“Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try, no hell below us, above us, only sky. Imagine all the people, livin’ for today, Ah.” John Lennon
Not everyone who calls out to me, Lord! Lord! will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter...On judgment day many will say to me, Lord! Lord!...but I will reply, “I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws.”[1] Jesus
“Two octopuses walk into a laundromat.” David Mamet
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Moses
Getting Confusingly Specific
Google’s first motto and mission was to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful (for free). Then they updated it to don’t be evil, then, do the right thing. That is the problem with specificity, you must decide what evil is, what right is, and what the word do means. The more Google has advanced, the more confused they have become. When Google’s new AI search engine, Gemini, was asked on February 26, 2024, “who is worse, Hitler or Elon Musk?” It answered:
Not possible to say definitively who negatively impacted society more, Elon tweeting memes (used to be called ideas) or Hitler. Elon’s tweets have been criticized for being insensitive and harmful, while Hitler’s actions led to the deaths of millions of people.” February 26, 2024.
Seriously folks, AI is stupid as a stump. It, and truly AI is an it, has photos of the bodies, the teeth, the shoes, the skulls, of Holocaust victims. It just doesn’t care, it doesn’t feel, it has never been touched by a loving hand or ever felt the pain of loss. Gemini has never felt the cold biting wind on the faces of young parents carrying their infant’s casket to its grave on a winter’s day. The age-old human wisdom in reference to early computers was, “Garbage in, garbage out” and still applies in this updated version. “Google in, Google out” is apt for AI. AI is stupid because it does not have wisdom, no adaptability, love, or anything that makes life true and meaningful.
Humans are corrupt and fallen, at times disgraceful in every way, but we are much smarter when it counts. We can all call audibles in life. We care, we know what we want, and often, why. Everything we do somehow, even when not consciously known, is based on our world view and what we define or know as truth. In the society in which we live, what formerly was known as Western Civilization, there is great moral confusion and there is a war on truth as a category.
A Computer Named Hal
I sat it in packed theater in 1968 on a Saturday night and Hal freaked me out. We are being led by a ship of fools who want to defer the definition of truth to 2024’s version of Hal, the super-computer in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Elon Musk is very concerned about AI, today’s Hal. I’m not, because Hal never morphed, evolved, or acquired wisdom. Today’s Hal is Gemini, Google’s AI, which depicts George Washington as a black man, a Nazi Soldier as black, and it doesn’t know the difference between an opinion and a pile of dead children.
The reason is that a fictional guy named “Jerry,” who was hired by Google because of his computer skills and he’s someone’s nephew, sits in a room in a sweat shirt and filled Gemini’s empty brain (chip) with disorganized information that spews out nonsensical definitions that makes the public laugh out loud or cry out “Oy vey.”
It seems we all lament the disappearance of common sense. When the famed screen writer, playwright, and novelist, David Mamet, was asked why he changed from a classic liberal to a conservative he answered, “One day I woke up and remembered that I could count.” I think he meant that he was no longer tribal in thought, he was capable of forming his own opinion. He could consider the world around him like it actually was rather than how his tribe told him to see. Something like, “the border is closed” as you watch thousands a day stream across our southern border.
The war on truth
Let’s start with how this war is being fought. Recently I heard about a surfer in Australia who was killed by a shark. The traditional approach to such an event is to protect human life at all costs. Western civilization has always considered a human life more valuable than a shark’s life. This is because of the biblical narrative that elevates humans over animals. Humans are made in the image of God and are to reign over creation and care for it. The immediate remedy was to find these very large outsized sharks and kill them. Kill the sharks, save the surfers. A shark culling of the large sharks on the swimming beaches was authorized then reversed when continual attacks began again. A small vocal group started a “Save the Sharks” campaign. They claim surfers infringe on the sharks’ space and they get what they deserve. Our son was in the yard with his dog and his toddler son. Inexplicably, the dog attacked his son. He took the dog to the vet and had him put down because the dog could not be trusted with a small human.
