(An unheeded observation from 32 years ago.)
“[Richard Eckersley, a prominent social scientist wrote] ‘Robbed of a broader meaning to our lives, ... we appear to have entered
an era of mass obsession, usually with ourselves: our appearance, our health and fitness, our work, our sex lives, our children’s performance, our personal development.’
“ Avowedly non-religious, Eckersley offered conclusions more at home in a sermon than a government essay: ‘It may be, then,
the greatest wrong we are doing to our children is not the broken families or the scarcity of jobs (damaging though these are), but
the creation of a culture that gives them nothing greater than themselves to believe in — no god, no king, no country” (Richard Eckersley,
Apocalypse? No! [Commission for the Future, 1992], 14 – 15).
“The Ten Commandments taught all this more than three thousand years ago. Abandoning the Creator will lead to a passion to accumulate smaller, created meanings in the hope that they can make up for the loss of the “broader meaning,” to use Eckersley’s euphemism. Breaking the first commandment leads organically to breaking the tenth. Coveting is both a social and a spiritual problem.”*
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*Dickson, John.
A Doubter's Guide to the Ten Commandments: How, for Better or Worse, Our Ideas about the Good Life Come from Moses and Jesus (pp. 161-162). Zondervan Academic. Kindle Edition. (Bold emphasis added.)
