what these have in common

Today I was listening to an Australian Christian on Youtube talk about "spiritual Babylon," and he made an interesting observation. He asked: what do Critical Race Theory, climate politics, the pride movement, abortion, euthanasia, and transgenderism all have in common? They all share an important unifying element: all of them compete with God's authority as Creator, by putting man and man's power in the place of God.

Examples: God is the only one who has the right and power to say when life begins, but man seeks to create his own, self-serving definition of when life begins. God is the one to say when anyone's life will end, but some seek to take that decision for themselves or for others. God is the one who makes us male or female, but transgenderism tries to give the power over sexual identity to humans. God made us all to be of one race, but CRT tries to say we are many races and some of those races must be forced to allow other (downtrodden) races to take ascendancy. God defined marriage as one man with one woman, but humans seek control over that definition and strive to establish validity for same-sex marriages. And so on.

All of these issues are examples of man's desire to be as God, to make decisions that replace those of God, to take control of matters whose control rightly belongs in God's hands. In doing so, man pushes God aside and places himself, fallible humankind, on a secular throne of self-rule. He rebels against God and essentially seeks to worship the created (himself) rather than the Creator (Romans 1).

The speaker says that every spiritual Babylon society, including the modern one, will demonstrate tolerance toward all sorts of gods, all sorts of ideals and philosophies, and a pluralism of viewpoints; but the one idea they can't tolerate is that of a single living Creator who is ruler over all the earth and its inhabitants, a Creator who has set forth one exclusive Way to come to Him. Thus, spiritual Babylons in the NT era always display hostility toward Christians and Christianity. As well, he points out, spiritual Babylons tend to seduce Christians into the same hedonistic self-rule.

This dovetails perfectly with the book I just finished reading, "Live Not by Lies" by Rod Dreher. Dreher similarly mentions that today's western culture heartily embraces the serpent's promise, "Ye shall be as gods," and he points out that the seduction of Christianity is a well-recognized phenomenon. In fact, the latter has even been given a name in 2005 by sociologists of religion Melinda Lundquist Denton and Christian Smith; they called it, "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." It is, says Dreher, "the decadent form that Christianity (and all faiths in fact) ha[ve] taken in contemporary America. It consists of the general belief that God exists, and wants nothing more from us than to be nice and to be happy" (emphasis mine). Dreher goes on to say that in today's therapeutic culture, "the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish. This goes hand in hand with the sexual revolution, which, along with ethnic and gender identity politics, replaced the failed economic class struggle as the utopian focus of the post-1960s radical left. These cultural revolutionaries found an ally in advanced capitalism, which teaches that nothing should exist outside of the market mechanism and its sorting of value according to human desires...if true freedom is defined as freedom of choice, as opposed to the classical concept of choosing virtue, then the door is wide open to reforming religion along therapeutic lines centered around subjective experience." The author also states, "...the spirit of the therapeutic has conquered the churches... Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous."

Many of today's churches and Christians have embraced the pluralistic, broadly-accepting viewpoint of modern spiritual Babylon toward abortion, gay pride, transsexualism, social justice, and other issues. What they fail to recognize is the fact that they have been seduced into a "go along, get along" attitude that is, at its root, a secular and anti-God movement. This movement, says Dreher, is in the process of developing into a "soft totalitarianism" which will prove to be just as hostile toward God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as is the hard totalitarianism of the Communist system.

 

Yes I quite agree with this. Marriage is to relationships what mixed doubles is to tennis. There should be a different name for the mens or womans doubles events.

This tolerance sounds commendable to me. They can tolerate the idea of a single living Creator who is ruler over all the earth and its inhabitants, a Creator who has set forth one exclusive Way to come to Him. Most societies seem to tolerate people having these ideas, they just don't necessarily agree with them.

As does the Bible --"Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods” (Jn 10:34 note the small "g" god)

 

Dreher's book makes some interesting points about social justice.

He points out something I had no idea of: the term, "social justice," was coined by a Jesuit in the 19th Century. "In Catholic social teaching, 'social justice' is the idea that individuals have a responsibility to work for the common good, so that all can live up to their dignity as creatures fashioned in God's image. In the traditional view, social justice is about addressing structural barriers to fairness among groups in a given society" based on Jesus' teachings about the poor and the outcast. This, of course, hangs upon our belief in a transcendent moral order as proclaimed in Scripture. Dreher writes, "A just social order is one that makes it easier for people to be good...Any social justice campaign that implies that the God of the Bible is an enemy of man and his happiness is fraudulent and must be rejected."

