The Puzzle Piece of the Nobel Peace Prize

I was sitting in a small coffee shop upon a cruise ship yesterday when my eyes decided to take a quick break from their place in my book and glance towards the television. There they settled upon the words, "Obama wins Nobel prize." In response my brain attempted to declare a civil war against my eyes for deceiving it so, but after a few moments my eyes made their case that things were so and my brain did what it could to process the information. My brain quietly made me stand up, clutch the shirt around my chest, rip it from my body, and use the scraps to violently break everything in the room. Apologizing to my hands my brain then gave me back control and I quietly excused myself from the room, went down to my cabin, and finished my book.

Upon making landfall I scoured the internet for the rationale behind such a decision and was forced to fight another rampage when reading that it was for what Obama could accomplish with his vision. Not for what he did, but for what he could do. Well, if this is the logic that allows us to give out a Nobel Peace Prize then why not give him an Oscar for what he could accomplish on screen or perhaps the Stanley Cup for what he could accomplish on the ice.

You know, I honestly don't know how people make sense of the world. We live in an age where it's illegal to test shampoo on a cat, but it's okay to replace a mother's warm embrace with a tube sucking out a baby's brain. Currently, a schoolgirl cannot be given aspirin by her school without her parents' permission, but she can receive an abortion without her mother and father knowing a thing about it. You can have naked women pushing products on television, but you can't have a cross in the middle of the desert. If you're a preacher and you get caught up in a sexual scandal the media jumps all over it, but if you're a celebrity or a member of the left then the news hides the story and Hollywood rushes to your defense. And soon, it seems, we can say whatever we want about conservatives, no matter how degrading or disgusting it might be, but it will become a crime to merely view homosexual marriage as a violation of common sense natural principles.

Modern man is a walking chimera of contradiction and contrarieties ever attempting to make his living on the mere shadow of what once was a culture built upon solid ground. Being troubled by a man winning what once was such a prestigious award for merely having the potential to win it is the least of our worries.

Christians and conservatives have been fighting a losing war for the past couple decades. We've been focusing on the issues and not the worldview. Yes, abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia are moral wrongs. Yes, evolution is a theory that doesn't make sense without active input from God. And, yes, this country was founded upon a certain political system. But while we were arguing for all that we missed the larger picture and the other side seized it and replaced it with their own. You see, to make sense of reality you need a worldview. You need a system of thought through which you can make sense of the little bits of information you take in and live by throughout the day. Christianity is the only system that actually succeeds in doing such a thing, and its upon these principles that mankind stands or falls. The Church ignored that truth and let the secular world work in plain sight in replacing God with man, design with chance, and morality with opinion polls.

For example, in Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently argued that castration on pedophiles was not a violation of human rights because pedophiles are such horrible people that they cannot be considered human beings. I'm not attempting to defend pedophiles but the logic is as clear as any modus ponens. If we're all a product of time, matter, and chance, then it doesn't matter who or what we declare is actually a human. Jews? Not worthy of human rights. Blacks? Not worthy either. Unborn babies? Place them on that list as well. It's a simple act of unwarranted fiat based upon the presupposition that man is nothing in and of himself.

However, in the Christian worldview it all falls into place. Human beings are human beings regardless of what they have done, what color their skin it, or how small or large they might be. This is not because some piece of paper or elite body of persons grants them this right, but because God created all of humanity to be equal. With proper theology in place, the pieces start to fit. All of them. And that includes this weird idea of Obama getting a Nobel Peace Prize for doing absolutely nothing while others attempting to really change the world through reaction and not rhetoric are constantly demonized.

You see, deep down inside man hates that which is good for man is in constant rebellion with God. Thus man will fight his best to destroy that light wherever it shines. America is such a place where that light shines, but Obama does not agree. And so he is rewarded for his constant trampling and trashing of all that is good. This reward is not in recognition of bringing peace between anything at all. This was a purely political move for the ideology of some godless Europeans who are enjoying Obama's destruction of all that which is good.

At least, that's the only way I can piece this together--and that's my peace prize for my own head.