Page Two

In many ways the world has trashed true values. But what about you? Do you treat as trash the values that have proved their worth over the centuries? Or do you wisely reserve your garbage can for rubbish and keep values as a guiding force in your life?

What Is Happening to Values?

In a 1948 Armistice Day address, General Omar N. Bradley said: “We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. . . . Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.” “Humanity,” he said, “is in danger of being trapped in this world by moral adolescence.”

AT ONE time there were traditional values based on Biblical sources. But no more. Now they are pushed aside as no longer fashionable. New life-styles are in vogue. “Truth” is relative. There is no right or wrong anymore. No need to be judgmental. Each one has his own set of values, decides what is right for him, does his own thing. No-fault fornication. No-fault adultery. No-fault divorce. No-fault child neglect. And no blame for any of the consequences​—the soaring teenage pregnancies, the millions of abortions, the ruined lives of children. And since there is no fault and no blame, there is no guilt. In these ways the world throws true values in the trash can.

The first human pair decided to determine for themselves what was right and what was wrong. (Genesis 2:17; 3:5) Today, millions have decided that there is no right and no wrong. Motivated by the wish to do as they please, they toss aside the traditional values and cry out: “Free at last! Anything goes!” What goes are the restraints​—then the woes pour in!

A headline in a prominent magazine asks, “A Nation of Liars?” and follows up with this blurb: “Government officials dissemble. Scientists falsify research. Workers alter career credentials to get jobs. What’s going on here? The answer, a growing number of social critics fear, is an alarming decline in basic honesty.”

Another major magazine runs a series of articles on ethics, sprinkled with such tidbits as: Scandal-scarred business deals, public trust betrayed, transgressions that run the gamut of human failings. Mistakes admitted, but not bad mistakes, and nothing so damning as sins.

That series of articles concludes: “If Americans wish to strike a truer ethical balance, they may need to re-examine the values that society so seductively parades before them: a top job, political power, sexual allure, a penthouse or lakefront spread, a killing on the market. The real challenge would then become a redefinition of wants so that they serve society as well as self, defining a single ethic that guides means while it also achieves rightful ends.”

The following headline appeared in The New York Times: “Public Officials Around the State Accepted 105 of 106 Bribes Offered, the F.B.I. Says.” Was the 106th bribe offered to an honest man? No, “he didn’t think the amount was enough.”

Matthew Troy, former city councilman and Democratic Party leader from Queens, New York City, speaking on the subject “Corruption and Integrity in Government” told a university class that bribes are commonplace. State Assembly votes are swapped for judgeships. “The usual price for a judgeship on the State Supreme Court was $75,000, with lower court posts going for $35,000.”

Novelist James A. Michener highlights such shenanigans as: glorifying financial adventurers who amass hundreds of millions of other people’s money, insider-trading scandals, takeover artists orchestrating green-mail coups, scandalous religious forces running amok for money, AIDS frightening the populace, terrorists disrupting society, politicians savaging national parks and permitting ecological disasters, an administration that sells arms to a proclaimed enemy and then illegally funnels the profits into a Central American revolution.

Michener’s overall conclusion: “The 1980’s will have to be remembered as The Ugly Decade, because so many distasteful things have surfaced.” And all of this because of one simple development: True values have been tossed into the trash can.

William J. Bennett, then U.S. Secretary of Education, criticized the failure to teach moral values in school and itemized teenage problems that result from this omission:

“Item: Some forty percent of today’s 14-year-olds will be pregnant at least once before the age of twenty, and more than half of those births will be illegitimate.

“Item: Teenage suicide is at a record high, and is the second leading cause of teenage deaths.

“Item: The United States leads the industrialized world in the percentage of youthful drug users.

“Can our schools ‘solve’ these problems? No. Can they help? Yes. Are they doing as much as they can to help? No.

“Why not? In part, because they are reluctant to address one of the chief goals of education: moral education. Take, for example, a recent article quoting several New York area educators proclaiming that ‘they deliberately avoid trying to tell students what is ethically right and wrong.’

“The article tells of an actual counseling session involving fifteen high school juniors and seniors. During the session the students concluded that a fellow student had been foolish to return $1,000 she found in a purse at the school.” The counselor did not pass judgment on their conclusion, explaining: “If I come from the position of what is right and what is wrong, then I’m not their counselor.”

Bennett’s comment: “Once upon a time, a counselor offered counsel. He counseled students about many things​—and among them, about right and wrong.”

Failure of Homes, Schools, Churches

The home is rapidly becoming a wasteland as far as the teaching of values is concerned. The disintegration of families makes the home a poor schoolroom​—both parents working, divorces, single-parent families with the parent working, children left to sitters or day-care schools or alone in empty homes with TV as a companion pushing sex for fun and teaching violence as the solution to problems. Syndicated columnist Norman Podhoretz comments on the results: “These effects include a rise in criminal behavior; a rise in drug and alcohol use; a rise in teenage pregnancy, abortion and venereal disease, and a rise in the adolescent death rate from violent causes (homicide, motor vehicle accidents, suicide). The only thing that seems to have declined is academic achievement.”

