It is an old question: “What on earth is wrong with society?”. The answer to that question, I believe, is that people are flawed. More specifically, humans are driven by an impulse to destruction, a facet of their will that works against their best interests, often in full knowledge of the implications of their actions. Examples of this impulse would be the preverse drive of the exhausted student to stay up one more hour, the glutton's sweet tooth driving consumption long past the point where food is enjoyable, and the antagonisim of the businessperson baiting a touchy coworker, just to set them off. On a weightier scale, this drive is behind the failed marriages and broken families there are new news reports of every week.
So, from politicians and celebrities to the average Joe or Jane down the street, it is easy to find examples of this impulse to destruction. I could certainly point to examples of this in my own life, and I suspect each of you could do the same. This suggests that this counterproductive will is a part of human nature, and that human nature is therefore broken. No one has to teach children to be petty and squabble: “Joey put his finger on my side of the bench, Mommy. Make him stop!”. No one has to teach children to be greedy, eating more sweets than they can stomach. No one has to teach a child to throw a fit simply for the sake of attention. Children do these things without instructions, and some adults never outgrow them (you can find them on any prime-time reality TV show). Some might say that humans are basically good and rational, and that that these examples are abberations, exceptional cases, or that that goodness and rationality simply take some time to manifest. I say humans are essentially petty, greedy, corrupt, irrational, and destructive, and only defeat these characteristics with difficulty.
This paints a dismal state of our race. This blog's byline talks about “the answer” though, so what is the answer to this problem? Mine (as you may have guessed), has a lot to do with God. Not only did Jesus' death pay the penalty for sin (in relation to this post, acts of rebellion against our better judgement are often also acts of rebellion against God, or sin), but his return to life was (and is) a statement of victory over sin and death. Therefore, by the power of Jesus' ressurection, human nature, in all its brokenness and destruction, can be replaced by God's nature, which is triumphant over those forces. People do not have to be bound to follow their impulse to destruction, and that is a good thing for everyone.
