The Mystery of Civilization

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We were born into this 20th-century world as it is. We take it for granted. But we can’t explain it. It’s like viewing a movie at a point already near the end. We see what is occurring at that point, but, not having seen it from the beginning and not knowing how events developed to the point of viewing, we simply cannot understand what we are seeing.

The developed nations have made awesome progress. They have produced a highly mechanized world providing every luxury, modern convenience and means of pleasure. Yet they are cursed with crime, violence, injustice, sickness and disease, broken homes and families. At the same time more than one half of the world is living in illiteracy, abject poverty, filth and squalor. Violence and destruction are rapidly multiplying.

Could anything be wrapped in more mystery than this world’s civilization? How can we explain the astonishing paradox—a world with human minds that can send astronauts into space and produce the marvels of our push-button age, and yet cannot solve the most basic human problems of family life and group relationships, or peace between nations?

How do we explain this astonishing paradox, a world of human minds that can create just about anything in the physical realm—yet cannot solve the simplest of problems when it comes to getting along with fellow man.

You can’t answer that—you cannot explain it, as Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in Mystery of the Ages, unless you go back and look at what happened at the beginning.