Don't Blame Culture, Blame Yourself

It's easy to blame culture for the problems of the human soul. Blame the media for peddling bling and bodies over art and truth. Blame the radio for playing evil rock and saccharine pop that gets stuck in your head and dumbs you down. Blame the movies for creating a culture of crazed sex and mad violence. We could play the blame game forever, because culture is quite messy.

But let's not forget that culture is what we've made it. Think about culture in the scientific context, and it has to do with creating the environment for a particular organism to survive. When you create a culture of bacteria, for example, you make sure that conditions will be favorable for said culture to exist and thrive. You create an environment in which culture can survive.

Now to the world's culture. It is not eternal, and it didn't spontaneously generate. It exists because we've made our hearts the environment in which it can survive. Our desires and appetites create an illicit culture. Humanity, and even people in the Church, have made the world an environment in which the culture of self addiction can thrive. When self is exalted above all, things go haywire. Sex, violence, lust for power, greed -- these are the born out of self addiction, self obsession.

So next time you feel the depravity of sin, or of the flesh, don't point the blame outward first. Sure, turn off the television, computer or whatever is the vehicle for your temptation. But before you blame the television, or the Internet, or the billboards, or the radio, interrogate and deal with the criminal who created the environment for the culture to survive in. We create the environment in which culture survives.

What culture will you allow to survive? Which culture will you decide to put an end to?



"It's from the heart that we vomit up evil arguments, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, lies, and cussing. That's what pollutes." Matthew 15:19-20, The Message