On The Acceptance Of Evil...

http://billrandles.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/on-the-acceptance-of-evil-2/ | 02-29-14 | Bill Randles

[pastorbillrandles]

…Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.(2 Thessalonians 2:6-10)

Evil thrives on lies. The fall of man came about by the acceptance of a lie. Satan himself is the father of lies. Lying and evil are indivisible.

We are currently living in a time of the mass acceptance of evil. Daily the case is being successfully made for things such as homosexual marriage, abortion, pedophilia, the justification of Islamic terror. People are unwittingly being conditioned to accept the previously unacceptable through the various forms of mass media.

It is surreal to see otherwise reasonable people advocate what only a short while ago would have been unthinkable to them. How have we gotten to this point? Evil has been successfully marketed to mainstream America.

I remember the day after the 9-11 attacks, going to the post office to buy stamps and being handed a packet of Islamic”Eid” stamps recently released by the post office. I politely asked for anything but Islamic stamps, only to receive this retort from the normally friendly postman, ”Christianity has done just as much terror as any other religion, we don’t have any room to complain!”.

We regularly receive the same hostility from otherwise normal people, whenever the subject of homosexual marriage comes up, as it has frequently lately. People who wouldn’t have dreamed of advocating any position endorsing so-called “gay rights” are now angry if such rights are ever so much as called into question. What’s going on here?

I believe what we are seeing here is the onset of something called “the strong delusion” warned about in the scripture above and other places in scripture. It follows upon and is a consequence of another phenomenon called “the apostasy”, that is the falling away.

Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;( 2 Thess 2:1-3)

It is not only christians who will fall away in many cases, but the Judeo Christian world is undergoing a departure from its christian worldview, and is in a vigorous process of repudiating the religious bedrock of its own culture, as well as the institutions that sprang out of it. This is predicted in the second Psalm;

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?2The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.(Psalm 2:1-3)

The prophesied “great apostasy” includes the departure of much of the Christian church from the faith once and for all delivered. But it goes far beyond it. The “Kings of the earth and their rulers” , that is the leaders, educators, clergy and opinion and culture shapers share a consensus that the influence of christianity is bondage that must be cast off!

For example, by means of a constant stream of media propaganda and sophisticated marketing, homosexuality has been sold as a viable option to mainstream America. People are embracing the lie that has been sold to them. Without thought they are parroting the propaganda. This is true even of many confessing Christians!

A particularly effective aspect of the marketing is the dishonest but deliberate confusion of the (valid) Civil Rights movement of the 1960′s, with ”homosexual rights”.

This has been effective because as authors like Shelby Steele point out , a constant drumbeat of “white guilt” heaped upon Americans by the media and academia for the legacy of slavery and racism, has made us vulnerable to any accusations of that nature, whether true or false. The last thing anyone wants to be called in America is a racist.

By the time homosexual activists deliberately hijacked the civil rights movement, claiming to be the new victims of discrimination, too many of us had already been put on the defensive to raise an objection. Propagandistic programs in schools such as “Days of silence” , in which solidarity is created between gay and straight students by means of keeping silence, have been largely effective.

Seizing upon dubious martyrs , such as Matthew Shepherd, who was killed in a drug deal gone bad, has also played into our American sense of sympathy for the victims. This is the logic behind “Anti-bullying” campaigns in our schools.

When Homosexual activists in the Media realized that most Americans didn’t actually know a homosexual, they wrote them into the scripts of sitcoms and talk shows, to “humanize” the perversion and break down resistance to it. Now through trash such as “Friends”, “Will and Grace” and “Ellen”, everyone knows a homosexual, and they like them!

Perhaps one of the greatest factors that has brainwashed our population is “Political correctness” which is a powerful factor in both the suppression of truth and in the promotion of the big lies. Succumbing to political correctness actually causes on to hold to a cognitive dissonance, we cannot speak the truth we know.

Everybody knows the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, but they can’t say it, they must praise the style of his “clothes” to stay on good terms with the emperor.

