Creation Corner
Lies of the devil: the three greatest
In the Bible the devil has many names. His two most popular names are “Satan,” literally meaning adversary or great opponent of God and man; and “devil” literally means “slanderer” or “false accuser.” He is also known as “the tempter”, “the ruler of this world”, “the prince of the air”, “the Father of lies,” and many others. Regardless of his name, he is an enemy of God and God’s people and his ultimate goal is to separate God from His people. In order to accomplish his goals, Satan has cleverly devised lies that have been effective since the Garden of Eden. Although there have been lies too numerous to list, this writing will be concentrating on the three most effective lies the devil has told humanity.
Big Lie #1: You can be like God.
Satan began implementing his vendetta against God as soon as man was created in the Garden of Eden. You know the story. God created a lush garden for Adam and Eve to tend and to enjoy, along with one restriction: Do not eat from the tree in the middle of the Garden, known as the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The command was simple and straightforward. Adam and Eve both clearly understood it.
In Genesis 3:1 we see at least two of the characteristics of Satan come into play: that of tempter and that of liar – or in this case perverter of the truth. Not only does Satan tell Eve that God is a liar by saying that what God told her wasn’t true, he also tells Eve that she can be like God if she eats from the forbidden tree. This was a temptation that she couldn’t resist. Although Bishop Usher calculated that we live about 6000 years after Adam and Eve, Satan’s lie that we can be like God still carries weight today. Of course in our more sophisticated age the verbiage has changed a bit. The lie now is that you can be your own god. Adam and Eve bought it 6000 years ago, the people at the time of the Tower of Babel bought it, and people are still buying it today. A lie that has lasted for 6000 years certainly qualifies as not only Satan’s first lie but one of his most effective – at least in my opinion.
Big Lie #2: God didn’t create anything. Everything evolved through natural causes.
The concept of Evolution has been around for a long time. The Greeks were the first to play with the concept, and the Apostle Paul wrote about a “green” form of Evolution where people worshiped the creation rather than the Creator in the Book of Romans. However, no one really paid much attention to it until Darwin wrote his Origin of Species back in 1859. Since then it has drawn multitudes away from believing that God exists by presenting a “scientific” hypothesis that sounds reasonable to those who are vulnerable. Of course, one by one, all the predictions in Darwinian Evolution have been debunked and obliterated, but the concept simply morphs into other forms.
Last year Barna research conducted a survey that concluded that 70% of students from Christian homes in high school intended to leave the faith upon graduation. They gave six reasons. One of them was the teachings of Evolution, and the Church’s seeming antagonism to science. Recently the Southern Baptists did a similar survey that increased the number to 90%. Given the sheer multitude of people that have been separated from God as a result of this lie, it qualifies as one of Satan’s three most effective lies – at least in my opinion.
Big Lie #3 – Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics.
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Considering that we live in a nation that was founded mostly by Christians and upon Christian principles, this particular lie can be credited with the decline in government and constitutional principles we are experiencing today. The Black Regiment that was given its name because of the black robes worn by the clergy active in the Revolutionary War would be horrified to hear Christians today say that they shouldn’t be involved in politics. They would admonish us rather strongly and in no uncertain terms tell us that we would not be a nation if the children of God didn’t understand that liberty is a gift from God that must be nurtured and defended diligently. They would tell us that it is the Christian’s duty to stand against tyranny and secular humanism and not to submit to a yoke of slavery.
It is inarguable that we are becoming more secularized and anti-Christian in nearly every mode of modern life. That would not be able to happen if Christians were “occupying” as the Lord commanded. Instead many have been content to sit in the pews of their churches and complain about the apostate world, all the while contributing to the apostasy by default.
One recent statistical study stated that 20,000,000 Christians don’t vote and another stated that 50% of Christians don’t vote. Is it any wonder that atrocities like abortion, sodomy, and socialism are running rampant? David Barton once reasoned that if Christians don’t make it into office, God’s principles don’t make it into office. We are seeing the results of Christian political default throughout society, and it starts with government. Imagine what would happen if 20,000,000 Christians showed up at the voting polls and only voted for pro-choice candidates! Abortion would become an atrocity of the past. Same sex marriage would become an oxymoron and government schools would no longer teach Evolution as absolute truth. Instead of alternate lifestyles and globalism, they would teach academics. Our children would learn to read, write, and be able to add 2 plus 2 without a calculator. All these things are the result of Christians not being involved in politics – and yet they claim they shouldn’t be.
Lie #3, Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics, has torn apart the moral fabric of this nation, threatened our national sovereignty by surrendering our rights to globalists, and has eroticized and dumbed down our children in government-run schools. And it has stolen the fruits of our labor through crippling tax laws that steal our hard-earned dollars in the name of “fairness.” Therefore, since this particular lie is greatly responsible for the decline of the greatest Christian nation the world has ever known, it qualifies as one of the three greatest lies the devil has ever told.
