ED MELICK
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JUST ONE BOOK

HUMAN NATURE

[The] principle and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the world is man.

Carl Jung

Whatever else men have believed they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind.

G.K. Chesterton

To me, the Bible’s teaching on human nature provides one of the greatest indications of its authority. When God made humans, he made them in His own image, giving all people the capacity to express His extraordinary love and righteousness. God also gave humans free will and the ability to choose their own path. Unfortunately, man chose to turn his back on God and pursue his own desires, which allowed sin and its consequences to enter the world. As a result, man’s heart became deceitful, his mind became hostile towards God, and all people became sinful.[1] The Bible tells us that we are born with a sinful nature, that our desires are never satisfied, and that this leads to contentions, strife, and wars.[2] (For additional teachings, please refer to the sampling of scriptures in the footnote below.[3])

What makes the Bible’s teaching so amazing is that it’s so readily supported by people’s behavior, yet most people completely deny it. This is truly fascinating. People are always asking for scientific proof of the Bible’s claims – something that is observable, consistent, and repeatable. To me, human nature and behavior are as predictably bad as the force of gravity is observable in everyday life. Want evidence? Consider the following.

War, Strife and Murder

I’ve seen estimates ranging from 188,000,000 to 262,000,000 for the number of people killed in the 20th century by war, homicide, genocide, and dictators.[4] This number doesn’t even consider all the people who were affected by these deaths (friends, relatives, loved ones) nor does it account for all the people who were hurt by others but didn’t die. The Washington Post called the past century “a hundred years of bloody warfare” while outlining its “many episodes” of genocide and other crimes against humanity.[5] Here are some more statistics to consider.

  •  The Center for Systemic Peace notes that there were 324 episodes of major armed conflict in the world between 1946 and 2014.[6]

  • The Global Terrorism Database cites over 140,000 incidents of terrorism from 1970 to 2014.[7]

  • The United Nation’s Children Fund notes that there were 55 civil wars worldwide between 1990 and 2004.[8]

  • In 2015, 60 million people around the world were displaced due to war, conflict, and persecution – the highest number in history.[9]

  • According to the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the United States had elite special forces deployed in 143 countries in 2017.[10A]

  • As of 2019, “the United States [had] been at war for about 225 of the 243 years since its inception in 1776. [The] number of U.S. foreign military interventions stood at 188 [in] 2017.”[10B]

When I last updated this section in 2015, unrest had spread throughout much of the Middle East including the implosions of Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Yemen; over half of Syria’s entire population had been displaced due to civil war; the Islamic State was trying to trigger a global conflict by killing what seemed like everyone they came across; North Korea was oppressing and starving its people as usual and threatening nuclear attacks; Iran continued to sponsor terrorism and develop nuclear weapons despite a pending nuclear deal with the U.S.; the United States had been involved in Iraq and Afghanistan for over a decade; and the Russians were escalating conflict in the Ukraine and gathering steam in Syria. 

Fast forward to 2021 and Israel and Hamas are lobbing bombs at each other; civil war is breaking out in Armenia; over one million Uyghers are being oppressed in China; continued fighting in Yemen has led to a staggering humanitarian crisis; the United States still has troops in Afghanistan; and the United States Capital was attacked by a mob of insurrectionists. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.            

This has all happened during a period when humans are supposedly more knowledgeable and enlightened than at any time in the past. In a letter to the early church at Rome, the apostle Paul wrote, “[People] are quick to commit murder. Wherever they go, destruction and misery follow them. They do not know what true peace is.”[11] Sadly, his words ring truer today than ever.

Greed

Proverbs 27:20 says, “Human desire is never satisfied.”[12] Let’s test that proverb. According to the World Economic Forum, global debt (i.e., the sum of all the government debt around the world) will reach $277 trillion dollars by the end of 2021, representing 365% of global gross domestic product (i.e., the value of all the goods produced and services provided around the world).[13] The world owes way more than it earns. 

In the United States, the federal government debt was just under $27 trillion in 2020.[14] According to many economists, this number is substantially underestimated. One expert placed our debt (or fiscal gap, as they say) north of $235 trillion in 2019, roughly ten times our country’s GDP.[15] The United States owes way, way more than it earns. 

We live in the wealthiest country on the planet and enjoy, by far, the highest standard of living. One could argue that we should have reached a point long ago where we don’t need any more stuff. But the evidence indicates otherwise. Among other things, total U.S. consumer debt reached an all-time high of $3.33 trillion as of January 2015;[16] our houses are bigger than ever (new homes averaged 2,600 square feet in size in 2013 versus 1,725 square feet in 1983 – which is even bigger than during the housing bubble years[17]); and our national debt is so bad that many economists believe our country is broke.

