Hypnotic Procedures: From Babylon's Sorcerers and Magicians to Our Own Time

In "The Aquarian Conspiracy," a book that has been called 'the New Age Bible,' Marilyn Ferguson (1938-2008) enthusiastically reports that a great, shuddering irrevocable shift is overtaking us,

"It is a new mind, a turnabout in consciousness in critical numbers of individuals, a network powerful enough to bring about radical change in our culture.   This network....has already enlisted the minds, hearts and resources of some of our most advanced thinkers, including Nobel laureate scientists, philosophers, statesmen, celebrities....who are working to create a different kind of society...The technologies for expanding and transforming personal consciousness, once the secret of an elite, are now generating massive change in every cultural institution---medicine, politics, business, education, religion and the family."   (America: The Sorcerer's New Apprentice, Hunt & McMahon, p. 34)

As Ferguson admitted, the psycho-technologies being employed for the transformation of personal consciousness or spirit, were once the private domain of ancient magicians and sorcerers.   In fact, as Constance Cumbey reveals in her thoroughly researched book, "The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow," many New Age esoteric historians claim their traditions originated in Atlantis and afterward were preserved in the ancient land of Babylon,

"...and surrounding Plains of Shinar and from there disseminated throughout the earth, including Taoist doctrines of China, Mayan-Aztec teachings of Mexico and Central/South America; Great Spirit teachings of the American Indians, Hindu/Buddhist teachings of Asia, etc" (pp. 250-251)

Occult New Age spirituality relies heavily on spirit revelations channeled through mediums such as the Luciferian Theosophists Helena Blavatsky and Alice Bailey together with their contemporary disciples, Benjamin Crème, Robert Muller, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Neale Donald Walsh to name but a few.  All of these mediums are not only under the influence of their spirit guides but demonically oppressed by them, often without their conscious awareness.   It is from demons then that the secret knowledge, the technologies for expanding and transforming personal consciousness, has been received.

Ferguson lists a number of these techniques 'for altering consciousness:'

".....Meditation, Self-Hypnosis, Focusing, Centering, Guided Imagery, Visualization, Transcendental Meditation, Yoga, Biofeedback, Dianetics, Silva Mind Control..."  (America: Sorcerer's New Apprentice, p. 43)

According to a 1987 New York Times article, psychologists who have studied these mind-altering techniques said that while participants are in this 'altered state' group-leaders are able to implant new ideas and alter thinking processes:

"Gurus hired to motivate workers are raising fears of 'mind control." (ibid, Hunt, McMahon)

This charge is so grave and frightening that former University of Wisconsin psychology faculty member Edwin Morse warns that graduates of New Age courses being required for employees of many businesses are often "psychologically scarred."  Now in private practice and specializing in helping such people, Dr. Morse declares:

"These (mind-altering) groups are using hypnotic procedures and people are not being told about it." (Dave Hunt, p. 42)

Richard L. Waring of Budget Rent-a-Car Corporation asserts that mind-altering techniques induce a trance-like state and adds that many participants are convinced that they have come under harmful, frightening influence from spirit entities as a result.  Arguing that people exposed by employers to "New Age psycho-technologies (for) altering normal consciousness....ought to be told up front" that inevitably their "fundamental worldviews and Judeo-Christian religious beliefs' are being tampered with, Waring explains,

"For about the last three years, I have observed the introduction and growth of a new philosophy of human potential and development (most often referred to) as the 'New Age' movement... I began noticing a number of consultants and corporate Human Resources Development practitioners who were promoting 'higher creativity,' 'improved memory,' 'accelerated learning,' 'stress management.'  I found that most of these methods were somewhere on Ferguson's list of 'means to altering consciousness'....(and) I began to wonder about the motives of the persons selling these concepts. Were they really out to improve human potential? Or had they had some profound experience on their spiritual journey and were really enlisting others to follow their path?" (ibid, pp. 42-43)

The New Age network is at work within our schools as well.  There they teach children the ancient art of "centering," a  psycho-technology that opens up the minds of children to the influence of demons.  In his book, "America's Schools: The Battleground for Freedom," Allen Quist warns:

"New Age religion is now aggressively being taught in our nation's public schools."  A model curriculum has been developed that "is clearly centered on pantheism."  "Much of what passes for environmental education and multiculturalism is really indoctrination in pantheistic/New Age theology.  The ACLU and other similar organizations have no objections to (pantheistic indoctrination).  It is only Christianity that these organizations object to."  (p. 51)

So-called 'extraterrestrials' are also at work.   In "Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the Evolution Connection," Gary Bates reports that the abduction phenomenon is occurring all over the world, including Third World countries. 

 UFO researcher Jacques Vallee notes that the abductee's perceptions of reality are being profoundly altered and adds that the structure of abduction stories is identical to occult rituals:

"...contact with ufonauts (is) a modern extension of contact with non-human consciousness in the form of angels, demons, elves, and sylphs....Such contact...often leaves marks and scars on the body and the mind..."   (p. 230)

 UFO research-scientist John Keel also likens modern alien abductions to contact with the demonic:

"Demonology is not just another crackpot-ology.  It is the ancient and scholarly study of the monsters and demons who have...coexisted with man throughout history....The manifestations and occurrences described in this imposing literature are similar, if not..identical, to the UFO phenomenon.  Victims of demonomania (possession) suffer the very same medical and emotional symptoms as the UFO contactees..."  (Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the Evolution Connection, Gary Bates, p. 260)

After considerable research, Gary Bates connects psycho-technologies to hypnosis.  So-called 'aliens' use hypnotic methods to enter into the subconscious mind to plant subliminal messages and alter thought processes to embrace the concept of naturalistic evolution which negates the Genesis account. (Bates, p. 262)

According to the Watchman Expositor, hypnosis is linked to ancient religious practices and eastern mystical experiences, involving similar trance states or altered states of consciousness. Such altered states are essential to such practices as out-of-body experiences, astral projection, and Yoga. William Kroger, M.D. and William Fezler Ph.D. maintain that,

"...hypnosis has been practiced in one form or another in the civilized and uncivilized world under many different labels since the dawn of history."  (Hypnosis, James K. Walker, watchman.org)

They further note that historically elements of hypnosis have been an integral part of pagan religious practices and world religions including Assyro-Babylonian exorcism, Egyptian soothsaying, Jewish mysticism, Byzantine Catholicism, Chinese Taoism , Sufism, Hinduism, Shintoism, forms of Buddhism (Tibetan and Zen), and Yoga. (Hypnosis and Behavior Modification, pp. 6-8; ibid).  

In  'Recognitions'  church father Clement records an evil deed of the magician Simon that bears a striking resemblance to the effects of modern psycho-technologies.   Clement reports that Simon had begun to commit murder by inducing a child to experience an out of body situation.  By way of mesmerizing,

"...abominable incantations he separated the soul of a child from its own body, that it might become his assistant for the production of whatever apparition he might require.  And he drew a likeness of the boy, and keeps it set up in the inner chamber where he sleeps, affirming that he...formed him of air by transformations such as the gods cause..." (Earth's Earliest Ages, G.H. Pember, p. 181)

In his interpretation of this dark passage, G.H. Pember concluded,

"...by mesmerism Simon had drawn out the spirit of the boy into a higher...state, and then omitted to recall it, so that the spirit had finally separated from the body; and that he had done this for the purpose of procuring a (spirit) familiar....Simon....denied the murder of the boy by asserting that he had merely resolved a spirit-form which he had himself produced." (p. 182)

In his 'Apology'  church father Tertullian writes that if magicians can produce apparitions, bring into evil repute the spirits of men who are dead,

"....mesmerize boys to obtain an oracular response...perform many wonders...by their conjuring illusions; send dreams by the aiding power of angels and demons whom they have...summoned to their assistance; through whose influence also goats and tables have been made to divine; how much more will that Satanic power be zealous to do with all its strength, of its own will, and for its own purposes, that which it does to serve the ends of others." (Pember, pp. 184-185)

A mere eighty years ago, America began moving away from its' founding Biblical-based worldview, and today by all appearances we are in the midst of an unprecedented and all-encompassing spiritual transformation of consciousness, a counter-conversion from belief in the God of the bible to acceptance of Luciferian New Age spirituality in its every false teaching and manifestation.   On the theological front, contemporary liberal and rationalistic theologians within the whole body of the church continue to either trivialize or outright deny the existence of  sin, hell, Satan and demons.   In the face of advancing chaos and demonic oppression in its every form they are utterly impotent, less than useless.

The clearest answer to the chaotic conditions of our times is found in the Bible.  We are living in the Last Days.  History is winding down and Satan is mobilizing his forces for a final all-out assault--- which we are already experiencing (1 Tim. 4:1 and 2; Tim. 3:1-4)  The demonic realm is brazenly interacting with our own realm, and it is in this light that we can understand the growing epidemic of madness, extremism, suicide, depression, apathy, apostasy, lawlessness, and hatred appearing on every side. 

We are living in the days of a demonic nature, said Dr. Kurt Koch (1913-1987).  For over fifty years Dr. Koch's name has been synonymous with authoritative and biblical insights and help for all who desire to understand or escape from the mesmerizing influence of the occult and demonic world. 

 Civilization is marching toward its own destruction said Koch, and if we fail therefore to take our stand at the foot of the cross,

"... fail to build our house upon the Rock, (we will) be swept away by the turmoil of the End-times."  (Demonology Past and Present, Koch, p. 37)

@Linda Kimball 

Serpent Power in Ancient and Modern Expressions

In "Why Some Scientists Embrace the 'Multiverse," Dennis Prager reports that he recently participated, along with 30 scholars, mostly scientists and mathematicians, in a conference on the question of whether the universe was designed, or at least fine-tuned, to make life, especially intelligent life. Participants — from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley and Columbia among other American and European universities — included believers in G0D, agonistics and atheists. (Prager, Jewish World Review, June 18, 2013)

 It was clear, said Prager, that the scientific consensus was that, at the very least, the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life:

"It appears that we live in a "Goldilocks Universe," in which both the arrangement of matter at the cosmic beginning and the values of various physical parameters — such as the speed of light, the strength of gravitational attraction and the expansion rate of the universe - are just right. And unless one is frightened of the term, it also appears the universe is  designed  for biogenesis and human life." (ibid)

 But many atheist scientists and fellow-travelers who insist there be no Creator God put forward the notion of a multiverse despite there being not a shred of evidence for the existence of these universes.  

 The multiverse hypothesis is a desperate grasp at the fantasy theory first proposed by David Deutsch in his book, "The Fabric of Reality."  Deutsch's theory postulates the existence of an infinite number of parallel universes in the vain hope that in at least one of them, conscious life and order arose by pure chance.

 Oxford professor Richard Swinburne responded that Deutsch's hypothesis was madness:

 "To postulate a trillion-trillion-trillion other universes, rather than one God, in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality." (Cosmos, Creator and Human Destiny, Dave Hunt, p. 209)

 Eminent quantum theorist John Polkinghorne utterly rejects the multiverse nonsense:

 "Let us recognize these speculations for what they are.  They are not physics, but....metaphysics.  There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes....To my mind greater economy and elegance would be that this one world is the way it is because it is the creation of the will of a Creator who purposes that it should be so." (ibid)

 Multiverse speculations, as Polkinghorne pointed out, are not physics but metaphysics, and in fact are based in ancient esoteric doctrines (i.e., monism, or one ultimate substance), have not gone away but have rather grown both in popularity and in madness.  For example, Royal Astronomer Lord Martin Rees's argues that if a multitude of universes exist then some of them are likely to allow the evolution of conscious life-forms far more advanced than our own.  And if this is the case, then super-intelligent alien beings might be capable of simulating in their brains or in a super-computer the complex history of our universe, meaning that the universe we inhabit is a simulation lacking real substance and existing only as a mental construction in the minds of our super-intelligent creators, the highly evolved aliens who seeded our world with life and travel through time in order to control time and our evolutionary progress. (Scientific Mythologies, James A. Herrick, p. 216)

 Rees claim that the universe we inhabit exists only as a mental construction is very similar to Hinduism's Brahman. Brahman is the Great Cosmic Spirit---the Ultimate One Substance or Essence of material phenomena, meaning that the universe exists only as a mental construction in the mind of Brahman: brahma satyam jagan mithya, or "Brahman is real, the world is unreal." (swamij.com/mahavakyas)

 Rees proposal is also very similar to the hypothesis presented by Olaf Stapledon, a scientist who has always kept one foot firmly planted in Gnosticized science fiction accounts.  Stapledon imagines our universe to be an artifact of the Star Maker.  Building off of Stapledon's fantasy Carl Sagan suggests that we are "star folk" made of "star stuff."    (Herrick, pp. 216-217)

 Replace Star Maker with Brahman and "star stuff" with sarvam khalvidam brahma, or "All is truly Brahman" (swamij.com) and we have ayam atma brahmam, "The Self is Brahman." ( (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.5)

Ree's reveals the ancient esoteric basis of his propositions in the caption of his book, 'Just Six Numbers.  The caption reads:

 "The ouraboros. There are links between the microworld of particles, nuclei and atoms [left] and the cosmos[right]." (Rees M., Just Six Numbers, P. 9)

In the text Rees writes,

 "Symbolized 'gastronomically' at the top, is the ultimate synthesis that still eludes us-between the cosmos and the quantum." (p. 8)

 "Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field…" — Genesis 3:1

 The Ouroboros or Uroboros is an occult symbol that means the power, creative and/or evolutionary impulse or energy of the serpent figuratively depicted as a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.  The serpent's body is often depicted as the Great Chain of Being, Cosmic Tree, or with Darwin, the Tree of Life.  

 The occult Tree of Life with its' multiple dimensions and life-giving energy systems not only powers the universe but reaches into the psyche, stirring imagination, bringing psychic powers and even awakening pre-human memories of when the scientifically "enlightened elites" were fish:

 "Remember when you were a fish...." suggested Jean Houston, the prophet of the possible, in a workshop to awaken ancient pre-human memories.   Nearly a thousand people dropped to the floor and began moving their 'fins' as if to propel themselves through water.  "Notice your perception as you roll like a fish. How does your world look, feel, sound, smell, taste?"  Then you came up on land, said Houston, so now you must, "Allow yourself to fully remember being a reptile....Then some of you flew. Others climbed trees."   A zoo of sounds erupted from the herd of pre-human birds, reptiles and apes. (America: The Sorcerer's New Apprentice, Hunt and McMahon, p. 218)

 From the time of the ancients serpent power has been important in religious and mythological symbolism all around the world. Within the Egyptian mysteries, the serpent was associated with,

..."the elemental forces that were in play before the creation of the world." (Teichrib, Gods of Ancient  Egypt, p. 182)

 In China serpents were spiritually linked with earth and water while in Scandinavian myth a world serpent protected man from cosmic forces of chaos.  The self-described Gnostic Carl Jung interpreted the Ouroboros as having an archetypal significance to the human psyche.    Serpent power is also associated with today's occult New Age spirituality as well as Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Freemasonry and its' blatantly occult Luciferian sister Theosophy, where serpent power represents "self-generation and evolution through its own creative power." 

In his book, "The Sign of the Serpent," Mark Balfour relates how pervasive serpent symbols are within India and the Hindu religion:

 "Any observant traveler who moves from the snow-tipped Himalayas in the North to the sun-soaked sands of Cape Comorin at India’s southern tip, will encounter—particularly in the rural areas and at sacred centres of pilgrimage wherever Siva, God of both Divine Wisdom and regeneration, is the presiding Deity—the serpent motif sculptured within shrines, impressed on myriads of stone implants in the ground and depicted in art." (A Short Guide to Occult Symbols: Serpent Power, Carl Teichrib, 2005, Kjos Ministries)  

 Balfour elaborates on this Hindu belief:

 "In Hinduism, the Cosmic Serpent—Ananta Sesha—symbolic of timeless eternity, carries the world on his 1000-fold [Cobra] hood…As the creative impulse stirs within the great Serpent in the Sky—when passive idea becomes active thought—the forces of attraction and repulsion come into play as ‘spirit’ begins its involution into "matter." (ibid, Teichrib)

Moreover, Kundalini yoga, a discipline within Hinduism, teaches that vast amounts of latent serpent energy lies at the base of the human spine, "like a coiled serpent, ready to spring." (Harper's Dictionary of Hinduism, p. 156, ibid, Teichrib)  

 Through strenuous yoga techniques, this serpent power uncoils and rises through seven "chakras" or power centers within the human body. The serpent force is considered to be a,

 ".....concentrated field of intelligent cosmic, invisible energy absolutely vital to life beginning in the base of the spine as a man or a woman begins to evolve in their first incarnation." (The Donning International Encyclopedic Psychic Dictionary, p. 343, ibid, Teichrib)

 The ancient occult concept of serpent power symbolized today by the theory of evolution, Darwin's Tree of Life, pre-existent or spontaneously generated matter and multiverse hypothesis has swept the post-Christian West and America, even entering into the whole body of the Church.

The prophet Daniel makes mention of the God of "forces" in connection with the Antichrist. (Dan. 11:38) 

Today this 'God' has mesmerized vast numbers of Westerners and Americans, secular and  Christian alike.

As the 'Christ' of the hugely popular "A Course in Miracles" the God of forces states that there is an "irresistible Force" within each person while New Age leader Marianne Williamson explains that this "universal force" can be activated within each person and has the "power to make all things right."   The 'Christ' tells New Age leader Barbara Marx Hubbard that on the day of Planetary Pentecost a Planetary Smile will flash across the faces of all people who have accepted the Luciferian Initiation.  There will be "uncontrollable joy" that the 'Christ' describes as the "joy of Force" that will "ripple" through the one body of humanity. 

The God of forces who is the serpent power worshipped by mankind from antiquity, the Ouroboros, the Cosmic Tree and Ultimate Spirit of the universe representing "self-generation and evolution through its own creative power" asks his modern worshippers,

"What if I am not a 'man' at all, but rather a Force, an 'Energy" in the universe, that IS the universe, and that is, in fact, All That Is. What if I am The Collective?" ("God" in Conversations with God: Book 3, p. 125, Neale Donald Walsh, from "False Christ Coming: Does Anybody Care? Warren B. Smith, p. 122) 

Tragically, many people today are looking with favor on the God of forces rather than our Savior Jesus Christ:

"I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6).

 @Linda Kimball

America's Gnosticized Evangelical Church

"As well as I can....I will briefly and clearly describe the position of the present false teachers....I am neither practiced in writing nor trained in rhetoric, but my love for you and yours encourages me to bear my witness about these teachings which have been hidden till the present, but have now by the grace of God come to light."  (Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, 130-200, in 'Against Heresies')

The false teachers were Gnostic Christians.   St. Paul called them the "super-apostles," the spiritual elitists who sought to accommodate the faith to paganism in spite of the apostle Paul's warning to converted pagans in Corinth:

"What harmony is there between Christ and Belial....between the temple of God and idols?" (2 Cor. 6:15-16) or between "the lord's table and the table of demons?" (1 Cor. 1021)  

Like its' modern Gnostic evangelical counterpart that seeks to grow the church and save souls by accommodating the faith to the felt-needs of America's paganized seeker-sensitive culture, ancient Gnosticism attempted to incorporate the seeker-sensitive spirituality of the Greeks into Christianity.

In his book,  "The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back," Dr. Peter Jones, professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, California, writes that the resulting perversion, 'Christian Gnosticism,' is a form of mystical Christian spirituality blended together with paganism. (p.6)

Where Dr. Jones clearly sees that occult New Age spirituality is Gnosticism returned with a vengeance, a many-headed Gnostic monster intent on obliterating supernatural Christian faith, the highly esteemed political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-85) identified certain modern secular movements as revised variants of neo-pagan Gnosticism.  In "Science, Politics and Gnosticism," he identifies them as positivism, Hegelianism, Marxism, the philosophy of Nietzsche, and the 'God is dead' school.

Our age is an age of Gnosticism. Indeed, Gnostic tendencies have been entering into the Protestant church for many long years.  The self-described Gnostic Jew, Harold Bloom,  a professor at Yale and New York Universities and author of more than 20 books including 'The American Religion" (1992) is delighted by the fall of Protestantism into Gnosticism and in response to Philip J. Lee's book, "Against the Protestant Gnostics," a profoundly penetrating analysis of Gnosticism within both the Protestant liberal and Protestant evangelical church, Bloom said:

"He (Lee) sees what I see, the American Religion, but what fascinates me moves him to dread and wrath, whether he encounters it among liberal or Fundamentalist Protestants."  (Preface to Against the Protestant Gnostics, p. xi)

In the essay, "The New Gnosticism," (modernreformation.org) Michael Horton, Ph.D., J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California delineates the main features of both ancient Christian Gnosticism and its' modern counterpart, Gnostic Protestantism.  Horton begins with old Gnosticism.

Old Gnosticism

1. Eclectic and polymorphic.  As Philip Lee observes,

"Gnostic syncretism...believes everything in general for the purpose of avoiding a belief in something in particular. In the case of Christian Gnosticism, what is being avoided is the particularity of the Gospel, that which is a 'stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles." (Philip Lee, p. 80)

Horton agrees with Dr. Jones that Gnosticism emerged as a form of mystical Christian spirituality blended together with Greek paganism:

" We recall Paul in Athens, in the Areopagus, where "people did nothing but discuss the latest ideas" (Acts 17:21), telling the Greeks that they were "very religious." Gnosticism was an attempt to incorporate the seeker spirituality of the Greeks into Christianity."

