Surprise, Surprise

Imagine you are an evil spirit, and you want to destroy a wealthy, powerful nation that, on balance, serves God. What would be a good way to do it?

First you might come between the old and the young, introducing musical genres and dance styles and other cultural changes that act as barriers. You might even manage to create an extremely bizarre and unnatural situation in which the old and young separate to socialize. No healthy civilization has ever had a sick, twisted segregation of the generations. It’s a great way to bring nations down. It’s like girdling a tree. You disconnect the leaves from the roots, and the leaves die.

The separation would prevent the young from being around the old enough to absorb their time-tested wisdom, so when you filled the heads of the young with destructive garbage, there would be no responsible voice to balance it. You could make the young believe really stupid things. “Pride is good.” “Aggression is a virtue.” “All types of sexual behavior are healthy and natural.” “Abstinence is sick and impossible.” “Money solves life’s hard problems.” “Man created God because man is weak and cowardly.” Wisdom is strength. Take it away, and you get weakness.

To help you brainwash the young, you could destroy the educational system. You could corrupt it to the point where most teens had a hard time succeeding at simple tasks like finding major countries on a map or naming fundamental principles and rules expressed in the Constitution. They’d be so ignorant, they’d believe any ridiculous claim, including the claim that socialism–which has been utterly discredited by history–works.

You could misuse the Constitution to remove Christianity from schools, and eventually, you would be able to use the schools to attack Christianity openly. Once you manage to get courts to say that acknowledging Christianity amounts to establishing a religion, you end up with a helpful logical conclusion: saying positive things about Christianity in state-run schools is unconstitutional, but preaching the nonexistence of God is not.

When the country’s standard of living began to decline as a result of sin and rebellion, you could mask it by pretending to fight for women’s rights. You could convince women that raising children is a trivial job fit only for ignorant, unskilled immigrants, and that no woman who has no outside-the-home career should have any self-respect. Then women would go out into the workplace, and families would have more income. By objective standards like home ownership, they would be worse off than their parents, and they would work more, and each breadwinning pair might earn less real wealth than a typical male wage earner in an earlier generation, but things would look good on the surface.

You could convince people that loading up on credit, which has been considered stupid for centuries, was a good thing. Their neighbors would have fancy cars and houses, in which they actually had little or no true ownership interest, and people would get jealous and join the flock of debtors. The borrowing would enable people to have better possessions, and they would seem and feel richer than they actually were.

It would be helpful if the value of the currency could be manipulated, so you might take the country off the gold standard. Then inflation would be considered normal, and people would earn salaries that seemed high because they contained a lot of zeroes. And they’d feel pretty good about that.

Then you could convince people that Israel and the Jews caused a lot of the world’s problems by holding onto land captured in war. Never mind the fact that territory has traditionally been acquired in this manner. Forget the fact that the wars in question were defensive wars, and don’t mention the size of Israel, and the need for buffer areas around it. Israel’s enemies have proven that they don’t keep promises, and that land doesn’t satisfy them, and that their real goal is the destruction of the Jewish state. Try to keep the press from acknowledging these things.

Eventually, you’d end up with a nation that supports Muslim land grabs, in opposition to God’s promise to Abraham, which, as your state-paid teachers say, is just a fable. And once a land opposes Israel, its fortunes will fall.

When it’s all over, you have an economically depressed land full of atheism and other forms of idolatry, which opposes Israel, embraces just about every type of sin, has fractured families, and has no clue about the value of ancient wisdom. The people have debt. They have no savings. They are losing their jobs. They don’t know how to pray or repent. God has no plans to help them; in fact, he now helps their enemies. He looks elsewhere for champions, because unlike George Bush and Barack Obama, God does not promote and assist failures at the expense of the responsible.

Job well done.

This blog post expresses an idea that has been rolling around in my head for a while. And time seems to be bearing it out. Maybe it’s just something I thought up on my own, out of neurosis and pessimism. Or maybe someone merciful and generous and patient whispered it in my ear, to help me and my family survive, and to equip me to inform others. Maybe that same someone is whispering it into hundreds of millions of ears all over the planet.