Free Gas for Your Think Tank — Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement

Nefarious! The world situation today is precarious (dangerous), contrarious (perverse), and vagarious (erratic) because popular culture has become nefarious!

The word nefarious popped into my mind yesterday but I didn’t know what it meant. I looked it up this morning and found these definitions: “contrary to divine law” and “flagrant breaching of time-honored laws and traditions of conduct.” Nefarious came into English from the Latin word nefar which means “not divine law.”

To be nefarious is to be openly and flagrantly at variance with God’s word. A nefarious culture that has thrown out God’s moral standards is like a football game without rules, field markings or officials.

As I was researching the word, I found this quote by Erwin Chargaff (an American biochemist, who was born in Austria in 1905 and died in 2002, who discovered that DNA is the primary constituent of the gene): “One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.”

Nefarious! In the 21st century, not only science, but culture in general is nefariously taking over and supplanting the reality of God’s moral standards with human whims and desires. Here are more quotes from Erwin Chargaff that illustrate the nefariousness of our culture!

“There exist mysterious links between language and the human brain; and the heartless and brutal way in which language is used in our times, as if it were only a power tool in public relations, a shortcut from sly producer to gullible consumer, has always seemed to me the most threatening portent of incipient bestialization. It is frightening to observe that a progressive aphasia (loss of ability to understand or express speech), appears to overtake large numbers of people who seem to be unable to express themselves except by hoarse barks and expletives.”

“There exist principally two types of scientists. The ones, and they are rare, wish to understand the world, to know nature; the others, far more frequent, wish to explain it. The first are searching for truth, often with knowledge that they will not attain it; the second strive for plausibility, for the achievement of an intellectually consistent, and hence successful, view of the world.”

“There is no question in my mind that we live in one of the truly bestial centuries in human history. There are plenty of signposts for the future historian, and what do they say? They say ‘Auschwitz’ and ‘Dresden’ and ‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Vietnam’ and ‘Napalm.’ For many years we all woke up to the daily body count on the radio.”

“In 1945, therefore, I proved a sentimental fool; and Mr. Truman could safely have classified me among the whimpering idiots he did not wish admitted to the presidential office. For I felt that no man has the right to decree so much suffering, and that science, in providing and sharpening the knife and in upholding the ram, had incurred a guilt of which it will never get rid. It was at that time that the nexus between science and murder became clear to me.”

“The double horror of two Japanese city names [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] grew for me into another kind of double horror; an estranging awareness of what the United States was capable of, the country that five years before had given me its citizenship; a nauseating terror at the direction the natural sciences were going. Never far from an apocalyptic vision of the world, I saw the end of the essence of mankind an end brought nearer, or even made, possible, by the profession to which I belonged. In my view, all natural sciences were as one; and if one science could no longer plead innocence, none could.”

“Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question ‘How?’ but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question ‘Why?'” –Erwin Chargaff

“Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable.”

““It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist . . . If he has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist.”

“The narrow slit through which the scientist, if he wants to be successful, must view nature; constructs, if this goes on for a long time, his entire character; and, more often than not, he ends up becoming what the German language so appropriately calls a Fachidiot (professional idiot).”