Podhoretz continues: “Two sociologists find hard statistical evidence for what we all know simply from looking around. They find more and more people for whom ‘self-fulfillment’ takes precedence over all other values. They find fewer and fewer people who believe in sacrificing themselves, or even their own convenience, to the needs and demands of their children. An astonishing two-thirds of all American parents feel that ‘parents should be free to live their own lives even if it means spending less time with their children.’”

John D. Garwood, when dean of instruction at Fort Hays State University, Kansas, commented on the loss of true values: “The failure of our homes, schools and churches to transmit a solid, lasting value system for those they influence, has brought about many of our problems today. The great British historian Arnold Toynbee sees in the Western World today a decline in honesty, lack of national purpose and a disastrous emphasis upon materialism, a decline in pride of workmanship, a dedication to a high consumption level with an emphasis upon self-gratification. He sees in our nation’s life styles many of the elements which led to the fall of the Roman empire.”

The trashing of true values has left this world in a mindless pursuit of more of everything. Rich in things but poor in spirit, man is left floundering and directionless. His rescue lies in a return to the source of true values.

The Source of True Values

A MORAL code is present in all human societies. Whether they wish to admit it or not, all peoples feel a need for a guiding force above and beyond themselves. They instinctively look to a higher power to worship or serve. It may be the sun, the moon, a star, a mountain, a river, an animal, a man, or an organization. Their moral code may be set forth in one of the many sacred writings of different cultures. The need is found in people everywhere. It is instinctive in man.

“Religion,” according to prominent psychiatrist C. G. Jung, “is an instinctive attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through human history.” The well-known scientist Fred Hoyle wrote of “the moral code present in all human societies” and added: “It would be easy to build a considerable argument to show that the moral sense in man persists despite all the temptations [and persecutions] which constantly work against it.”

The best known and most widely circulated of all the sacred writings, the Bible, recognizes this inherent moral sense in man. It says at Romans 2:14, 15: “For whenever people of the nations that do not have law do by nature the things of the law, these people, although not having law, are a law to themselves. They are the very ones who demonstrate the matter of the law to be written in their hearts, while their conscience is bearing witness with them and, between their own thoughts, they are being accused or even excused.”

Hoyle considers evolution “an open charter for any form of opportunistic behaviour,” and he continues: “Frankly, I am haunted by a conviction that the nihilistic philosophy which so-called educated opinion chose to adopt following the publication of The Origin of Species committed mankind to a course of automatic self-destruction. A Doomsday machine was then set ticking. . . . The number of people who nowadays sense that something is fundamentally amiss with society is not small, but sadly they dissipate their energies in protesting against one inconsequential matter after another.”

Intelligence Behind Life’s Origin

Then, with mathematical precision, Hoyle proceeds to show that the probabilities for life to have originated on earth by chance are nil. Orthodox scientists, he says, have been turned away from the idea of a creative force by “the religious excesses of the past.” But Hoyle believes that life was created by some intelligent force out in universal space. He believes that what was impossible on earth was possible in outer space​—but he postulates that even out there some kind of intelligence was at work. Even the simplest form of life, a bacterium, is so amazingly complex that intelligence had to be involved in its creation, but he can’t bring himself to call that intelligence God.

Others who “sense that something is fundamentally amiss with society” are not so reluctant to do so. One of such is psychiatrist Jung, previously quoted: “The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.”

Presiding Justice Francis T. Murphy of the Appellate Division says that modern man “does not know the ultimate meaning of his life and doubts that life has any meaning. Whatever his moral pretensions may be, he has in fact driven God out of his life, out of his office, out of his home. He therefore lacks a moral center.” From the sports world, Howard Cosell voiced the same opinion when discussing the problem of drug abuse by athletes. He said: “There is no definable moral center in America anymore . . . and that is a problem for the entire culture.”

“It is impossible,” says syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, “to have a moral community or nation without faith in God, because everything rapidly comes down to ‘me,’ and ‘me’ alone is meaningless. . . . When ‘me’ becomes the measure of all things​—at the expense of God, of church, of family and of the accepted norms of civil and civic human behavior—​we are in trouble.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that if asked to identify in a few words the principal trait of the 20th century, he would say: “Men have forgotten God.” He continued: “The entire twentieth century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction. . . . All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain.”

For six thousand years, man has tried it his way, deciding what is right and what is wrong. Now the modern trend is to do your own thing​—there is no right and wrong. History has recorded the horrendous consequences of both ways, proving that it is not in man to direct his steps. “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” (Proverbs 14:12, Revised Standard Version; Jeremiah 10:23) Jehovah God made man, knows him inside and out, and has provided the map to happiness: “Your word is a lamp to my foot, and a light to my roadway.” (Psalm 119:105) His Word, the Bible, identifies the true values for man’s blessing. The accompanying box lists some of the dos and don’ts.

