A World Without Answers
PEOPLE are creatures of hope. After repeated disappointments, they still hope. When it is hopeless, they continue to hope. As a poet once said, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”
This persisting of hope is nowhere more apparent than in human governments. One after another fails, but people are ever ready to hope in the next one. It has been happening for thousands of years. Monarchies, empires, dictatorships, republics, democracies, communistic or capitalistic rules—all have been tried, all have failed.
Even world governments have been tried. The League of Nations, tried and failed. The United Nations, tried and is failing. But people are still hoping, ready to hope in anything and everything—everything, it seems, except the only one sure hope.
THIS world we live in is a world without answers. Six thousand years of human history have proved that. Nor has this present dazzling world of science come up with answers to the pressing questions hanging over the head of this generation. Consider a few of the many.
No answer to war
For centuries before our Common Era and up to the end of World War II, there were comparatively few years of peace, yet thousands of peace treaties were made and broken. World War I was to make the world safe for democracy. It cost 14 million lives, but it did not secure democracy. World War II was to rid the earth of dictators, but its loss of 55 million lives did not accomplish that. Since then 30 million have died in scores of wars, and thousands more are dying in current conflicts.
Far more terrifying, a nuclear arms race is now on. The nations involved are spending over a million dollars a minute. But a nuclear war could bring on a “nuclear winter.” And that, many scientists say, could end human life on earth.
No answer to famine
Millions starve to death every year. Figures range from 20 million to 50 million—and the expression “starve to death” must take in also the millions that die from malnutrition and the diseases that come in its wake. In Africa rapid population growth means more land denuded for firewood, and stripped land means less rainfall and lost topsoil, which means meager harvests. Concerning Africa, the president of Worldwatch Institute recently said: “We may be on the edge of an unfolding human drama like nothing we’ve ever experienced before.” For suffering Africa, no answers are in sight. Even in affluent United States, hunger has been declared epidemic—20 million are affected. Worldwide, 450 million are at the point of starvation.
Massive relief efforts get bogged down in red tape. Food is denied to the hungry, and instead it is used in political or military manipulations. Profiteering also diverts food from empty bellies to fatten rich purses. Two years ago the World Bank estimated that over the next decade it would take $600 billion just to hold hunger at present levels. But as populations increase and deserts spread, hunger will intensify. The outlook is bleak, with no answers on the horizon.
No answer to disease
Medical science has done much in fighting disease, but the picture is not the rosy one forecast in 1975 by one of the world’s leading scientists: “I know of no medical problems we will not be able to solve in the near future.” Ten years later, not only is the fight far from being won but it is losing ground on many fronts. Cancer, heart trouble, cirrhosis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, malaria, sleeping sickness, snail fever, leprosy—all rage on unabated.
Venereal diseases have not succumbed to antibiotics. Stronger antibiotics result in more resistant bacterial strains. AIDS is incurable and spreading—primarily among homosexuals, intravenous drug users, and recipients of blood transfusions. There is no known cure for genital herpes. Chlamydia is an epidemic that annually “afflicts at least three million and perhaps as many as 10 million people.” Among other disabilities, it causes infertility.
Newsweek of February 4, 1985, reported: “The United States is currently in the grip of an STD [sexually transmitted disease] outbreak of unprecedented proportions. The statistics are awesome: 1 in 4 Americans between the ages of 15 and 55 will acquire STD at some point in his or her life.” The article concludes: “The best protection against STD, it seems, just might be a return to that old-fashioned safeguard: monogamy.” This is an answer unacceptable to this world.
No answer to infanticide
We feel horror that, long ago, people who had babies they didn’t want merely put them outside to die of exposure. Today they are killed while still in the mother’s womb. Those who do this claim the infants are not really human lives, or souls, and feel no pain. But the babe in the womb jumps when startled by a sudden noise, it sucks its thumb, it drinks fluid, it hears its mother’s heartbeat—yet some say it is not living? Incredible! Its brain is functioning, its heart is beating, its senses are recording sensations—yet it feels no pain? Again, incredible! Painless abortion—is it just a claim made to ease guilt?
It would seem so, in view of the recent film The Silent Scream. It reveals what appears to be the agonies of a fetus being aborted, being dismembered in the womb and sucked out piecemeal. During the ordeal, it jumps, squirms, draws back, and opens its mouth in a way suggestive of a “silent scream.” It is in this and other ways that this world disposes of some 55 million babies every year!
The Bible views an unborn baby in the womb as a life, a soul, and under the Mosaic Law, anyone causing its death, even accidentally, painfully or painlessly, was guilty and had to give “life for life,” or “soul for soul.”—Exodus 21:22, 23, Ref. Bi., footnote.
No answer to pollution
Acid rain that kills fish and forests. Toxic waste dumps that poison soil and groundwater. Automobile emissions that damage crops and human lungs. Oil spills, heavy metals, radioactive waste, plastics, asbestos, pesticides, herbicides, microwaves—all of these and more are growing threats to life on planet Earth. Many species have already become extinct, and daily many more become endangered.
Speaking for UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program), executive director Mostafa Tolba reported to more than a hundred delegates in Kenya: “Take action now or face disaster.” Failure to do so, he said, would bring “by the turn of the century environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.” Early astronauts spoke glowingly of the earth: “Our blue planet is amazingly beautiful.” In 1983 astronaut Paul Weitz said: “It is appalling to me to see how dirty our atmosphere is getting. . . . Unfortunately, this world is rapidly becoming a gray planet. . . . We are fouling our own nest.” But greed has no ears for such talk. Short-term greed speaks louder than long-term need.
No answer to drugs
A worldwide crackdown by law-enforcement agencies has not stemmed the tidal wave of drugs. Recent headlines tell the story: “Vast, Undreamed-of Drug Use Feared.” “Women and Cocaine: A Growing Problem.” “World Heroin Trade Is Increasing.” In Mexico last November, a series of raids netted 10,000 tons of marijuana—eight times more than officials thought Mexico produced in a whole year! Investigators believe that they have been greatly underestimating worldwide drug production. Not only does evidence show the Mafia to be heavily involved but individual smugglers from the Third World “just keep coming like ants.”
People may start drug use out of curiosity or peer pressure, but soon it becomes hedonism, the love of pleasure. The drugs can boost their pleasure-high far above that obtained by ordinary means, including sex. Next comes addiction, then stealing to support the habit, and finally health complications and death by overdose. Add to this the crimes, including murder, by the traffickers in drugs. But before loading all the blame on the criminals, remember: All these evils are supported and made possible by their customers. The answer is simple: Users, break the habit, dry up the market, and in one fell swoop kill the whole evil business. But this simple answer is also unacceptable.
More missing answers
Decay of honesty, lack of integrity, religious hypocrisy, collapse of the family, divorce on any whim, neglected children, no natural affection, selfishness, rudeness, me-ism, sick sexual perversions, revolting child molesting, spreading violence, increasing lawlessness, international terrorism—on and on the listing could go of things for which this world has no answers. It has a bumper crop of questions but a crop failure of answers. How aptly Jesus foretold this very time in which we are living when he said: “On the earth anguish of nations, not knowing the way out”!—Luke 21:25.
There is, however, a way out.