Bible Study Series
In our last section, we looked at how genuine religions get turned into idolatry. We spoke of hijacking as an apt analogy for the transition between genuine religion and idolatry. We looked to the clenched fist of Baal and determined that the purpose of these false “lords” was practical: political, social, cultural, and economic control over their subjects. Idol-pushers replace the real God with an idol, redefine the god, gradually remove its meaning, and if possible, make themselves into the gods. In this section we will discuss the methods they use to remove God (to replace Him with an idol). Christ says “You will know [these ravenous wolves in sheep’s clothing] by their fruits (Mat. 7:16).” These “fruits” include deception, hijacking, manufactured consensus, demoralization, and degradation.
Deception
“I write this to you about those who would deceive you (1 Jn. 2:26).” We must always remember that part of being deceived is not realizing you are being deceived! “Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore, we know that it is the last hour (1 John 2:18).” As we know from a quick look in Strong’s concordance, “anti” does not always mean “opposite” or “against.” It can also mean “instead of.” For the idol-pushing antichrist, nudging a believer off the narrow course by 30 degrees is much easier than turning them 180 degrees! But it is just as effective and accomplishes the same goal. Placing an empty effigy “in the stead of” true religion is the story of idolatry’s life, as we saw in the previous section.
Hijacking
Let us first consider the act of hijacking, an apt allegory of how the first century church was taken over; but also, a description of how most churches in our day have devolved. How many times have we met people who want nothing to do with organized Christianity, based on the awful reputations that popular churches have? A casual observer sees televised greed, predatory priests, multimillion-dollar temples, fabricated fables, and generalized ignorance and hypocrisy. These valid concerns cause many moral, intelligent people to “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” As Bible students, we know that these corruptions don’t stem from God or the Bible. They arise from the fact that opportunists often use religion as a way to get money and control and hijack the truth.
Analogous to a plane being hijacked, most people at these churches see these as not part of the corruption; they are not even aware they have been hijacked. They are either concerned with the business of their trip or are being entertained by their gadgets. Only if they are a stewardess or a pilot or a keen observer do they become aware that their vessel is being led away by sinister hands. The pilot knows about the hijackers but doesn’t want to blow the whistle and risk catastrophe. Or perhaps he is a coward. Maybe he hopes he can “fix the problem from the inside.” Either way, the churches have been hijacked in our age. In another chapter, we will demonstrate that these idol-pusher antichrists of Babylon have also hijacked the schools, the government, the banks, medicine, the military, media, entertainment, and even human souls! Even more terrifying, we will find that the hijackers we must deal with are often invisible!
Consensus Is King
“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” So says astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who still thinks that debunked theories like interspecies evolution are facts. Never have Paul’s words echoed truer than today: “The wisdom of this world is folly…he catches the wise in their craftiness (1 Cor. 3:19).” We are living in a new Dark Ages, where the Medieval Church has been replaced by an arrogant, fully hijacked “Church of Scientism” that only recognizes as ‘real’ what it can already explain! Rupert Sheldrake explains in his book The Science Delusion: “The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in.” In his banned TED talk video, he summarizes the self-retarding era we live in: “Science says ‘Give me one free miracle (the Big Bang) and the I will explain away all the others.” In real science, they welcome skepticism. In real science there are always more questions than answers. But we live in an age when science and academia have been hijacked by corporations and “the foundations.” These “charitable trusts” pay media to tell us that “the science is settled” and “all the scientists agree” about whatever “Emperor’s New Clothes” lie they need us to believe. Dissenters like Sheldrake are ignored, banned, blackballed and censored…even if their views represent the majority! Meanwhile, atheism “evangelists” like Bill Nye the Science Guy are given the media spotlight so they can push the idea that we came from nothing and are going nowhere.
The flip side of manufactured consensus is derision. If they cannot win an argument with “science says,” then they ridicule you and turn everything into a big joke. In his book for left-wing activists (which is dedicated to Lucifer), Saul Alinsky advises: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon…Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it (Rules for Radicals).” Fundamentalist Christians (who believe that the Bible is literal) are a favorite target for the “intellectuals” of our day. Late night comedians, animated shows, trendy politicians, and Hollywood movie magicians will ridicule anyone who questions the social warrior “flavor of the day” and refuses to go along with their godless agenda. Dare to be different (i.e. traditional or common-sense minded) and you will soon be outed as a bigot, racist, homophobe and hater. But never apologize for your separateness! Be like Daniel and his fellows who refused to give in to peer pressure. The king of Babylon soon found out that these weird “non-conformist fundamentalists” were “…in every matter of understanding…ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in his kingdom (Dan. 1:20)!” There is no contest between the wisdom of God and the sophistry of modern man. Their “latest” scientific “discoveries” don’t disprove, but rather validate the Bible on a seemingly daily basis! Unfortunately, this does not phase them and only makes them double down and become enraged.