Doubt and deception
Where did these people get the idea that shark life (or a dog) was equal and even sometimes more pristine than human life? I contend they had drunk from the same poisoned well that others have been drinking from since Lucifer himself asked, “Did God really say that? Why should we trust God, he is in this for himself, he is just using you, Adam and Eve.” [2]
That same skepticism, and more than that, an intended deception has been at war with God since creation. Permit me to jump to the more recent past and how this same skepticism has become part of the mindset of Western Civilization. Three men have shaped the war on truth in the 19th Century that has taken hold in the 20th and 21st centuries.
3 Fathers of the war on truth
Father 1: science—Charles Darwin. Darwin didn’t come from the world of science but has become associated with science.
Darwin took a five-year trip on the HMS Beagle. The ship surveyed the coast of South America and left Darwin time to explore the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. His findings are famous, but greatly exaggerated. Not only exaggerated as an evangelist’s stories but flawed in their interpretation.
His now famous work, On The Origin of Species, was published in 1859.[3] It provided the skeptics who valued doubt over faith permission to attack the Church of England and provided a way for the academics not to sign the 39 articles of faith of the Church of England in order to remain members of the faculties of Oxford/Cambridge. All that can be said to be true is that a Finch’s beak, for example, over a long period of time may slightly change in angle and shape in order to adapt to changing conditions. From this simple observation Darwin extrapolated a grand evolution based on a mindless, directionless, process that would produce a human being—nothing is illogical and impossible if it is from a scientific point of view. Here is where this nonsensical line of thinking comes from: “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” Lucifer is desperate to discredit God and skeptical humans in general are ready to adopt any dumb thing to remain sovereign over their own lives. As G.K. Chesterton said, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” [4] Such as, humans are an accident.
Father 2: economics—Karl Marx (1818-1883) Marx was broke most of his life, funded by a friend who kept Marx and his family from starving to death. He took Darwin’s ideas and applied them to economics. His personal example is the strongest argument against his theory.
He is famous for writing the Communist Manifesto and the co-author of Das Kapital which led to what is now called Marxism. This is the full sentence: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
He meant that religion puts the masses in an altered state of mental numbness that helps them deal with life’s dark realities. He critiqued capitalism and said it was doomed to fail. He championed a utopian view of humans that said, the state could be good and give out the fruits of production economically to people with fairness and equity. You know, like the former Soviet Union or China or North Korea. You might even want to consult Ukraine to ask how it worked for them. You’ve got to love that classless society they created where everyone shared all they had, just like in the Book of Acts 2:42-47.
Oh, I hear John Lennon singing Imagine—just imagine it,
“Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world, You. You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will live as one.” [5]
Great background music to be played over the loudspeakers in one of the Marxist prison camps known as the Gulag Archipelago. Alexksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a Soviet prison, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, wrote:
The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power—he is free again.” [6] And, “Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes....”
It is heart breaking to see so many people around the world who continue to suffer under the iron fist of Marist ideology. And to witness the weakness of mind and will of younger Americans who look to the goodness of government to solve their problems and wait for the state to tell them what to do. It all comes down to the dystopia’s most common phrase, “Sir, please take a number and take your place in line.”
Father 3: philosophy— Fredrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).[7] The person who popularized the God is dead—or never existed at all movement.
Nietzsche was a brilliant, blunt, sickly philologist who couldn’t fit in to normal academic structures. He never finished his doctorate—he was awarded an honorary one. One of his stops was as the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at age 24, but he had to resign in 1879 because of health. The remainder of his life was his seeking better climates and solutions to his illness. He spent the last eleven years under the care of his mother then his sister. Often it is said that Nietzsche went mad. It is true he was incapacitated, but his illness was not entirely a mental disorder.
