5-Minute Trekker's JournalSample

EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED

In the nineteenth century, many intelligentsia members decided that the Bible's God was false and irrelevant. Whether it was through the work of Darwin, Marx, or Nietzsche, God, for the most part, was ushered off the stage. This created a new problem: Who would lead the way in establishing the new world order? If mankind were to continue climbing to ever-higher technological and scientific achievement levels, then a substitute standard and standard bearer would be required. It was Nietzsche who proposed the idea of the Overlord or Ubermensch.

Another nineteenth-century writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, saw a darker side to the "God Is Dead" movement. He wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted." It would not be until the twentieth century that the world would be able to test the practical applications underpinning the godless Overlord, and by then, it was too late. The hope of the nineteenth century devolved into the horrific political and scientific perversions of the twentieth. It turns out that, when everything is permitted, "everything" inevitably includes Nazi death camps and Soviet Gulags. In the hands of the dictatorial Ubermensch, whether Hitler or Stalin or Mao, the people would be liberated into a demonic level of suffering.

Journal your thoughts and feelings on today's readings.

Spend time in prayer about what you wrote down.