2. Elitist, individualistic, and subjective (morally relative):

The gnostikoi (elites) were repelled by the ordinariness of the Christian "masses" and  "found orthodoxy boring." Rituals (i.e., Communion), traditions, and simple expositions of biblical texts  "for uneducated audiences" were offensive to their exalted intellects.  As spiritual elites who knew better than God, they required differentiation between themselves and the "herd." (Lee, p. 162)

3. Immanence (pantheism) over transcendence:

"... the Gnostic stresses God's nearness over his distant holiness and sovereignty. In fact, the individual self is a "spark" of the One (God). As one scholar puts it, "The self is the indwelling of God."  (Horton)

4. Spirit over matter:

" Sometimes called in our day "mind over matter," the Greek and Gnostic worldview is dualistic. That is, it divides the world into matter (evil) and spirit (good). Evil, suffering, illness and death are all attributed to the existence of matter and the "Fall" was not from innocence to rebellion (as in the biblical account), but from pure spirit to physical bodies. Imprisoned in a material world, the self is alienated from its true home. This theme of a war between Light and Darkness, Spirit and Matter, the Divine Within and the World Outside, and the sense of alienation, despair, loneliness and abandonment in the physical world, is the recurring key to understanding Gnosticism.  In our day, Matthew Fox, repeating the warning of self-described Gnostic psychologist C. J. Jung, expresses this sentiment well: "One way to kill the soul is to worship a God outside you." (ibid, Horton)

5. Anti-institutional orientation:

"Associated with matter and the physical imprisonment of the self, institutions are viewed as spiritual enemies. The Outside God and the Outside Church are enemies of the soul, directing the self away from one's own inner experience to others and to formal structures of authority, creeds, doctrines, rituals and sacraments." (ibid)

6. Anti-sacramental:

"If the self enjoyed a direct and immediate relationship with God's Spirit, and knowledge came through a secret revelation of a mystical nature, surely the introduction of material means of grace-the printed word (accessible to everyone), water (in Baptism), and bread and wine (the Eucharist)-actually become impediments to real fellowship with God. They are insufficiently "spiritual" for Gnostic piety, as rebirth (a prominent Gnostic theme) is by the Spirit in opposition to matter. Furthermore, the gnosis (Revelation Knowledge) was based on the idea that only a few really knew the secrets, while Christianity's emphasis on Word and sacrament, available to anyone who could read or eat, challenged this private, spiritual elitism." (ibid)

7. Anti-historical and focused on escape:

" As spirit is opposed to matter, and individual inwardness is opposed to an institutional church, eternity is opposed to time. Salvation for the Gnostic is redemption from the body, institutions, and the grinding process of history into which the pure self is mercilessly thrown." (ibid)

8. Anti-Jewish:

" While biblical religion focused on God's personal involvement with the world in creation and redemption, through the bloody sacrifices that anticipated the Messiah, Gnosticism harbored a deep distrust of the Old Testament God. In fact, two Gnostic sects appear in this connection. Marcion (d. A.D. 160) rejected the Old Testament entirely on the basis that it represented a wrathful Judge who created matter and imprisoned souls in history, while the New Testament God (Jesus) was the God of Love. The Creator-God (Old Testament) and the Redeemer-God (New Testament) were viewed as opposites in Marcionism. In addition to the Old Testament, Luke's Gospel and Paul's epistles underwent radical revisions." (ibid)

9. Feminist and androgynous:

" Ancient Gnosticism... divided the world into spirit and matter as columns of "good" and "bad." They defined characteristics of femininity as love, freedom, affirmation, and nurture, and these were in the "good" column, while those of masculinity were defined as justice, law, wrath, and strength, and put in the "bad" column. This is in sharp contrast to the Christian God who, in both Testaments, is a good, gracious, loving and saving, as well as just, holy and sovereign Father. "Sophia," the Greek word for "wisdom," after the goddess of wisdom, became the "God" of many Gnostics. The 13th-century mystic, Meister Eckhart, wrote, "What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth," and this image is replete in the mystical literature." (ibid, Horton) 

"Ancient Gnosticism," Lee writes, "loathed the patriarchal and authoritarian qualities of official Christianity. From the Gnostic point of view, the structure and discipline of the Church stifled the spirit." (p. 158).

The antipathy toward nature (God's creation) was reflected in the Gnostic celebration of the "androgynous (i.e.,  sexless or 'gay') self." While the body (evil matter) may be either male or female, the spirit is "free."

Gnosis is not only anti-historical and morally relative but anti-intellectual and feelings-oriented.  This is why St. Irenaeus called it "pseudo-knowledge" and Paul told Timothy it was "knowledge falsely called" (1 Tm 6:20) as it preferred "heart knowledge" (feelings) to "head knowledge," (morally informed reason, logic, apologetics) although Christianity knew no such dichotomy.

New Gnosticism: trends, religious expressions and tendencies

1. Narcissism:

"....what the Bible calls 'forgiveness' is received not from the Almighty...but from the self....Self-loving-self is the primary pattern of grace.  When such eternal significance is given to a narcissistic 'human experience' and we see such implicit Gnosticizing of the human personality, we can only say what Irenaeus in exasperation was forced to say of Valentinus: 'Iu, Iu, Pheu, Pheu!" (Lee, p. 152) 

2. Elitism

While orthodoxy maintains that all who receive baptism, repent of their sins, confess the creed, participate in the Eucharist and agree to obey the Church are Christians, the Gnosticized evangelical church heaps,

"...ridicule on those mere Christians who only attend weekly services.  Apparently, there is no one more worthless than the weekly church-goer who simply sits in the pew and drops something in the offering plate..."  On the other hand, the real Christians, the worthwhile ones, "are those who become involved in mission studies (and) take part in organizational activities..." There is little doubt that such differentiation between involved (real) Christians and the ordinary nominal Christians, "is a classic example of elitism, an insult to thousands of simple, non-organizational Protestants who desire the Word and Sacraments and other means of grace (in a simple, ordinary church) and who on a day-to-day basis witness to the faith in their homes and on the job."   (Lee, pp. 265-266)

Ordinary Christians and ordinary congregations have been made to feel inferior to Gnosticized "innovative ministries, mission fields and other more avant-garde endeavors."   Against the extravagant elitism of Gnosticized born again evangelicalism, "there must emerge within Protestantism an appreciation of ordinary Christians.  The emphasis should be precisely on participation in the liturgy.  All other ecclesiastical functions are secondary and responsive to the Church's essential gathering about Christ's Table." (ibid)

3. Irreverence, irrelevance and therapeutic messages:

 "...preaching (has) turned from the objective emphasis on God's saving work in Christ, to techniques for self- improvement, psychologically and morally conceived. Considered too offensive for the immortal and innocent self, the Law was not suitable for preaching unless it could be shown that it was somehow beneficial for personal transformation. Divine commands had to be seen as attainable and reasonable principles for self-enhancement and universal love. Damnation was entirely out of place as a purpose for the Law, or for any sociable discourse. Similarly, the Gospel, hardly distinguishable now from the Gnostic law, became a secret formula (gnosis) for rebirth, self-realization, and the personal unmediated experience with the Divine. This was true equally for liberals and evangelicals, Unitarians and revivalists, as well as for the many Gnostic cults that were born in this environment (Christian Science, Unity, Adventism, etc.), however differently each may have stated it." (Michael Horton)

4. A Christ who does not redeem but merely reveals:

"Ironically...the liberal Christology has not been substantially different from that of the evangelicals.  In one important respect, the two polarities have....come together: both essentially proclaim a Christ who does not redeem."  Though Christ is given center stage "He is not responsible for the Creation.  He is not the Incarnate God who...has access to all persons alike: Muslims, Jews, atheists, Hindus, as well as Christians.  He is not empowered to bring healing to the world....The Jesus of this mind-set must be known in order to effect change; his only function is to bring saving knowledge." (Lee, p 107)

 Another way to shed light on the Gnostic tendency to regard Christ as revealer only is to observe the Protestant fascination with technique.  There are techniques for church growth, conversion and for saving paganized postmoderns:

"Both liberals and evangelicals disdain doctrine for personal experience, and objective truth for personal transformation, and in this sense, each is, in its own way, Gnostic."  (Michael Horton)

5. Rebirth or magical Gnosticized born againism---immediate purification (perfection) of the soul.  Horton comments:

"...the experience of "rebirth" comes neither through the Word of the Gospel nor through the water of Baptism, but through a "Spirit Baptism" that is direct and immediate. The Word is primarily seen as an instrument for coaxing the individual into accepting the new birth. The new birth, especially if one judges by the testimonies of converts, is not so much the result of hearing with human ears, in human words, a declaration of things that happened in human history. In short, it is not so much the preaching of the Cross, but the preaching of "my personal relationship with Jesus," the day when "Jesus came into my heart," that is central."

Philip Lee:

"Whereas classical Calvinism had held that the Christian's assurance of salvation was guaranteed only through Christ and his Church, with his means of grace, now assurance could be found only in the personal experience of having been born again. This was a radical shift, for Calvin had considered any attempt to put 'conversion in the power of man himself' to be gross popery." In fact, "Rebirth in God is the exact opposite of rebirth into a new and more acceptable self, as the self-acclaimed born again Christians would see the event" (pp. 144, 255).

Horton again:

"Also in terms of their views of Christ, liberals and evangelicals reveal a common Gnostic tendency. While the liberals divided the Jesus of History... from the Christ of Faith (resurrected God-Man), proclaiming that the Spirit of Christ lives and calls us into vital communion even though his body is not raised, evangelicals often seem to worship the spirit of Jesus apart from his humanity. "Jesus in my heart," at the end of the day, is more important for personal Christian experience, piety, and worship than Jesus in history. Although evangelicals insist on a historical resurrection as a matter of official creed, in actual practice, one wonders why it is important if the spirit of Jesus is in one's heart? After all, no one believes that Jesus takes up physical residence in one's heart, so what can we mean by "asking Jesus into our heart" other than inviting his spirit? Little is said of the biblical notion that it is the Holy Spirit who unites us not to the spirit of Jesus in our hearts, but to the God-Man in heaven according to both his divine and human natures."

6. Faith is magic:

In Orthodox Christianity, faith is trust in God's specific promise of salvation through Christ. "In Gnosticism, faith is magic. It is a technique for getting what we want by believing in it strongly enough."  As church-growth guru C. Peter Wagner, an advocate of the Vineyard movement puts it, "Empirical evidence also validates the absolute necessity of faith or whatever else you want to call it-possibility thinking or goal setting-as a prerequisite for church growth."  (Horton)

Gnosticized faith turns out to be a synonym for humanist possibility thinking, church growth and missional ambitions.   Against this, the Second Helvetic Confession (a 16th century Reformed statement) declares,

"Christian faith is not an opinion or human conviction, but a most firm trust and a clear and steadfast assent of the mind, and then a most certain apprehension of the truth of God presented in the Scriptures and in the Apostles' Creed, and thus also of God himself, the greatest good, and especially of God's promise and of Christ who is the fulfillment of all promises."

7. Immutable truth, moral absolutes, creeds, doctrines, traditions, obedience and institutions divide people, especially narcissists for whom:

 "Spirit is the inner, experiential aspect of religion; institution is the outer, established form of religion. This distinction is increasingly pertinent because of the strong emphasis on self in contemporary culture and the related shift from objective to subjective ways of ordering experience."  Orthodox Christian theism, "is too restricting, but spirituality offers a way of plugging into the divine with the correct spiritual technology." (Horton) 

In other words, the purpose of the church is not liturgy, sacraments and other means of grace but the impartation of elitist therapeutic knowledge; it is not of sin and salvation by Christ's atonement, but of elitist techniques for successful Christian living, church growth and missions. It is purely narcissistic and individualistic as well as pseudo-moralistic. The church that scorns ordinary Christians in favor of accommodating paganized seekers is the church that 'grows' and this is the Gnosticized church that meets the felt-needs and appetites of seekers and offers and delivers more gnosis-saving techniques than others.

From its' beginning, the Church has always been distressed by heresies, and Gnosticism has been one of the most dangerous and destructive of all heresies.  And though the Gnosticized contemporary Protestant Church appears to be a hopeless case,  Philip Lee advises us not to conclude that the problems and heresies plaguing the Church are overwhelming or insoluble.  Renewal can occur, but only if and when,

"...Protestants are prepared to be honestly critical of their own religion, and then determine to do something about it." (p. 218)

The appointed place for the beginning of renewal, of any reform or purification of the Church must be the pulpit,

"...the platform from which that Word contrary to all our mistaken words is proclaimed.  Any successful foray against heresy must be launched from that spot.  In fact, insofar as the historical Church has been serious about combating false faith, Gospel preaching has been her primary weapon.....What could be more Protestant than to begin a new reformation with the preaching of the Word?" (ibid)

@Linda Kimball

Life in a Madhouse Enforced by Tyranny: What is it like?

For many years now MassResistance has been trying to warn Americans that the homosexual movement, backed by Obama and other narcissists with a lust for power for the sake of power, is fighting  hard for "transgender rights"  and "gender identity non-discrimination" laws because these laws are the entré  to fundamentally transforming society. Once these laws are in place,  we will no longer be allowed to distinguish between male and female, nor will parents be allowed to protect their children against 'otherly-gendered' sexual predators or even themselves from aggressive sexual advances.  (Lawsuit forces Boston Police Dept. to implement outrageous  transgender policy regarding arrests & searches, Massresistance.org)

All of this madness and more became the 'norm' in the former Soviet Union where even 'thought' was a crime:

"Thought crime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.  You might dodge successfully for awhile...but sooner or later they were bound to get you."  George Orwell, 1984

To get an idea of what that madness was like let us imagine that pathologically twisted color-blind people have managed to seize absolute control of our country and have forbidden Americans from distinguishing between the colors yellow (for bananas) and purple (for plums).  Special politically correct 'color' police armed with the force of 'depraved' law patrol farmers markets, personal gardens, grocery stores and restaurants, scrutinizing faces for signs of politically incorrect 'thought'  in order to make sure that no one selects yellow bananas or purple plums which indicate that they are discriminating between yellow and purple.  Of course the color police are not color-blind themselves but because they too are pathologically twisted they receive enormous pleasure from psychologically bullying, terrorizing and dominating other people.   

Natan Sharansky, a dissident in the former Soviet Union describes existence there as madness enforced by tyranny where,

"...there were no dissidents (because) they were simply killed immediately." Under the terrorist-tactics of hate crime laws, speech codes, and other thought-control tactics, everyone became double thinkers. To outside observers notes Sharansky, double thinkers appear as true believers: "everybody says the same thing, everybody votes the same way, everybody speaks with passion." But this is an illusion caused by fear of speaking the truth, of discriminating between good and evil, truth and lie, normal and abnormal. These people, he noted, "live with self-censorship throughout their lives. Since the regime  demands loyalty right from childhood, many don't even notice. They just automatically control how they express themselves." But when a "fear society disappears or becomes  weak, people suddenly start saying what they feel," Sharansky commented, and "It's such a big relief."

To determine if a society is fear-based, Sharansky applies what he defines as the "town square test." In this test, if you,

"...can go to the center of town and publicly express your views without being punished, you have a free society" even though that society may not be just. However, if you are "punished for your views you live in a fear society....In such societies there are always three types of population: True believers, who accept the ideology...dissidents, who take risks to speak publicly; and double thinkers, who have doubts or disagreements about the official ideology but are afraid to express them publicly."

In conclusion said Sharansky, the level,

"....of dissidence is always a function of how tough the regime is." (The Power of Freedom, published in The  American Enterprise, Apr/May 2005, pp. 38-39)

Measured by Sharanskys' town-square test we can see that America  and the West are quickly descending into a fear-based madhouse where dissent against abortion, evolution, any or all of the 'gay' agenda, decadence festivals, illegal immigration, the sexualization of our children, the imposition of shariah, and socialistic 'healthcare' brings immediate demonization.  You may lose your job.  In America it can even bring the terroristic force of the IRS against you. 

In an address to the 10th Annual Freedom 21 Conference (10/16/09) Tom DeWeese tried to warn Americans that,

"....we are witnessing an all-out drive to impose thought control that seeks to ban the ability — the right — to think or speak for one's self.  Thinking is becoming a crime."    (Globally Acceptable Truth and the Crime of Thinking, Tom DeWeese)

But a morally depraved, willfully ignorant people will not listen.  Caught up as they are in gratification of 'self' they do not care to hear things that disturb them, that make them feel 'bad' or guilty.  

But when people are universally ignorant and debauched said founding father Samuel Adams:

"....they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."  

As they sink under the weight of their own ignorance and depravity, freedom of speech will be taken away from them, and when that occurs,

"...then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." George Washington

@Linda Kimball

Deluded Tim Keller: the Dangerous Esoteric Doctrines He Unwittingly Embraces

Timothy J. Keller (b. 1950) is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and author of many bestsellers including The Reason for God.   He is also the most recent compromiser in a long line of Christian compromisers (priests and intellectuals) stretching back to the Renaissance, to embrace evolution and suggest that in order for it to be compatible with the Bible  we must see the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo in a non-literal, non-historical context.

In a position paper Keller published with the theistic evolutionary organization Biologos he argues,

“....there is no logical reason to preclude that God could have used evolution    to predispose people to believe in God in general so that people would be able to    consider true belief when they hear the Gospel preached.”  (A response to Timothy Keller’s ‘Creation, Evolution and Christian Laypeople,’ Lita Cosner, 9 September 2010, creation.com)

Evolutionary scenarios commonly proposed by evolutionary theists typically reduce Adam and Eve to mythical figures, with the consequence that Eve was never promised a ‘Seed' and death didn’t come from a mythical Fall but rather from the death of the millions of evolved creatures that preceded humans by billions of years.   So evolution not only makes God responsible for death but in amputating the entire historical  precedent from the Gospel it changes the rest of Scripture and makes Jesus Christ unnecessary as atheist Frank Zindler points out:

“The most devastating thing though that biology did to Christianity  was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know Adam and Eve never  were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never  was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an  original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation  there is no need of a savior. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed. I think that evolution absolutely is the  death knell of Christianity.” (Frank Zindler, American atheist, in a debate with William Craig, Atheism vs Christianity video, 1996, from "Homeschooling parents demand evolutionary textbooks," Lita Cosner, 13 June 2013, creation.com)

Shallow-thinking, weak-willed compromisers like Keller rush in where angels fear to tread, meaning that first of all, evolution is not what he believes it is, and second, it is completely at odds with the Bible.  It is the enemy of the Bible, as even evolutionary atheist Richard Dawkins agrees:

“I think the evangelical Christians have really sort of got it right in a way, in seeing evolution as the enemy. Whereas the more, what  shall we say, sophisticated theologians are quite happy to live with evolution,  I think they’re deluded. I think the evangelicals have got it right,  in that there really is a deep incompatibility between evolution and Christianity..." (ibid)

So just what is evolution?  Where frank speaking occurs, it is revealed that evolutionary science is in fact an esoteric subject.  When asked by a layman why he should be interested  "in so esoteric a subject as evolutionary biology," Professor S.J. Gould replied that evolution tells us,

“.... us where we came from, how we got here, and perhaps where we are going. Quite simply, it is science’s version of Roots, except it is the story of us all."   (The Religious Nature of Evolution Theory and its Attack on Christianity, John G. Leslie and Charles K. Pallaghy, Ph.D, creation.com)

Gould candidly admits that evolutionary biology is an esoteric account of the ultimate origin of life.  According to this account, about 3 billion years ago lifeless chemicals laying around on an already existing earth (pre-existing matter)somehow combined and finally magically transcended themselves after a hundred or a thousand identical operations thus allowing the transmutation of the chemical substances into life.   Once life emerged, natural processes (evolution, laws of nature) were set in motion that supposedly eventuated in the arrival of man:

If man has arrived at his present state as a result of natural processes rather than a supernatural will, he can learn to control these processes...The concept of evolution, which is now basic to the life sciences, has provided new and in some ways revolutionary answers to questions men have been asking for centuries. The two most important of these are, ‘Why am I here, what is the purpose of human existence, and what is the nature of the world of life that surrounds us?"   (ibid, Dobzhansky, T., Ayala, F.J., Stebbins, G.L. and Valentine, J.W., Evolution, W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1977)

 Evolutionary biology is an esoteric science, a modern Mystery Religion consisting of both an exoteric or outer meaning for mass consumption (for deluded people like Keller) and a hidden, or esoteric meaning, for higher initiates. 

Hiding beneath the idea that life will eventually emerge from the mixing of lifeless chemicals is a vision arising from the age-old technology of alchemy and its magical or mystical meaning: the ancient Egyptian Hermetic principle of the macrocosm's correlation with the microcosm, “As above, so below” symbolized by the great chain of being, or with Darwin the tree of life.

In occult theosophical thought for example, "As above" corresponds to a number of different astral planes and sub-planes comprising the habitations of all,

"... supernatural entities, the locale of gods and demons, the void where the thoughtforms dwell, the region inhabited by spirits of the air and other elements, and the various heavens and hells with their angelic and demonic hosts....With the help of ritual procedures, trained persons believe that they can 'rise on the planes,' and experience these regions in full awareness." ("Beyond the Body: The Human Double and the Astral planes, Benjamin Walker, 1974, pp. 117-8)

The Apostle Paul speaks not of astral planes, cosmic trees and the inhabitants supposedly existing there but of fallen angels, the "spirits of wickedness under the heavens" (Eph. 6:12) and their chief, "the prince of the powers of the air." (Eph. 2:2) 

According to Paul, fallen angels are dispersed in a multitude throughout the whole blue expanse of sky which is visible to us under the heavens, the dwelling place for the host of fallen angels who have been cast down from heaven.    This means that the whole blue expanse of sky under the heavens where fallen angels dwell is the "As above" consisting of astral planes and sub-planes connected by the great chain of being up which the initiate ascends (evolves) by way of ritual (i.e., transcendental meditation) to reach divine status and gain powers. 

