As you know, if you have been following my blogs, I love science fiction. SciFi, as it has been affectionately called, often times is a look into societal evolution. While watching an old ‘Outer Limits’, the 1980’s remake not the original series, I happened across an episode called ‘The tipping point’. The premise of this episode touched me because it brought into light something that I feel our society has reached in many ways, a tipping point.

This episode touched on the evolution of AI or artificial intelligence. The antagonist in this story felt like an outsider because of his genius,  and created a computer program that evolved into a thinking and reacting artificial intelligence that was going to become the new god. The creator of this program even said this intelligence that he created was his new god. The tipping point referred to a time when the creations of man became bigger than the creator himself and evolved into something that would eventually control its creator.

This made me think of other ‘tipping points’.  I eventually bought the book entitled ‘The Tipping Point’, a book on how small things can grow, like a small virus that can grow into a full blown plague, or how a small story can become the top movie of the year. This book was written as an advertising book, but I think it touches on other aspects as well. A ‘tipping point’ is like when I mentioned a swing set swinging too far so the balance is off, causing it to tip over.

Do you have a ‘smart phone’? Do you own a tablet computer? How many computers do you own and use? The newspaper industry is dying because most people in the industrialized world get their news from the internet. With streaming software, you can watch almost any movie or TV program at your convenience. We now make phone calls from a palm sized computer with a phone app built into it and we call it a ‘smart phone’. A device that evolved from the PDA (personal data assistant), we Americans rely on this device to make us ‘more efficient’, but I think it has made us more dependent on the creation that we made for ourselves. At work, we are inundated with information, emails, text messages, information from the internet not to mention the phone calls. People have become tethered to their phones. They can’t go anywhere without them. We rely on them, sometimes too much I believe.

My grand parents were from, what I believe, the greatest generation. Their generation fought evil back, and survived the great depression. A depression, I might add, that was extended by the works of a socialist madman at the time. That generation still grew their own food, knew how to can and preserve, did not waste and still raised and educated a generation that lived life better than they did. My grandmother kept string, aluminum foil, bacon grease for cooking and could cook a dinner for her family from virtually nothing but scraps. My grandfather was ‘jack of all trades’. He could plant a garden, make a rubber band powered toy and still have time to cut the top off a beer bottle to make it into a wine goblet and make his own peanut butter. Like the old Army television ad used to say, he did more before 10 o:clock than the rest of us do all day.

We here more and more about how Planned Parenthood has been selling not only baby body parts for profit, but whole bodies, but no one is in an uproar as they are for a Lion that was killed by a hunter, who had purchased a license to hunt, in a foreign country. The life of millions of children is dismissed but the death of one lion, majestic as he was, gets more news coverage.(Reference ‘Cecil the lion from Zimbabwe) How Hillary Clinton can destroy her personal email server that was illegally used while she was Secretary of State but gets a pass by the press, but let a football player destroy his phone and everyone screams foul and demands a four game suspension from playing football. (reference ‘deflategate’ on google. Story of Tom Brady of the New England Patriots four game suspension)

My point is, America has, I believe, already reached the tipping point. It is like watching that swingset falling in slow motion. There is nothing that can be done but watch, or is there? Is there something, anything that can be done to catch that swing set before it crashes and save the children on it? We have already seen that man, if left to his own devices, will find a way to foul things up, so what can we do to unfoul things up?

2 Chronicles 7:14 gives us the answer. Look it up and read it for yourself. That verse gives the recipe for ‘unfouling’ things that we have fouled up. It gives certain actions that we must do FIRST before things can be corrected.  Read it, ponder it, do it, live it and expect it.