Not So Smart, Are We?

One of my favorite books is the book "Man to Man" by Richard Halverson. It's been out of print for about 20 years, but it's amazing how relevant to the current times it is.

Here are some excerpts from one of my favorite essays:

"Human-like, man blames everything but himself for his trouble. It's the government or education or economics of the military or the law or management...
Everything is wrong except man himself!
So man goes on in his blundering, egotistical way puttering with the symptoms while the disease rages unchecked. The pay-off is precisely what we feel at the mid-twentieth century--complete frustration. Take a frank look at our position in this enlightened age...
We are more knowledgeable about child psychology than we've ever been, yet juvenile delinquency steadily increases.
Law enforcement has become an excact science and sociologists have produced the answers on rehabilitation of the criminal, yet the crime rate rises every year.
Elaborate, scholarly research has gone into alchoholism and its causes. A.A. labors tirelessly around the clock, yet in the U.S. there are fifty new alcoholics every hour (1200 a day).
Book and articles by the hundreds are published on marriage and the home, marriage clinics and counselors abound everywhere, yet the divorce rate ascends inexorably.
In an era of unprecedented application of psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy, mental hospitals are bulging, mentall illness is skyrocketing, and millions exist on Benzedrine, tranquilizers and sleeping pills. Even the perfecting of astounding new antibiotics seem to trigger new, unfamiliar mystifying viruses.
While America is burdened with a growing food surplus, halft the world never knows the luxury of a full stomach and millions perish of starvation annually -- and apparently the only solution man can devise for the dreaded population explosion is some method of preventing babies from being born.
There is more and more talk about peace--and less and less hope for it...
Incredible progress has been made in science and technology, but the consumerate product of that progress constitutes a sickening, relentless threat to survival of civilization. Meanwhile, human nature sweats it out, blaming everything but itself for its confusion and perplexity.
One step forward and two steps backward, seems to be the pattern of history. It looks like the smarter we are, the farther behind we get--the more we know, the less we can do about it!
However, the mystery lifts when we consider the diagnosis Jesus made as it is recorded in Mark 7:14-23. He declared that the trouble lay withing human nature itself. He diagnosed it as a malignancy in the human heart which infects all that man does. Man's trouble originates within man, springing from a condition in his nature which only God is adequate to meet. The burdens of the world are the symptoms of which the disease is sin, and the only cure for sin is the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.
Not the way human nature is organized, but human nature itself is the root of the problem. While he was president of the United Nations General Assembly, General Carlos Romulo of the Philippines said, "We have harnessed the atom, but we will never make war obsolete until we find a force that can bridle the passions of men and nations." This is the big question, where do we find that force?
The answer is the Gospel of Jesus Christ which is "the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes..." Romans 1:16"

Man to Man, Richard C. Halverson, Zondervan Books, Copyright 1961 by Cowman Publications, Inc.