In "God and the Knowledge of Reality," the Catholic philosopher and historian, Thomas Molnar (1921–2010), writes that during the Renaissance Christian mystics and scholars such as Emanuel Swedenborg discovered Hermetic and Cabala esoteric texts and like Pico della Mirandola, argued that hermetic science---the divine technology of reaching divine status and powers through magic, ritual procedures and for Swedenborg, astral plane traveling----is the best proof of the divinity of Christ.    In other words said Molnar,

"..by the time of the Renaissance the esoteric texts of the first centuries A.D. had acquired in scholarly and humanist circles an unparalleled prestige, confronting as equals the texts held sacred by the church.  In Pico's estimation, 'nulla est scientia que nos magis certificet de divinitate Christ quam magia et Cabala' (there is no science that would prove for us Christ's divinity better than magic and the Cabala.)"  (ibid, pp. 78-79)

The astral plane is well-known around the world in its' many esoteric traditions:

" References to this reality are the Dreaming of the Australian Aborigines, the Spirit-world of Shamanism, the Duart of the ancient Egyptians, the Bardo (Intermediate State) of the Tibetans, the Imaginal world of Islamic Esotericism - e.g. the Barzakh (Interworld) or  of Suhrawardi and the the Mithal (Imaginal realm) of Ibn Arabi - the Universe of Asiyah of some Kabbalists, or of Yetzirah according to others.  Other descriptions are the Nervo degree of the Physical State of Theon, the Astral or 2nd Prakritic plane (corresponding to the Linga Sharira or Subtle or Astral body) and the Kama (Desire-Plane)  of Blavatsky,  the Astral Plane of the Adyar school of Theosophy and of popular occultism, Rudolf Steiner's "Soul World"; and and the Vital and Subtle Physical described by Sri Aurobindo and Mirra.  These are just a few of the innumerable descriptions of this plane of existence. " (The Astral Plane, kheper.net)

In order for occult rituals to work, matter (the One Substance) must either pre-exist or have come into being from the Big Bang in order for lifeless chemicals to be laying around on an already existing earth.  In either scenario, all being is at bottom one, or monistic: As above, so below.

Esoteric knowledge pertaining to the One Substance with its' different astral planes and sub-planes and  great chain of being teaches that the "vehicle beyond the etheric body"  begins to progress (evolve) as it makes its way to the heaven-world as in Swedenborg's teaching, is inseparably linked in Hermetic doctrines. 

Molnar writes that the Hermetic practitioner must strive first for separation of the soul from the body (purification), and second, for the spiritualization of all matter.  For modern Western practitioners, Teilhard's spiritual conception achieves the second goal while Darwin's esoteric formula attains the first as it imaginatively un-creates man as God's spiritual image bearer:

"....the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living things created themselves, which is in essence a metaphysical claim....Thus...evolutionism is a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb....it is a scientistic myth. And the myth is Gnostic, because it implicitly denies the transcendent origin of being; for indeed, only after the living creature has been speculatively reduced to an aggregate of particles does Darwinist transformism become conceivable."  ( Dr. Wolfgang Smith in From Old Gnosticism to New Age I, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal Vol. 28:4-29:1, 2005, pp. 30-31)

In his great masterpiece, "That Hideous Strength," C.S. Lewis points out that humanist philosophy, naturalism (monism), Hermetic magic, Cabala, evolution, cosmic trees and other forms of occultism were two sides of the same revival of Renaissance paganism underlying the intellectual edifice of modern science. Thus he argued that occultism and humanistic rationalism were not enemies in principle but rather cooperating philosophies united against supernatural Christian theism and Christian civilization. Lewis underscores this point in "The Abolition of Man:"

"You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak." In conclusion, evolutionary biology and Darwin's tree of life symbolize deep religious desires of transcendence and self-redemption, thus are incarnations, “ ...of the ancient, deeply religious endeavor “to become like God” – infinitely wise, omnipotent, autonomous, and immortal." (Dr. Erdmann)

In embracing esoteric evolutionary science, shallow-thinking deluded enthusiasts like Keller not only negate God's Revelations to man through the Old Testament prophets but unwittingly sign onto a whole host of dangerous occult doctrines and philosophies: naturalism (monism), Hermetic alchemy and Cabala, the cosmic chain of being, occult mediumistic rituals and the idea that  man can reach divine status and gain powers. 

@Linda Kimball

Rev. 19: the Antichrist

Saint John of Damascene (c. 675 or 676 – 4 December 749) was a Syrian monk and priest whose characterization of the Antichrist was the primary model for the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel, "The Brothers Karamazov," (1879-1880).   The Grand Inquisitor is an important part of the novel because he represents Dostoevsky's penetrating insight into the fallen human psyche and one of its' most important endowments: moral freedom. 

Thus the Inquisitor symbolizes the principle of rebellion and negation in mortal men such as Hegel, Max Stirner, Karl Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Albert Pike (and the Illuminated Brotherhood), Teilhard de Chardin, Sartre, and Gnostic death of God theologians, who though not the actual devil are of like mind with him, hence are in service to the Devil and are in fact prototypes of the coming Antichrist.  Some, like Karl Marx's anarchist comrade Bakunin, openly laud the Devil while others, like Albert Pike and the Illuminated Brotherhood worship him as their god:

"The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority....Socialists recognize each other by the words, "In the name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done....Satan (is) the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds."  (Mikhail Bakunin, Marx & Satan, Richard Wurmbrand, p. 27)

"We worship a God, but it is the God that one adores without superstition.  To you, Sovereign Grand Inspectors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the Brethren of the 32nd, 31st, and 30th degrees---The Masonic religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the Luciferian doctrine.....Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good, is struggling for humanity against Adonay (the Triune God), the God of Darkness and Evil." (New World Order: The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies, William T. Still, p. 124)

Because the Inquisitor is of like mind with the Devil, he is a conscious swindler, a Big Liar who knows that the living Triune God of Revelation exists, yet perversely chooses to rebel against God as revealed through Jesus Christ despite that he knows his own life is by the grace of the living God. 

In the following passage John of Damascene describes the Antichrist:

".....the Devil himself does not become man after the manner of the incarnation of the Lord---God forbid!---but a man is born of fornication and receives into himself the whole operation of Satan, for God permits the Devil to inhabit him, because He foresees the future perversity of his will."

"So, he is born of fornication...and is brought up unnoticed, but of a sudden he rises up, revolts, and rules.  During the first part of his reign---or his tyranny, rather---he plays more the part of sanctity; but when he gains complete control, he persecutes the Church of God and reveals all his wickedness.  And he shall come 'in signs and lying wonders'---sham ones and not real---and he will seduce those whose attention rests on a rotten and unstable foundation and make them abandon the living God, 'inasmuch as to scandalize (if possible) even the elect." (Political Apocalypse:A Study of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, Ellis Sandoz, p. 146)

The man who receives into himself the whole operation of Satan organizes the political, scientific (mandated universal evolution), and religious cult of Satan, which will be military in character.  The nature of the militaristic cult will be absolute as its' purpose is total seizure of both the world's resources and the whole man---his mind, conscience and soul---by taking possession of his body through a Luciferian Initiation. 

Discussed with great excitement among the world's powerful occult New Age leaders, most of them under the influence of spirit guides, this much anticipated event will directly link the initiated with the Antichrist, the being described as "the angel of man's evolution" by New Age leader David Spangler.   (Reflections on the Christ,  p.37)

Vladimir Soloviev (1850-1900), a brilliant Russian philosopher, theologian and visionary, was a good friend and confidante of the great Russian novelist and prophet, Fyodor Dostoevsky.   Soloviev's predictions regarding events in our age (i.e., idolatry, confusion, revolutions, lawlessness, hatred between brethren, division among Christians, apostasy) are astonishing in their prescience, primarily because they not only offer an amazingly accurate glimpse into the mind of the idolatrous man-god who will become the Antichrist but because they also illustrate the real obstacle to salvation, the refusal by proud, willful, envious, covetous, evil-minded men to recognize, admit and repent of their sins.

In the "A Short Tale of the Antichrist" Soloviev describes the idolatrous man-god as outwardly just, but within he is full of pride, envy, hate and covetousness and is therefore a morally reprehensible idolater, just as so very many, both within and without the Church are today:

".... He believes in God but loves nobody but himself. His relationship with Christ was quickly defined as one of superiority (for he will never) bow before Him like the most stupid of Christians (nor) mutter senselessly....'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me'....'I, the bright genius, the superman! No, never!" (The Wrath of God: The Days of Antichrist, Livio Fanzaga, pp. 39-40)

As the man-god slides ever deeper into the abyss, instead of the former cold rational pretense of respect for the living God and Christ:

".....there was born and grew in his heart, first, a kind of terror, and then a burning, choking and corroding envy and furious breath-taking hatred."  Devoured with envy and hatred of Jesus Christ he cries out "He rotted in the tomb, rotted like the lowest..." (ibid, pp. 40-41)

This is the moment the Evil One has been waiting for.  He openly approaches the man-god and possesses him:

"He saw those piercing eyes and heard...a strange voice, toneless...stifled, and yet clear, metallic and absolutely soulless as though coming from a phonograph."  Satan pours out his spirit, saying, "I ask nothing of you, and I will help you for your own sake...Receive my spirit...it gives birth to you in power. At these words...the superman's lips opened of themselves, two piercing eyes came quite close to his face, and he felt a sharp, frozen stream enter into him and fill his whole being. And at the same time he was conscious of a wonderful strength, energy, lightness and rapture." (p. 43)

 According to Soloviev, the Antichrist is a,

"...great spiritualist, ascetic and philanthropist" whose exalted self-esteem seems to be justified by the "highest expressions of abstinence, unselfishness, and active helpfulness;" he is, "above all others a compassionate friend of man, indeed, not only a friend of man, but also of animals; he is himself a vegetarian." (The End of Time, Joseph Pieper, p. 139)

But in reality he suffers the same monstrously inflated pride, envy and covetousness that transformed Lucifer into the devil. This same pride and envy animated the pantheist sorcerer Hegel, the Masonic Illuminati who planned and instigated the bloody French Revolution, as well as Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, the West's "God is dead" theologians, America's Ruling Class, and contemporary New World Order globalists and priests who claim to believe in God but love no one but 'self.'

All who are animated by the spirit of poneros---pride, envy, hate and covetousness---will adore the Antichrist who has established peace by dealing with all conditions that lead to envy and covetousness.  This he has done by creating,

"....a firmly grounded equality (sameness) in all mankind: the equality of universal satiety (of sin)" (ibid, p. 140)

After he has been proclaimed absolute ruler of the world he issues a manifesto which concludes as follows:

"Peoples of the earth! The pledges have been fulfilled! World peace has been secured to eternity.  Every attempt to disturb it will instantly encounter insuperable resistance; for from this day forth there will be upon the earth only one single central power...This power is in my hands...International law at last possesses the sanction it has hitherto lacked.  Henceforth no power will have the temerity to say 'war' when I say 'peace.' Peoples of the earth! Peace be with you!" (ibid)

So all the world's unrepentant sinners pray to the Antichrist, the beast, and say,

"Who is there like unto the beast."  And it was given "him to make war with the Saints, and to overcome them....and all that dwell on the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life." Rev. 13:7-8

Soloviev masterfully portrays a striking contrast between the apostles of Christ and the saints who enter into Paradise and the Antichrist and those who spend eternity in outer darkness. The former receive the power of the living God and are full of wisdom, love of truth, courage and the rest of the virtues while the latter, those who believe not in the Truth but take pleasure in unrighteousness, receive the power of the devil and are full of pride, negation (i.e., love of unbelief, ridicule, scorn, skepticism, destructive criticism), lies and sophistry, lust, revulsion, burning envy, impatience, seething hatred, jealousy, rebelliousness, and blasphemy.

But though war is made with the Saints, and to overcome them, the Antichrist and his followers are defeated once for all:

"After these things I heard as it were the voice of much people in heaven, saying: Alleluia. Salvation, and glory, and power is to our God." Rev. 19:1

Now heaven opens and releases a rider upon a white horse,

"And he was clothed with a garment sprinkled with blood; and his name is called, THE WORD OF GOD....And the armies that are in heaven followed him on white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean."  "Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.... He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.  On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: king of kings and lord of lords...And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small.”

"Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to wage war against the rider on the horse and his army.  But the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed the signs on its behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped its image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur.  The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh." Rev. 19

For all who have held on and enter into Paradise, the unimaginably bright, beautiful renewed earth, as  N.T. Wright explains,

"...there will be a new mode of physicality, which stands in relation to our present body as our present body does to a ghost....a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out...and put on...over the self that will still exist after bodily death." (Eternal Perspectives, Randy Alcorn, p. 154-155)

@Linda Kimball

Ponerology: Macrosocial Evil

"Political Ponerology" is the name given by Polish psychiatrist Andrzej M. Łobaczewski to an interdisciplinary study of the founders (i.e., Karl Marx) and supporters of 20th century totalitarian political regimes.     His study utilizes data from psychology, sociology, philosophy, and history to account for the propagation of man's inhumanity to man through such phenomena as aggressive war, ethnic cleansing, ostracism, genocide, and despotism.

Lobaczewski's  original manuscript quickly went into the furnace just minutes before a secret police raid in Communist Poland.  In 1984 the manuscript was reassembled but its publication blocked by Zbigniew Brzezinski.  After half a century of suppression it is finally available.

Though Lobaczewski's study is a clinically accurate description of the true nature of evil it often falls into the error of speaking of it as though caused by disease.   Despite this failing, Political Ponerology is however a shocking account of the large scale evil and madness, or what Lobaczewski terms 'ponerogenic processes'  that have overtaken whole societies and nations since time immemorial.

When ponerogenic processes have finally encompassed a society's entire ruling class and opposition from morally informed people has been suppressed, then we are dealing with what Lobaczewski calls Macrosocial Evil or a "macrosocial ponerologic phenomenon." (p. 121)

Ponerogenic processes are synonymous with pride, envy, and covetousness.  Thus when 'macrosocial ponerologic phenomenon' have encompassed a nation's  ruling class and most of its society it means that evil and madness have overtaken it.

"And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. Amen." Matthew 6:13

From the time of the ancient Sumerians, people all around the world have believed that there is both a spirit of light as well as a spirit of darkness.  The spirit of darkness works through a person whose work it becomes to lead men into temptation and evil.

Scripture attributes poneros to Satan, the spirit of rebellion and negation, the father of lies, the "evil one" "the adversary" "the accuser," and  "calumniator" who works through the principle of negation and rebellion in the fallen soul of  man.

Poneros  has played a part in human dynamics ever since the envy-bitten Cain murdered his brother Abel:

"The evil man out of his evil treasure bringeth forth evil (poneros) things" Matthew 12:35

As macrosocial poneros had  finally overtaken and led to the degradation and implosion of ancient Greek society an exploration of Greek thought with regard to types of envy will prove enlightening.

The first type is 'zelos,' a type of envy stirred up by any type of advancement beyond the average.  Zelos is the spirit of socialist demands for egalitarian sameness as well as the spirit of Decadence Festivals, 'gay' marriage and the mandated sexualization and perversion of our youth.

In the poem, 'Work and Days,' Isocrates presents the spirit of zelos as "with grim face and screaming voice, who delights in evil" and causes Decency and Respect to flee as is the situation here in America and throughout the West. (Envy and the Greeks: A Study of Human Behavior, Peter Walcot, pp. 2-3 from Death by Envy, Fr. George R. A. Aquaro, p. 12)

Philotimia, the love of honor, is next.  Whereas zelos is typified by an inferior-to-superior relationship, philotimia envy's the good fortune of others of equal or lesser rank.  In Greek mythology, philotimia is manifested when the gods punish men for usurping their authority as well as when they struggle amongst themselves for positions of primacy.    Here in America, philotimia is manifest by America's godlike progressive 'ruling class' in their unrelenting psychological bullying and terrorizing of the masses, especially the morally informed such as the Tea Party, as well as by the vicious infighting amongst themselves.

The third type of envy/covetousness is hybris.  The definition of hybris is insolence, arrogance, shame, insult and mistreatment of a perceived inferior by a self-designated superior.  Today hybris  manifests itself over a broad swath of society by the president and his henchmen to the IRS, certain university professors, scientists, police, and even some priests who deride their flocks.

Phthonos is the fourth type of envy/covetousness.  Phthonos seeks to deprive  the envied 'other' of possessions, honor, status, and spiritual virtues.  Phthonos is driven not just to ostracize and confiscate but to use force to take or deprive 'other' of whatever is envied.  Phthonos can even drive a man (i.e., Cain) to murder his own brother.

As ancient Greece had been overtaken by the spirit of envy,

"...one had to watch not only the malevolent actions of envious friends and enemies, but the very real threat of ostracism by the democratic community.  Philanthropy had much less to do with (love of man) as it had with....avoiding other people's phthonos of one's success."  (Death by Envy, p. 14)

In Athens, the egalitarian, or leveling impulse, served to help relieve an envy-torn culture by leveling men down.  This was enforced by the threat of ostracism.

The fifth type of envy/covetousness is vaskonia or Evil Eye (ophthalmos poneros) and means something even more malignant than phthonos.    Vaskonia expresses a type of witchcraft or dark force or spirit associated with the experience of envy, the malign touch or glance of which leaves a soiled imprint and implies instant victimization and death.   Vaskonia is inherently sudden, meaning the impulse of a momentary passion or craving is all it takes to become its' victim.

As a whole, Scripture combines envy with hatred of one's brother, which means that there can be no love whatsoever where there is envy and hatred in one's heart.

Today increasing numbers of Americans at every level of society, on both left and right, Christian and secular, are controlled by their passions unfettered from the restraint of transcendent moral law.   Adding to the problem is the culturally relevant 'seeker-sensitive' church model attended by thousands of Americans that caters to felt-needs and self-indulgent emotional feel-goodism.  Thus  America  is "a nation ruled by its passions," said Reb Bradley, author of "Born Liberal Raised Right."    This is why  heinous acts,

"...of casual disregard for life, unheard of fifty years ago, have become a familiar item on the evening news; students killing classmates, children murdering their playmates....these gruesome crimes are merely symptomatic of a breakdown of moral fiber..."  (ibid, pp. 2-3)

The most frightening aspect of America's descent into moral imbecility and diabolical psychopathy is that our society is being overtaken by "ponerological processes" in the hearts of evil-thinking, evil-speaking men.   Through the White House, legislatures, media, Hollywood, courts, academia, pentagon, seminaries and even pulpits, the spirit of poneros, of envy and hate, is encompassing our society, suppressing morally informed people, and overspreading our nation with a "macrosocial ponerologic phenomenon" eventuating in the rejection of the living Triune God.  With this comes the reversal of conversion in which the soul ceases to live from the spirit and begins to live with the life of the body.  The disordered passions thereby revived absorb the life of the person who spiritually dies resulting in the natural man of 2 Tim. 3:3. (St. Tikhon, Works II, as quoted in Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, Ellis Sandoz, p. 120)

 "..... I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life..."   Deuteronomy 30:19-20

The Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Word become Flesh, Jesus Christ the Physician came to heal the spiritually sick.   But whoever rejects the Physician, whether through indifference or outright denial, rejects His prescription, hence destroys him or herself.

Destruction however, does not mean annihilation of the soul.   The soul though immortal, nevertheless suffers a kind of death when the living God forsakes it:

"The man wakes from the final struggle of death, in absolute loneliness...Not a hint, not a shadow of anything outside his consciousness reaches him...Soon misery will beget on his imagination a thousand shapes of woe, which he will not be able to rule, direct, or even distinguish from real presences." (C.S.Lewis: George MacDonald, an Anthology, p. 61) 

@Linda Kimball

America's Adolescent Evangelical Church

In 1965 Lionel Trilling coined the phrase "adversary culture" to describe the existence of a hostile counter-Christian, counter-establishment (all vestiges of authority, including parents), counter-tradition avant-garde, an  American elite class born of  'enlightened' modernism, or anti-theistic scientific socialism.   Primarily through higher education, media, and seminaries Trilling saw they were demoralizing and initiating other Americans into a naturalistic, morally relative 'alternative faith,' thereby creating a  dumbed-down, immoral "mass elite," something new under the sun. (The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West, p. 8) 

By 1997, American Demographics noted that there has been,

"...a comprehensive shift in values, including 'environmentalism, feminism, global issues, and spiritual searching."  (How Now Shall We Live? Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcy, p. 25)

This New Class, or what the article called the 'Cultural Creatives' embrace a morally relative "trans-modernist" set of values and concepts in place of the West's traditional philosophy and Biblical moral absolutes and unchanging truth they no longer accept.  The 'new values'  and modernist concepts include change, social justice, evolutionary thinking, unfettered libido, abortion, euthanasia, tolerance, accommodation, inclusion, feminism, lesbianism, homosexuality, and occult New Age spirituality. 

In furtherance of their destructive agenda, in 1941 the avant garde introduced and then began popularizing the concept of 'teenager.'  Prior to its' introduction Westerners and Americans thought in terms of children and adults.   This way of thinking is absolutely necessary, said American moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), for if a society is to preserve its stability and a degree of continuity it must,

"...know how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, attitudes, values, and fantasies on everyday life."   (Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973, p. 29 from Death of the Grown-Up) 

In morally mature traditional America, children aspired to adulthood not to adolescence, and mature adults did not aspire to remain teenagers.     But to our detriment, the adolescent mindset is now our 'new' norm, both outside the church and increasingly within, for it was the avant gardes' concept of teenager that made possible an entirely new conception of church ministry: youth ministry.  

In the "Juvenalization of American Christianity" Thomas Bergler  writes that though youth ministry started with good intentions, beginning in the 1930s and '40s,

"Christian teenagers and youth leaders staged a quiet revolution in American church life that led to what can properly be called the juvenilization of American Christianity. Juvenilization is the process by which the religious beliefs, practices, and developmental characteristics of adolescents become accepted as appropriate for adults. It began with the praiseworthy goal of adapting the faith to appeal to the young, which in fact revitalized American Christianity. But it has sometimes ended with both youth and adults embracing immature versions of the faith. In any case, white evangelicals led the way." (When Are We Going to Grow Up? The Juvenilization of American Christianity, Thomas E. Bergler, Christianity Today, 6/8/12)

Bergler connects America's adolescent church to pop worship music, pastors and worshippers in jeans and T-shirts, falling in love with Jesus, mission trips, spiritual  searching and church hopping, faith-based political activism (social outreach) and the therapeutic deism of the culturally inclusive seeker-sensitive model.  

In the typical juvenalized contemporary seeker-sensitive church, spinning, multicolored lights sweep the auditorium while a mind-numbing,

".....rock band launches into a rousing opening song. "Ignore everyone else, this time is just about you and Jesus," proclaims the lead singer. The music changes to a slow dance tune, and the people sing about falling in love with Jesus. A guitarist sporting skinny jeans and a soul patch closes the worship set with a prayer, beginning, "Hey God …" The spotlight then falls on the speaker, who tells entertaining stories, cracks a few jokes, and assures everyone that "God is not mad at you. He loves you unconditionally."

