Refutations/Rebukes
Is Your Head in the Sand?
Why is it that when a catastrophe hits a third world country, it seems to get very little media attention? Why is it that masses of people are subjected daily to starvation, slavery, genocide and the aftermath of war, yet they are considered less news worthy than the personal lives of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie? Why are sports figures and rock stars idolized to the point of extreme fanaticism that quickly wanes until the next season or big event? Why will some people do whatever it takes to achieve fame, fortune, and power regardless if others are stepped on or eliminated to achieve their self-centered goals? Why are people ignorant or deliberately forgetful to the fact that history has a tendency to repeat itself, and this world hasn’t seen the last of brutal dictators, evil tyrants and mass murderers? These questions deserve an honest answer.
Man is much more than just some bipedal mammal. He has the capacity to be intelligent, kind, good, sympathetic and loving. He also has the capacity to be ignorant, cruel, evil, selfish, and indifferent. It all hinges on whether he yields to or disregards his conscience, as well as how he exercises his freewill.
At this time, we would ask that you cover your left eye with the palm of one of your hands while reading the next sentence only with your right eye. It is now being demonstrated to you that man has a freewill. Now, why didn’t you cover your eye, or why did you cover it? You could have covered your right eye instead of your left. You could have just shut your eye instead of covering it. You could have taken a sledge hammer to your monitor and keyboard or gone to the fridge to make yourself a ham and cheese sandwich.
Human beings are not robots. There is a reason they have been given the freedom to choose from within themselves, and only divine intervention can alter this. Human beings have also been hard-wired with a conscience by their Creator, and this can be easily surmised by the logic of the following argument. (Get ready for a monkey wrench being thrown into the gears of some of today’s prevailing theories, views and opinions). The argument is posed in some questions:
Why is it wrong to murder, rape, kidnap, torture, cannibalize etc.? If we follow the atheistic evolutionist’s line of reasoning of natural selection and the survival of the fittest as to how man has arrived at his present state, then how can those who perpetrate heinous crimes be deemed as evil? After all, how would you expect man to behave if he is just a coincidental descendant of some protozoa that swam in a stagnate pool of water from the Precambrian Eon? How could crimes against humanity be wrong when it is just the dominant DNA flexing its muscles which has been repetitively passed down from generation to generation? If you’re buying into what is being propagated by the majority, you need to thank your ancient half-man / half-ape, hominid ancestors who skillfully utilized those bison jaw bones to fatally wound those of competing, rival clans to win the prize of the wooly mammoth’s meat, hide and tusks. Don’t you know, according to this thinking, if it wasn’t for their dominant genes and tenacity, you wouldn’t be here today? It would have been their rivals’ descendants living in your house while browsing the web and not you.
For those who are inclined to view man as a partial descendant from ancient chimpanzee-like hominids who split off from our primate cousins 6 million years ago, we want to ask them why civilized society doesn’t hold our present day fragmented ancestors accountable for their crimes. It has now been thoroughly documented by primatologists that chimps will murder their own kind in a type of gang-style violence. If we can go to the penitentiary for murder, why can’t the chimps? Most would say that’s absurd; they’re just animals and can’t be held accountable. Well, if they’re animals, then we’re animals. Why the double standard? On the flipside, isn’t it a little hypocritical of us to track down and kill man-eating lions, tigers and bears while murderers get paroled all the time from our justice system? Who’s to say these distant relatives don’t go back to their dens or lairs at night and feel remorse for ripping a fellow animal’s jugular veins out?
Another pointed moral question here is, ‘Why is it wrong to eat human flesh?’ Jeffrey Dahmer and Edi Amine didn’t have a problem with it. Looking back in history, the Aztecs had quite an elaborate form of human sacrifice, and eating parts of the victims was reserved for the elite in the upper echelons of their society. Why is human sacrifice now viewed as psychotic behavior? Why is the consumption of its victims considered highly repulsive to those in the so-called civilized world? Why don’t Americans eat dog, cat, or rat, but one can travel to the far east and find it to be an accepted cuisine? Is it really just how we have been influenced by our culture or is there something much bigger that has to be taken into account? What nerve of the staunch evolutionist to say that the few remaining cannibalistic tribes on the planet are uncivilized barbarians since they kill and consume those of their own species. Why can’t they just take it in stride and view it as natural selection working itself out as nature intended? …Can someone please pass the salt?
In retrospect, perhaps modern, “civilized” homo sapiens should act according to the laws of natural selection. If this were the case, history would have to be rewritten to include the survival of the fittest “heroes” such as Joseph Stalin since he was responsible for the deaths of over 50 million humans who he considered rivals. Other tributes could be spotlighted in textbooks for “role models” such as Genghis Khan, Adolph Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il and many other sadistic, barbaric tyrants who attained to the rank of the fittest and conquered the masses.
Let us now conclude this folly as we have sarcastically driven home the point that if man is just a product of a random cosmic accident, then lawlessness is law. If the conscience is just relative and is not truly a make or break issue that keeps society from the precipice of utter chaos, then let’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. When one takes on the mindset that there will be no final reckoning with The Engineer who designed the blueprint of life, or that the conscience isn’t His instrument to keep man in check and make him accountable, then there is nothing that can be defined as absolutely right or wrong. Once you take the One who made us out of the picture, views on genocide, murder, torture, cannibalism, euthanasia, cloning, abortion, child abuse, rape, incest, homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality, adultery, fornication and racism will only be contingent on the mental state and psychological conditioning of that present society.