One would have thought that the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression (the one in 2007-2008) would have sobered us up, but I’ve seen little evidence of that. Stories about Wall Street’s resurgent excesses,[18] the scandalous mal-distribution of wealth in America,[19] and our growing narcissism abound.[20] The fact that the richest country in the world is also the world’s biggest debtor is clear proof that human desire, indeed, is never satisfied.

Porn

Back in 2012, an ExtremeTech online article reported that, “It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet.”[21] This figure was later confirmed by a porn industry insider who said, “On balance, I think [that] report is OK.”[22] The implications of that statement were truly staggering, given that over 31 exabytes of data (1 billion gigabytes) passed over the Internet every month in 2013.[23] The ExtremeTech reporter closed his story by writing, “The Internet really is for porn.”[24]

As of 2021, porn almost certainly constitutes less than 30% of data transferred across the Web given the explosion of less erotic activities like watching movies on Netflix and cat videos on YouTube. This does not mean, however, that porn isn’t incredibly pervasive and influential. An Internet search for current porn statistics can be frustrating, though. Much of the data cited is 10-to-15 years old and too much of it is simply not referenced. To make matters worse, porn providers tend to inflate their numbers to stoke ad revenue and porn opponents are inclined to highlight the worst data to prove how bad the problem is. Regardless, some data is worth a review.

Back in 2011, two of the more reliable data sources stated that 12% of all Web sites (over 24 million) were pornographic;[25] there were 116,000 searches for “child pornography” per day;[26] the average age at which a child first saw porn was 11;[27] and 90% of children between the ages of 8 and 16 had viewed pornography.[28] I chose to cite the final three statistics for a reason. The ill effect of pornography on our children is unquestionable and getting worse by the day. A 2013 article on DailyMail.com drove this point home with me. The article described a sex educator’s encounter with 20 boys and girls, ages 13-to-14, in England.[29] When asked to write a list of sexual terms they knew from A through Z, every single one of them wrote “anal” for the letter A. It turns out that every child in the group had seen the act of sodomy in an online video. The young teens went on to talk about things like bestiality and scenes “too graphic to describe in a family magazine.” At one point, the author wrote, “The true stories of boys I met whose lives had been totally taken over by porn not only moved me to tears but also made me incredibly angry that this is happening to our children. And the looks of revulsion on those poor girl's faces in the playground enraged me. I feel as if an entire generation's sexuality has been hijacked by grotesque online porn.” The increasing access children have to smartphones and highspeed Internet at younger and younger ages has only made this problem worse.

What about the ill effect of porn on adults? Much has been written about this, and some on how it’s actually good for us, but I won’t focus on these. Instead, let’s look at porn’s pervasiveness from another angle as well as how weaponized it has become. Consider the following from a 2017 article in New York Magazine:

On the Internet, there is a maxim known as Rule 34, which states: If you can imagine it, there is porn of it. No exceptions. And now that we are solidly into the age of Internet pornography, I believe we are ready for another maxim: If there is porn of it, people will try it. (Maybe we can call it Rule 35.) And if people are trying that thing, then inevitably some of them will make videos of that thing and upload those to the internet… Today, even the mainstream [population] is porn-literate, porn-saturated, and porn-conversant.[30]

The article and a sister article exhaustively and happily list the many warped and depraved things that people across the globe have instant access to. We have taken something intended to be used in a pure and sacred way and debased it to a level unimaginable not long ago. Even worse, far too much porn that is free for all to see involves non-consensual sex like revenge porn, rape, child rape, and trafficking. There are uncountable people – usually young girls and women – who have been victimized and humiliated by such videos and have little recourse in getting them off the Web. And there are some people who actually protest the removal of this kind of porn from popular porn Web sites. Consider the following excerpt from a recent Medium article.

Some claimed that if men couldn’t have this ‘release,’ then they would be ‘forced’ to go out and rape women. That they ‘can’t survive’ without daily porn. Which is a means, once again, to hold everyone but the rapist accountable for the actions of adults. They’re okay with the violation of others. As long as it doesn’t affect their masturbation habits.[31]

When I first wrote this section nearly ten years ago, I noted how publisher Judith Regan talks about the “pornoization” of our culture. “If you watch every single thing going on out there in the popular culture, you will see females, scantily clad, implanted, dressed up like hookers, porn stars, and so on – and that this very acceptable.”[32] Judith’s former company – ReganBooks, a division of Harper Collins – published a book entitled “How To Make Love Like A Porn Star.”

Photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders was shocked when there was intense competition to publish his book of porn star photos. Mainstream publishers called him rather than him chasing them, which was normal up to that point. He called this “surreal” and said, “There was a bidding war.”[33]

Porn production firms like Flynt Enterprises employed major accounting, law, and legal firms, and no one blinked an eye. Major corporations like GM (which owned DirecTV), big telecom and cable providers (like SBC and Comcast), and all major hotel chains (like Marriott and Hilton) make money when porn is sold to their customers. Porn is a high-profit-margin business that they gladly accept without making a lot of noise.

Clearly, what was once private, unthinkable, taboo and completely unacceptable has become commonplace, available for all to see, and sadly mainstream. Long ago, the apostle Paul wrote, “When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, your lives will produce these evil results: sexual immorality, impure thoughts, [and] eagerness for lustful pleasure…”[34] How true.

Entertainment

Nothing’s shocking anymore. As a society, the United States has become so accustomed to seeing and hearing about horrific, immoral and crazy things that we’re fast becoming numb to it all. A Washington Post article summarizes, “Take any medium or art form – literature, film, TV, music, political discourse – and chances are you’ll find that it has become more intense, more extreme, more desperate to provoke a reaction from a desensitized audience.”[35] The author calls this the “Sledgehammer Effect.” Need proof? Just turn on the TV and watch the litany of funk we call entertainment. Shows like Jerry Springer, Jersey Shore, Real Housewives, The Maury Povich Show, and countless others are designed to shock and titillate audiences while belittling and degrading people. A World’s Dumbest Partiers episode that aired a few years back showed a video of a young man vomiting on a naked stripper’s crotch while his mother and friends looked on, some of them cheering. The content in shows like South Park, Louie, and Man Seeking Woman would have shocked people not long ago, yet they barely elicit a yawn these days. I recently landed on an episode of Man Seeking Woman that featured a “penis monster” that was indescribably disgusting.

Movies are even worse. Joel Achenbach writes “…the sledgehammer has its ultimate source in Hollywood… Sledgehammer movie directors give us protracted rape scenes, dead children galore, vast armies of Orcs storming castles, [and] space monsters devouring human flesh the way fat kids eat Doritos.”[36] Violent R-rated movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre air at all hours of the day on TV with scant editing so we can watch people repeatedly get ripped or sawed in half. What makes matters worse is that America is exporting all of this crap to the rest of the world. While it’s true that people have reacted with shock to books and entertainment throughout the ages, there’s no denying that the volume, pervasiveness and extreme nature of what’s out there today is without equal - and it’s picking up steam. Shortly after the creation account described in the book of Genesis, Moses wrote that violence, depravity and corruption were everywhere on earth.[37] This has been the case throughout history and is just as true today.

Dishonesty

A few years ago, I interviewed an authority on lying who said that 93 percent of Americans admit to lying and the other 7 percent are lying when they say they don’t.

Dishonesty researcher Dan Ariely says, “On one hand we want to look at the mirror and think that we are good, honest, and wonderful people. On the other hand, we want to benefit selfishly from being dishonest.”[38]

This crisis of dishonesty has become commonplace even at the highest levels of government. By one account, former president Donald Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims while in office.[39] Is this number exact? Almost certainly not. Is it close? Almost certainly, yes. I have read his tweets and listened to him speak countless times and he is an astounding liar. Yet his followers cheer him on – and that hasn’t changed since he left office and began perpetuating a huge lie about corruption in the 2020 election.

During the July 2021 CPAC conference, Donald Trump said the following about a poll that concerned him that was taken during the conference. “If it’s bad, I disown [it], I say It’s fake. [Crowd laughs] If it’s good, I say that’s perhaps the most accurate poll ever. [More laughter]”[40] This is insane.

Politics

Our political system is broken. Self-dealing, partisanship, and delusion rule in our federal and state governments to the point of gridlock. Politicians say one thing when running for office and sell out after taking power to maintain their positions.