"After worship, some members of the church sign up for the next mission trip, while others decide to join a small group where they can receive support on their faith journey. If you ask the people here why they go to church or what they value about their faith, they'll say something like, "Having faith helps me deal with my problems." (ibid)

Dr. R. Albert Mohler,  president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, contends that America's juvenile evangelical church is marked by so much spiritual and theological confusion that the God of the Bible has largely disappeared from view and been replaced by,

“…less imposing deities that are more amenable to the modern mind.” (The Disappearance of God, Mohler, p. xiii)

Today millions of  spiritually immature American evangelicals claim a divine right to their own spiritual cocoon and belief system as well as their,

"...own personal Jesus."  This personal vision of Jesus Christ "may well bear little or no resemblance to Jesus as He is revealed in the Bible.”  (p. xiii)

 The Reformed Church of the Holy Trinity agrees and in a powerful video, "The Egyptian Shake,"   show adolescent seeker-sensitive church-goers taking part in an ecstatic pagan craze:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TOehO_jDXk 

In "The New Spirituality: Dismantling and Reconstructing Reality," Dr. Peter Jones contends that since the Sixties we have entered a new world, said Jones. The intellectual pride of modernism and  its religious sister, "Christian" liberalism, has been exploded by the radical critique of postmodern deconstruction. The objectivity of autonomous human reason as a means to truth is now seen as pure fiction, so the world must be reconstructed on the basis of ancient paganism. 

Today, said Jones, a triumphant form of ancient religious paganism, a  "new" oneness ideology dominates the campus, popular media, and even many pulpits.  Under its' influence the juvenile narcissistic 'me' generation has practically lost all sense of the antithesis (right or wrong, true or false, either/or, male or female), and are placing their faith in the pagan synthesis of "both/and" monism (oneness).

This is also true for Christian youth, for despite the billions of dollars spent by Evangelicals on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, camping trips, pizza nights and media, a culture of young Christians have been produced,

"who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures."  (The Coming Evangelical Collapse, Michael Spencer, Mar. 10, 2009, csmoniter.com)

Spencer writes that evangelicalism, especially the contemporary version, has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself and in response to the coming death of evangelicalism will further compromise itself in a futile attempt at reaching postmodern paganized souls by becoming more culturally relevant, not less.  Thus it will,

"...  become more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. Emphasis will shift from doctrine to relevance, motivation, and personal success – resulting in churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith." (ibid)

Though a sizable remnant of faithful traditionalist Christian adults still resist the pressures exerted by the juvenalized narcissistic church, in the main America's burgeoning adolescents of every age are winning, within the Church and without.  The adolescent anti-adult, anti-authority, anti-tradition adversary culture has become our 'new' norm.  

Though youth ministry has its' shining spots it nevertheless needs to be reformed and kept in its' proper sphere of influence.   That said, Thomas Bergler wonders if and when we'll grow up.  For in an adolescent Church and nation where mature adults are resented, marginalized and becoming extinct, narcissistic adolescents in adult size bodies who refuse to grow up, can't say no to themselves, don't know right from wrong, and resent those who do, are fostering a paralyzing, deeply destructive cultural relativism that undermines everything from the Church to traditional marriage, the Constitution, healthcare, and our economy.  

@Linda Kimball

Lessons of Evil

In "The High Cost of 'Free," Lloyd S. Pettegrew and Carol A. Vance report that in the Denver arena where Mr. Obama gave his DNC 2008 acceptance speech,

"...a woman in the audience became overwhelmed by the speech and said that she no longer needed to worry if she could make her car or mortgage payments because he would take care of it for her. In Cleveland, a woman claimed that she was going to vote for President Obama again because he gave her a free cellphone (along with a litany of other entitlement giveaways)."  (Ludwig von Mises Institute, June 5, 2013)

There is no 'cash tree' growing in Washington D.C. yielding the millions of dollars handed out by politicians for 'free' cell phones, 'free' house payments, 'free' education, 'free' condoms,  ‘free’ abortions, 'free' healthcare and other 'entitlement' giveaways.    Money doesn't grow on trees---it has to be earned the hard way by people who work.

The allure of "free" is so powerful, so overwhelmingly seductive that an alarming number of people, both citizen and noncitizen alike, willfully choose to become wards or 'slaves' of Big Brother's entitlement/welfare state rather than captain their own destiny:

“Economist Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute believes that Americans have become a nation of takers, threatening the self-reliance that has long characterized our national psyche. Eberstadt (2012, p. 4) presents data showing that entitlement payments to Americans, since 1960, have risen annually by 9.5 percent..... This has resulted in 49 percent of American households receiving one or more government transfer benefits (Eberstadt 2013); this amounts to 18 percent of all personal income and a burden of $7,400 for every American." (ibid)

Under the pretense of compassion, fairness, equality, 'rights,' fighting poverty, protecting the environment, and granting 'choice' to abortion activists our 'broken' law forcibly takes property from one person and gives it to another.  It takes the wealth of the many and gives it to a favored few.  It gives the power of death to the self-serving few over the lives of the inconvenient and unwanted.   This is legalized murder and plunder and  is common to socialists, communists and others of the totalitarian bent of mind who see plunder  and murder together with forcing everyone to be miserable as a way of putting an end to all conditions that make for envy/covetousness, their own first of all.

The Founders fully recognized that in light of man's sin nature, covetousness/envy could easily become a driving force in politics, so they designed the Constitution to protect our God-given rights of life, liberty and property from the grasping hand of a tyrannical government.  They never intended for law to assume the role of Big Brother granting man-invented 'rights' 'privileges' and 'entitlements' to certain favored groups or individuals:

"The Constitution is a chart of negative liberties, (it) says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government must do on your behalf." (Who Poses the Greater Threat? Walter Williams, Townhall.com, Mar. 3, 2010)

"Envy is rottenness to the bones" (Proverbs 14:30), and whether it is the genocidal socialism of the former Soviet Union, the version espoused by the Nazis or the Americanized socialism that is emerging here, the overarching sentiment is the very same cold-blooded deadly sin---covetousness/envy:

"Marxism has been described as a blood cult, with envy its abiding stimulant, fuel, and motive."  (Joseph Epstein, former editor of The American Scholar, quoted in "Truths About Socialism," Coral Ridge Ministries, p. 66)

Where the Church promised the remission of original sin, regeneration by the Spirit of God and salvation in paradise or eternal damnation in outer darkness, Marxist Communism held a redemptive belief in the Promethean destiny of mankind.  This was the messianic dream of the Workers’ Paradise where all conditions making for envy/covetousness would be put to an end by liberating libido and by seizing all 'sinful' property---including wives, daughters and sons coveted by the libidinous---and by liquidating all state 'enemies,' (i.e., the human objects of envy, dissidents).  'Enemy' was a totally elastic category that expanded or contracted to meet political needs, libidinous desires, whims and caprices of the moment:

"The enemy is the great justification for terror, and the totalitarian state needs enemies to survive.  If it lacks them, it invents them.  Once they have been identified, they are treated without mercy."   Being an enemy is enough, "there is no need actually to have done anything at all."  (The Black Book of Communism, Courtois, Werth, Panne, Paczkowski, Bartosek, Margolin, . p. 747)

The methodology of evil begins by labeling the hated and envied an 'enemy' (i.e. in America--- homophobe, racist, bigot, pro-lifer, traditionalist or anti-Muslim) and then declared a criminal (hateful bigot), which leads to his exclusion from society.   Where power is total, exclusion very quickly leads to arrest and then extermination:

"The leaders of totalitarian regimes saw themselves as the moral guardians of society and were proud of their right to send anyone they chose to their death."  (ibid, p. 748)

If not death then deportation---and no trial necessary:

"But when you were deported, what was it for? What was the charge?" "Why bother to think up a charge? 'Socially harmful' or 'socially dangerous element'--S.D.E.', they called it. Special decrees, just marked by letters of the alphabet. So it was quite easy. No trial necessary."  "And what about your husband? Who was he?" "Nobody. He played the flute in the Leningrad Philharmonic. He liked to talk when he'd had a few drinks." “…We knew one family with grown-up children, a son and a daughter, both Komsomol (Communist youth members). Suddenly the whole family was put down for deportation to Siberia. The children rushed to the Komsomol district office. 'Protect us!' they said. 'Certainly we'll protect you,' they were told. 'Just write on this piece of paper: As from today's date I ask not to be considered the son, or the daughter, of such-and-such parents. I renounce them as socially harmful elements and I promise in the future to have nothing whatever to do with them and to maintain no communication with them.”    (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,   Cancer Ward)   

 As envy really is rottenness to the bones, the reduction (dehumanization) of the hated and envied to pig, weed, dog, filth, bigot, homophobe, or socially harmful element for example, occurs as a matter of course to the darkened burning mind of the envious, especially to the soulless husks void of empathy and conscience.   Just as dehumanization precedes branding  as 'enemy,'  legalized plunder and exclusion from society, so it precedes the death of the envied, as was the case with Cain before he murdered his brother.

The systematic murder of millions of people in the former Soviet Union was primarily facilitated by two things.  First by scientifically animalizing  'others,' the objects of hatred, resentment and envy.   This was achieved by application of the Darwinian biological and zoological strain of thinking that ultimately enabled Marxists to justify their monstrous crimes against humanity.   Second, by maliciously whipping up and enflaming covetousness/envy within the hearts of the 'oppressed.'

In 1956, Ludwig von Mises exposed the rottenness of envy and resentment fueling the paradoxical reasoning of people who are favorably disposed toward socialism rather than capitalism:

"It is paradoxical indeed that the leaders of these Oriental peoples, while casting longing glances at the prosperity of the Western nations, reject the methods that made the West prosperous and are enraptured by Russian communism that is instrumental in keeping the Russians and their satellites poor. It is still more paradoxical that Americans, enjoying the products of capitalistic big business, exalt the Soviet system and consider it quite "natural" that the poor nations of Asia and Africa should prefer communism to capitalism." (Reactionary Socialism, Mises Daily, Dec. 12, 2011)

Those who prefer the legal plunder or redistributionist policies of socialism,

"...are blinded by envy and ignorance. They stubbornly refuse to study economics and spurn the economists' devastating critique of the socialist plans because, in their eyes, economics, being an abstract theory, is simply nonsense. They pretend to trust only in experience. But they no less stubbornly refuse to take cognizance of the undeniable facts of experience, viz., that the common man's standard of living is incomparably higher in capitalistic American than in the socialist paradise of the Soviets." (ibid)

At the end of WW II, dispirited atheist, communist, socialist, progressive and Christian thinkers began to analyze the crisis the war had precipitated and to reconstruct the civilization it had threatened.  Out of these efforts arose the "new conservative" or traditionalist wing of the postwar conservative intellectual movement in America. (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, p. 30)

Their penetrating analysis of the ideas underlying and fueling communism and socialism such as the total immanent society (omnipotent, all-knowing society), Social Darwinism, positivism, rationalism, naturalism, materialism, collectivism, atomistic liberalism and underlying them all, atheism, led many of them to declare that evil ideas working through the minds of men had ultimately unleashed the catastrophic evils that had enveloped much of the world.  Upon this realization many of them either returned or converted to orthodox supernatural Christian theism.

For example, Douglas Hyde, an English ex-Communist and convert to Catholic Christianity emphatically declared:

"The sanest things on earth are those for which the allegedly reactive, unscientific, obscurantist Church stands and for which she is doing battle." (ibid, p. 52)

"Christianity is the most complete and perfect revelation of the nature of God and of God's will for man," wrote John Hallowell in 1950.   Orthodox Christianity was the unifying thesis of Hallowell's interpretation of modern scientific/ political philosophy:

"....the basic insights of the Christian faith provide the best insights we have into the nature of man and of the crisis in which we find ourselves.  That crisis is the culmination of modern man's progressive attempt to deny the existence of a transcendent or spiritual reality and of his progressive failure to find meaning and salvation in some wholly immanent conception of reality....Only through a return to faith in God, as God revealed Himself to man in Jesus Christ, can modern man and his society find redemption from the tyranny of evil."  (ibid, p. 53)

The Christianity which Hallowell, Buckley, Hyde, Vivas and others defended was not the liberal or modernist evolutionary Christianity of the Social Gospel and Gnostic immanent Protestantism.   It was a supernatural Christianity grounded in what for many early conservatives was the deepest, most terrifying lesson of WW II: the lesson of evil, of original sin:

"We must restore to our vocabulary a word discarded long ago, namely sin," asserted Hallowell.  To Richard Weaver, no concept gave deeper insight into the "enigma that is man" than original sin.  Evil was not just a "bad dream" an "accident of history," or "the creation of a few antisocial men."   Evil is a "subtle, pervasive, protean force," and original sin was a "parabolical expression" of this "immemorial tendency of man to do the wrong thing when he knows the right thing."   (ibid, 53)

Eliseo Vivas concurred.   Inside every man and woman he said, lay "brutality" and a "natural tendency" to define value in his own interests (moral relativism).  And this is precisely what powerful, amoral socialists, progressives, and others of the Social Darwinian mindset do, thereby liberating themselves and their malignant allies to maliciously fan the flames of covetousness/envy and hate in the hearts of our youth:

"Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain 'equality'--the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today's free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance--the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money.”   Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The social implications of original sin were obvious to early conservatives who believed that if the West and America were to have any chance of surviving rather than finally erupting in flames and blood, then there must be a revival of traditional Christianity along with the restoration to our vocabulary of a word discarded long ago, namely sin.

Peter Hitchens, author of "The Rage Against God" agrees.  The living, supernatural God of the Bible is the chief rival of global socialist utopians whose power has grown enormously due to the trivialization of sin by the submissive, irrelevant contemporary church and through an alliance with radical Muslims and the cult of unrestrained libido unleashed into the Western world by Freud, Reich, Kinsey and Marcuse,

".... promoted by the self-pitying anthems of rock music, and encouraged by the enormous power of 'progressive' education in which so many cultural revolutionaries work."  (p. 135)

Echoing the cautionary advice of early conservative intellectuals, Hitchens  warns that only the concepts of sin,

".....of conscience, of eternal life, and of divine justice under an unalterable law are the ultimate defense against the utopian's belief that ends justify means and that morality is relative.   These concepts are safeguards against the worship of human power." (p. 135)

Without these safeguards America and the West will be overcome by a tyranny of evil.

@Linda Kimball

Isaiah and the Remnant

During his lectures at the University of Virginia in 1933, T.S. Eliot explained in "After Strange Gods" that in every generation only a small number of people, a remnant, are in possession of any criteria for discriminating between good and evil while the number of,

"...half-alive hungry for any form of spiritual experience, or what offers itself as spiritual experience...is considerable."  (Permanent Things, Andrew A. Tadie and Michael Macdonald, p. 5)

But Eliot's 'modernist' generation had failed their moral duty to transmit the transcendent permanent things, the humane elements--- the good, the true, the honorable, the beautiful, the four cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, courage and prudence, the three supernatural virtues of faith, hope and charity and the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost." (ibid,  David Whalen, p. 31)  

The treacherous  'modern' generation deliberately betrayed the masses by fostering a process of decay.  According to conservative poet and journalist Anthony Harrigan (1925-2010), modernists forced the,

"....acceptance of pornography as medical science, filth as artistic realism, and abnormality as a mere difference of opinion....Americans are in the hands of a cultural ruling class which, having led to destruction the humane elements in our civilization, is conducting us to ruin...." (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, pp. 39-40)

 Like Harrigan, Eliot knew of the deliberate betrayal of the masses:

"Never has the printing press been so busy, and never have such varieties of buncombe and false doctrine come from it. 'Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! O Israel, thy prophets have been like foxes in the waste places.....And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying Son of man, these men have taken their idols into their hearts, and put the stumbling block of their iniquity before their face: should I be inquired of at all by them?" (ibid, p. 5)

So rather than being edified and spiritually and morally uplifted and strengthened, from Eliot's generation to our own, the masses have been brought up on a diet of sophistry, propaganda and foulness transmitted by way of media, books, movies, entertainment, schools, and so-called 'science' which loathsomely misrepresents human nature and incites to gross acts of transgression, violence, perversion, sadism, cruelty, and other types of evil.   This depravity not only reflects the growing corruption of our society but defiantly justifies it.

Our depraved generation of liars is quickly becoming the 'worthless' generation of Isaiah.   In 1936, Albert Jay Nock explained in his essay "Isaiah's Job" that when the Lord commissioned Isaiah in the year of Uzziah's death to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come He said,

"Tell them what a worthless lot they are." "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life."  (Mises Daily, June 21, 2008)

Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job said Nock, and in fact, he had asked for it — but the prospect raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so — if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start — was there any sense in starting it?

"Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it." (ibid)

So it was the Remnant and not the depraved masses that Isaiah was to reach since if anything good were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it. 

Whether high or low, king or slave, priest or layman, the masses are those who are spiritually, intellectually, and morally immature, thus according to Nock they possess,

" ....neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either."  (ibid)

 The picture presented by Isaiah of mass man depicts him as not only,

"... weak minded and weak willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous. The mass woman also gets off badly, as sharing all the mass man's untoward qualities, and contributing a few of her own in the way of vanity and laziness, extravagance and foible. The list of luxury products that she patronized is interesting; it calls to mind the women's page of a Sunday newspaper in 1928, or the display set forth in one of our professedly "smart" periodicals. In another place, Isaiah even recalls the affectations that we used to know by the name "flapper gait" and the "debutante slouch." (ibid)

This view of the masses is the one that we find prevailing not only among the Old Testament Prophets and ancient authorities such as Plato and Marcus Aurelius whose writings have come down to us but also in the Book of Revelations.   But in the 18th century, certain morally depraved Enlightenment philosophers spread the notion that the mass man, in his natural (fallen) state, is not at all the kind of person that earlier authorities made him out to be,

"....but on the contrary, that he is a worthy object of interest. His untowardness is the effect of environment, an effect for which "society" is somehow responsible. If only his environment permitted him to live according to his lights, he would undoubtedly show himself to be quite a fellow; and the best way to secure a more favorable environment for him would be to let him arrange it for himself. The French Revolution acted powerfully as a springboard for this idea, projecting its influence in all directions throughout Europe." (ibid, Nock)

 From Europe it spread to America where today depraved mass man is Protagorean man, the measure of all things.   Whatever he covets, whatever spite, malice, nonsense, whimsy, or caprice takes him must be treated with all seriousness and so deeply ingrained in our utterly perverse culture is the idea that all that pertains to value begins subjectively in the feelings of mass man that everyone from our president to our politicians and priests are eager for mass man's acceptance and approval. 

Very great care is taken to capture the masses' attention and interest on behalf of  everything from buying votes to mass marketing and church growth.  Albert Nock writes that this attitude towards the masses is so exclusive and so devout,

"....that one is reminded of the troglodytic monster described by Plato, and the assiduous crowd at the entrance to its cave, trying obsequiously to placate it and win its favor, trying to interpret its inarticulate noises, trying to find out what it wants, and eagerly offering it all sorts of things that they think might strike its fancy."

Appealing to mass man however, necessitates an opportunistic dumbing-down of everything from reading, writing and arithmetic to church doctrine. If for example you are a priest interested in attracting as large a congregation as possible, which means an appeal to the depraved masses, then you must replace intellectually-oriented hymns with mind-numbing rock and reduce your message to the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit.

If you are an educator said Nock,

"... with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many students as possible, and you whittle down your requirements accordingly. If a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician, many auditors; and so on."

But in the realization of these ambitions,

"....the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities... that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message."

While Hollywood, spiritual gurus, sophists, scientists so-called and false prophets and priests of the American masses must aim consciously at the lowest common denominator of intellect, taste, and character, the prophet of the Remnant on the other hand, is in the enviable position of  forking out the very best he knows how to produce,

"...knowing it would be understood and appreciated by those for whom he produced it, and caring not a button what anyone else thought of it — and that makes a good job." (Nock)

In any given generation our Lord's Remnant are almost always an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them said Nock:

" You can be sure of those — dead sure, as our phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you.... the Remnant will find (the prophet). He may rely on that with absolute assurance. They will find him without his doing anything about it; Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade."

Almost everyone today is overly eager to reach the masses except for the prophet of the Remnant.  Though like Isaiah it means being a nobody in the eyes of the world and means working in impenetrable darkness, his job is a good job, a rewarding one that is,

"... much more interesting than serving the masses; and moreover it is the only job in our whole civilization, as far as I know, that offers a virgin field."

@Linda Kimball

When Lying is Accepted it becomes Required and Society Turns Upside Down

In "Do Blacks and the Left Really Believe This?" Dennis Prager begins by observing that every time you think that the left and its political party have hit moral bottom, they will eventually prove you wrong.

The most recent example occurred last week in Louisiana when the head of the Louisiana Democratic Party, State Senator Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, stood before her colleagues in the state Senate and announced the reason people oppose Obamacare is because they are racists.  It is President Obama's skin color:

"It isn't about the administration, and it should not be about the administration of the state nor federal level when it comes to Obamacare," she said. "But in fact it is. And why is that? I have talked to so many members in the House and Senate and you know what it comes down to? Are you ready for this? It is not about how many federal dollars we can receive. You ready? You want to know what it's about? It's about race. Now nobody wants to talk about that. It's about the race of this African-American president. ... It comes down to the race of the president of the U.S. which causes people to disconnect and step away from the substance of the bill." (Prager, Townhall.com, June 4, 2013)

Prager wonders why the head of a state Democratic Party -- and a state senator -- would say something that is equally vile and moronic? 

There are two possible explanations, and one is worse than the other:

"One is that Peterson doesn't believe what she said; that she said it solely in order to intimidate opponents of Obamacare. When a prominent black accuses anyone -- even if it is most white people in America -- of racism, it usually ends all debate."  (ibid)

But if not that then she really believes what she said:

"And if she really believes that the more than one hundred million Americans who oppose Obamacare -- a CNN poll last week found that 54 percent of Americans oppose Obamacare -- do so because Obama is black, America is in trouble. America is in real trouble if Peterson represents a large majority of black Americans. And we have every reason to believe that she does. She represents a 48-percent black district. And virtually every black leader routinely charges whites with racism." (ibid)

Now either the great majority of American whites are profoundly racist (or homophobic and anti-Muslim) and oppose Obamacare solely because the president is black,  or the great majority of blacks wrongly perceive reality when it comes to their perceptions of whites. In either case said Prager, blacks and whites are living in parallel universes.

