You Will Be Like God...

Good News and Bad News

A while back I saw the Tom Hanks movie adaptation of the book “The News of the World”. It was set in the Civil War era, about a man who traveled and charged people ten cents to listen to him read (and sometimes comment) on newspaper articles about “current events around the world” (some of which was weeks or months old by the time he read them) to people who did not have access to newspapers. During his travels he encounters an evil community and culture led by an idealogue, reads an article, makes some observations and comments, and manages to change the culture of a small community and set an obvious victim free at great personal risk. It felt good for some reason. And I’ve thought about why it felt good since.

But of course “good” films evoke emotions, not always from a good place, but script-writers and producers know they must tap in to some sacred territory of the human heart to sell tickets.

When I was a child in the 1950’s the “news of the world” was delivered in 30 minutes at 6:00 and 10:00pm by Walter Cronkite or (if my parents could afford it) an 8-12 page morning newspaper with paragraph long synopses of international events and one page of “Editorial opinions” and “Letters to the Editor” on current national, international, and local events.

Of course everyone had opinions on all that, even people who didn’t get published in “Letters to the Editor”. I got to hear some of them (even if I didn’t know what they all meant) around our family table and when my parents had friends over for BBQ’s and weekly pinochle games. Our company was far from “everyone”, they were not even everyone my parents knew, just their intimate circle. From the sometimes raised voices and impassioned tones I’m sure their conversations were probably a microcosm of the landscape of opinions on politics, world events, celebrity scandals and international Cold War intrigue.

But things have changed since “News of the World” and in the 60 years since my childhood.

And things have not changed.

What has not changed is our desire to know things beyond our personal experience and our desire to influence the world. There has always been “News of the World” because, I think, we are created for community and we innately know our community is beyond the boundaries of our street, valley, mountainside, zip code, prince or king. And the enormity of that news, whether delivered by a herald, minstrel, pamphlet, or broadcast, had been edited, curated, and synopsized for human consumption because the delivery methods were limited in knowledge (one person’s report of personal experience or delegation of the message), space (document pages and word count), or time (length of broadcast to fit all the events needing to be told).

What has changed about the news in our current culture is this: The internet. The internet gives us an omniscience about, and a platform to address the world in ways that were previously available only to God. We have the ability to immediately see photographs and videos of the graphic realities and hear the most intimate details about situations and issues that exist outside our personal experience, thousands of miles from our neighborhood, on scales of personal to international complexity, by people and even governments we have no relationship with nor influence over.

Here is the difference between us and my parents: None of them thought, imagined or believed that their opinions expressed over fried chicken or pinochle hand mattered to anyone but themselves and three or four other couples around the table. They argued, passed the coleslaw, debated, sloughed and ran up the bids, prognosticated on local and international affairs and drank Falstaff beer. At the end of the night everyone hugged, laughed, and went home in peace even knowing their opinions, solutions, bitching and predictions made no difference beyond the kitchen table.

We, on the other hand are gods by virtue of the internet. Like Satan, it reports a view of the world then demands a reaction from us: Here’s your existence. Here’s what’s controlling your existence. What’s your reaction? Like? Care? Sad? Angry? Ah, but I don’t just have a face or a finger…, I have a voice too! So the internet gives us the empty comment box, calling to us for an opinion, a hot take, a wise word, a show of solidarity, a judgment, a condemnation, a clever or condescending retort to the ignorant, a triumphant final word. The internet tells us “you are like God. You know good from evil. Be God: Correct the willfully ignorant. Contradict the lies. Restore the Old Ways. Declare truth to power. Change people. Change history with your insights and wisdom accumulated by your personal research! And God help you or damn you if you know something different than what I know…”

In the “olden days” perhaps even up to the times when we had newspapers and thirty minute newscasts instead of heralds, bards and pamphlets, people knew that they were still human beings, limited, finite, and generally powerless to alter world events unless they were elected to power or rose to celebrity status via the news. WE, on the other hand, with a keyboard in our hands, have become even more “like God”. We see everything globally AND intimately about everyone and every thing. Nothing is hidden from our sight. With every post we read about current events, people, situations whether personal, national, international, or ecclesial, our souls are assaulted with the first temptation over and over: Judge this. You are like God knowing good from evil. Click and type. Inform everyone else what is good and evil about this nation, global event, celebrity, person 10,000 miles from me in a jungle and the person with a barking dog two doors down on our local neighborhood website that I’ve never met in person….