Everybody knows that Islam is evil, violent and anti american to the core, but few can say it. Everybody knows homosexuality is twisted, and unclean but few dare say it. Honesty has been strangled to death in the political warfare of our times.

Instead we are strongly pressured to corrupt ourselves, and to literally sell our own souls in the service of the lie. We are in danger of becoming reprobate, no longer able to distinguish good from evil! Worse than that we are in danger of actually being biased against good and in favor of evil.

Theodore Dalrymple is insightful here on how this pressure has succeeded in getting us to accept evil…

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. ~Theodore Dalrymple

This is as good an insight as any I have heard yet, as to how many are losing their soul, accommodating and even championing evil. They have been conditioned by PC to first be silent in the presence of obvious lies, eventually to ”assent to the lies”, and in many cases have been forced to repeat them over and over again.

Homosexuality is just one of the previously unthinkable “big Lies” which we have received. There are many related abominations commonly accepted, which fly in the face of all reason, logic and experience .

People are being set up for the ultimate soul-destroying lie Paul warned about in the above quote. The lie is the old lie, that man can be “as gods”, defining for ourselves truth, morality,virtue and meaning with no reference to the God of the Bible.

The rot of our society is almost complete, the only hope for anyone is to take seriously the once well-known promise of Jesus

“If you continue in my words you will be my disciples indeed, and you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free!”(John 8:32).

[Lake Living]

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;

And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. II Tim. 4:3 - 5

I think we’ve reached that time.

[Ohioan]

For a primarily secular approach to the same points that you discuss from a theological perspective, that is the recurring of the same patterns that have led to Man's Fall & corruption throughout history:

Variations On Demonic Theme

My point is not to question yours; but to show that whether one approaches this as have you, or from a purely historic basis, you endlessly encounter the same evil methodology.

William Flax

[alloysteel]

In any choice between the two very bad alternatives presented, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

The strategy then is to expand the universe of alternatives. And sometimes, there are WAY more than the two choices offered.

[inpajamas]

Satan is the father of lies. If Satan had a son, I know who he would look like.

[EternalHope]

Very well said.

Thanks for posting!

[Noumenon]

At an even more fundamental level, the acceptance of lies and the evil that enables eventually costs us our humanity. Solzhenitsyn understood this very well:

"The state system which exists in our country is terrible not because it is undemocratic, authoritarian, based only on physical constraint - a man can live in such conditions without harm to his spiritual essence."

"Our present system is unique in world history, because above and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. "

"To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render unto him what is God's - that is a sacrifice we dare not make!"

"The most important part of our freedom, inner freedom, is always subject to our will. If we surrender it to corruption, we do not deserve to be called human."

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, from the essay "As Breathing and Consciousness Return" published in From Under the Rubble - October, 1973

[pastorbillrandles]

Thank You- (Are you William Flax)? I appreciate the articles

[pastorbillrandles]

Wow, what a quote! Exactly what I was trying to say- thank you I am a big fan of Solzhenitsyn!

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

I think people confuse the ongoing collapse and conquest of Western Civilization with the end of the world. Other civilizations have gone through the same collapse and conquest and the world did not end. For example, the Romans once had pure morals and slowly lapsed into total decadence and eventually they were wiped out by the Germans. Read their historian Livy for a description of the decay and Gibbon for the eradication of Rome.

[Biggirl]

.....Yet it was the Christian faith that saved Rome.

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

People lived in Rome after the sack, But in the spiritual sense they were no longer Romans. Compare the conduct of the Roman in 450 A.D. with the conduct of the Roman after Cannae circa 216 B.C. to see what I mean. I remember reading that by say 500 A.D. the population of Rome was about 50,000. In say 100 A.D. its population was estimated to be about 1,000,000. After the sack Rome died spiritually and physically.

[aimhigh]

I think the greatest delusion of this age is the theory of evolution. It violates the foundation of Genesis.

[Ohioan]

Yes, I am he.

William Flax

[Faith65]

Great read- thank you.

[pastorbillrandles]

thanks for your work MR Flax