A New Religion: I don’t think the present paradigm that is replacing historical religion with a new one is anything to be proud of.
Up front, this isn’t about discrimination. We work and live alongside people we disagree with all the time. This nation is about individual liberty mated with duty to community. Many of us are very OK with the idea of tolerance and competition in the marketplace of ideas. However, for it to be about tolerance, we all get to exist and express ourselves. If one group thinks their way of life is better but only that group gets to speak freely, then we have a totalitarian society, not a pluralistic one. The people in the seats of power worldwide now should have had to read books from Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, and Ayn Rand in high school or in college telling us explicitly not to live the way we are living today. Those books were not road maps to utopia, they were alarms about entertaining the very ideas that permeate society today. Disclaimer over.
The inability to cry for help. Everything is normalized. Acting out is even encouraged and sanctified. Having unholy behavior become pseudo-holy is also part of a religion.
Mankind wants religion. It’s in our DNA.
Define religion – https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion
: a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
: the service and worship of God or the supernatural
: commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
: a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
: scrupulous conformity
They get holy ground? Seriously, they took the most common ground possible, an intersection, and made it holy. Off limits. By order of law. Same with idolatry. The guys in the book of Daniel. Making us genuflect before the accepted doctrine is literally a religion.
Made us male and female, they want to undo that, too! Foundational shifts.
Alternative creation story – Accident with a capital A. All religions have a creation story, gods or God. Take your pick.
Alternative apocalypse – telling us it’s hotter and hotter when we can remember it’s the same. Prophets – wrong prophets. Climate change, get real. Pollsters always wrong, still using them.
Stuff that’s off limits – each day waking up to find out what words are ok. Makes those who get to determine this to be our gods. They decide what language is acceptable, they rule the world.
“One’s god is that which is one’s ultimate reality. Therefore, it cannot be questioned. So there arose new movements, causes, ideologies, and systems of thought that could not be challenged or questioned no matter how irrational they were – because they were now gods.” Jonathan Cahn, Return of the Gods.
You’ll excuse me if I don’t think the current reality is anything to be proud of. Under the guise of “you can’t make me do anything”, we’ve allowed ourselves to be overrun. The only way we can respond, brothers and sisters, is to continue worshiping the true God in the Name of His Son, Yeshua.