One of them is both factually and morally very wrong said Prager and added that the idea that whites only oppose Obamacare because the president is black is one of those terrible lies that shape a society for ill.   Furthermore, it is the non-black left that routinely accuse whites of racism.   In fact, it is mainly white-skinned Leftists such as Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Chris Matthews of MSNBC, former president Jimmy Carter, Frank Rich of New York Magazine, and so many other Leftists who perpetuate the lie of racism (and homophobia, sexism, etc).  And their charge is not only malicious, notes Prager, but is just one more example of the societal destruction wrought by the left.

Today it is the case that Americans are thoroughly entangled and increasingly isolated within a massive and still growing web of delusion, false perceptions, propaganda and lies mainly perpetrated by God-hating Leftists who want there to be no living God as Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University admits in his book, "The Last Word."  

According to Nagel, rage against God has produced poor science (and other pathologies) among unbelieving scientists:

"My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.  One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind." (The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith, Peter Hitchens, pp. 149-150) 

 Thus evolutionary thinking and Darwin's theory in particular---which proposes that everything ascended (evolved) upward out of self-generated matter----is the central and radical lie ".. in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives..."  said C.S. Lewis.  (Letter to Bernard Acworth, Spt. 13, 1951)

"I suppose the reason we leaped at the origin of species was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores," confessed Sir Julian Huxley, former president of UNESCO and grandson of Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley. (Henry M. Morris, The Troubled Waters of Evolution, Creation-Life Publishers, 1974, p. 58)

In his masterpiece, "Ideas Have Consequences," early intellectual conservative Richard Weaver traced the first threads of today's web of lies to the late 14th century when Western man made an "evil decision" to abandon his belief in transcendent, unchanging "universals" and thus the position that "there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of man..." The consequences of this revolution were catastrophic:

"The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably...the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of 'man is the measure of all things." (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, pp. 30-33)

As lies, corruption, false perceptions and self-delusion rapidly spread and deepened, the web expanded and the downward spiral continued:

The living, supernatural God was conceptually murdered, heaven shut-down and nature (matter) and the physical world of the senses elevated to the supreme reality. The doctrine of original sin was abandoned and replaced by the 'goodness of man' and the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo dehistoricized and replaced with evolutionary cosmogonies claiming spontaneous generation and vast ages of time.  As supernatural Christianity declined, rationalism and then Protestant Liberalism (pantheism) arose and reductionist evolutionary science became the most prestigious way to study man. With knowledge limited to the sensory realm, Jesus Christ the Word Incarnate was reduced to an immanent mystical evolutionary force or Christ consciousness within nature while man's spiritual attributes — soul/spirit (mind, conscience and will) — were soon lost in an endless cycle of reductionism and determinism. Man, created in the spiritual likeness of his supernatural Creator would be lost. In his place would stand the soulless hominid, an accidental emergent product of spontaneously-generated mystical matter and evolutionary forces:

"Marxist philosophical materialism remains beyond all doubt that at some time or other in the remote past, life must have arisen from non-living matter." (Outline of Dialectical Materialism, 1948, p. 494)

Spontaneously generated dead matter not only thinks but is divine:

"...matter itself continually attains to higher perfection under its own power, thanks to indwelling dialectic...the dialectical materialists attribution of 'dialectic' to matter confers on it, not mental attributes only, but even divine ones." (Dialectical Materialism, Gustav A. Wetter, 1977, p. 58)

In "Socialism and Religious Beliefs," Enrico Ferri (1856-1926), a prominent socialist of his day and editor of Avanti, a socialist daily, confesses that Darwinism is fundamental to socialism and further reveals that forces or energies of nature substitute for miracles and divinity:

"....modern positive science...has substituted the conception of natural causality for the conception of miracles and divinity....I add that not only is Darwinism not contrary to socialism, but that it forms one of its fundamental scientific premises. As Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing else than the logical and vital outcome partly of Darwinism and partly of Spencerian evolution." (www.marxists.org/archive/ferri/1894/religion.htm)

 Darwinism has destroyed the foundations of supernatural Christian theism, immutable truth, moral law, sexual ethics and man's soul/spirit:

"Darwinism came at the desired time; Darwin's theory that man is the descendant of a lower animal destroyed the entire foundation of Christian dogma."   (Anton Pannekoek, "Marxism and Darwinism," translated by Nathan Weiser. Transcribed for the Internet by Jon Muller, Chicago, Charles H. Kerr & Company Co-operative Copyright, 1912 by Charles H. Kerr & Company)

For many long years, thoughtful, concerned people have been pointing to the connections between Darwin's evolutionary theory and the spreading epidemic of pathological lying, narcissism, moral insanity, hatred, despair, paranoia, disordered thinking, dark fantasies, psychosis and other spiritual pathologies together with the murder of 150,000,000 men, women, and children by God-hating Communists and Fascists, the breakup of the family, the abortion of 60,000,000+ unborn here in America, the perversion of children, rampant hedonism and homosexuality, and the relentlessly rising tide of psychiatric drug and porn use, crime, decadence, homicide and suicide in the 'evolutionized' West.

But for the most part, their concerns have been ignored, derided, scoffed at and mercilessly ridiculed by the ignorant, gullible and fools who hate truth.  This is also the case within the whole body of the church.   From the Roman Catholic to Eastern Orthodox and Protestant/Evangelical Church, evolutionary thinking--- the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives ----has supplanted the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo.  So completely has the evolutionary transformation been that it has successfully inverted the order of creation and reversed the direction of Biblical theism.  With creation ex nihilo virtually replaced by evolution, it is now believed that men have not fallen from perfection but instead are gradually evolving upward from their ape beginnings toward greater and greater spiritual perfection.    

As a result, moral duty has turned upside down because "lying is accepted instead of condemned," said J. Budziszewski, a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas. (What We Can't Not Know, Budziszewski, p. 197)

The moment lying is accepted it has to be required because it is the means to an end, the way to win, to have what we want, to preserve our inflated conception of 'self,' to dominate and control others, and to shift personal guilt away from 'self' and onto 'other'.   Thus refusal to lie for the cause---whatever that may be---- makes you guilty of betrayal, of being a spoil-sport, of being unscientific, backward, insane, and hateful.

For our generation of liars there is no heaven above nor hell below.  There is only sovereign 'self' who knows only personal selfishness, ambition, physical lust and hate.  Being immeasurably proud (narcissistic), 'self' detests moral absolutes, authority, obedience, accountability, direction, rules, restraints, and truth since narcissistic 'self'  already knows everything worth knowing.

A nation of liars.  This is where we are and what we are becoming.  The problem is not just in Obama, Leftists, 'gay' radicals, and abortionists but in our churches and in ourselves. If only there were evil liars somewhere,

"... insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”   Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The source and taproot of all lying in whatever form is pride (preference for 'self' over God and others).  Pride is the beginning of all sin and the,

"...beginning of the pride of man is to fall away from God." ("On Nature and Grace", St. Augustine, from Ancient Christian Devotional, Thomas Oden, p. 73)

As confession is good for the soul, Budziszewski wonders if we might finally repent of our lies.  Will we at last,

"...yield ourselves to Truth, to be scraped, scoured and made honest until we can give back His light?"

If not, then the Church and our nation, individually and corporately, will continue to reap the consequences of the lies we have been sowing.

@Linda Kimball

The Occult Pagan Spirit Entering the Contemporary Church through the Front Door

"Every year thousands of people visit Damanhur to try out the social model, study the philosophy and to meditate in the Temples of Humankind, that great underground construction excavated by hand by the citizens of Damanhur and which many have called the ‘Eighth wonder of the world’.  (The Temples of Humankind, damanhur.org)

 Secretly under construction since 1978, the Temple of Humankind is 100 feet below ground inside a mountain near the northern Italian city of Vidracco.   The incredibly beautiful cathedral is dedicated to the divine nature of humanity.  It is not therefore a place of prayer to the living supernatural God but rather a place for inward contemplation of and meditation to the divine god-force or energy within self.  Its' builders describe the Temple as a great three dimensional book which recounts the history of Humankind through all the art forms, a path of re-awakening to the Divine inside and outside of ourselves.

The Temple of Humankind is merely the latest in a long line of 'high places' raised up at the direction of an internationalist occult spiritual elite, most of them apostate Christians.  These temples are where they gather to plan and plot a totalitarian world order, channel the divine within and chant in unison their eerie Great Invocation. 

In 1962 Edith Kermit Roosevelt attended a benefit dinner held to inaugurate the first American temple--- the Temple of Understanding built on 50 acres by the Potomac River, Washington, D. C.   The temple serves as a "Spiritual United Nations" designed to fulfill the rituals of a 'new' pagan spirituality encompassing forms of the feminine spirit which has unfolded over the centuries from Egypt, Babylonia, China and Europe.  (The Temple of Understanding, The New Hampshire Sunday Times News,  Edith Kermit Roosevelt, April 1, 1962)

Among the Temple's influential apostate backers were John D. Rockefeller IV, Socialist leader Norman Thomas, Rt.Rev. James A. Pike of San Francisco, Cary Grant, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a founding member of the Fund for the Republic's Center for Democratic Institutions; militant pacifist and Nobel Peace Prize and Nobel Peace Prize winner Philip Noel Baker; Holland D. Roberts of the Academic Freedom Committee, a former head of the Communist party's  California Labor School who was identified as a "party member" at a  Jan. 22, 1956 hearing of the Subversive Activities Control Board; U. Alexis Johnson, depute undersecretary of state for political  affairs; Sen. Kenneth B. Keating (R-N.Y.), Prof. Pitirim A. Sorokin, director of Harvard University's Research Center for  Creative Altruism and Brooks Hays, special assistant to President Kennedy. (ibid, Roosevelt)

Among other endorsers were Jack Benny, Douglas MacArthur II, ambassador to Japan; Max Lerner of the New York Post, Prof. J. B. Rhine  of Duke University; Roland Gammon of the Laymen's Movement  and World Parliament of Religions; Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, president of Guatemala; Sir Roy Welensky, prime minister, Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; Rev. Fred Jordan, president, International Spiritualists,  Norfolk, Va.; Philip S. Linnik, director Universal Brotherhood Center, Glen Cove, Long Island, N. Y.; James A. Linen, president Time-Life Inc., and S. A.  Mohamed, cultural attache of the United Arab Republic, Washington, D. C. ("The Cult of the All-Seeing Eye," Robert Keith Spenser, pp. 43-46)

In an essay entitled, "Is Crestone/Baca, Colorado 'the Vatican City of the New World Order?” Dr. Eric Karlstrom describes another of the occult elite's high places.  This one consists of 25 spiritual centers.   These include,

"... Dharma Ocean (Buddhist), Chamma Ling (Tibetan Bon religion), Karma Thegsum Tashi Gomang (Tibetan Buddhist), Nur Ashki Jerrahi (Crestone Sufi Circle), Vajra Vidya Retreat Center (Tibetan Buddhist), I Am Harmony, Crestone Baptist Church, Yeshe Khorlo (Bhutanese Tibetan Buddhist), The Academy of On, Oniyan Wakan Tipi (Lakota Sacred Breath Lodge), Meditation Place of the Vast Expanse (Tibetan Buddhist), Shumei International Institute (Japanese), Dragon Mountain Zen Center, Nada Carmelite Hermitage (Catholic), The Way of Nature Fellowship, The Sri Auribindo Learning Center, Crestone Mountain Zen Center, Haidakhandi Universal Ashram (Hindu), Sacred Mountains Foundation Inc. (Navajo), Little Shepard of the Hills Episcopal Church, The Pundarika Foundation (Tibetan Buddhist) and The Desert Foundation (Catholic ecumenical).....  a Moslem Ziggurat, a Tibetan Peace Park, and a Crestone End of Life Cremation Project." (Karlstrom, January, 2012, naturalclimatechange.us)

All of these temples and high places are parts of an occult temple complex in New York City consisting of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Temple of Understanding, the UN (in particular its’ pyramid-shaped meditation room,) and Lucis Trust, originally named Lucifer Trust, repository for the “Ageless Wisdom Teaching” (revelations from spirits) whose taproot stretches back to the plain of Shinar.

 Replacing Marxist Communism's 'red' color is 'green,' the symbolic color of the temple complex.  Green is the color of the “new” occult pagan spirituality which describes itself in secular terms as the green eco-movement for sustainability and peace.  Its’ worldwide utopian project is green spiritual communism.  It hails Lucifer as the first free-thinker and liberator of mankind.  Its’ deity is Isis, the Goddess of a Thousand Names.  As Goddess Earth Mother, she is Gaia, the deity honored on what is considered “the largest secular holiday in the world”.....Earth Day:

" Yet there is little secular about it. Rather, a variety of spiritual activities takes place; from Mother Earth rituals to multi-faith Sunrise services, from interfaith Earth gatherings to Spring meditations and “Earth Prayers” – such as the one suggested below,

“Mother, Father, God, Universal Power/Remind us daily of the sanctity of all life/Touch our hearts with the glorious oneness of all creation/As we strive to respect all the living beings on this planet/Penetrate our souls with the beauty of this earth,/As we attune ourselves to the rhythm and flow of the seasons./Awaken our minds with the knowledge to achieve a world in perfect harmony/And grant us the wisdom to realize that we can have heaven on earth.” (Jo Poore, Earth Prayer [to be used on Earth Day], cited by Carl Teichrib in "All For Gaia: Earth Day and Total Transformation for a Post-Christian World,April 19, 2011, forcingchange.wordpress.com)

 Tom DeWeese, President of the American Policy Center, has also been tracking the rise of occult pagan spirituality.  In a work entitled, "Teachers, Preachers and Greens: The Unholy Alliance to Transform America,"  DeWeese reveals the existence of a well-funded yet covert effort to paganize American society through an assault on schools and churches.  He reveals that the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City is the home of the enormously influential Gaia Institute as well as the  Temple of Understanding — a politically influential U.N. Non-Governmental Organization.   DeWeese describes a pagan "church service" at St. John the Divine:

"As the congregation sit in their church pews in the great Cathedral of St. John, the Divine in New York City, the priest stands at the alter, ready to receive a procession of animals for the annual Feast of Saint Francis blessing. Down the aisle comes a procession of elephants, camels, donkeys, monkeys and birds. These are followed by members of the congregation carrying bowls of compost and worms. Next, to the sounds of music, come acrobats and jugglers. In the pulpit, former Vice President Al Gore delivers a sermon, saying, "God is not separate from the Earth." (http://www.federalobserver.com/2010/11/14/teachers-preachers-and-greens-the-unholy-alliance-to-transform-america/)

In "The New Spirituality: Dismantling and Reconstructing Reality," Dr. Peter Jones writes that the 'new' spirituality is not new but is rather,

" ....the reappearance of the massive system of ancient world paganism and, as such, represents the greatest threat to the church since the Greco-Roman pagan empire. The situation is urgent."   (modernreformation.org)

Jones adds that our post-Christian culture is quickly reaching a tipping point of momentous implications where the,

"New Spirituality may well represent the next phase of the faith and practice of modern autonomous humanity, whose goal is nothing less than the construction of a new Sodom and Babel." (ibid)

Christianity as a dominant moral and social force is all but spent and its great opponent, secular humanism and/or scientific materialism, is in free-fall. Materialist scientism has always been utterly repugnant to more spiritually sensitive people.  With its' nihilism, mindless mechanistic universe, reductionism, moral anarchy and irrationalism, it has generated its own crisis of credibility. However,  as a universal alchemical-solvent that has broken down the West's Biblical-based worldview, it has served to throw wide the door to equally irrational but far more dangerous occult spiritual New Age  which as a spiritual force began to emerge in the United States around 1965.

Since the Sixties we have entered a new world, said Jones. The intellectual pride of secular humanism and  its religious sister, "Christian" liberalism, has been exploded by the radical critique of postmodern deconstruction. The objectivity of autonomous human reason as a means to truth is now seen as pure fiction, so the world must be reconstructed on other bases:

 "The irony is delicious," says theologian Don Carson. "The modernity which has arrogantly insisted that human reason is the final arbiter of truth has spawned a stepchild that has arisen to slay it." (ibid)

A triumphant form of ancient religious paganism, a  "new" oneness ideology dominates the campus, popular media, and even many pulpits.  Under its' influence the narcissistic 'me' generation has practically lost all sense of the antithesis (right or wrong, true or false, either/or, male or female), and are placing their faith in the pagan synthesis of "both/and" monism (oneness).

This is also true for Christian youth, for despite the billions of dollars spent by Evangelicals on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, camping trips, pizza nights and media, a culture of young Christians have been produced,

"who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures."  (The Coming Evangelical Collapse, Michael Spencer, Mar. 10, 2009, csmoniter.com)

Spencer writes that evangelicalism, especially the contemporary version, has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself and in response to the death of evangelicalism will further compromise itself in a futile attempt at reaching postmodern paganized souls by becoming more culturally relevant, not less.  Thus it will,

"...  become more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. Emphasis will shift from doctrine to relevance, motivation, and personal success – resulting in churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith." (ibid)

In her Washington Times article, "Beware: Hell Exists, There's No Christianity without Sin, Death, and the Resurrection," Janice Crouse addresses America's growing theological crisis, noting that the Evangelical Church has become divided against itself, with traditionalists on one side and culturally relevant church growth advocates on the other.   Citing "Evangelicals Divided," in the April edition of First Things, she writes:

"First Things warns, 'If evangelical theology...does not exercise the kind of intellectual humility required by Traditionalism, it will not survive...it will risk disintegrating into ever more subjectivist and individualistic sects, many of them neither evangelical nor orthodox."

Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary addresses this crisis in his book, "The Disappearance of God." There is a growing chasm notes Mohler. On one side are the traditionalists, on the other, the self-autonomous contemporary church which defines itself over and against Traditionalism, or authentic Christianity.   Whereas traditionalists reject the dangerous idea of  accommodating the church to culture, the contemporary church is willing to adopt the cultures practices to reach the culture:

" This means  whatever is influencing the culture can more easily come into the church because  we are adopting its ways. Previously what is spiritually harmful has been coming  through the backdoor instead of the front. Now it’s knocking on the front door,  and many are answering it by opening it and inviting it in. This is done because  of a lack of judgment on leader’s part. While everyone is making a fuss about the  Da Vinci code released to persuade the public on Christianity we have not  recognized what is taking place in our own living room – the church." (New Age Pathways in the church, letusreason.org)

On behalf of church growth ambitions and reaching the lost the contemporary church is jettisoning authentic Christianity, thereby doing the will of the occult pagan elites.   

Authentic Christianity is very narrowly defined.   All traditionalist Christians across a vast denominational range who hold fast to the fundamental doctrines are Authentic Christians said Dr. Mohler, while all who do not are not by definition Christian.  Fundamental doctrines are:

"The Trinity (including full deity and humanity of Jesus Christ); the authenticity of Scripture  (the Revealed Word of God); the Incarnation (death, burial, resurrection); justification by faith; sin (humanities willful revolt against God the Father); the traditional doctrine of Hell, and the absolute sovereignty of God the Father." (Psalm 1)

The contemporary church is strongly attracted to the postmodernist kind of Christianity proposed by the Emerging Church whose leaders include Bill Hybels, Brian McLaren, Rick Warren, and Rob Bell. As an anti-intellectual spirit of therapeutic deism and missional 'works righteousness' energizes the emerging churches, and as the contemporary church embraces its' pseudo-theology it is uncomfortable with apologetics, hymns, and fundamental doctrine.    Like the emergent church it prefers  mind-numbing rock-style noise to intellectually oriented hymns together with humanist church-growth formulas,  programs, novelty, entertainment, fun, inclusive open door policies,  and feelings, especially whatever "feels good."  It rejects higher authority, immutable truth, moral absolutes and discipline and supplants these with therapeutic feel-good messages rather than expository sermons and sound apologetics.  Like mega-church Temples of Humankind, its' deity is a spirit of  "all-inclusive love" so it never speaks of wrath and judgment, hence hell, ethical sin, and repentance are not just unwelcome, but are in fact "intolerable" to the self-autonomous contemporary mind, noted Mohler.

 The postmodern theology of the emergent church already has much in common with 'new' pagan spirituality and the hubristic contemporary church is quickly following suit, meaning that the Church Militant is becoming the postmodern Church Imitant,

"...adopting "a new Christian worldview" that, devoid of theological biblical clarity, apes the pagan culture and concludes that "the body of Christ is queer, is man, is woman, is straight  The "new Christian" employs spiritual techniques borrowed from pagan mysticism and imitates the self-justifying moralism of liberal social action." (ibid, Peter Jones)

In 1898, Abraham Kuyper pointed out that  supernatural Christian theism is the antithesis of the naturalist or pagan worldview:

"The fundamental contrast has always been, is still and will be until the end: Christianity and Paganism."

With regards to the future, a courageous though tactful announcement of the 'traditional' gospel in the light of the biblical worldview of the antithesis will be both politically incorrect, spirituality explosive, and hated with a vengeance. A courageous and clear witness to the pagan world said Dr. Jones,

" ....will involve suffering and persecution but, in the providence of God, may well lead, as at the beginning of the church's history, to a glorious ingathering of God's elect people, set free by the truth. Most of all, it will bring glory, in our paganized, polytheistic time, to the name of the only true God, transcendent Creator and gracious Redeemer." (ibid, The New Spirituality: Dismantling and Reconstructing Reality)

@Linda Kimball

The Modern Church: Hell-Bent and Determined on Committing Suicide

In "What the Hell? Vatican caught on damnation of non-believers" Jonathan Owen reports that with a new Pope in place, the Catholic Church is keen to portray itself as accepting, modern and relevant. But a recent suggestion by Pope Francis that atheists could also be "redeemed" by God has led the church to return to medieval rhetoric - with an official Vatican spokesman forced to clarify that non-believers are indeed destined for hell.   (thereporter.com.au, 29th May 2013)

In a thinly veiled rebuke of the new Pope, Vatican spokesman Father Thomas Rosica made it abundantly clear that merely being "good" is not enough to avoid going to hell.  On the issue of "salvation" he remarked:

"They cannot be saved who, knowing the Church as founded by Christ and necessary for salvation, would refuse to enter her or remain in her." (ibid)

On his Friendly Atheist blog, Hemant Mehta wrote:

"We all knew that sense of one-ness and actions-speak-louder-than-prayers wasn't going to last very long." "Atheists, according to Christians, are going to hell unless we accept Christ's divinity. We already knew that. It was still an unusual and welcome gesture from the Pope to recognise that everyone, regardless of beliefs, can do good and 'be saved' - at least it was a step up from what we're used to hearing." (ibid)

David McKeegan of The Freethinker journal remarked:

"We atheists were over the moon when the Pope told us that we were all going to heaven. Then when the Vatican told us that it wasn't true, and that we were going to hell after all, we were sick as parrots." (ibid)

Owen's charge that the Vatican has been "caught" (red-handed) is entirely reasonable given its acceptance of  both Darwin's theory of evolution and Teilhard de Chardin's  spiritualized Hindu-pantheist conception, which if true means that the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo is not true and by extension, man is not the spiritual image bearer of the living triune God, there is no transcendent dimension outside of the space/time dimension, there was no fall,  man is not a sinner, and there is no hell.  Thus the idea of damnation is a baseless, hateful notion based in unscientific medieval rhetoric . 

