A World of Make Believe

“Yea, they have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations.  I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear; but they did evil before mine eyes, and chose that in which I delighted not.”

(Isaiah 66:3-4)

“But they hearkened not, nor inclined their ear, but walked in the counsels and in the imagination of their evil heart, and went backward, and not forward.”

(Jeremiah 7:24)

“When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”

(Romans 1:21)

God has said that when men reject the truth, He will give them over to delusions, to the imaginations of their own heart, to lies that pretend to be true.  Sadly, as mankind moves farther into the twenty-first century, they are more and more deluded, living in imagined reality, basing their lives on premises with no basis in fact, reason, or history.  This epidemic madness is sending us running furiously towards destruction, and although this is evident, few are alerting us to the fact that men are living in a world of make-believe.  Yet most people are living there these days.  It is as if we are children inviting each other to play games of “pretend.”  Haven’t we all heard the intelligentsia, the academia, the media, and the politicians asking us to “make believe” with them?  They are saying strange things indeed.

1.       “LET’S MAKE BELIEVE THAT GOVERNMENT CAN PROVIDE EVERYBODY’S NEEDS.”

The illusion that the government can take care of us developed from utopian dreams popularized by intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  These dreams proposed that men could sustain economies based on cooperation instead of competition. The meeting of human needs could be founded on collective instead of private ownership of property.  These ideas were called “socialism” and “communism” in nineteenth-century Europe and America, and they envisioned a mutually-beneficial economy managed by an enlightened government.  Socialism and communism were tried a few times and in a few countries before the twentieth century with disastrous results.  Then in the world of the twentieth century they were applied to the politics and economics of many nations, again with disastrous results every time!  Socialism always fails because it misunderstands human nature.  The philosopher and the revolutionary may think it should work, but it never does.  Socialism doesn’t remove self-interest from the motivations of men and turn them into angels.  Attempts at some kind of socialism drenched revolutionary France in blood, enslaved the peoples of Germany and Italy, destroyed the lives of the millions trapped for so long behind the Iron Curtain, and has in the twenty-first century brought Europe to the brink of collapse.  It never created heaven on earth.  Socialism bought on the collapse of the Soviet Union!  Yet millions still believe that wealth-redistribution and state-run economies can work, even though they never have.  Socialism or communism wants to redistribute the wealth, but it can never produce wealth.  Nothing in the world has been more thoroughly proven than the inevitability of the failure of a socialist state.  The Biblical model of economics based on the personal ownership of property is the only one that has been proven useful.  However, people who refuse to submit to divine commands such as, “Thou shalt not steal,” and, “Thou shalt not covet…any thing that is thy neighbor’s,” or to believe divine promises of a future paradise, have sought to bring about an impossible heaven-on-earth by dreaming that totalitarianism can produce equality. Have all-powerful states ever made men equal or happy?  Instead of making a heaven, they have repeatedly made hell on earth.  Talk of defining human needs as human rights has called on governments to guarantee the supply of these needs by stealing from productive people and ruined the capacity of economies to meet the needs of the people.  Any time and every time the fantasy of socialism has been believed, the result has been disastrous.   It will happen here unless we wake up.

2.       “LET’S MAKE BELIEVE THAT ANY COMBINATION OF TWO PEOPLE CAN BE A MARRIAGE.”

Marriage as an institution has been an integral part of civilization for all of human history.  Its definition has remained constant and undisputed for millennia.  A man and a woman who can together produce human offspring commit themselves to each other for life by civil law in order to provide a secure situation in which to bring up their children.  This is marriage.  Human children are not like calves or kittens in that they require diligent and prolonged training to come to responsible adulthood.  They should not be produced like barnyard animals and left to themselves or in unstable situations if societies are to continue to be civilized.  Marriage provides the only logical solution to the challenge of responsible human reproduction.  The parents are bound together by a legal compact that establishes a home for their children.  Who doesn’t know that this is what a marriage is?  However those who want to change the legal definition of marriage so that people of the same sex can “marry” have lately gained support both in popular opinion and in the halls of government.  To “marry” two people who cannot physically reproduce human beings is to engage in a game of make believe.  None of these groupings are marriages by any historical or reasonable definition of that term.  They are pretend marriages. When states establish same-sex marriages, they are giving legal sanction to people who want to pretend that they are married couples.  These “couples” want to adopt other people’s children so that they can pretend that they are parents.  And we are going along with their fantasies!  Same-sex marriages are something, and something significant in current societal trends, but they cannot rationally be called marriages.  To countenance homosexual behavior in a positive way is to ignore the facts about the unhealthy characteristics of this way of life: disease, depression, suicide, infidelity, domestic violence, and a shortened life-span.   Scripture warns us against it, telling us that such behavior is “against nature” and “unseemly,” and that men and women are caught in its trap, they are will be “receiving in themselves” the “recompence of their error” (Romans 1:26-27).  The truth is that the redefining of marriage in our states will recommend and sanction a degrading and destructive way of life, serve to destroy the institution of the family, and doom generations to unhappiness, all in the name of make believe.

3.       “LET’S MAKE BELIEVE THAT A MORAL SOCIETY CAN BE MAINTAINED WITHOUT GOD.”

It is a cardinal doctrine of atheism that you don’t have to believe in God to be moral, and that societies don’t have to have to acknowledge God in order to enforce their norms and values.  An atheist will fight you on this point.  It is one of his most devoutly-held beliefs.  Yet he cannot prove it from history or even from common experience and intuitive evaluation.  The atheists, whose religion is rising in influence in this country with the weakening of Christian influence, have often accused religion of producing war and carnage.  It is true that when churches have sought and gained that power of the state, terrible things have been done.  Yet even the harm done by the union of church and state has not matched the evil that has been done by godless states.  The foremost mass murderer in history was Mao-Tse-Tung of China, who butchered at least million of his people for no good reason.  Second was Stalin of the Soviet Union.  Of course, both of these men and their regimes were atheistic.  The monster Pol Pot of Cambodia slaughtered million in his little country.  He was another atheistic tyrant, unhindered by fear of judgment and the afterlife.  Incidentally, he died of old age.  Hitler’s religion was hard to define, but any analyst would conclude that he was a practical atheist.  Killers take comfort in the belief that there is no God and no eternal judgment.  “The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.  His ways are always grievous; thy judgments are far above out of his sight…He croucheth, and humbleth himself, that the poor may fall by his strong ones.  He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it” (Psalm 10).  America’s gradual but relentless expulsion of God from public life has produced seriously unhappy results.  Choosing the years of 1962 and 1963 as a focal point in the process because of the court rulings against the acknowledgement of deity by public education, researchers find a dramatic increase in campus crime, teen pregnancy, gang violence, and youth suicide, as well as a significant drop in grades, standardized test scores, graduation rates, and general morality.  Certainly disbelief in God has had a major role in the thinking and behavior of the mass shooters who have terrorized our communities in recent years.  Sound morals are based upon belief in God and in divine revelation.  And civilization is built upon sound morality.  The founders of our country did not really regard the existence of God as the Creator and Ruler of the Universe as a religious doctrine.  In our founding documents they affirmed these facts as self-evident truths accepted by truly rational people!  And the abandonment of these truths must predict the collapse of our civilization.

Disaster can be averted.  When the people recognize the falsehood of their fantasies, they can take the steps necessary to prevent the consequences of playing “make believe.”  The first step would be to turn back to the principles that have proven true over the centuries.  We must return to God and to His precepts, and ask Him to help us rebuild our lives and our country.

DR. RICK FLANDERS, drrickflanders@gmail.com.