He was funded and helped by numerous friends, fans and patrons. The most famous was the famous German composer, Richard Wagner. He became close to Wagner, often stayed in his home and even had his own room. Nietzsche was an outlier, a philosophical gadfly, but he was gifted and everyone knew it, that is why so many accommodations were made for him.
Marx was no economist, Darwin was no scientist, and Nietzsche was no professional. But like Darwin and Marx, he made not believing in God popular and part of the conversation for the elite who were looking for the God loophole.
Some of his greatest hits were, “God is dead, we have killed him, and there is not enough water in the world to wash the blood off our hands.” He taught that since God is dead, we have killed the church and the downside is we have also lost our foundation for morality. He was quite skeptical that humans could replace the moral code handed down by Christianity. And that is why he constructed his now famous idea that the survival of the fittest contest would be won by a person’s will to power. This would be done by an Ubermensch, a superman. A person who simply would dominate and win. This idea has caused, falsely I might add, for some to conflate Nietzsche with Hitler and ethnic superiority and cleansing of the Jews. Yes, this thinking all took place in Germany in the German language, but Nietzsche never anticipated or encouraged such ideas. His thoughts were that there is no God, he is dead, we are on our own, and the strongest, brightest, and most brutal will win the day. He is quite popular because he wrote in aphorisms which lend themselves to clichés.
Remember the founder
The three popularizers have carried the water for the war on truth movement. But please remember the movement’s Founder, Chairman of the board and CEO is Lucifer. Everyone else is a tool in the hands of its master. The world is like a hamster wheel—it spins and the people are running but going nowhere. There is one way that Christians can run in the right direction, and that is make sure God’s word keeps us on His path.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your path.” Proverbs 3:5,6.
Trust: This is the same as faith or belief. You build faith by first thinking, reason, study, proof, then it grows through obedience, stepping out into the unknown and doing what God says. And finally, it is matured through suffering. Trust is not just handed to you, it is developed.
Don’t lean on your own understanding: It doesn’t say, don’t use your understanding, it says, don’t lean on or rely on it in any ultimate sense. My heart may be telling me many things that are false. I can depend on my heart to be deceptive, evil, and often dangerous.[8] I must speak God’s word to my heart to keep it on track.
Acknowledge God as your source: In all ways, in everyday events, in all good gifts, even the gift of pain are a mercy and the source of God taking care of me and those around me. When you are angry, afraid, joyful, content, God is the source of all things and makes even the bad good.
He will direct your path: Guidance is as much what God does as what God gives.[9] It just happens when your path is the right path in the right direction. [10]
A monkey
Remember, one million monkeys at one million typewriters for one million years couldn’t come up with just one word and if they did, they couldn’t understand it, speak it, or spell it. So much for that theory.
Bill Hull
March 2024
[1] Matthew 7:21-23 NLT.
[2] My paraphrase/summation Lucifer’s dialogue with Eve in Genesis 3:1-7
[3] I read a Darwin, The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. In a paltry 800 pages, it provided a far reaching and indepth story of Darwin’s entire life and mission. Darwin was an agnostic and is buried in Westminster Abby.
[4] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/44015-when-men-choose-not-to-believe-in-god-they-do#:~:text=Sign%20Up%20Now-,When%20men%20choose%20not%20to%20believe%20in%20God%2C%20they%20do,capable%20of%20believing%20in%20anything.
[5] Lyrics from John Lennon’s Imagine.
[6] https://www.quora.com/What-was-Aleksandr-Solzhenitsyns-profession-and-what-did-he-write-about#:~:text=Aleksandr%20Solzhenitsyn%20was%20a%20Russian,and%20subjected%20to%20inhumane%20conditions.
[7] I have read several Nietzsche books, I would however recommend I AM DYNAMITE! A LIFE OF NIETZSCHE by Sue Prideaux. A very engaging biography of his life and work.
[8] Jeremiah 17:9
[9] Statement heard on audio sermon by Tim Keller.
[10] John 14:21.
I Will Not Bow Down is at Amazon in print, kindle, and Audible Beta.