The widespread acceptance of Darwinism within and without the Church has destroyed the foundations of supernatural Christian theism and man's soul/spirit as Dutch astronomer, Marxist theorist, and social revolutionary Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960) affirms:

"Darwinism came at the desired time; Darwin's theory that man is the descendant of a lower animal destroyed the entire foundation of Christian dogma."   (Anton Pannekoek, "Marxism and Darwinism," translated by Nathan Weiser. Transcribed for the Internet by Jon Muller, Chicago, Charles H. Kerr & Company Co-operative Copyright, 1912 by Charles H. Kerr & Company)

If Darwin's philosophically materialist theory is true then man is nothing more than a soulless bag of chemicals or equally soulless hominid and there is no ultimate fixed meaning or higher purpose to life except what we choose.

 " You are born, you suffer, you die — that's it. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you may get recycled as organic manure — but beyond that, you're just a number that happened to come up in the great casino of the universe." (Darwin, Spurgeon and the 'black dog,' Carl Wieland, Creation.com)

Wieland points out that even where Darwin's philosophical materialism is denied by Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Protestant evangelical evolutionary theists,

".....but 'millions of years' ideas are proclaimed, hopelessness finds foothold.  Any 'god' who condoned millions of years of death, cruelty, disease and bloodshed, certainly cannot be the personal, biblical God of love. And if the Bible got it so obviously wrong about the timing of creation as to mislead hundreds of millions of Christians until the present day, how can we really trust it about our eternal future? John 3:12 (ibid)

Keeping in mind the widespread acceptance of 'modern' evolutionary theory by the culturally relevant 'modern' Church, anthropologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, longtime director of the American Museum of Natural History, reveals that Darwin is not its' originator after all, but rather ancient pagans are.  In the introduction to his history of evolutionism Osborn wrote:

"When I began the search for anticipations of the evolutionary theory....I was led back to the Greek natural philosophers and I was astonished to find how many of the pronounced and basic features of the Darwinian theory were anticipated even as far back as the seventh century B.C." (Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin, p. xi)

Charles Darwin received the idea of evolution from his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who was a neo-pagan monist known to attend séances.  As master of the famous Masonic Canongate lodge in Edinburgh he had close ties with both the Jacobin Masons, the organizers of the bloody revolution in France, and with the infamous Illuminati, whose diabolical cause was overthrow of  the  Church and destruction of Christendom.  Thus Erasmus Darwin was an important name in European Masonic anti-Christian organizations engaged in revolutionary activism.  Erasmus Darwin mentored his grandson Charles:

"Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was the first man in England to suggest those ideas which were later to be embodied in the Darwinian theory by his grandson, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) who wrote in 1859 Origin of Species." (Scarlet and the Beast, Vol. II, John Daniel, p. 34)

Pope Leo XIII issued a famous bull in 1884 entitled Humanum Genus in which he discussed the sinister undertakings of the Free Masons and the Illuminati:

"...the partisans of evil seems to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons.  No longer making any secret of their purposes, they are now boldly rising up against God Himself."  They intend nothing less than "the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas (that) shall be drawn from mere naturalism."  (Humanum Genus, Encyclical on Freemasonry)

In his book "Utopia: The Perennial Heresy," Catholic philosopher and historian Thomas Molnar (1910-2010) notes that the two recurring themes of modern humanist ideologies (including Free Masonry and the Illuminati) are monism and evolutionary conceptions. At the root of these two themes there is:

"... defiance of God, pride unlimited, a yearning for enormous power and the assumption of divine attributes with a view to manipulating and shaping mankind's fate."  (p. 227)

In order for god-men to create a new world and a new man, one who is not created in the spiritual image of God but is rather a free spirit whose soul is untouched by Him:

"...the order of being must be obliterated (and reinterpreted) as essentially under man's control."  Taking control "requires the decapitation of being — the murder of God."  (Eric Voegelin, "Science, Politics and Gnosticism,"  p. xv)

Fundamentally, Darwinism is materialist monism and as the pillar of natural science is the devilish idea by which naturalist god-men have "decapitated God" and seized control of the order of being.  This makes Darwinism a powerful magic, a universal solvent wielded by a cult religion's sorcerers:

"(Darwinism is) nothing but a kind of cult, a cult religion....It has no scientific validity whatsoever.  Darwin's so-called theory of evolution is based on absurdly irrational propositions, which did not come from scientific observations, but were artificially introduced from the outside, for political-ideological reasons." (Jonathan Tennenbaum, "Towards 'A New Science of Life,' Executive Intelligence Review, Vol. 28, No. 34, Sept. 7, 2001)

The Cult of Darwinism Remakes Mankind as Apes

"Instead of Adam, our ancestry is traced to the most grotesque of creatures; thought is phosphorous; the soul complex nerves, and our moral sense a secretion of sugar."  (Disraeli, quoted by John Passmore "A Hundred Years of Philosophy," p. 36)

With the triumph of natural science and Darwinism in the nineteenth century, the murder of God and the obliteration of His order was cast in the cement of "enlightened" pseudo-science.   Westerners would be cut off from God the Father and their own souls, thereby disrupting:

"....the bio-psycho-spiritual unity of human consciousness...." (Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, 1999)

The modern secular "scientistic" West has almost succeeded in obliterating the souls of its' citizens and now seeks obliteration of the two sexes:

"Little Johnny went to school; There to learn a brand new rule; No longer could the boys be boys Or have their special trucks and toys; Only six, so young and tender, It's time for him to unlearn gender."  (Here At School the Slant is Gay, cited in Our Gay Pride President, David A. Noebel, http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=7292 )

 Evolutionary thinking as 'scientific fact' has finally reached saturation point in government, law, media, education, healthcare, psychiatry, the public arena and increasingly within the whole body of the Church which seems hell-bent and determined to commit suicide on behalf of its need to be viewed as 'modern' 'scientific' and 'culturally relevant."

@Linda Kimball

Envy, Covetousness and the Cold, Clear Fire of Hell

Whoever keeps God's commandments loves God (John 14:21):

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind: and thy neighbour as thyself." Luke 10:27

The end of the commandment is charity (love) from a pure heart, a good conscience and unfeigned faith. (1 Thess. 1:5) He that loves his neighbor fulfills the law for he does not lie, commit adultery, kill, steal, bear false witness (i.e., slander, gossip), covet/envy.

Charity works no evil. It is not perversely puffed up with pride. It is not ambitious, does not serve self, thinks no evil, does not covet and rejoices not in another man's misery as the envious do:

“When men are full of envy, they disparage everything, whether it be good or bad.” (Publius Cornelius Tacitus)

“Nothing sharpens sight like envy.” (Thomas Fuller, British clergyman and writer, 1608-1661)

“Pride is seldom delicate, it will please itself with very mean advantages; and envy feels not its own happiness, but when it may be compared with the misery of others.” (Samuel Johnson, British poet, critic, writer, 1709-1784)

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” (Winston Churchill, British orator, author and Prime Minister during World War II, 1874-1965)

"When I say that Marxism is based on envy, I mean that the glorious revolution of the proletariat...was really a promise to put a final end to all the conditions that make for envy." (Joseph Epstein, author and former editor of The American Scholar, from Truths about Socialism, Coral Ridge Ministries, p. 66)

Envy/covetousness is the principle of negation and rebellion in the fallen soul of every man and has played a part in human dynamics ever since the envy-bitten Cain murdered his brother Abel.

Dorothy Sayers, who translated Dante's Inferno where pride and envy were punished in the lowest part of hell called envy 'the great leveler.' At its worst,

"...it is a destroyer---rather than have anyone happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together." (ibid, p. 66)

Dante described the lowest part of Hell as ice. Interestingly it was "clear cold fire" that Alice Baily saw as she came ever closer to the Hierarchy (spirit masters) by way of transcendental meditation. Baily preferred 'self' to God and others and is one of the important contributors to the concepts and language of the New Age movement, a modern mixture of occultism, spiritism, eastern mysticism, subjectivism (everyone invents their own truth), philosophical monism (ultimate one substance), pantheism (everything is god) and selfishness.

Baily was an apostate Christian who negated the living supernatural triune God, heaven, hell and substitutionary atonement. She viewed other people as dehumanized 'vehicles,' taught that Christ's Kingdom is of this world; asserted her own divinity, embraced evolutionary conceptions, eugenics, abortion, revolutionary violence, communism and socialism.

As she approached the Hierarchy (or lowest part of Hell), she said,

"...darkness is pure spirit" and each "contact with the Initiator leads the initiate closer to the centre of pure darkness---a darkness which is the very antithesis of darkness...It is a centre or point of such intense brilliance that everything fades out and at the place of tension, and at that darkest point (we) see a point of cold clear fire." (False Dawn: The United Religious Initiative, Globalism, and the Quest for a One-World Religion, Lee Penn, p. 283)

The Decalogue shows that the beginning of envy is pride (preference for self over God and others), since a proud man or elite group of men (i.e., Cain, Alice Baily, Karl Marx, Obama, global elite 'economic super-entity’) make idols out of themselves, thereby assuming they possess honor and rights. This is why pride leads to contempt for truth, law, wisdom, norms, authority, rules, institutions and other people in combination with any or all of the following: lying, treachery, gluttony, greed, covetousness, lust, hate, cheating, promiscuity, sadism, sodomy, pederasty, pedophilia, adultery, theft, and the dehumanization of other people resulting in physical slavery, population control schemes, abortion, brutality, terror, murder, genocide and tax slavery: 

Former insider at the World Bank, ex-Senior Counsel Karen Hudes, says a treacherous global financial system dominated by a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve dominate the pillars of America's government and control the media to cover up its crimes:

"What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group,” she explained, adding that the “corrupt power grabbers” have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.”  (World Bank Insider Blows Whistle on Corruption, Federal Reserve, Alex Newman, New American, 22 May 2013 )

Hudes, an attorney who spent some two decades working in the World Bank’s legal department, has observed the machinations of the criminal network up close:

“I realized we were now dealing with something known as state capture, which is where the institutions of government are co-opted by the group that’s corrupt... The pillars of the U.S. government — some of them — are dysfunctional because of state capture; this is a big story, this is a big cover up.” (ibid)

Envy/covetousness is a major theme in the Law, Psalms, Prophets and New Testament. Scripture combines envy with pride, covetousness and selfishness into a single manifestation of idolatry of self and belief that there isn't enough 'good' to go around, hence the burning compulsion to destroy by way of gossip, slander, ridicule, and destructive criticism the good name and spiritual virtues of people who are the objects of envy as well as to consolidate all goods (i.e., recognition, honor, status, wealth, natural resources, etc) into the hands of one or a privileged few.

Envy/covetousness ultimately leads to abortion (child sacrifice) and other forms of murder. Among the self-serving social elite of Punic Carthage for example, the institution of child sacrifice may have assisted in the consolidation and maintenance of family wealth, of eliciting favors from the gods, and as a convenient way of disposing of unwanted or illegitimately conceived babies.

In 1921 the largest cemetery of sacrificed infants in the ancient Near East was discovered at Carthage. Hundreds of burial urns filled with the cremated bones of infants, mostly newborns but even some children up to age six years old, as well as animals, were uncovered at Carthage. All of the victims had been burned to death on the altars of idolatrous men and women.

The actual rite of child sacrifice at Carthage has been graphically described by Diodorus Siculus:

"There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire." (Abortion and the Ancient Practice of Child Sacrifice, Andrew White, MD, 1/5/2012, Associates for Biblical Research)

Plutarch, a first and second century A.D. Greek author, adds to the description:

"...the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people." (ibid)

Church Father Tertullian condemns child sacrifice, saying no matter how it is rationalized, it is still murder:

"....murder is once for all forbidden; so even the child in the womb, while yet the mother's blood is still being drawn on to form the human being, it is not lawful to destroy. To forbid birth is only quicker murder. It makes no difference whether one take away the life once born or destroy it as it comes to birth. He is a man, who is to be a man, the fruit is always present in the seed." (Tertullian, Apologeticus IX.- 6, 8)

The beginning of idolatry is pride, which together with selfishness demonstrates preference for one's self instead of God and neighbor, and just as no violation of the Law can occur without one first being an idolater, envy/covetousness and murder are its' final results, for where self is primary then self deserves everything that it can get.

Envy/covetousness will even drive men so far as to conceptualize the murder of God (theocide) as exemplified by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, de Chardin and Alice Baily.

In "Death by Envy," Fr. George R.A. Aquaro points out that Christ's earthly ministry centered on convicting the world of idolatry by provoking people (represented by the Pharisees) to envy and then murder. By becoming the scapegoat, Jesus Christ allows mankind to place their sins upon Him so that we might repent at the sight of His blood. (p. 101)

The tragedy of the fall is that man has lost his introspection. Judas had no hope of looking within himself and seeing his own personal envy which inevitably destroys someone or something. The Cross is thus a messenger of mankind's envy/covetousness and murderous intentions. Therefore we are obliged to search ourselves for envy and its root cause, idolatrous self-centeredness because,

“Look, I am coming soon! Says the Lord. My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”   (Rev. 22:12-16)   

And there is nothing "covered that shall not be revealed; nor hidden that shall not be known" (Luke 12:2) and just as it is "...appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment" (Heb. 9:27) so there will be eternal life in Paradise for those who love God and have kept His commandments but for those who have done evil, whose "hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God..for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger."  (Rom. 2:5)

For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but delivered them, drawn down by infernal ropes to the "cold clear fire" of lower hell, unto torments, to be reserved unto judgment (2 Pet. 2:4) then He shall say to all idolaters that shall be on his left hand:

"Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels." Matthew 25:41

@Linda Kimball

Make Way for the Shape-Shifting Reptilians!

One of the devil's greatest achievements in our age of biological science and evolutionary thinking has been to convince the "most enlightened" Westerners to believe that all that exists is matter in motion.   This means on one hand that the living God, heaven, hell and the devil and his evil minions do not exist while on the other highly evolved deep space beings---themselves the emergent product of evolutionary forces acting on matter--- almost certainly exist, according to prominent scientist Stephen Hawking and many others.

Hawking warns against contact with deep space aliens because he believes that since they would most certainly be a very highly evolved life-form they would view human kind as a primitive life-form to be conquered and used as slaves or worse.

 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker  also believes in the existence of aliens.  The author of "The Color Purple" is a disciple of David Icke, thus like him she believes  the world is run by shape-shifting reptilian aliens who practice mind control from the Moon.  

In his book, 'Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More' Icke describes how the human mind is controlled from the moon which he claims is actually a “gigantic spacecraft” which sends us a “fake reality broadcast... in much the same way as portrayed in the Matrix movie trilogy."  ("Prize-winning author Alice Walker gives support to David Icke on Desert Island Discs," Liam O'Brien, independent.uk, Sunday 19 May 2013)

The source and taproot for the idea that all that exists is matter resides in ancient Greek Epicurean atomism and in Buddhism. The common denominator of both is metaphysical nihilism, which means that there is no ultimate source for life, conscious life, spirit, moral absolutes, transcendent truth, and the two sexes, male and female.

In its contemporary forms metaphysical nihilism is called evolutionary materialism by Darwinists and spiritual science by Theosophists, occult New Agers, and other forms of Eastern mysticism.  While the former embraces some variation of Darwinism the latter prefers spiritual conceptions such as Teilhard's idea which leapfrogs off of Darwin's theory. 

The apostate French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) taught that a God-force emerges from matter.  According to him, this evolution of God from the world or universe results in evolution becoming "conscious of itself" and ultimately, in the transformation of all matter into "Christ consciousness" or "pure spirit." He called this final stage the "Omega Point" or "the cosmic Christ."

Depending on which camp UFO believers fall into, they either view aliens with great fear and horror or as the saviors of mankind who will rescue the earth in the process.   The Vatican's  astronomer Dr. Guy Consolmagno, an avowed evolutionist  and self-confessed science fiction fan said he would even be happy to baptize an alien,  but “Only if they asked”.   (I’d love to baptise ET, says Vatican’s stargazer,  dailymail.co.uk,  25 January, 2011)

Other Christian believers have rapture-type events predicted for the future while many others are tormented by waking-visions and nightmares by what one man describes as demons,

"(and) the feeling of paralysis and being incapable of  speaking. All I could do in such a situation was mentally pray in Jesus name for deliverance. I would then feel the ‘presence’ leave and I’d wake  up." ("Aliens, evolution and the occult," Gary Bates, creation.com, 24 February 2007)

Bates notes that he has heard many such testimonies and today many people are having very similar experiences—with some  ‘visitors’ masquerading as aliens.  

Tragically, because evolution is widely accepted throughout the West and taught in Western schools as science, and science fiction has become our myth, secular high-school children believe that there must be some kind of evolutionary Star Wars-like ‘force’  behind the universe.   Many even believe that highly evolved and technologically advanced  aliens created (or ‘seeded’) life on earth.  

 Science fiction has become our myth and science has become our religion, observed UFO commentator and author Ronald Story.  And due mainly to media influences,

“... and a hideously complicated world, most  people are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish fantasy from reality.(Ronald Story, editor The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, 2002, p. 679 from Prepare ye the way—the aliens are coming! Gary Bates, creation.com, 10 February 2011)

In a big picture sense, the whole realm of UFO beliefs is truly a religious idea built upon yet another religious idea (evolution), said Bates:

“The common denominator of both camps is the belief that evolution has occurred  for countless eons on the earth and all over the universe. This point cannot be  emphasized strongly enough—it is the basis for virtually all belief in alien  life, whatever form one thinks that life may take.”  (ibid)

Large numbers of Christians have already been led astray by accepting evolution in one form or another  while for many others, belief in an evolutionary force, which some call Lucifer, and in extraterrestrial life has effectively become a new religion that supplants traditional Christian theism.   Indeed, many UFO messages have been received and channelled by contactees  who claim to be receiving special revelation from our ‘space brothers.’ 

All of this led the sociologist Gerald Eberlein to say that:

“ … research has shown that people who are not affiliated with any church, but who claim that they are religious, are particularly susceptible to the possible existence of extraterrestrials. For them, UFOlogy is a substitute religion." (ibid, Bates)

 Over eighteen hundred years ago the Apostle Paul foretold all of this,

“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will  abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.”  (I Timothy 4:1)

@Linda Kimball

The Demonic in Our Postmodern Fabricated Alternative Reality

The article, “Deep Divide of ‘Evil Genes" reports that evolutionary biologists at the University of Connecticut are analyzing Adam Lanza's DNA in the hope of determining if whether an evil gene caused him to go on a killing spree.   (Deep divide of 'evil genes, Julia Llewellyn Smith, Age of Technology, April 11, 2013)

So controversial is the idea that evil may be genetically caused that projects set up to investigate the issue have been shelved after public uproar:

"Scientists are haunted by the ghosts of the pseudoscientific eugenics movement, which held that mankind could be improved by breeding out the bad. Peaking in the early 20th century, its influence led to the sterilisation of mental patients and prisoners and, by extension, to Hitler's ''final solution'' of eliminating the ''Untermenschen." (ibid)

Like Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Saul Alinsky, one of the Left’s favorite thinkers, Hitler was a psychopath. Psychopaths are spiritually dead demonized human predators who wear a mask of sanity to disguise the fact that their conscience is demonically occluded and their lack of empathy and malignant narcissism permits them to negate reality and impose on their victims a false reality made up of distortions and fabrications.  They can imitate feelings but what drives them is a ravenous hunger for what they are after, which is making others suffer. Just as normal humans enjoy seeing other people happy and thriving, the psychopath enjoys the opposite.

Lack of empathy results in blindness to the humanity of their victims which in turn permits them to be sacrificed without remorse on the altar of narcissism, for with the negation of humanity intended victims are no longer human beings but objects to be used, abused, tormented and discarded at will.  This monstrous evil finds expression over and over in the writings of the sexual psychopath, the Marquis de Sade:

"The philosopher sates his appetites without inquiring to know what his enjoyments may cost others, and without remorse."  (Libido Dominandi, E. Michael Jones, p. 26)

Though such individuals are not the actual devil they are of like mind with him and their mesmerizing powers of persuasion come from him, thus they seemingly possess a limitless supply of demonic energy, especially when engaged in imposing their will over the wills of others.  Since they desire power for the sake of power, their overriding passion is to utterly control and dominate the minds and wills of others which they poison by manipulating their perceptions.

In "Leftism as Psychopathy," John Ray, M.A., Ph.D., begins by pointing out that moral imbecility is a primary characteristic of psychopathy before briefly outlining some of its other defining features:

"(the psychopath) is unmoved by brutality (except to enjoy perpetrating it); he has no moral or ethical anchors or standards; he is deeply (but discreetly) in love with himself (narcissism) so secretly despises others and thinks they are fit only to be dominated and exploited by him and those like him; he is a great manipulator who loves getting others to do his bidding by deception or otherwise; he is the master of the lie and the false pretense but sees no reason to be consistent from occasion to occasion; he will say anything to gain momentary praise or admiration; his only really strongly felt emotions seem to be hate and contempt and he is particularly enraged by those who have what he wants and will be totally unscrupulous in trying to seize what others have for himself. But above all, the psychopath does not seem to be able to tell right from wrong and, as a result, does sometimes commit or connive at murders and other heinous crimes with what seems to be a clear conscience."

