It's all about ME!

On Sunday, my wonderful wife indulged me yet again...we went down to the 16-plex to see the new Indiana Jones movie. The flick itself was not really anywhere near Indiana Jones standards, but that's another blog entry.

We got there almost two hours early, so we nosed around the shopping center in the Old Mill District. What I saw looked like a strip mall straight out of an affluent suburb: trendy clothing stores whose daily revenues could feed a Third-World country for a year, restaurants offering hamburgers for $18 (more than BOTH our movie tickets combined), and an expanding Victoria's Secret outlet with 2-story pictures of underwear-clad models on the front of the building. Honestly, it seems VERY out of place in the middle of rural Central Oregon.

The most ridiculous sight involved the historic old mill.

See, this town used to house one of the largest sawmill operations in the world. After operations shut down, the mill sat abandoned and was prey to vandals. When someone started renovating it, many locals rejoiced. As for me, I thought they were going to set up some kind of museum.

There's an REI store in there now...what a blow to the history of this town.

Now, for reference, Bend is not huge. It HAS grown significantly in the last few years (50,000 people in 2000 to 78,000 in 2007), but there's not really a lot of people there. What in the world keeps these places in business?

I can sum it up into one phrase: "It's all about ME."

Our world has drifted away from the greater good, morals, ethics and simply doing the right thing towards a self-centered society. To the guy who steps in front of cars without looking, blithely assuming that pedestrians always have right-of-way, to the teenybopper who sprays clouds of scent into the air in a store with no mind on whom she douses, to the person who blows off their bills because they can get away with it, we are a self-centered bunch of people.

Self centered people will do what they do best: spoil themselves. They will go up to their ears into debt just so that they have the latest clothes, the nicest house and the coolest car/motorcycle/boat/ATV. This is why such a small town can support such a decadent retail industry.

Honestly, I blame Darwin.

No, really. Follow me here: Darwin suggested that we were not created but evolved. People decide that if we evolved, then maybe God doesn't exist. If God doesn't exist, then nobody's watching if I do this...or this...or maybe even THIS...

See where I'm going from here? Granted, it's not all Darwin's fault, but before Darwin the atheist movement had no real foothold in the sciences; the majority of scientists were openly Christian. Now the number of American scientists openly professing Christ is but a small fraction of the whole. The majority of the rest are devoutly atheist and profess Darwinian theory. And hey, if a scientist says it, it's gotta be true, right?

My point, and I do have one, is that our society is "all about ME." The tweener who demands (and gets) the latest fashions and newest cell phones, MP3 players etc. and her parents who overspend in the hopes of peace and quiet at home. The woman who murders her unborn child because having a baby at this point in her life would be "inconvenient." The scientist who will reject all that is good and Holy for the sake of being right in the eyes of the world.

Maybe these changes to our society are the reason why it's tough for even Christians to see that it's all, and I mean ALL, about GOD.