The age of delusion
By Tom Quiner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLNhIbroC4s
You know the story: “The emperor’s new clothes.”
Let us revisit this wonderful tale by 19th century Danish writer, Hans Christian Anderson with this excerpt:
“As the emperor proceeded down the street, everyone exclaimed, “Goodness, the emperor’s new clothes are incredibly beautiful! The finest he’s ever worn! What a perfect fit!” No one wanted to admit that the emperor was naked, for that would make the person seem stupid or unfit for his or her job.
At last a small child said, “But he doesn’t have anything on!”
“Goodness!” said the child’s father. Then he turned to his neighbor. “Just listen to what this innocent child said,” he whispered, repeating the child’s comment.
One person whispered to another, and then another and another. Soon everyone was shouting, “But he doesn’t have anything on!”
The emperor was not only deluded into believing he was clothed when he was, in fact, naked, he insisted that others collude in his delusion or face the consequences.
We face the same situation today in dealing with modern liberalism.
We are pressured to believe that human life is disposable.
We are pressured to collude with modern elites to believe that marriage is all about lifestyle; that the fruit of one man and one woman is irrelevant to marriage.
We are pressured to collude with the delusion that gender and even race is something you choose and that objective truth on these subjects is silly.
If you disagree, the deluded will try to take away your job, your business, and freedom.
Some 3000 years ago, a wise man talked about people who present a lie as the truth. His wisdom, as presented in the Book of Proverbs, remains timeless in this Age of Delusion:
Honest people hate lies, but the words of wicked people are shameful and disgraceful. (13:5)
The child in all of us knows that the baby in the womb is a person.
The child in all of us knows that it takes a mommy and a daddy to make the child, and that that is why people really get married.
The child in all of us knows that if we’re born a boy or a girl, it’s because God made us that way.
Liberals are going to hurt a lot of good people in this age of delusion. But at the end of the day, the truth stands … no matter what the elite tell us or threaten us with.
At the end of the day, the child’s cry, “But he doesn’t have anything on!” still stands.
Excellent analogy Tom! God wishes for us to embrace our inner child- your comparison makes a strong case for that.
Thanks, Tiffinay.
So clear, Tom. Nice work! What prevents everyone from understanding this?
Liberalism.
Tom, I remember watching an episode years ago on EWTN, featuring Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons, about homosexual sin and anger, both separate topics and not associating each word with the other. The doctor spoke about the term “iniquity” and it’s characteristics. He talked about a type of evil sin, one which is a perversion and which, when done over and over again, can instill the person with a deep soul infliction. The Church talks about iniquity as not specifically just a sin but the perverse character of the sin. Dr. Fitzgibbons, who has worked with the Vatican on family matters, was very clear that those who practice iniquity can get into a state of demonic possession/obsession and that there is a need for intervention to remove the effect of the iniquity, to restore sanity.
I have looked at Liberals over the years; at first I myself was confused about their confusion, lol, and I watched as most of the participants became enraged and deranged when certain topics were approached for discussion. It is as if they become dispossessed of sanity. Michael Savage (who, like all of us, has his faults, lol) has some great secular definitions of liberalism. He calls it a mental disorder (as do certain Catholic theologians). St. Paul, in his letters to the Romans, specifically Romans 1:18-32, speaks on the topic of men being turned over to their depravities when certain conditions exist. “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.” I think you will find that the Apostle to the Gentiles and Michael are very similar in their understanding.
The practice of Liberalism (an iniquitous sin) characterized by narcissism, pretension and immaturity, perverts the mind because God is so offended that He turns the iniquitous sinner over to confusion (to put it mildly). He removes His graces from the offenders and they become adrift.
Saint Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians (4:13-15), effectively tells us that we all must attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but by speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head.
The addled mind pays no heed to our God, but to the false god of his own making, pride.
Really well-said.
What a lesson to be learned if people will just stand up for truth.
Amen! Thanks for writing.
Ah, that is the flashpoint, isn’t it. Liberals believe that Truth is flexible and gooey, when in fact it timeless and unchanging.
I think one of the dangers with appealing to the notion of a “child in all of us” is that it assumes an underlining state of innocence, purity, or even sanctity inherent in all of us. That if only every individual turned inward we would be able to intuit a verifiable truth in all human beings. The danger is that even the idea of children as innocents, as emblems of an ideal state once commonly held by all people, is one that can be traced through, deconstructed, or historicized through Western ideas (for instance the English Romantic tradition and its ideas about children). If we accept this construction about the notion of children, contextualized in its given time and culture, then we open the floodgates for a larger reexamination into the complexity of how truth can be constructed. The additional danger this has on this particular strand of conservative theory (entwined as it is with the literalism of Biblical infrastructure) is that it becomes increasingly susceptible to attack not merely by leftist critique, but by the more mainstream, more academic, or more moderate forms of argument. It is my belief (and only my belief) that if your form of conservatism is to thrive it must undergo a ‘loosening of the belt’, so to speak. If Truth and God are to make a substantial attack against liberalism and the left they should, at least, begin to rely less on static, intuitional ideas about Gods and try to incorporate new, innovative, critical, and, most importantly, flexible approaches into conservative religion and politics.
Once contraception started being accepted by various Christian groups after 1930, it broke the intrinsic connection between the purpose of the human sexual act. As you and I know, it is BOTH unifying and procreational. Being “open to life” does not mean we expect the physical union of two octogenarians to result in a new life. But when we close the door to it with contraceptives at any age, we are thumbing our nose to God and the logical conclusion of this position is to demean human life to a disposable commodity.