano-technology? Visualize a man-made famine produced by hundreds of millions of computer-controlled miniature robotic “locusts” that destroy crops at will.

America today is a nation that worships at the altars of scientific progress, possibility thinking and entrepreneurial capitalism. None of these things are inherently evil. They only become so when they develop into cultural idols that replace God and the inviolable moral laws that He has set before us. In 2007 it is impossible for anyone with even the minimum ethical discernment God gives through common grace not to see that this replacement is well underway. The pervasive pop culture philosophy of “if you can dream it, you can do it” is our guiding light today. Indeed there is much we can dream and much we can do in the United States of the 21^st Century. The question is what will happen to the world as a nation under satanic self-deception continues to produce “counterfeit miracles”?

It is painful for an American to say so, but it may well be that some of the horrors of the Book of Revelation will come straight out of the prosperous laboratories of the United States. What a terrible end that would be for a land which was once considered by some to be a “City on a Hill” that would be a light to all nations.