This brings to surface the conscience and its significance in the world to come. How you respond to the various proddings of your conscience, and the way you exercise your freewill determine what type of person you are. Your decisions also reveal whether you are part of the problem or part of the solution to help alleviate some of the suffering and pain on the world’s playing field and keep society from falling apart. The role of your conscience is also one of the main factors that will come into play once you leave this existence. The Apostle Paul summed it up well in Galatians 6:7-8, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life.” NKJV
Is Life Meant Solely to Enjoy?
Most of the technological advances and household luxuries that have turned a 24-hour period from being content with food and clothing to blatant hedonism has been like a snowball effect. Ever since the industrial revolution, there has been no turning back, and it looks like there’s no end in sight. Just two hundred years ago, it was only kings, rulers and the elite who could pursue a lifestyle of pleasure and attain it. To put things in perspective, even the Epicureans of old who sought after fine food and sensuality would have thought they were in seventh heaven if they could have fallen through a worm hole to the year 2008 and landed in a trailer park. Even a lukewarm Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings delivered by “meals on wheels” to a single-wide trailer with a musty-smelling Futon and an old 19-inch TV with cable would have blown their mind.
This brings us to the point that for countless centuries, man as a majority has had to struggle in order to carve out a living through many trials and tribulations. This way of life is by no means in danger of extinction but continues to be all the more emphasized across the globe in the backdrop of other, able pleasure seekers. It should be obvious that the philosophy, ‘He who dies with the most toys wins,’ is for those not in touch with reality.
The reality is that life, overall, is very hard and always has been. All one has to do is look back in time to verify if this is true or not. It is so easy for materialism to blind men from the obvious. The Genesis account, whether taken literally or figuratively, paints a plain picture. Mankind is in this current state of turbulence because of consequences from rebellion which were sown in a previous time.
Enjoyment is really only one piece of the pie, while the other slices can consist of pain, loss, sickness, sorrow, emptiness, hard labor, and of course death, etc. If you have doubts or denials about those other slices, then take our challenge to cut off your electric, water and gas meters. Next, give all that’s in your refrigerator and freezer to a needy family, and throw your car keys into a pond. Now go hunt, fish and farm to feed your family, and draw your water from a (not so purified) well or other water source to wash your dishes, clothes and bathe like your ancestors did. After that, visit some jails, hospitals, nursing and funeral homes once a month, and read some world history in your down time by candle light. If your schedule permits, try to undertake our challenge during the cold winter months, and you’ll get the added benefit of nature’s sometimes harsh teaching methods to keep you focused on the path to enlightenment. Just a simple trip to the outhouse in freezing rain would be enough to get most participant’s attention.
Time for a little pop-quiz. Here’s a multiple choice question that has a logical answer. We’ll let you use rational thinking to choose either A,B,C, or D. If life is not meant for enjoyment, then why are we here?
A) We have been planted here by aliens long ago for a food source. Once our brains develop to their specifications and taste by what they term as evolutionary farming, they’ll come back to harvest them for one of their favorite sources of protein.
B) There was a big bang event, and some bacterium in a warm puddle of water emerged as the father of us all. We are just the by-product of a coincidental, cosmic accident of which the odds of it having happened this way are one in 489 quindecillion gazillion.
C) Physically, we are not really here. Just as in a dream, we are playing out as little gods who came up with a universal virtual reality game. The first to conquer and micro chip every other god who is playing this humanoid experience wins.
D) The most influential person in history (who this hemisphere bases time on) is the source for your existence. His life, death and resurrection, as recorded in one of the most historical documents of antiquity, supply further details about why you’re here and where you’re going.
This article mainly takes aim at the worldly, self-centered, pleasure-seeking mentality that is all around us which is based on a distorted philosophical view of life. It also brings to mind those professing faith in Christ who have fallen into the deception of the health, wealth and prosperity gospel. This heretical teaching clearly shows the sheer ignorance of its victims as to what has been recorded in history and what the scriptures actually state. It is obvious to those well read that these flashy “Jimmy Gimme” false teachers in their $3,000 Italian suits are in reality “… individuals who have found a way to scam an income and manipulate others.”(Unknown) To those who feel we are coming down too hard on these wolves and their prey, we recommend you research for yourselves what the Christ and His Apostles actually taught, as well as how they lived and died. After this simple study, move on to the early Church Fathers for more investigation. It just might be that you, too will get fired up and see why our blood boils at the thought of these malignant tumors in the Body of Christ.
Finally, think about this: Do you think there has ever been any sane, Messianic Jew who survived the Holocaust that followed a “name it and claim it,” positive confession, health, wealth, prosperity message? Can you see the late Corrie ten Boom falling for this nonsense? These false teachers are so blatant in their lavish lifestyle that even some in government question their (501c3) status. While focusing on free-spending TV evangelists with billion-dollar endowments and their tax-exempt status, Senate Finance Committee member Senator Grassley is quoted, “Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, not a Rolls Royce.” What is really sad about these people is that they appear shameless and seem to have reached a point of thinking they are untouchable.
…Earth to Benny, the two Kenneths, Gloria, Oral & son, Fredrick, Creflo, Paula, Eddie, Juanita, Morris, Mike, Charles, T.D., Joyce, Joel, Robert, Paul & Jan and all your buddies… do you read us? …over… We repeat, do you read us? … over… Ground control to the hirelings. Your circuit must be dead. Is there something wrong?… Can you hear me, Major Tom?