The Counterfeit gods of Bad Ideas

We live in an era of unlimited access to information. Some of that is a gift, but it has also given us a direct, unbroken view into horror and evil. The view and depth of the evil is unfathomable and horrifyingly cavernous. Cities flattened on a screen by on military armament. The curtain pulled back on the Epstein Files and the perpetrators mostly being unfettered and left to freedom. A steady feed of stories you once thought belonged only to your nightmares. Some shut it off and pretend it isn't there. Others stare into the abyss until it stares back, then become scarred and cynical or worse, they become like the evil they abhor.

But it has always been this way. Way back, 2000 years before Epstein, there was the miscarriage of justice in Christ’s crucifixion. The people knew Christ was innocent and Barrabas was guilty but still chose to set the murderer free and murder Christ instead. Paradoxical. There are the perversions and horror of Caligula, who spent seven years on Capri engaged in sadism and cruelty. Down through the centuries the evil and horrors have continued unabated.

No matter the era, there have been people so evil that rationality and logic refuse to explain them. They have always existed. As far as I can tell, there are three roads to evil. These often follow each other in order and they do so for a reason.

1. They worshiping the wrong things. They abandon God, opening themselves to false ones.

2. They succumb to warped or evil ideology or evil gods or ideas

3. They become so bitter that they resent life itself, thereby drift into nihilism.

First, worshiping the wrong things. The moment you put anything before the idea of God or try to supplant God’s proper position in the world, something or someone inferior will take His place. Man’s minds are idol making factories. If we push God out, something else will set itself up in our thinking making itself a god in our lives. There are some types of people who set wealth, lust, power, and status as his highest values and will do anything to obtain them.

Because God has been removed as the basis for morality, morality evaporates. The people who reject God not only have a proclivity to pull of moral restraints, they will gladly lie, cheat, and steal for more sex, control, fame, and money.

Once these lesser gods are attained, the godless immoral believe that God’s morality or true morality no longer applies to him. They stand above the petty Biblical guardrails. If they won’t abide by God’s law then man’s laws fair even worse. They posit that laws or rules are for the weak. At the same time these types of godless people count themselves among the strong who dictate them. They make themselves gods in the vacuum they created by rejecting the true God and the morality His character embodies. They again, accept themselves and their own thinking as a lesser God thinking it is superior.

Everyone else becomes an instrument to their ends. A tool, not a person. Dehumanization and callous action towards other people become commonplace. In their eyes, other humans or people hold not value other than to propagate their evils.

Second, ideology supplants the knowledge of God (Romans 1:21-22). These types of people, on stepping away from a God and a religious moral worldview, fill the vacuum with ideology. Marxism, transgenderism, feminism, wokism, nihilism, progressivism, anarchism, environmentalism, nationalism, capitalism, empiricism, hedonism, scholasticism…the list is endless. God no longer works in mysterious ways because he is no longer in people’s lives by their own choice to push Him out. Instead, these atheistic godless drones hold and think they control a system that tells them exactly why things are the way they are and how they ought to be. They cast and attempt to portray themselves as educated, learned and as scientific…yet are mentally, morally and spiritually as dead as the day is long.

They view the world is the way it is because of an intelligible chain of cause and effect they created and have control over in the absence of God. They sadly only fool themselves in doing so. The communists held it to be class struggle. The Nazis, genetic determinism. The ideologue believes he is entitled to seize that chain, choosing new causes so the world is remolded in his ideology's image. We see it today in the American Left Marxists and the media that tows their line of immoral and depraved thinking. People become cogs in machines, swapped out or sacrificed in the pursuit of utopia.

Lastly, we see the end result of the first two. Resentment. Those who see themselves as helpless victims end up hating life itself. They believe life was meant to be easy and every hardship was thrust upon them unfairly. I never asked to come into this world. Life is a curse, they whine, yet they are too cowardly to end it, so their purpose becomes opposing those who are truly alive. These are the people who always play the victim. They are always demanding others give to them to assuage they misery. The unemployed malcontents that attack the productive members of society. They attach themselves like parasites spreading a moral disease and siphoning off life of those who are productive for society. The Carmelo Anthony’s and his supporters. The people violently protesting the rule of law and ICE facilities.

In essence these three roads to ruin are an instance of people making God's of ideologies. Said more plainly they are counterfeit god's (lowercase 'g') of bad ideas. Ideas that both the Bible and history have shown to be failures. In the past they've gone by different names, but the end is always the same. Their value system inverts. Good becomes evil. Their evil and their parasitic behavior becomes 'good'.

Strength is mocked. Weakness praised. Wealth becomes theft and theft becomes reclaiming what was rightfully theirs. Helplessness is learned and acceptable for the trade-off which is free things from the government or the rich who want to own them. Never once realizing they are in-fact, accepting a form of slavery for trinkets and baubles. These three roads have always existed and always will. You cannot stop others from walking the road away from God and dragging many with them into the pit…but it is your responsibility not to walk that road. If you chose to do so, you are not only complicit, you can only blame yourself for the misfortune and evil that befalls or plagues you.