[Box on page 7]

Values to Live By

▸ Love Jehovah God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.

▸ Love your neighbor as yourself.

▸ Do to others as you want others to do to you.

▸ Follow Jesus as your Exemplar.

▸ Forgive others as you want to be forgiven.

▸ Honor your father and your mother.

▸ In honor preferring others.

▸ Be faithful in all your dealings.

▸ Pursue peace with all.

▸ Seek mildness, kindness, self-control.

▸ Return evil for evil to no man.

▸ Be conquering the evil with the good.

▸ Do not worship false gods.

▸ Do not bow down to images.

▸ Do not commit murder.

▸ Do not steal.

▸ Do not bear false witness.

▸ Do not take God’s name in vain.

▸ Do not covet your neighbor’s belongings.

▸ Do not let the sun go down on your wrath.

What Values Govern Your Life?

BEFORE answering that question, you may need to consider this one: What do you want out of life? Riches, fame, excitement, sensational adventure, sexual fulfillment? Or perhaps your goal is a reputation for honesty, charity, compassion, public service, spirituality? Whatever it is, this Biblical rule holds true: ‘Whatever you are sowing, that is what you will reap.’​—Galatians 6:7.

If you trash true values, you must be willing to live with the consequences. Superior Court judge Paul R. Huot pinpoints some of them. Citing a drift away from respect for law, social decorum, and discipline, he said: “Things aren’t black and white anymore. Everything is gray. We’ve lost good manners. We’ve lost courtesy. We’ve lost decency. Fewer people recognize the difference between right and wrong. The sin now is getting caught, not the violation.”

As knowledge grows and power increases, there is greater need for morality to govern their use. (Proverbs 24:5) Unfortunately, the increase of knowledge and power has been accompanied by a collapse in morality. Historian Arnold Toynbee comments on this: “It is tragic to think that we have been so successful in the technological field, whereas our record of moral failures is almost immeasurable. . . . If the morality gap continues to widen, I foresee a time when private citizens may be walking round with pocket atomic bombs.”

The current trend is to devalue true values and relegate sin to the garbage dump. The attitude is the same as that of the adulterous woman of Proverbs 30:20: “Here is the way of an adulterous woman: she has eaten and has wiped her mouth and she has said: ‘I have committed no wrong.’” But sin is still with us, hale and hearty, only operating under such aliases as openness, freedom, relativism, values clarification, nonjudgmentalism​—all summed up as “the new morality.”

Making Wrong Look Right

Nothing has really changed since Isaiah’s time. His words are still on target: “Woe to those who are saying that good is bad and bad is good, those who are putting darkness for light and light for darkness, those who are putting bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20) To make the wrongs look right, they change the marks on the thermometer to make the fever normal.

Which values produce good results? Which ones make you happy, produce loyal friends, make for inner peace and contentment? Do you want a reputation for honesty, truthfulness, concern for others? To be liked, respected, loved? Or do you value more the having of unlimited possessions, to taste the power of great wealth? Is the satisfaction of fleshly desires of paramount importance? Is it vital for you to concentrate on self-fulfillment?

Illicit sex is widespread, enjoying a pat of approval from the media and society in general. But how destructive to marriage and family and the welfare of children! Growing out of this sexual permissiveness are the gross extremes of unnatural homosexual perversions so rampant today and which are tolerated and even sanctioned by some of the mainstream religions of Christendom. Relative to such practices, God’s Word asks and answers: “Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush.”​—Jeremiah 6:15, New International Version.

Jesus stressed the spiritual need, saying: “Happy are those conscious of their spiritual need, since the kingdom of the heavens belongs to them.” (Matthew 5:3) But many dismiss this need as of little value and do nothing to fulfill it; yet lives devoid of it end up being superficial. Even with many worldly accomplishments, such lives are still superficial and lacking in genuine happiness and contentment of spirit. And sadly, those aware of the need and seeking its fulfillment in the churches of Christendom come away empty, for in Christendom there is, as the prophet Amos foretold, “a famine, not for bread, and a thirst, not for water, but for hearing the words of Jehovah.”​—Amos 8:11.

Moreover, many in the churches are not in the mood for healthful spiritual teaching, but ‘in accord with their own desires, they accumulate teachers for themselves to have their ears tickled; and they turn their ears away from the truth, whereas they are turned aside to false stories.’ (2 Timothy 4:3, 4) Both clergy and laity feel as did those in Isaiah’s day, saying to those seeing the spiritual need: “‘You must not see,’ and to the ones having visions, ‘You must not envision for us any straightforward things. Speak to us smooth things; envision deceptive things. Turn aside from the way; deviate from the path. Cause the Holy One of Israel to cease just on account of us.’”​—Isaiah 30:10, 11.