There are only two kinds of spirituality. Gospel Truth/Pagan Lies explains five major points of pagan thinking (All Is One and One Is All; All Humanity Is One; All Religions Are One; One Problem: Amnesia; One Answer: Look Within), and their Christian answers (God, the Creator; One in Christ Alone; Only One Faith; One Problem: Death through Sin; One Answer: Look to Him).
Fake News
Both Liberals and Conservatives cry “Fake News!” about much of the information we receive, whether delivered to us in magazines, podcasts, tweets or TV and radio broadcasts. Some fake news is from hearsay, some from poor reviewing and fact-checking, and some from deliberate deceit. Unfortunately, it seems that journalists are often happy to play fast and loose with uncorroborated “sources.” Many news operations have become mere slander factories with no standards, no editorial control, no integrity, and no conscience when proven wrong about what they declared to be true. The most egregious fault is to publish misinformation knowingly, in hopes that it will stick in our memories and affect the way we think.
Fake Politics
This “news” problem is deeply related to a far more serious problem, that of political expediency.[1] On August 31, 2019 the increasingly progressive Democratic National Committee passed a resolution praising the values of the “religiously unaffiliated.” Secular, non-sectarian members are hailed as “the largest religious group within the Democratic Party.”[2] These paragons of secular morality will “ensure that policy is driven by science and evidence, not sectarian beliefs” (religion).
Fake Morality
Beyond the politically-motivated fabricating of fake news and fake facts is “fake morality.” Expressions of contemporary culture are seeded with unethical thinking that relativizes morality until it no longer exists. It goes like this: What’s right for you may not be right for me because there are no ultimate objective moral standards—and that’s my moral position, but I sure won’t swear to it on any Bible!
This “fake morality” is foisted on contemporary life by the need to justify the “normalcy” of a whole series of immoral choices, natural to our sinful nature, of course, but culturally enhanced in the US by the Sixties emancipation from most of the moral principles of the Christian worldview.
The Morality of Homosexuality
The most disruptive moral issue in the modern world is the normalization of homosexuality, often based on the false affirmation or assumption that homosexuals are born that way. A number of attempts in the past sought genetic evidence for homosexual tendencies but had to admit failure. The openly gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay, having claimed to find the “gay gene,” concluded: “This is not a fault of nature…this is not your fault.” He was later forced to admit: “I did not prove that homosexuality is genetic or find a genetic cause for being gay.”[3] Now a pivotal new study[4] of four hundred thousand people shows that no one gene determines a person’s sexual orientation. Five genetic markers were associated with same-sex behavior but together accounted for only 1% of same-sex tendencies. One of the professors who worked on the study declared: “It is effectively impossible to predict an individual’s sexual behavior from their genome.” How many homosexuals have been goaded into sexual experimentation by this false “scientific” justification of their lifestyle, which is now part of our cultural “heritage”?
There are only two kinds of spirituality. Gospel Truth/Pagan Lies explains five major points of pagan thinking (All Is One and One Is All; All Humanity Is One; All Religions Are One; One Problem: Amnesia; One Answer: Look Within), and their Christian answers (God, the Creator; One in Christ Alone; Only One Faith; One Problem: Death through Sin; One Answer: Look to Him).
Good for Morals: The Drag Queen Story Hour
Who could have predicted just a few years ago that public librarians would willingly organize a “Drag Queen Story Hour”?[5] These horrifying events are taking place in public libraries all over the country. Males dressed as sexually-suggestive females dance and read gay-oriented books to young children—all in a place considered one of the safest for our young children, namely the children’s library. My grown children now tease my wife for her “go-to” answer to boredom: “Just walk down to the library!” No parent can now send his or her child to the library (or to school?) without close supervision! The rationale of the Drag Queen Story Hour is to teach the little children how to be nice to people. They are told that it’s okay to be whatever you are. Those who tell you who you ought to be are haters. The next generation needs to be trained in gender fluidity and in cultivating a positive attitude toward a queer worldview.
But with this fake morality, our culture is visibly collapsing—a failed experiment in liberalism. The cultural insanity of such things as the Drag Queen Story Hour (and there are many other such outlandish attacks on biblical morality) has turned our moral universe upside down. How can such events be tolerated, much less celebrated? (One cannot help but think of Romans 1: 32—“they not only do such things but give approval to those who practice them.”) The new (fake) morality is described boldly by American Buddhist scholar Sarah Jacoby, professor in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University: “Remembering what it means to be a self is not some kind of [created] given… personal identity is culturally and linguistically constructed.”[6] With no objective morals or behavioral norms, we end up with a perfectly “normal” Drag Queen Story Hour for kids.
A Human Being Today: 24 Hours Earlier, a Piece of Garbage
Serious US presidential contenders publicly make the case for infanticide in the name of women’s rights. Texas presidential hopeful, Beto O’Rourke was asked by a man in his audience about third-trimester abortions:“My question is this: I was born September 8th, 1989 and I want to know if you think on September 7th, 1989, my life had no value.” O’Rourke answered: “…of course I’m glad that you’re here. But this is a decision that neither you, nor I, nor the United States government should be making. That’s a decision for the woman to make.”[7] In other words, it is perfectly ethical to kill a baby the day before its birth. What state of moral relativism with no pangs of conscience must a person attain in order to plunge a knife into the head of a perfectly formed, helpless little baby? It is the same kind of immoral reasoning and ethical cover-up that obliges the Health Professions Council of South Africa to inform graduating doctor, Jacque de Vos, 32, that he had committed a professional fault for telling a woman that an abortion kills a human being. De Vos, only a week away from finishing his medical degree, lost his job and was banned from practicing medicine ever again. This young doctor lost his career for telling the truth rather than the culturally-imposed lie.[8] Of course, behind that lie is the one that convinces a young woman that she should feel free to have sex with whomever she wishes, while convincing a young man that he doesn’t need to take responsibility for impregnating a woman—they can just decide together to kill the baby and move on with life.
These examples show that modern progressivism can only succeed by rejecting objective notions of truth and morality. How can our morally-compromised culture survive (in spite of its much vaunted sophistication and technology) if morality is defined by any group that seizes power, by whatever means, and then imposes its subjective view of what is “right” on everyone else? There’s one word for all that: Totalitarianism.
We cannot avoid totalitarianism, but we can choose the kind we want. The thousands of civic crosses that dot our land raise a finger of witness against human totalitarianism and should never be pulled down. But there is another kind of totalitarianism: the total power of the personal Creator God of Scripture. He is all-powerful and the final authority over all the earth. He has revealed his moral norms and terms to sinful human beings and we all have an ingrained sense of those norms. This is a terrifying truth, yet God is also a God who is personal, knowable and who can be trusted. He has carried the weight of our immorality in the body of his perfect Son, to bear our sins and restore us to his truth and to a love for his law. May our lawmakers, our librarians, our ob-gyn doctors, our teachers and our library-going children be protected from their own fake moral laws of immorality and enveloped instead in the law of the Lord our God, whose infinite love is extended to all who believe.
[2]https://secular.org/2019/08/democratic-party-embraces-nonreligious-voters-at-annual-summer-meeting/
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discover_Magazine
[4]https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6456/eaat7693
[6]https://research.northwestern.edu/news/treasure-seeker
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. Used with permission.
[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]
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