These three lies of the devil have been the most effective from the beginning of time, and they will continue to be as long as Christians believe another lie – tolerance is civilized and absolute truth is judgmental. Will our ministers wake up and put on the Black Robes of old? There’s one way to tell – if America continues to exist as one nation under God, then they have; if we find ourselves telling our grandchildren about a nice experiment were liberty once lived and people enjoyed the fruits of their own labors, it means the ministers have remained silent and the children of God have continued to believe the lie.
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“Of course, one by one, all the predictions in Darwinian Evolution have been debunked and obliterated”
Your comments about thermodynamics can probably be excused as ignorance, but this one is simply a lie. What predictions made by Darwin have been debunked? I’d be surprised if you could name a couple – to be expected bearing in mind that Darwin’s work is over 150 years old, was written with no knowledge at all of genetics and is about as relevant to the current state of the science as the Wright Brothers’ machine is to modern aircraft design – and to claim that all the predictions of evolutionary theory have been debunked is utter nonsense and so far from the truth that you must know it’s false.
Well, here’s the big one: that the cell is not an irreducibly complex item. Darwin himself said that if the cell be found to be so complex that a critical number of its components must have self-assembled for the cell to work, but could not self-assemble in synchrony, then his theory would fail. Well, the cell is so complext that its components cannot even self-generate, much less self-assemble.
“Well, the cell is so complext that its components cannot even self-generate, much less self-assemble.”
Huh? What does that have to do with anything? Of course cellular components can “self-assemble.” What do you think protein folding is? And as I already said, Darwin was completely ignorant of genetics, so he didn’t have any idea how the parts of a cell are built. Darwin never saw a cell as anything other than a small package with some vague objects inside, because the means to see more never existed in his lifetime. My own microscope, which is far in advance of anything available to Darwin, still can’t show me any more than a vague hint of chromosomes, and even then only during certain stages of mitosis. To properly see the internal structure of a cell you need an electron microscope, and when those were developed they showed us the true complexity of a cell and, simultaneously, gave us the solution. There is nothing irreducibly complex about cells.
You don’t really think that modern evolutionary theory stands or falls on the details of a book written in the mid-19th century, do you? There has been 153 years of further research since then, all of which has confirmed the basics of Darwin’s theory. It’s also filled in gaps, and corrected errors, caused by the state of biological knowledge in 1859.
I would quite literally bet my life on evolution by natural selection being the correct explanation for the diversity of life. In fact according to Roseann I actually am. Fine; I’m happy to. The evidence is that good.
How did the first cell self-assemble? Until you can solve that, you have no foundation for abiogenesis.
And you’re not going to solve that. The odds against that are nothing short of astronomical.
“How did the first cell self-assemble?”
From the last proto-cell, of course. This is a classic creationist mistake. You think that evolutionary theory (this is well after the point of abiogenesis) says a complete, modern cell appeared out of nothing. Of course it doesn’t. That would be silly. But a modern cell, with all its parts, isn’t the only way to get along as a cell; much simpler ones are possible. In fact much simpler ones exist.
“Until you can solve that, you have no foundation for abiogenesis.”
Abiogenesis has nothing much to do with the first cell. In fact abiogenesis, like evolution, is the sort of incremental process that’s impossible to pin down temporally. Just as a time-travelling observer would never see the moment when a synapsid hatched from an amniote egg, or an Australopithecus mother gave birth to a Homo baby, she would also never see the moment when a non-living replicator molecule produced a copy that was alive. All you can say is that at Point X we have non-living replicators and at Point Y we have life, and that somewhere between the two points the replicator crossed the fuzzy line between non-life and life. The old “law of biogenesis” stuff (life only comes from life, as if scientists believe an amoeba assembled out of chemicals dissolved in the water) is almost childishly simplistic.
“And you’re not going to solve that. The odds against that are nothing short of astronomical.”
But, as I’ve just explained, the odds against that don’t matter because nobody’s suggesting that it ever happened. Could a modern cell ever “self-assemble”? Of course not; quite impossible. Does that rule out evolution or abiogenesis? Not at all.
“Considering that we live in a nation that was founded mostly by Christians and upon Christian principles”
That is the single biggest lie and distortion of the truth that Christians continue to perpetrate and it’s time they were called out on it.
1. Nowhere in the US Constitution do the words “”Jesus Christ,” “Christianity,” “Bible,” “Creator,” “Divine,” and “God” appear. Inn addition, the Establishment Clause specifically prevents the creation of a state religion.
2. The Treaty of Tripoli, signed a few years after the Constitution, states: “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”
The notion of the USA being a Christian nation is simply a fantasy and a fallacy made up by fundamentalists.
The reasons for that do not support your thesis. At least one article, possibly two, will come that refute both.
“Considering that we live in a nation that was founded mostly by Christians and upon Christian principles…” – CNAV, 8 October 2012
“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…” – President John Adams, 7 June 1797
One of you is wrong, and I doubt it was John Adams.