Our national elections have come to disfavor voting majorities in favor of strategically positioned voters in small states, and gerrymandering makes matters worse at the state level. A recent magazine article notes:

These unrepresentative state and federal governments seem less and less capable of coping with the problems of the modern world. In the span of 12 years, the U.S. has had the two worst economic collapses since the Great Depression. It has started and lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It cannot collect taxes it is owed—including from the [previous] president. It cannot balance its books even in prosperity; in fact, it long ago ceased even to write annual budgets. It cannot police its borders against unauthorized immigration. It cannot act against existential environmental threats. It cannot protect its people from a disease that can be controlled by wearing a $5 mask. The U.S. system depends on compromise and cooperation. The administration cannot administer without the budgets and laws passed by Congress; Congress cannot legislate without deal-making between the parties and (except in the most extreme cases) a signature from the president. Yet the spirit necessary to make the U.S. system work is draining away.[41]

Summary

I could go on, but I won’t. I will, though, ask you to consider your own daily behavior and thoughts. Are you offended by your neighbors, engaged in political battles at work, tempted to stretch the truth at tax time, bickering with your loved ones, over-embellishing your online dating profile, blowing off people who have asked for your help, cursing too much, eyeing your neighbor’s wife or married coworker, gossiping, etc.? These things (and uncountable others) represent sin in action.

Now consider the times you’ve wanted to do the right thing and didn’t? Have you ever tried to change a bad behavior/habit only to immediately fall back into it? The apostle Paul wrote to the Romans about this phenomenon nearly 2,000 years ago. “…I really want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate… When I want to do good, I don’t. And when I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway… Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life dominated by sin? …the answer is in Jesus Christ.”[42]

The Bible nails human nature. But it doesn’t stop there. Its message is incredibly encouraging. Despite the fact that we’re sinful and unable to change on our own, God is willing to forgive our sins, give us good standing in His sight, and help us overcome our sinful nature if we’ll only let him. We’ll discuss how this works later.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Jeremiah 17:9, Romans 8:7, Romans 3:9-12.

[2] Ephesians 2:3; Psalm 51:5; Genesis 8:21, Proverbs 27:20, James 4:1-3.

[3] Genesis 6:5,11; 2 Chronicles 7:30,36; Psalm 53:3; Ecclesiastes 3:18; Isaiah 64:6; Matthew 15:19; Mark 7:20-23; John 2:24-25; Romans 8:7; Colossians 3:5; 2 Timothy 3:2-6 - New Living Translation.

[4] Figures gleaned from two Web sources: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html; and http://necrometrics.com/all20c.htm.

[5] David Bosco, Crime of Crimes. Washington Post, March 6, 2005, Page B1.

[6] http://www.systemicpeace.org/warlist/warlist.htm                                                                                   

[7] http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/about/

[8] Celia W. Dugger, UNICEF Says a Billion Children Now Suffer Deprivation Worldwide. The New York Times, December 10, 2004.

[9] http://www.newsweek.com/syrian-refugees-all-you-need-know-373475

[10A] W.J. Hennigan, The New American Way of War. TIME Magazine, November 30, 2017.

[10B] See The US Has Been at war 225 out of 243 years since 1776 (thenews.com.pk).

[11] Romans 3:15-17 - New Living Translation.

[12] New Living Translation.

[13] How has COVID-19 affected global debt? | World Economic Forum (weforum.org).

[14] U.S. national debt statistics 1990-2019 | Statista.

[15] Actually, 'Medicare for All' is the only affordable option | TheHill

[16] http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-debt-statistics-1276.php.

[17] http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/04/real_estate/american-home-size/.

[18] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/24/wall-street-excess-is-back_n_788043.html

[19] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/opinion/26herbert.html?_r=1&ref=bobherbert

[20] Jennifer Senior, Me the People. New York Magazine, November 8, 2010, page 28

[21] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123929-just-how-big-are-porn-sites/2

[22] http://www.xbiz.com/news/146703

[23] http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/index.html

[24] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123929-just-how-big-are-porn-sites/2

[25] http://www.dailyinfographic.com/the-stats-on-internet-pornography-infographic

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] http://erlc.com/issues/quick-facts/por/

[29] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2432591/Porn-pernicious-threat-facing-children-today-By-ex-lads-mag-editor-MARTIN-DAUBNEY.html

[30] Maureen O’Conner, Pornhub is the Kinsey Report of Our Time. New York Magazine, June 12, 2017.

[31] Sharon Alger, The Freakout Over Pornhub’s Mass Deletion. Medium.com, December 26, 2020.

[32] Andrew Wolff (Producer), Raw Profits. 60 Minutes, December 2006.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Galatians 5:19, New Living Translation.

[35] Joel Achenbach, Numb Nation. Washington Post, April 1, 2004, page C1.

[36] Ibid, page C4.

[37] Genesis 6:5 – New Living Translation.

Ed Melick