When the Air France jet skidded off the runway this week in Toronto, two faces of human instinct were on display.
Inside the plane, pandemonium broke loose as Survival instinct took over passengers, experts say
A primeval, and sometimes ugly, survival instinct swept over some of the desperate passengers of Air France Flight 358 when they found themselves trapped in the burning plane … It was for a time, as several passengers described it, everyone for himself or herself….Stephanie Paquin, a 17-year-old returning from a student exchange in France, said "people were just pushing. They didn't care about anyone else." After fleeing through the emergency exits, "everyone was trampling everyone."
The experts point to this as evidence of a primal instinct built into us over the eons:
"We have a bunch of primitive reflexes in which we exhibit behaviour like animals in certain situations," said Steven Taylor, a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, whose research focuses on trauma and anxiety. … Often people will "later feel embarrassed" for their behaviour.
Yet, another instinct drove one man who was driving by the airport at the time of the crash to drive toward the crash, against the rush of other cars fleeing the seeing, scale the barbed wire fence and lend a hand becoming the The hero of Flight 358
As terrified passengers fled the burning Air France jet, Guy Ledez stood atop a muddy ravine, pulling survivors from the wreckage.
He then ran on board the burning wreckage of Flight 358 to make sure no one was left behind. The 37-year-old airport rental car manager says he didn't have time to stop and think of danger when he witnessed the crash on a routine Tuesday afternoon.
"I looked down and there's just a sea of people trying to get up," he said. "I had two babies passed to me." He and another bystander - whose name he never learned - pulled survivors to safety and then went down to help elderly passengers up the ravine.
Not knowing whether injured survivors remained on board, he said, the two men scrambled up the emergency slide at the tail of the plane. Each took an aisle and did a sweep to make sure nobody had been left behind.
All 309 passengers and crew had remarkably escaped serious harm.
The other unknown good Samaritan jumped out and landed safely. Just as Ledez headed toward an exit, he heard an explosion from the back of the plane, one that ultimately ripped the aircraft into pieces.
He jumped and ran for his life. Only then did he realise how much danger he had escaped: "That sort of woke me up," he said. "That's when the reality set in."
…
"There was no thinking involved, just, 'I gotta go help', so boom, I did it," he said.
One the tensions Christians must grapple with lies between the total depravity of man, which speaks of the capacity and even propensity towards evil inherent in all of us, and our role as image bearers of God, created as good creatures, yet now fallen. Must we strive to empty ourselves of every ounce of human will to make room for God? Or do we seek to subject to and join our will with His will to achieve His purposes? Saints have grappled with these questions for millennia with no clear answer, and the two faces of human instinct shown in Flight 358 does little but highlight the tension. Perhaps that is as it should be.
Peace.
1 comment:
Sin is, anything that sets itself up or is set up against the knowledge of God. Or in simpler terms if the object of our affections and desire is anything but God it is sin. Fortunately God in His mercy not only presents us with the problem He gives us the solution and worked it out for us before we were even born.
The essence of sin, then, is independence…independence is the attempt to find life somewhere other then God…man alienated from God was not the man God had made. Having taken sin into himself he became something different, He became a carrier of death rather than a carrier of life. J. Wimber
The species
The process of the fall of Adam was not, I conceive, comparable to mere deterioration, (He began to die) as it may now occur in a human individual; it was the loss of status as a species, which condition was transmitted by heredity to all later generations, for it was not simply what biologists called acquired variation. It was the emergence of a new kind of man; a new species—never made by God!—Had sinned its way into existence. It was a radical alteration of His constitution. C.S. Lewis
For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 1 Cor. 15:22
The species of Adam, which was created by disobedience, is reversed by the obedience of Jesus, at the cross and a new species is born. Children of God, citizens of the Kingdom Heaven.
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