Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

3. Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration
Seneca: “Devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations.”
Anatole France: “It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.”

Perversion
Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. It is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s purpose in the world so that energy and resources are wasted on unworthy ends or wrong ends.
Spiritual hygiene requires us to be able to recognize and assess goods, to pursue them with appropriate degrees of interest, and to enjoy them with the appropriate level of pleasure. Ignorance and self-deception often skew our judgments about what is worth longing for in the first place.
Any return to greatness requires a reappraisal of what the primary purpose of man is, his spiritual nature, and his responsibility to God and others.

Pollution
When a church uses hymns or praise songs primarily for entertainment, it simultaneously perverts the hymns and pollutes worship.
To pollute is to defile, to weaken a whole entity by introducing a foreign element.
Idolatry is pollution in that a third party gets in between God and the worshipper, adulterating an exclusive loyalty.
Ingratitude fouls our character and our relation to God.
Dividedness and Disintegration
Idolatry both contaminates and divides proper loyalty to God.
A pure heart is an undivided heart.
When the foundation is cracked the building will crumble.
Sin tends to disintegrate both its victims and its perpetrators.

Amor Mortis
Sin has caused deterioration to spread through our soul and our psychic governing center, making it internally lawless.
Sinners who lose spiritual purpose and control eventually descend into a spiral of increasingly grave assaults on civic and personal integrity.
Sin both numbs us and hollows us out.
Sin eventually creates an upside down morality, showing that evil has crossed some wire within them so that their moral polarity has switched.
“Wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be in love with death.”