The problem is, we are not equipped to be God. Adam and Eve had one thing to control and could not deal with the temptation attached to it. They failed as “gods” in a near-perfect world in which only one thing in their world demanded a consequential choice. One thing. In one small place. With one clear instruction. No other people. No “big picture”. No big deal. Their world was as limited as their humanity. And yet they failed to be even as human as they could have been.

I don’t know if the world is bigger and more complicated because of the Fall, or if we have just not been able to keep up with it because of the Fall. Either way, we are not created with the capacity to deal with omniscience. Our finite humanness is created to obey God and let God be God and judge and control all things (to not “be God”). It is not created to “be God” and judge, control and respond to the entire world’s issues. Because we are not God and we live in a fallen world, we can only take in so much pain, evil and dissolution (on top of what is already in our own hearts and lives) before we break.

What does it look like when a human being breaks?

Psychologically when things become too complex and there is more information and data and experience than we can process, we have to simplify the world into smaller bits that we don’t have to discern or judge. If we can judge and define things and toss them in a “box” then there is no need to think about things that are already determined to be good or evil. But in this process of simplification we also become more rigid, inflexible and self-referential. The vast world is no longer a wide swath of gray with a vast number of options, ideas, and ways of dealing with conflict, but because I can only take in so much at once, parts get tossed together into the boxes I’ve constructed because this looks a lot like that. So now the world as I see it is black and white, polarized: it is this or that, this is good, that is evil, and I judge it in reference to MY (limited but god-like) self, MY knowledge, MY feelings, MY experiences.

Of course this is an individual continuum. Some people can deal with more “stuff” than others, but eventually, if the world is too overwhelming, the human being implodes and the entire world becomes about US and is defined by our personal perceptions, ideas and how we connect the dots of what we see and experience. When this happens in an extreme it is called “psychosis”, an inability to interpret even basic reality without fear, dread and self- referential consequences.

I saw this first hand with a friend who had a mental health psychotic break. The things of the normal world, planes flying overhead, cars parked across the street, school buses passing in front of his house, a noise from his neighbor’s apartment, his internet TV buffering, even someone walking by him in the grocery store, were all “evil”, EVERYTHING was an assault on his life and well-being. There were no “gray” motives, there were no actions or events that were benign or random or directed at anyone else. Every person, sound, blip, word, beep, look, or random event was about him, was black and white, and never without an evil intention. He psychologically could not deal with even “normal reality” so his “box” got smaller and smaller and eventually he and his perceptions were the only thing in the box and his “godlike” knowledge judged it all to be evil.

I’ve watched the internet for over 20 years now and I see the same thing happening. We are in a cultural and personal “psychotic break”.

The “break” is this: We are overwhelmed with an ungodly amount of information, we are tempted and called on to be “gods”, but we, by nature, incapable of omniscience. The world is big, out of control, gray and complex. We, on the other hand are small, relatively powerless and simple. At the intersection of the vast world and our limited humanity is the potential for “psychosis”. And it is ultimately a spiritual issue.

The spiritual issue is our hubris: the place where our human limitations merge with creation’s complexities, and this is where we fall, just like in the beginning: We think we are God, or at least more “god” than our neighbor is capable of being. We think we can take in the entirety of the world’s evils, discern the good from evil, understand all the nuances of human motives and prescribe a godlike solution for all humanity that will elevate the world to new levels of cosmic peace and unity if everyone just bought MY god-like vision. Or, if nothing else, at least I could teach someone a thing or three in a comment box and shine some heretofore unknown knowledge or wisdom on everyone’s darkened minds.

Unfortunately, not only are we not omniscient, neither are we as omnipotent as we imagine we are. Both our opinions and power are, like our minds and our flesh, even with the god-like omniscience and omnipotence of the internet’s promised powers, finite and limited on both a temporal and eternal level.

The hardest spiritual discipline, from the beginning, is to “stay in our human lane” and not fall for the First Temptation to “be like God, knowing good from evil”. All the evils in the world were brought about by that simple appeal to our human ego and the news of the world, no matter how intimate or global that news is, has tempted humanity since.

And I always fall for it.

I need to pin this to my internet browsers:

“Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.” Psalm 131:1

(This is a ChatGPT-free blog post.)