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"None of those who have Hell before their eyes will fall into Hell. No one of those who despise Hell will escape Hell.... Nothing is so profitable as to converse concerning Hell. It renders our souls purer than any silver."  

~St. John Chrysostom~

BOOK

Drunkenness and Conformity of Thought

Dear Aaron,

             It really should not surprise you that all of a sudden, your roommate is getting more and more into the party scene and that he even wants his girlfriend to sleep over. You’ll notice that this is happening shortly after you made the commitment to evangelize with your fellowship. It is the Devil’s way of getting back at you. In his mind you are messing with him, so he is going to mess with you. What I would do, in a nice way, is tell your roommate that what he does on his own time is up to him, but that you’d appreciate it if the room was a party and sex-free zone. I was quite a partier in college, and even though I may not have liked such an arrangement, I would have respected it, and hopefully your roommate will also. 

As to why your roommate, and so many others on college campuses get drunk, there are the obvious reasons, such as having fun, relieving stress, and finding women, but I believe that these are the symptoms and not the cause. I think the real reason is simply peer pressure. The first thing an eighteen year old who is away from home for the first time is going to do when he walks onto a college campus is to survey the social scene and see how he can best fit in. He will quickly find that the easiest way to do so is to party.

Certainly no student who sits down and pores over the medical records would come to the conclusion that getting drunk is good for him. He does know, however, that it will get him accepted by his peers. Because of this, it seems obvious to me that if the peer pressure were different the behavior would also be different. What if, as each new crop of college freshmen walked on campus, they perceived that 95% of their fellow students thought that getting drunk was low life behavior? Would they be as eager to get drunk and brag about it to their friends as they are now? I don’t think so.

This is not solely confined to drunkenness either. It seems to me that there is great conformity of thought in the moral and spiritual realms on college campuses these days. Most of the students I speak to at Penn State will vehemently claim that they have come up with their moral and spiritual beliefs on their own, and that they would never sink so low as to get them by conforming to a religion or holy book. The problem is, the vast majority of them think a like. I believe you will find that the same thing is true on your campus. This is either an amazing coincidence, or they are conforming without realizing it.

For instance, if you ask the average student on campus what he thinks about drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, abortion, and homosexuality, you will get the same pro-choice answer from almost anyone. They will tell you that they may or may not approve of the behavior themselves, but they don’t believe that they have the right to tell others how they should live. Universities promote this as the intellectual and enlightened way of thinking. By contrast, those who take a stand against these behaviors are considered to be narrow-minded and backwards. This is used at universities today to control thought in much the same way as do the homosexual activists that I mentioned in a previous e-mail. I believe this is what is causing many of the students to conform.

In other words, if you agree with the above mentioned morals and believe that all religions are equally right, then you are a kind, open minded, generous, and thoughtful person, but if you do not, then you are a mean-spirited, narrow-minded bigot. Because of this intense peer pressure, most students will at least outwardly consent to this way of thinking—with many embracing it wholeheartedly. The question is whether this pro-choice attitude is really one of enlightened intellectualism or just plain ignorance. If you hadn’t already guessed, my view is that it is one of ignorance.

The way I usually try and show this to skeptical students—and you may want to try this also—is to ask them what they think about something as obviously immoral as murder. Virtually every time they will tell me that they think it is wrong. There is absolutely no pro-choice sentiment in them at all. Do you see that when they know something is wrong, they are not pro-choice? It’s when they are ignorant that they resort to it.

I do not really blame the students for this ignorance. It is simply how they have been educated to think. The reason for this is that our primary way of understanding the world around us has come from the philosophy of the Enlightenment. This philosophy claimed that we could only know that which we could apprehend through our reasoning. God was left out, and man became the measure of all things.

The flaw in this philosophy soon became evident, as man, when left to himself, not only failed to come to an agreement as to what was right and wrong, but also often changed those morals which he had previously agreed upon. We can see this in our own society, as less than fifty years ago we believed abortion to be wrong, and now it’s legal in all fifty states. In the 1950s few would have even considered the possibility of homosexuality being right, and now many are accepting of it.  For most of our country’s history we believed Christianity to be the only true religion. Now a sizable number believe it to be only one of many which are equally true. Who knows what we will believe in another fifty years. Because of this, many have given up ever knowing what is the truth and have gone to the default position of being pro-choice. Ironically, the Enlightenment has not brought us to knowledge and understanding, but to ignorance and confusion.  

 Many bright young students will graduate college knowing many useful things, but they will be ignorant of why they exist and how they should live their lives, and worse yet, will have been given no tools with which to answer these extremely important questions. Is it any wonder that so many resort to drunkenness and lives of materialism and pleasure? The only way to right the problem is to allow God—and His ability to reveal Himself—back into our way of knowing the world around us. If it is possible to know who is the true God, then we can know the right religion, and by extension the right morals. If not, then we are doomed to moral ignorance and spiritual bankruptcy.

Sometimes I wonder if parents know what awaits their sons or daughters as they send them off to college. Then again, maybe parents these days are fully aware and in agreement with what is being taught by the universities and what is believed in by the students. It is, after all, the philosophy most of them adopted during their college days in the ’60s.

In any case, don’t let the Devil get you down. These things are to be expected when you begin to infringe on what he sees as his territory. Try to stand your ground with your roommate without destroying the relationship. Remember, you are evangelizing him also.

Always here for you,

Uncle Greg