Demoralization
Like derision, demoralization is another common method of idol-pushers. It can be summed up as “scum down, dumb down, numb down, and bum down.” Demoralization is the first step that the communists use to take down a nation (according to KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov). Removing a nations’ morality goes a long way toward collapsing it. To “scum” down the youth means intentionally lowering a society’s moral standards. Moral relativism misguided “tolerance” and general nihilism combine with “alternative lifestyles” and broken families. The goal of this “ideological subversion” is to get young people to hate themselves by filling their heads with messages of despair and self-loathing. This is done through news, film, sit-coms, and especially school. In his 1984 interview (available on YouTube) Bezmenov says that the demoralization phase takes 15-20 years because that is one school generation. The school and television “programming” teaches children to hate their parents, their country, their religion and even themselves! In his book Dumbing Us Down, schoolteacher John Taylor Gatto criticizes the public schools for its conformist social engineering: “What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up. The truth is that schools do not really teach anything except how to obey orders…Although teachers do care and do work extremely hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience. This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.”
Numbing us down means creating a mindless, distracted “safe space” for people so that they don’t have to care about anything. Staring at screens, walking like zombies, “They are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm; for them, the nether gloom has been reserved (2 Peter 2:17).” They are eager to escape into the latest installment of fantasy being conjured up by Hollywood Babylon. As long as they have the latest season of shows and sports, they won’t have to think. Adult virtual reality video games are getting so entertaining that you barely want to pause for meals. And you sure don’t want to work! The ancient poet Juvenal, in his work Satire X witnessed this very same combination as a powerful contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire: “everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”
The “bread” mentioned by Juvenal was the “dole” or food stamps of Roman times. What is more demoralizing than ending our self-sufficiency? Dependency on the state (bumming down) is key to the success of idol-pushers because it is one step closer to slavery. The corrupt Emperors knew that if the people were given “bread and circuses” they would be passive and hence not interfere with their politicians’ schemes. Examples abound today of many modern countries who have traded their God-given rights for “free” stuff.
Degradation
It is also worth mentioning the cruelest method of these ravenous wolves, degradation. We cannot go to a natural science museum without coming face to face with our ape “ancestors.” How demeaning to the “likeness” of God! We are barraged with media telling us that robots are smarter than us and will be better workers and drivers. Why degrade us? Simply put, to degrade another human being is to degrade God, because we are “made in His image (Gen. 1:26).” To the idol-pusher, cruelty for its own sake is part of being a god. Orwell’s villain O’Brien sums up this painful truth in his prescient novel 1984: “How does one man assert his power over another? …By making him suffer… Obedience is not enough. Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing (1984 pg. 266).” The insights from 1984 help us to explain the horrific aspects of idolatry like torture, self-flagellation, abasement, child-sacrifice, pornographic gore, pedophilia, sexual abuse, human trafficking and satanism. These attributes of “religion” are older than the Bible and have not gone away. As “normal” people, it is sometimes hard for us to “peer into the abyss” and see that evil is real. Serious. The Bible, however, has no problem cutting straight to the “heart” of the matter: “the imagination of a man’s heart is evil from his youth (Gen 8:21).” And the Bible recognizes that some groups of people, like the Amalekites, are so evil that the only solution is complete annihilation. “I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven (Exo. 17:14).” Recall that Saul thought it was ok to negotiate with Agag king of the Amalekites. But “Samuel hewed Agag to pieces before the LORD” (1 Sam. 15:33). David also shows no mercy to those called satan (literally in Psa. 109:6,20, 29) saying “may their memory be cut off from the earth (v. 15)!”
The “tearing of minds” Orwell describes in 1984 is a daily occurrence nowadays. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a war being waged against women, a war against men, against children, against the family unit, and against marriage. Whether the topic is “toxic masculinity,” “family planning,” “transphobia,” or the paradoxical trappings of “Women’s Liberation” and “gender equality,” propagandists seem to be systematically attacking every natural law of common sense written in God’s word. These are the talking heads on television “who make their way into households and capture weak women (1 Tim. 3:6).” They “promise them freedom while they themselves are slaves to corruption (2 Pet. 2:19).”
This modern world may seem bizarre and chaotic, but it was all planned this way. Go back to 1932 and read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and you will realize that he blew the whistle on the plans to end love, marriage, natural childbirth, and families. There are even plans to masculinize women and make them promiscuous, as well as mandatory psychiatric drugs and the sexualization of preschoolers. The book, a warning against a kind of scientific dictatorship called technocracy, is like a finished puzzle that we can compare to our present world in which pieces are rapidly coming together (as puzzles often do at the end). As we will see in upcoming sections, the idol-pushing technocrats are smashing every natural institution and mixing everyone into one gray primordial ooze in order to “make mud for bricks and tar for mortar” (Gen. 11:3) so that they can build a new Tower of Babel where there is one people, one world, one language, one truth and one religion.