"That seems to me to constitute, by and large, a fairly comprehensive description of your average Left-wing intellectual -- particularly of the many intellectuals who did (and often still do) support in various ways the old Soviet system in Russia."

Moral imbecility is the inability to recognize right from wrong independent of passions (i.e., pride, jealousy, covetousness, lust, envy) and attendant impulses and compulsions.   To the degree by which the moral sense is corrupt, so is reason.   The greater the degree of corruption the more depraved is reason, meaning that moral imbecility can easily shade into diabolism, or psychopathy.

Paul Hollander's book "Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society" recounts what morally depraved Leftist intellectuals and liberalized priests did for many decades in the Soviet era. To quote one Amazon reviewer:

"Political Pilgrims is the amazing story of how Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. The book relates how cultural and religious leaders from the West, including familiar names, visited the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other communist countries, and told the most appalling lies." (ibid, Ray)

Psychopaths seem to have minds of metal and exist in a demonically twisted, upside-down atmosphere more bizarre than Bedlam as affirmed by the Communist magazine 'Iuni Kommunist' which characterizes their inverted atmosphere as a 'devilish antiworld,'

"...which externally is completely like ours (but wherein) man must reply with evil to every success in life." (Marx and Satan, Richard Wurmbrand, p. 106)

 Then the article audaciously affirms the inverted exegesis of Satanism,

"Satan is not the foe of man. He is Life, Love, Light." (ibid)

The affirmation of Satan runs throughout the old Soviet and Nazi systems and in fact, the altar of Satan at Pergamum (Rev. 2:13) unites both.   After the altar had been excavated by German archaeologists and brought to Germany during Hitler's satanic reign, the Soviet army brought it to Moscow after the conquest of Germany.

On Jan. 27, 1948 the Svenska Dagbladet (Stockholm) reported that in 1924 the altar of Satan was used as a model for the mausoleum of the mass-murderer Lenin.   (Marx and Satan, Richard Wurmbrand, pp. 111-112)

While the demonized Hitler mentions in his poems that he goes sometimes "to the oak of Wotan to make a pact with dark forces," Kaganovitch, Stalin's brother-in-law and closest collaborator describes Stalin as no longer human:

"Even when he exhibited some emotions, they all did not seem to belong to him. They were as false as the scale on top of armor...He was not human at all..." (ibid, p. 53)

Milovan Djilas, Communist leader of Yugoslavia, perceptively describes the mesmerizing satanic energy emanating from the 'no longer human' Stalin:

"Was it not so that the demonic power and energy of Stalin consisted in this, that he made the (Communist) movement and every person in it pass to a state of confusion and stupefaction, thus creating and ensuring his reign of fear..." (ibid, p. 54)

Here Uspenski expresses the reality of ideas, which as they are of the unseen world, there are some that will forever mark and poison the spirit of man:

"There are ideas which touch the most intimate corners of our lives. Once these are touched, the marks remain forever....They will poison life." (ibid)

Today it is America that has passed into “a state of confusion and stupefaction” as it implodes under the powerfully destructive effects of widespread moral imbecility throughout the general population. Even more ominous, thousands of psychopaths exist at the highest most influential levels of American society.  Among prominent ones, John Ray lists Leftist intellectuals throughout academia, Bill Clinton, John Kerry and Obama.

If evolutionary biologists are correct in their assumptions, then moral imbeciles in general and psychopaths in particular are fully caused and determined by stupid genes and evil genes. But increasing numbers of anthropologists, scientific psychiatrists, and other professionals from the counseling and medical field are jettisoning as useless genetic-materialist explanations. These researchers take very seriously the fact that something frightening, hideous and unexplainable by modern Western science is going on here in America and throughout the West. In their search for answers a "new" consensus is emerging: men have souls and demons exist:

"...we need to understand a number of different concepts in order to comprehend the worldwide phenomenon of possession and exorcism. On the psychological level, we have come to know the notion underlying all possession, namely, that the body is a shell, inhabited by a soul, and that this shell may on occasion be surrendered to an intrusive alien entity.” (How about Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World, Felicitas Goodman, 1988)

"Dr. Frank Lake in a talk on the demonic recalled the occasion when Hans Rudi Weber was giving a talk on Christ's Victory over the Demonic Powers to this large gathering of psychiatrists and theologians. It was quite amusing to see how uncomfortable the theologians were at this strange exhibition of what I think they regarded as Medievalism from a distinguished member of their own theological group. It was as if they were apologizing to the scientific psychiatrists present that a theologian had returned to the era of demons and evil possession. By contrast the psychiatrists were in fact leaning forward eagerly recognizing that the collective demonic is something with which they are continually dealing. As they said afterwards, 'Why didn't some theologian tell us about this before? We know what he's talking about, we live with it'" (But Deliver us From Evil: An Introduction to the Demonic Dimension in Pastoral Care, John Richards, London, Dartman, Longman and Todd,1974)

"In later life, Jung admitted that he was open to the ideas that all these metapsychic phenomena could be explained better by the theory of spirits ....in the long run (he said) I have to admit that the spirit hypothesis yields better results in practice than any other." (The New Age Movement and the Biblical Worldview: Conflict and Dialogue, John P. Newport, Eerdmans, 1998)

Dr. Kurt Koch (1913-1987), a noted German theologian who counseled thousands of people suffering from demonic bondage in its various forms throughout the world argues that sin cuts a person off from God.  Sin opens the door to demonic oppression and possession seen in relation to psychological distortions having the following predominant characteristics:

1. Warped, distorted character; hard egoism, uncongenial dark nature

2. Extreme passions; abnormal sexuality, violent temper, belligerence, tendencies to addiction, meanness, kleptomania

3. Compulsive thoughts of suicide and murder; anxiety states

4. Demonic possession: confusion, delusion; destructive, murderous urges; fits of mania, tendency to violence, inhabitation by demons, conscious atheism, simulated piety, blasphemous thoughts, words and acts and bigoted attitude against Christ and God. (Occult ABC, Koch, pp. 266-282)

The Beatles were completely bigoted against Jesus Christ according to Derek Taylor, their own press agent:

"They're completely anti-Christ.  I mean, I am anti-Christ as well, but they're so anti-Christ they shock me." (Derek Taylor, Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 6, 1964)

In "Hostage to the Devil: the Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans," (1992) Malachi Martin presents five cases of possession which express important elements and basic attitudes that characterize psychopathy in particular and postmodern American society in general. In the possessed person, such as Hitler and the 'no longer human' Stalin, these elements and attitudes are pushed to a very narrow and frightening extreme.

Martin summarizes these elements and attitudes in the following points:

1. Moral imbecility: All sense suddenly seems like nonsense; nothing is ever right

2. Hopelessness confirmed as the only hope

3. Death, cruelty and contempt are normal

4. Moral relativism and/or postmodernism: the depraved insistence that there is no essential difference between good and evil; all 'truth' and 'moral' values are subject to one's personal preference

5. Empiricism: The supernatural and miraculous must be resolved in 'natural' or rational and empirically verifiable scientific explanations

6. Naturalism: There can be no relevance for the modern person in anything that cannot be rationally understood and no 'truth' important beyond what is this-worldly or natural.

7. Androgyny: There are multiple and ever-expanding 'genders' and expressions of 'love'

8. A fatal confusion between spirit (mind, will) and psyche (soul). Of this Martin said, "If everything (of) spirit can be made to seem a product merely of human psyche...then love can be made to seem only a chemical interaction, and love's paradigm is killed."

9. Confusion: One basic note of possession is confusion of the things of God with untruth, sex with gender, truth with lie, good with evil, supernatural with natural. Confusion is a prime weapon of evil said Martin.

In "Three Characteristics of the Diabolical, and how they are Manifest in the Modern World," Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington provides three more elements and attitudes characteristic of the demonic:

1. Love of Nudity - This is clearly manifest at several levels. First there is the widespread tendency of immodest dress...“fashions” (that) reveal more than is reasonable and generally have, as their intent to draw attention to aspects of the body that are private and reserved for sexual union in marriage. Too many in our culture see little problem parading about in various stages of undress, wearing clothing that are more intended to disclose and call attention to, than to conceal the private areas of the body. This love of disclosure and titillation is surely an aspect of the Evil One’s love of nudity, and he has surely spread his obsession to many in the modern West.

2. Pornography, though nothing new in this fallen world, has surely reached epidemic proportions via the Internet. Any psychotherapist, counselor or priest will tell you that addiction to pornography is a huge problem among people today. Pornographic sites on the Internet outpace all others tenfold. Multimillion Americans are viewing enormous amounts of pornography and the “industry” is growing exponentially. What was once hidden away in adult bookstores is now one click away on the Internet. And the thought that browsing habits are easily discoverable matters little to the addicts of this latest form of slavery. Many are on a steep slope downward into ever more deviant forms of porn. Many end up at illegal sites before they even know what has happened to them, and the FBI is knocking on their door. Satan’s love of nudity has possessed many!

3. The overall sexualization of culture also ties in to Satan’s love of nudity. We sexualize women to sell products. We even sexualize children. Our sitcoms chatter endlessly about sex in a very teenage and immature sort of way. We are, collectively, goofy and immature about sex, and our culture giggles like horny teenagers obsessed with something we don’t really understand. Yes, Satan loves nudity, and everything that goes with it.

In agreement with Koch and Malachi Martin that confusion is a prime weapon of evil, Msgr. Charles Pope adds:

"And then of course there is the utter confusion that celebrates homosexual activity. What Scripture calls gravely sinful, disordered, and contrary to nature (= παρὰ φύσιν – para physin – Rom 1:26) many in our culture now openly celebrate. And those afflicted as such, openly identify themselves with what tempts them. Rather than lament the difficulty and trial of such affliction and offer love, support and truth that they, may live celibately, (as all the unmarried are called to do), our sex saturated culture, blinded and darkened by its own wild lust, affirms and encourages them to indulge what can only bring further harm to them, and others, for it is of the darkness and contrary to nature. They have exchanged the truth of God for a lie… Romans 1:25”   (blog.adw.org, Apr. 8, 2013)

In case four, "Uncle Ponto and the Mushroom Souper" Martin provides us with an example of the hard egoism that is overtaking millions of Americans--- trendy liberalized Christian and secular alike--- without their realizing it and without those around them taking cognizance of it.  While we have been cast into confusion and paralyzed into a stupefied and fearful silence by the counter-intuitive, idiotic proclamations of the so-called scientifically enlightened community of Godless leftist psychopaths and their morally insane liberal lapdogs, an extreme individualism,

"...which exceeds by far the bounds of what used to be known as selfishness and egotism....has produced in thousands of people an aberrant and idiosyncratic behavior which is truly destructive." (p. 25)

These are the conditions of the upside-down, aberrant society in which we now live. From the highest, most powerful office of our land to our universities, liberalized seminaries and churches, Hollywood, 'news' media and mean streets these are the spiritually convoluted, pathologically sick conditions of the false reality in which we and our loved ones must now live, and to a far greater degree than most of us could have imagined fifteen or so years ago said Martin,

"...a favorable climate for the occurrence of demonic Possession has developed as the normal condition of our lives." (p. xi)

Twenty-one years have passed since Malachi Martin warned America of the demonic energy overspreading our society. Dr. Carl Raschke, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver and America's leading authority on America's spreading subcultures of darkness concurs with Martin's grave concerns.

In "Painted Black," he connects the pieces of a terrifying puzzle to reveal the chilling facts and cases behind an invisible wave of evil sweeping our nation. He points out that the hard egoism, decadence, pornography, drugs, heavy metal rock, mass murders, criminality, and 'new religions'  in American culture have certain social and spiritual ties that bind them together, revealing that they are part of a similar spiritual genus manifesting itself in a will to do evil.

However, the demonic does not always manifest itself in a will to do evil:

"Many of today's young Satanists (are characterized) by a metaphysics of exhaustion and despair.  A culture of despair becomes ever easier pickings for the...child pornographers (and the) professional (satanic) terrorists themselves.  Satanism has already yielded a climate of fear in middle-class quarters where fear had never flourished before." (p. 406)

Tragically, our arrogant, spiritually blind Western science does the work of the devil by explaining Satanism away by reducing it to a manageable,

"….adolescent disturbance.  Such a posture hinges on the most incredible delusion that the symbol of the Devil does not at all mean what the symbol of the Devil has always meant." (Painted Black, p. 404)

Without realizing it, Americans are psychologically manipulated, deluded and disarmed by influential moral imbeciles, whose minds being in accord with the devil’s mind,

"....exploit good people by persuading them that it is wrong to call evil by its name." (Persuasive Wickedness & What We Must Say About It, James Hitchcock)

One of the real horrors of the fabricated alternative reality imposed on us is its positive declaration of a satanically twisted moral ethic which we commonly think of as political correctness with its two overriding absolutes, 'tolerance' and 'inclusion.'  Thus today the perverse claim of 'politically correct' moral imbeciles  and psychopaths to the moral high ground from where they audaciously point accusing fingers at the living triune God, Biblical ethics, pro-lifers, founding principles and traditions and the Americans who hold fast to them.

The Devil’s Greatest Achievement

Speaking of his demonic bondage Little Richard confessed,

"I was directed and commanded by another power. The power of darkness... that a lot of people don’t believe exists. The power of the Devil.  Satan." (The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White, 1984, p. 206)

Ultimately, we wrestle not against weak, sinful men, be they ever so morally insane and diabolical, but against unseen power of a far more formidable order. (Ephesians 6:12)

In this light, one of the devil's greatest achievements in our age has been in how skillfully he has interwoven, enmeshed and divided us---one against the other--- in a vast and complex web, a subtly fabricated alternative reality where biological science and evolutionary thinking  have convinced the proudest---the most enlightened forward-thinkers---that all that exists is matter in motion, which means that the living God, immutable truth, moral absolutes, Original Sin, heaven, the devil and hell are absurd beliefs held by only the most backward, uneducated rubes.

@Linda Kimball 2013

The Human Condition: Basically Good or Inherently Sinful?

Are "Mormons morphing Boy Scouts into 'Girl Scouts'?" asked Stephen Stone, president of Renew America.  Stone reports that the influential Mormon church is bowing to pressure from 'gay' activists and like-minded supporters who demand admittance of 'gays' into the Boy Scouts.

A central premise of both 'gay' activists and their supporters is that 'gayness' is genetically caused the same as skin color, thus 'gays' have little choice but to behave as they do because they are 'born that way.'

Many people do not buy this argument.  Nor does Stone,

"... no one is inherently gay, even if they behave that way. If they adopt homosexual practices, they do so by choice, willful yielding to inordinate self-centeredness and desire for easy gratification — not victims of innate "gender confusion." (Stephen Stone, Renew America, May 16, 2013)

At stake here are three fundamental issues. First is evil. Why does it exist? Second is the human condition, is it fallen or essentially good? Third is the moral agency of man. Is man able to choose or not choose to engage in sodomy, bestiality, pederasty, lesbianism, and pedophilia as well as hate, kill, lie, deceive, cheat, steal, rape, seduce and pervert children or is he a psychochemical machine or evolved monkey helpless to resist genetically caused instinct and stimuli?

Merely to answer any of the three questions is to demonstrate moral agency (free will) and voice of conscience.    The truth is that man can in fact choose to lie or not lie, and the genocidal murderer Joseph Stalin amply demonstrated his own free will and demonically occluded conscience when he not only ordered the liquidation of millions of people but pointed out that whoever controls the mind of man can be the engineer of his soul, in other words, play at being God.

The Biblical view of man is the antithesis of the world's view which believes that men are basically good and evil is something external to man.  Guns for example are evil, while the human who pulls its trigger is somehow not really responsible unless he is a bona fide NRA member. 

What we believe at the level of man's nature is not just a matter of how we feel or what our opinion may be, for men are either fallen, thus inherently sinful, or not fallen and basically good.  The Biblical view of man is the antithesis of the other view. Either the first position is true or the antithesis is---they cannot both be true.

President Ronald Reagan was a Christian, thus he believed that man is fallen, that mankind is created good but because he is also fallen he contains within himself the seeds of corruption and evil. However, because mankind is endowed with free will, he has the ability to say “no” to bad impulses.  As this is true, then man's character, whether noble or ignoble, is determined by,  

“... a thousand other choices made earlier in seemingly unimportant moments. It has been determined by all the ‘little’ choices of years past - by all those times when the voice of conscience was at war with the voice of temptation, [which was] whispering the lie that ‘it really doesn’t matter.’ It has been determined by all the day-to-day decisions made when life seemed easy and crises seemed far away - the decision that, piece by piece, bit by bit, developed habits of discipline or of laziness; habits of self-sacrifice or self- indulgence; habits of duty and honor and integrity - or dishonor and shame.” (Ronald Reagan)

By extension of Christian reasoning, man must be held personally responsible for the bad choices he makes.  Thus from the architects of the Benghazi scandal to practicing sodomites, thieves, liars, pedophiles, pederasts and murderers---all are responsible for the wrongs they have committed and society has a duty and obligation to punish them.

But if the Christian view is wrong, then the living God does not exist and man does not contain within himself the seeds of evil, nor does he have to account to the living God for his actions here in this world.  If this is so then why not, as Donald Kaul suggests, repeal the Second Amendment and declare the National Rifle Association,

 ".... a terrorist organization and make membership illegal.... (I would also raze the organization's headquarters, clear the rubble and salt the earth, but that's optional.) Make ownership of unlicensed assault rifles a felony. If some people refused to give up their guns, that "prying the guns from their cold, dead hands" thing works for me."(Des Moines Register publishes gun-ban column advocating deadly violence against NRA, GOP leaders, Tim Graham, foxnews.com, Jan. 2, 2013)

As Dostoevsky said, if God does not exist then all things are possible, so why not stir up hate and murderous intent against anyone you hate, envy, and desire to see destroyed?   Why not seduce and sodomize young men in the military, in our schools and in the Boy Scouts?  

Why not overhaul straight America by way of a carefully orchestrated campaign to psychologically manipulate Americans into accepting 'gay' behaviors as "just another thing, with a shrug of their shoulders," for then "your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won."  (After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90's, Marshall Kirk & Hunter Madsen  http://www.amazon.com/After-Ball-America-Conquer-Hatred/dp/0452264987 )

If you can get away with it, then why not do what you want?

"There's nothing to fear but fear itself. So why not go ahead? What's to stop you?"  Go ahead, "make my day." whispers the devil in sadistic anticipation.

@Linda Kimball

Idolatry and Human Sacrifice

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness" Romans 1:18

God has revealed Himself and His truth with clarity.  Even apart from the explicit revelations of the Bible beginning with the Genesis account of creation, God has made sufficiently clear some of the principle elements of spiritual truth to all people through creation and conscience (Romans 1:19-20, 2:14-16) so as to leave the entire human race without excuse.(Roman's 1:20) But from the beginning, many have refused to profit by the light they have, and love the darkness rather than the light. All who do not live up to the spiritual truth they possess, who choose to do worse than they know, hold the truth in unrighteousness. They resist and obstruct the truth, rather than let it have free scope.

In the beginning wickedness did not exist said Church Father Athanasius.  It was men who later on began to contrive it and to elaborate it to their own hurt and the hurt of others.

The truth as to evil said Athanasius,

"....is that it originates, and resides, in the perverted choice of the darkened soul" which, "materialized by forgetting God" and engrossed in lower things, "makes them into gods," and thereby "descends into a hopeless depth of delusion and superstition," whereby "they ceased to think that anything existed beyond what is seen, or that anything was good save things temporal and bodily; so turning away and forgetting that she was in the image of the good God, she no longer... sees God the Word after whose likeness she is made; but having departed from herself, imagines and feigns what is not (and then) advancing further in evil, they came to celebrate as gods the elements and the principles of which bodies are composed...." (Against the Heathen, New Advent)

With their understanding sundered from God they fell lower in their ideas and imaginations and "gave the honor due to God first to the heaven and the sun and moon and the stars, thinking them to be not only gods, but also the causes of the other gods lower than themselves."  Advancing still further in evil, "they came to celebrate as gods the elements and the principles of which bodies are composed..."  And then, creeping in the slime like land-snails, the most impious of mankind, "set up as gods men, and the forms of men, some still living, others even after their death (and they even) transferred the divine and supernatural name of God at last even to stones and stocks, and creeping things both of land and water, and irrational wild beasts, awarding to them every divine honor..." 

But going even further in their audacity these foolish men mixed "up the rational with the irrational, and combining things unlike in nature, they worship the result as gods, such as the dog-headed and snake-headed and ass-headed gods among the Egyptians, and the ram-headed Ammon among the Libyans." 

Still others, straining impiety to the utmost, "have deified the motive of the invention of these things and of their own wickedness, namely, pleasure and lust, and worship them, such as their Eros, and the Aphrodite at Paphos. While some of them, as if vying with them in depravation, have ventured to erect into gods their rulers or even their sons, either out of honor for their princes, or from fear of their tyranny, such as the Cretan Zeus.. and the Arcadian Hermes; and among the Indians Dionysus, among the Egyptians Isis and Osiris and Horus, and in our own time Antinous, favourite of Hadrian, Emperor of the Romans whom, although men know he was a mere man (and) full of licentiousness, yet they worship for fear of him that enjoined it. For Hadrian... ordered (Antinous) to be worshipped; being indeed himself in love with the youth even after his death, but for all that offering... a proof (of the) idolatry... of the lust of them that imagined it." 

 "According as the wisdom of God testifies beforehand when it says, 'The devising of idols was the beginning of fornication. Wisdom 14:12 .” (Against the Heathen, Athanasius, New Advent)

The Decalogue shows that the beginning of idolatry (preference for self over God) is pride, since a proud man makes an idol out of himself, thereby assuming he possesses honor and rights.  This is why idolatry leads to contempt for truth, law, wisdom, norms, authority, rules and other people in combination with any or all of the following existing within a climate of treachery, deceit and violence: lying, gluttony, greed, cheating, promiscuity, sodomy, pederasty, pedophilia, adultery, theft, and the dehumanization of other people resulting in slavery, population control schemes, abortion, brutality and murder.  

