Detecting Foolishness

Some cocktails are dangerous. The following literary cocktail has proven quite dangerous, but sometimes it's good to live on the knife's edge. Danger serves to provide a sort of reality check. My literary cocktail has been the combination of Solomon and Kreeft. Yes, that's right. The Solomon of the Bible and the Peter Kreeft of Philosophy put together. Quite a concoction! Well, I paired them (or rather, they paired themselves) in the book Three Philosophies of Life. In this book Kreeft addresses Ecclesiastes, Job, and Song of Songs. It is in his observations of Ecclesiastes that he suggests, "Vanity cannot detect itself, just as folly cannot detect itself. Only the wise know folly; fools know neither wisdom nor folly."

The Bible condemns foolishness time and again. Agatha Christie said, of stupidity, that it was the one sin that could never be forgiven and was always punished. Of course, it is rather unfair of me to fuse foolishness and stupidity as one and the same thing. They're not (at least I think they're not). But, anyways, that's not really the point at all. The point is that as Christians we are called to be discerning. We are called to examine everything. This means that we must detect folly (foolishness). Precisely because we are Christians this should not be a difficult thing to do. Foolishness is, after all, rampant. We see it all the time in the movies or on TV. It's everywhere. The problem is we detect it and then do nothing about it. In fact we usually allow ourselves to be seduced by it. Instead of detecting and destroying foolishness, we detect it and become a part of it. That is just plain foolish. Where have our standards gone? To the gutter? We are heavenly creatures - not gutter creatures.