Unfortunately, the secularists' meaning of social justice has more to do with the equitable distribution of goods based upon a secular view of fairness and of people groups, than with Biblical views of fairness and of godly love. While there are many varying people groups, they all are initially and broadly sorted as either "oppressors" or "oppressed." Whereas in classical Marxism those two category labels were applied to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat respectively, in secular social justice "the oppressors are generally white, male, heterosexual, and Christian. The oppressed are racial minorities, women, sexual minorities, and religious minorities. (Curiously, the poor are relatively low on the hierarchy of oppression. For example, a white Pentecostal man living on disability in a trailer park is an oppressor; a black lesbian Ivy League professor is oppressed.) Justice is not a matter of working out what is rightly due to an individual per se, but what is due to an individual as the bearer of a group identity" (emphasis added).

Even worse for Christians is the fact that they "are seen by progressives as the enemies of social justice" because they are perceived as defenders of a particular, transcendent code of sexual morality and gender categories. (An aside: is this why some Christians capitulate on these issues? Are they attempting to preserve, in the eyes of secularists, their image as social justice proponents?) Dreher quotes a Catholic philosopher named Michael Hanby as having written that "the sexual revolution is, at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body and internally to our self-understanding." To the secular SJW (social justice warrior), the God of the Bible is an enemy of man, so anyone who believes in, adheres to, or advocates adherence to the Bible is also an enemy.

Dreher cites his 2019 interview with Sir Roger Scruton, who "agreed that we are not waging a political battle but are rather engaged in a war of religion." Sir Roger elucidated that "in the emerging soft totalitarianism, any thought or behavior that can be identified as excluding members of groups favored by the Left is subject to harsh condemnation. This 'official doctrine' is not imposed from above by the regime but rather arises by left-wing consensus from below, along with severe enforcement in the form of witch-hunting and scapegoating." Scruton stated that thought crimes (such as racism, oppressed-category hatred, homophobia, Islamophobia, or transphobia) are the secularists' version of heresies which "by their very nature make accusation and guilt the same thing."

The author also cites an atheistic university mathematician named James A. Lindsay, of whom Dreher says, "Perhaps no public intellectual has thought so deeply about the fundamentally religious nature of these progressive militants...Lindsay contends that social justice fulfills the same psychological and social needs that religion once filled but no longer can. And like conventional religions, it depends on axiomatic claims that cannot be falsified but only accepted as revealed truths...[SJWs] are members of what Lindsay calls an 'ideologically motivated moral community.'" For these (warped) moral rigorists, social justice is a mission to create more equitable power relationships, and "those who resist [their brand of] social justice are practicing 'hate' and cannot be reasoned with or in any way tolerated, only conquered." The SJWs hold the power and decide what is true or false; thus "the value of truth claims depends on who is making them." Secular SJWs utilize identity politics to sort oppressed from oppressors. "Intersectionality" (a matrix of oppressed groups) links them together ecumenically. SJWs also "tightly police the spoken and written word, condemning speech that offends them as a form of violence" (emphasis added).

How does this play out for people outside of the SJW power structure in today's society? Dreher writes: "As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people--always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers--who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake." In this system, people can be presumed guilty based entirely on their words, their class, their skin color, their faith, or even their thoughts. The author draws a parallel between this and the methods employed in the Communist regime by quoting Martin Latsis, then head of Ukraine's secret police, who instructed his agents: "Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror."

 

In his novel, 1984, George Orwell concocted a world governed by a totalitarian dictatorship. Two of its tools were "Newspeak" and "Doublethink." Newspeak was the Party's word for the verbiage it imposed on society to help control the way people thought. Doublethink required the people to simultaneously hold and accept contradictory beliefs in their minds.

Orwell wrote: "It was as if some huge force were pressing down upon you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your breain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it....Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense."

It seemed at the time of the writing to be a fanciful and unlikely scenario. Yet what do we see nowadays? Dreher writes: "In our time, we do not have an all-powerful state forcing this on us. This dictatorship is far more subtle. Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called 'he.' Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result."

The Marxists in Russia brought about their totalitarian state by marching against, toppling, and replacing the government. Today's SJWs have instead marched through and infiltrated the public and private institutions of our "bourgeois" society, quietly conquered them, and used them to transform our world.

Anyone ready for a cold Budweiser?