The Carthaginians for instance, worshipped Saturn, the Roman name for Cronus, the lord of the titans in Greek mythology.  The Carthaginians, Greeks and Romans had given the honor due God to Saturn, the second largest planet to which they attributed their own self-serving motives. The Syro-Palestinian archeologists Lawrence Stager and Samuel Wolff suggest that:

"Among the social elite of Punic Carthage the institution of child sacrifice may have assisted in the consolidation and maintenance of family wealth. One hardly needed several children parceling up the patrimony into smaller and smaller pieces . . . for the artisans and commoners of Carthage, ritual infanticide could provide a hedge against poverty. For all these participants in this aspect of the cult, then, child sacrifice provided special favors from the gods."  (Stager, L.E. and Wolff, S.R., op. cit., pp. 50,51 from Abortion and the Ancient Practice of Child Sacrifice, Andrew White, MD, 1/5/2012, Associates for Biblical Research)

Dr. White reports that in 1921 the largest cemetery of sacrificed infants in the ancient Near East was discovered at Carthage.  Hundreds of burial urns filled with the cremated bones of infants, mostly newborns but even some children up to age six years old, as well as animals, have been uncovered at Carthage.  All of the sacrificial victims had been burned to death on the altars of idolatrous men and women.

The actual rite of child sacrifice at Carthage has been graphically described by Diodorus Siculus:

"There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire." (ibid, Dr. White)

Plutarch, a first and second century A.D. Greek author, adds to the description that:

"...the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people." (ibid)

The earliest reference to child sacrifice in the Bible is found in Leviticus where the practice is forbidden by Moses in connection with Molech, "the detestable god of the Ammonites" (I Kings 11:7):

"Do not give any of your children to be passed through (the fire) to Molech for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the Lord." (Lev. 18:21; 20:1-5)

Dr. White reveals that the Hebrew word Molech is the same Semitic root as the Punic word mulk which was found inscribed on several burial monuments at Carthage giving linguistic evidence for the continuity between the practice of child sacrifice in Canaan and at Carthage:

"But whereas at Carthage the word refers to the sacrificial offerings including human sacrifice, in Leviticus it refers to the god who demands child sacrifice. The "passing through" refers to sacrificing by burning in a fire. For this "passing through to Molech" (same Hebrew words in Leviticus and Jeremiah) took place later in Israel's history in the region of the high places of Ba'al in the Valley of Ben Hinnom in Jeremiah 32:35."

This murderous scene was described by the Lord through the mouth of Jeremiah in earlier chapters:

"For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned sacrifices in it to gods that neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah ever knew and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built me the high places of Ba'al to burn their sons in the fire as offerings to Ba'al -something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind. So beware, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when people will no longer call this place Topheth  or the Valley of ben Hinnom, but the Valley of slaughter. (Jeremiah 19:4-6; 7:31-32)" (ibid, Dr. White)

 Moshe Weinfeld, an Old Testament scholar, connects cultic prostitution with child sacrifice in Isaiah and Ezekiel saying,

"The children born of cultic prostitution associated with Molech were presumably delivered to the idolatrous priests, even as the offspring of a regular marriage may have been handed over to Molech." (Dr. White)

Many of the children offered to Molech were conceived illegitimately either by way of adulterous affairs or prostitution, so it seems probable that sacrificing babies to Molech was a convenient way to dispose of the consequences.
 
By New Testament times idolatry took on a broader meaning.  Commenting on the New Testament authors' understanding of idolatry, Herbert Schlossberg notes that,

 "a man can place anyone or anything at the top of his pyramid of values, and that is ultimately what he serves. The ultimacy of that service profoundly affects the way he lives." (Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, p. 6)

And so Church Father Tertullian sees no difference between the idolatrous Carthaginian practice of child sacrifice and the equally idolatrous Roman practice of infanticide:

"...there is no difference as to baby killing whether you do it as a sacred rite or just because you choose to do it."

 No matter how it is rationalized it is still murder, and for followers of Christ,

"murder is once for all forbidden; so even the child in the womb, while yet the mother's blood is still being drawn on to form the human being, it is not lawful to destroy. To forbid birth is only quicker murder. It makes no difference whether one take away the life once born or destroy it as it comes to birth. He is a man, who is to be a man, the fruit is always present in the seed." (Tertullian, Apologeticus IX.- 6, 8)

In Pauline theology idolatry is recognized as any worshipping or serving the creature (i.e., 'self,' nature, cosmos, elements, matter, chemicals, genetic material, or mystical concepts such as natural selection, and evolution) rather than the Creator as this is equivalent to exchanging the truth of God for a lie (Rom. 1:23,25):

"Placing anything above the Creator and His truth is idolatry, for in this idolatry the creature's erroneous value judgments are substituted for the Creator's correct ones. Sadly, people know the truth but suppress it , Rom. 1:18." (Dr. White)

In 1977 British journalist William Rees-Mogg saw that the West had lost its faith, and like a fish out of water or a drowning man was,

"...desperately thrashing around for lack of oxygen.  Since the time of Christ there has been no period in which there has been the same feeling of...spiritual impoverishment."  (from Idols for Destruction, Schlossberg,p. 2)

Thirty-six years later, but for a remnant, Christendom is dead and America's idolatrous, nihilistic post-Christian culture and narcissistic postmodern church are quickly following suit.   While there are as yet many churches, pastors, evangelists, distinguished Christian laypeople and missionaries here in America and around the world proclaiming Christ crucified for the sins of all men and fulfilling their vocations with humility and integrity, the culturally-relevant church of "what's happening now," the contemporary Church consisting of trendy, disaffected Roman and Eastern Orthodox Catholics and 'new' Protestant evangelicals practices a spirituality that is Christian in name only, a spirituality that is trivial, irreverent, self-affirming, fun-loving, irrelevant, and permissive to the point of practicing abortion:

"..the practice of abortion by Christians is spiritual prostitution to an idol, defiles God's sanctuary and profanes His holy name. God alone is the Author of life and it is not the creature's prerogative to question the Creator's wisdom in bringing to life a fellow human being at conception. Whenever men disregard their Creator's wise judgment by destroying His innocent creation, they are serving another god. They are, in fact, spiritually prostituting themselves to the idolatrous self whom they believe is wiser in its value judgments." (Andrew White)       

Consequently, our land is being filled with the blood of the innocent, spilled not on the altars of Cronos, Molech and Saturn but in charnel houses run by executioners like Kermit Gosnell.

We are an idolatrous people who hold the truth in unrighteousness, and unless we repent and are cleansed by his merciful forgiveness, the Lord will set His face against this nation. This is what the Lord says:

"Look I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions." (Jeremiah 18:11)

@Linda Kimball      

Whatever became of Truth and Sin?

Our age is an age when the very idea of transcendent truth is being attacked and scorned, even within seminaries and the church where clergy who ought to revere truth most highly instead boast of thinking outside the box, of not being restricted by rules, and in the spirit of postmodern contemporary church leader Brian McLaren of having,

 "....captured, stuffed, and mounted truth on the wall." (The Truth War, John MacArthur, p. x)

In 1973, secular psychologist Karl Menninger took aim at the attack on truth when he pointed out in a book entitled, Whatever Became of Sin? the fact that American churches were in the process of suppressing the reality of guilt in accord with the concept of a divine standard of right and wrong.  

Menninger's definition of sin was distinctly Biblical and thus entailed the idea of willful rebellion against the transcendent truth and moral laws of God, and it was this unique concept of sin that was disappearing from the American consciousness and by extension, from public discourse.

Forty years later, increasing numbers of people within the Church either wittingly or unwittingly accept Robert Sculler's postmodern arguments in "Self-Esteem: The New Reformation."  Today's church said Schuller, can no longer afford to think in a God-centered fashion but must put humans and their needs first.  It was appropriate for Calvin and Luther to think theocentrically but now,

"the scales must tip the other way" towards a "human needs approach."  In fact, "classical theology has erred in its insistence that theology be 'God-centered,' not 'man-centered."  In this context, the new definition of sin is, "any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem...And what is 'hell'?  It is the loss of pride that naturally follows separation from God---the ultimate and unfailing source of our soul's sense of self-respect...A person is in hell when he has lost his self-esteem."  (Schuller, from "Christless Christianity, Michael Horton, p. 33)

Osteen reflects this broader assumption among contemporary evangelicals.  No longer do we fall short of God's glory (Rom. 3:23) as "new" sin now means falling short of self-esteem.   So we are not sinners saved by Christ's objective work for us but by our subjective personal relationship with Jesus through missional works that we perform.  Being saved is as simple as making a decision to have a personal relationship with Jesus. 

Yet given the lack of any serious account of the human predicament before a holy God said Horton, 

"....it is unclear what this personal relationship might accomplish."  Nor is it obvious "how or why an average American today would even care to have a personal relationship with a Jewish rabbi who lived in the Middle East two thousand years ago."   (ibid, p. 73)

Besides the fact that Scripture never refers to the gospel as having a personal relationship with Jesus nor defines faith as a decision to ask Jesus to come into our heart, this concept of salvation fails to realize that everyone has a personal relationship with God already:

"either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified coheir with Christ and adopted child of the Father." (Horton, p. 74)

For America's postmodern Church, salvation is no longer a matter of divine rescue from judgment that is coming on a sinful world. Today the Cross merely sanctifies narcissism (self-esteem) and Paul's admonition to Timothy, "But understand this...in the last days...people will be lovers of self..." is a statement of hate that must not be preached lest it "hurt a lot of beautiful people," said Schuller.   

For forty years both Christian and secular have been told how special and unique they are, that they should not submit to rules, authority, processes or other restrictions and above all, trust your feelings to guide you.  Relying upon absolute principles and immutable truth places unrealistic limitations on you and damages your self-esteem.  So esteem 'self,' have lots of fun, actualize your dreams, embrace change and reject tradition, realize that God helps those who esteem and help themselves, and revel in the moment.    

In this light it comes as no surprise that to increasing millions of Americans Jesus Christ serves as a mouthpiece through which both narcissistic clergy and Christian masses self-righteously affirm 'self' and the great things that 'self' thinks and does. 

Today's Church is not interested in truth but in feeling good about self.  George Barna agrees. Based on numerous studies he concludes,

"....if we even believe in a supernatural deity (he) exists for the pleasure of humankind.  He resides in the heavenly realm solely for our utility and benefit.  Although we are too clever to voice it, we live by the notion that true power is accessed not by looking upward but by turning inward." (ibid, p. 31)

From 2001 to 2005 University of North Carolina sociologist Christian Smith investigated teen spirituality in contemporary America.  From his extensive research he concluded that the dominant form of spirituality among teens is "moralistic, therapeutic desism" in which God is restricted to the inner sphere's of one's private world. 

Smith defines moralistic, therapeutic deism in the following five points:

1. God created the world
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when needed to resolve a problem
5. Good people go to heaven when they die 
(ibid, Christless Christianity, pp. 40-41)

While there are as yet many churches, pastors, evangelists, distinguished Christian laypeople and missionaries here in America and around the world proclaiming Christ crucified for the sins of all men and fulfilling their vocations with humility and integrity, Michael Horton sees that the postmodern Church is well on its way to falling into what he calls Christless Christianity.

Already we have arrived at a point where the message of the contemporary Church has simply become trivial, irreverent, sentimental, self-affirming, and irrelevant. 

We do not realize the extent of our schizophrenia said Horton.  While we annually decry the commercialization of Christmas we enthusiastically embrace the consumer-product-sales-approach formulated by 'church growth' experts like Hybels, Warren, Thom Rainier and other transformational gurus.  While calling our capitulation to self-affirming narcissism "mission and relevance" we charge secularists,

"..with emptying public discourse of beliefs and values that transcend our instant gratification." And as we lament "the growing secularization of American society...we ensure that the generations currently under our care will know even less than their parents..."  (pp. 22-23)

After citing a series of reports, Barna concluded that the spirituality of America is Christian in name only:

"We desire experience more than knowledge.  We prefer choices to absolutes.  We embrace preferences rather than truths....Faith must come on our terms or we reject it. We have enthroned ourselves as the final arbiters of righteousness, the ultimate rulers of our own experiences and destiny.  We are the Pharisees of the new millennium." (Horton, p. 31)

Unless something changes warned Barna,

"It will be every man for himself, with no second thoughts or regrets about the personal or societal implications of this incredibly selfish, nihilistic, narcissistic way of life..." (ibid)

A spirit of pride and rebellion flows throughout America's contemporary Church.  The sin of pride begets the vice known as hatred of truth.   In "Against the Heathen," early Church Father Athanasius reveals that pride and a haughty spirit preceded the fall of pre-flood men into idolatry (love of self), superstition (hatred of truth) and violence. Violence always accompanies man's fall into worship of self, selfish ambition, status, pleasures and acquisition of things.

Violence is the effect of a human will not in submission to the will of God. It is the use of force, which may be psychological (i.e., shunning, ignoring, belittling, slandering), physical or both, in order to dominate, control, outrage or transgress the dignity and integrity of a righteous man.

In his book, "The Truth War," John MacArthur writes that one of the distinguishing qualities of every true believer is love for the truth:

"...a genuine love for the truth is built into saving faith...In Jesus' words, they have known the truth, and the truth has set them free. John 8:32" (p. xi)

The reverse is true of those who will not enter the kingdom of God. The primary characteristic of those who perish (2 Thessalonians 2:10) is non-submission to truth:

"...where there is true faith in the Gospel of Christ, and in Christ the substance of it, there is salvation; the reason therefore of these men's perishing is not the decree of God, nor (for) want of the means of grace, (or) the revelation of the Gospel, but their rejection and contempt of it." (Clarke's Commentary on the Bible)

The haughty spirit rejects personal sin and holds truth in contempt and is therefore aligned with the will of Satan, the father of lies, narcissism, nihilism, and violence (John 8:44). Thus it is to haughty spirits that Jesus said,

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ Matthew 7:21

@Linda Kimball

The Postmodern 'New Church:' a trendy mausoleum for the children of unbelief

In his book, "The Truth War," John MacArthur writes that all 'true' truth, as opposed to man's rationalizations and feelings passed off as truth, begins with what is true about the living, supernatural God.  Truth is what His will approves, what His holiness entails, what His mind knows.  Truth then is determined and properly explained by the being of God, thus by extension,

"A biblical perspective of truth also necessarily entails the recognition that ultimate truth is an objective reality.  Truth exists outside of us and remains the same regardless of how we may perceive it.  Truth by definition is as fixed and constant as God is immutable." (MacArthur, p. xx)

God has revealed Himself and His truth with clarity.  Even apart from the explicit revelations of the Bible beginning with the Genesis account of creation, God has made sufficiently clear some of the principle elements of spiritual truth to all people through creation and conscience (Romans 1:19-20, 2:14-16) so as to leave the entire human race without excuse.(Roman's 1:20)

This being the case, all those who are condemned in the final judgment said MacArthur,

"...will be held responsible for rejecting whatever truth was available to them....a just and righteous God holds unbelievers and believers alike responsible for obedience to His revelation is irrefutable proof that He has made the truth sufficiently clear for us.  To claim that the Bible is not sufficiently clear is to assault God's own wisdom and integrity." (pp. xxi-xxii)

Yet today tens of thousands of people who call themselves Christians claim to follow Jesus but reject His truth, claiming instead that personal feelings and experience are more important then revealed truth.  These Christians are adherents of today's contemporary or postmodern 'new way of doing church.' 

in 'Postmodern Youth Ministry,' Tony Jones, a leading contemporary and/or emergent pastor says:

"Stop looking for some objective truth that is available when we delve into the text of the Bible." (Emerging Church/New Spirituality: Part 3 Postmodernism, ImmanuelCommunity.org.uk)

In agreement, Brian McLaren says:

"Arguments that pit absolutism versus relativism, and objectivism versus subjectivism, prove meaningless or absurd to Postmodern people." (ibid)

Postmodernism is a reaction against the 'modern' age of Enlightenment which began around the beginning of the 18th century and lasted until about 50 years ago.  The Enlightenment was a philosophical, intellectual and cultural revolution that elevated the mind of man--his reason, logic, and criticism over the mind of God together with superiority of empirical scientific thought  over doctrine and creeds, which were dismissed as blind faith and superstition.

Modernism represented the pursuit of absolutism (i.e. Darwin's absolute law of natural selection), the empirical method as the only reliable way to determine truth, and rationalism (mind of man over God).

The Modern mind dismissed the idea of the supernatural, miracles, and even man's soul and sought scientific and rationalistic explanations for everything.  According to John MacArthur:

"Those presuppositions gave birth to Darwinism, which in turn spawned a string of humanistic ideas and worldviews.  Most prominent among them were several atheistic, rationalistic, Utopian philosophies - including Marxism, fascism, socialism, communism and theological liberalism." (p. 9)

Overconfident rationalism, human conceit, arrogance, men usurping the throne of God---all of this characterized the Modern era which finally issued in organized hatred of God---a universal totalitarian atheism that unleashed catastrophic destruction and rivers of human blood during the 20th century.

As noted previously, postmodernism is a reaction against the modernist mindset characterized by arrogance, inflexibility, omniscient reason, the need to be right at any cost coupled with the burning desire to be in control which brought the world to the brink of disaster.  Postmodernism therefore reflects a loss of confidence in the power of human reason and scientific inquiry to understand the nature of true reality.  

With the rise of postmodernism our view of man, of what we can and cannot know, of reality and the world changed, said business management guru Peter Drucker in the introduction to his 1957 book ‘Landmarks of Tomorrow.’ At some unmarked point during the last twenty years we have moved out of the Modern Age,

" ....and into a new, as yet nameless era.  Our view of the world changed…. There is a new spiritual centre to human existence." (ibid, ImmanuelCommunity.org.uk)

With Pilate, postmodern thinkers derisively ask, "What is truth?" (John 18:37-38) and claim therefore that we can't be certain about anything, including God's self-revelation through the scriptures.  In his book, "A Heretic's Guide to Eternity," Spencer Burke, expresses this uncertainty:

"I’m not sure I believe in God exclusively as a person any more." (ibid)

Postmodern thinker Peter Drucker played a key role in the development of the contemporary 'new way of doing church' formulated by Bill Hybels, Rick Warren and countless other contempory 'new church' gurus and slavishly cloned by thousands upon thousands of infatuated pastors.   In "Peter Drucker's Mega-Church Legacy" Herescope (Discernment Research Group) reports:

"One perhaps unexpected example of Druckerism is the modern mega-church movement. He suggested to evangelical pastors that they create a more customer-friendly environment (hold back on the overt religious symbolism and provide plenty of facilities). Bill Hybels, the pastor of the 17,000-strong Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, has a quotation from Mr Drucker hanging outside his office: 'What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?'" ("Trusting the teacher in the grey-flannel suit" The Economist, Nov 17th 2005, Herescope, November 18, 2005)

The Drucker-style contemporary church model de-emphasizes immutable truth, moral absolutes, Original Sin, hell, confession, repentance, vertical spiritual growth, apologetics, and traditional hymns and proposes instead a horizontal approach tailored for unbelievers and their felt-needs rather than for the spiritually-mature.   This way of thinking is in keeping with the belief of the postmodern Church that theology must be constructed from human experience, needs, desires, and passions and not from divine revelation.  For postmodern pastors there is no supernatural authority that determines truth, moral absolutes, the shape of theological vision, or doctrine.  They hold in contempt statements of faith, appeals to transcendent Authority, definition, rules and doctrinal boundaries and reject any concept of certain, objective, and universal knowledge as well as all who profess them.  These people, the most spiritually mature, are most generally disparaged, marginalized and ridiculed as 'traditionalists.'

In this light it makes sense that Hybels solution was to poll unbelievers and tailor Sunday morning service to their expressed needs. What unbelievers want is to feel unthreatened as well as entertained in a creative, humorous, culturally relevant atmosphere,

" ... a place designed for [the unbeliever]. We have put a lot of time and thought into what non-churched people want from a Sunday morning service. And we have concluded that they basically want four things: (1) anonymity; (2) truth presented at an introductory level; (3) time to 'make a decision'; and (4) excellence in programming, creativity, humor, contemporary [worship], relevancy, etc." ( Hybels' 1990 message: "Who We Are at Willow Creek.")

Thousands of postmodern people attend Willow Creek's "seeker sensitive services" where they can dress down and dine on earthly bread without guilt or shame. There is no room for heavenly bread in Willow Creek-- no uncomfortable sermons against sin, nothing about judgment, and no call for repentance.

Instead 'worshippers' are lavishly entertained by a 20-piece "Christian" rock band with laser lights and an elaborate sound system, energizing pop-rock singers, multi-media displays, plays, stories and thin gruel punctuated by jokes geared to those who are investigating Christianity. To further entice the seeker-sensitive crowd there are darts, basketball, and coloring for the youngsters, a massive food court and a fully-out-fitted exercise gym. (Bill Hybels, Biblical Discernment Ministries)

As is the case with all postmodern 'new church' formulas, the Hybels model weaves the reigning secular system of the world with the sacred, the dark with light, thereby compromising the Revealed Word and rejecting the proposition that truth "by definition is as fixed and constant as God is immutable." (MacArthur, p. xx)

As its focus is on supplying unbelievers with earthly bread, there is no heavenly bread, hence no possibility of renewing the spirit of the mind (Ephesians 4:23-24):

"The spirit is the human spirit, having its seat in and directing the mind...The renewal takes place, not in the mind, but in the spirit of it. "The change is not in mind psychologically, either in its essence or in its operation; and neither is it in the mind as if it were a superficial change of opinion either on points of doctrine or practice: but it is in the spirit of the mind; in that which gives mind both its bent and its materials of thought. It is not simply in the spirit as if it lay there in dim and mystic quietude; but it is in the spirit of the mind; in the power which, when changed itself, radically alters the entire sphere and business of the inner mechanism" (Vincent's Word Studies).

The spirit of the mind that has not been renewed walks according,

"...to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of this air, of the spirit that now worketh on the children of unbelief." Ephesians 2:2

In the final analysis, the postmodern church is not a place of life but of death.  It is a trendy, culturally relevant mausoleum for the children of unbelief.

@Linda Kimball