You’ll see more evidence soon enough.
“You’ll see more evidence soon enough.”
For what? That several of your founding fathers were deists, if not outright atheists, and that your first president wrote a treaty beginning with a denial of christian foundations which your senate ratified and your second president signed?
So you have evidence that contradicts both the Constitution and the words of a US President?
Can’t wait to see this.
Oh, and please don’t use the “in the Year of our Lord” defense, because using that logic, the US should be Roman, because of the use of September.
However, I look forward to seeing how you’re going to spin a document that makes no reference to Christianity, into being a Christian document.
In one sentence: the Framers deliberately left the references to God to the States. They did not want an established “Church of America.” But that didn’t mean they didn’t want a church at all.
“that didn’t mean they didn’t want a church at all.”
Some of them undoubtably did. Others, equally undoubtably, didn’t. James Madison, for example, hated the clergy and after the Constitution was written expressed the opinion that the separation of church and state was “strongly guarded” within it. Benjamin Franklin openly doubted the divinity of Jesus, which in the 1790s was an astounding heresy and makes you wonder what his real opinion of christianity was.
Of course a major problem for those who wanted church involvement in government was that most of them were Anglicans. As the head of the Anglican church at the time was George III I can see an obvious drawback to not enforcing a separation of church and state…
Genesis 3:22 – And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
God explicitly says that eating the fruit made man like God. How is that a big lie?
But God wouldn’t allow man to eat from the tree of life.
“But God wouldn’t allow man to eat from the tree of life.”
Yes, strange, that. In fact it was one of the first things that made me start questioning my faith. If god loves us why wouldn’t he let us eat from the tree of life? Doesn’t make much sense really, especially as according to the bible we were, up ’til Eve went scrumping, supposed to live forever anyway.
It does if God does not want to trap us into immortality in sin.
“It does if God does not want to trap us into immortality in sin.”
Sorry, that makes even less sense. It also fails to answer the original point that, up until Adam and Steve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (and what’s so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil anyway? There’s a word for people who don’t, and it’s “sociopath”) god’s plan was allegedly that they wouldn’t die. Did he intend people to be immortals who have no clue whether what they’re doing is right or wrong, or is the whole story just an incoherent mess?
I’m not going to accept that “Adam and Steve.” You know better than to try to set a precedent that way. I might not be a lawyer, but I’ve been around enough of them to know their tricks.
“I’m not going to accept that “Adam and Steve.””
There’s nothing to accept about it; it’s just a joke. The correct response is to chuckle ruefully, or sigh resignedly, then answer my actual point – which is that the whole story makes sense.
As for lawyers my favourite line from Shakespeare is from Henry VI Part 2, when Dick says “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
“The correct response is to chuckle ruefully, or sigh resignedly, then answer my actual point – which is that the whole story makes sense.”
I’m sure I wrote “the whole story makes no sense. Oh well, must have been a typo.
“But that didn’t mean they didn’t want a church at all.”
But the DID explicitly want a state separate from the church. They weren’t snti-religion, even though some of the signatories did have a less than enthusiastic view on Christianity, but they specifically made allowance that the State should be run free of religious interference.
The Establishment Clause states that. Even if you want to call the Constitution a Christian document, you can’t get around that.
Again, please provide the section where they leave God to the States.
The fact remains that if the right wing in America continue to try and shoehorn their religious beliefs into their political positions, then it is they who are tearing up the Constitution they claim to hold so dear.
State Constitutions did not take that position. Those at the Constitutional Convention did not want to interfere.
[…] Under God October 10, 2012 RoseAnn Salanitri No comments In my last article, “The Devil’s Three Greatest Lies,” I said Lie #3 was the devil’s lie that Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics. The […]
The highest, the transcendent glory of the American Revolution was this — it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the precepts of Christianity
The Bible contains the revelation of the will of God. It contains the history of the creation of the world, and of mankind.”
John Quincy Adams
So great is my veneration for the Bible that the earlier my children begin to read it the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful citizens of their country and respectable members of society. I have for many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year.”
It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.
George Washington
Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
George Washington
Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.
Abraham Lincoln
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Thomas Jefferson
If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.
Ronald Reagan
Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.
Ronald Reagan
Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.
Ronald Reagan
Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.
Ronald Reagan
John Quincy Adams
“One day the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in the United States will tear down the artificial scaffolding of Christianity. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” – Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, 11 Apr 1832 (original in Library of Congress)
“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved–the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!” — John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson
“The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation, is ever more dangerous. Jesus had to work on the perilous confines of reason and religion; and a step to the right or left might place him within the grasp of the priests of the superstition, a bloodthirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore.” — Thomas Jefferson to Story, Aug. 4, 1820
“Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in history.” – James Madison
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.” – James Madison
“When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.” – Benjamin Franklin
“My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years…” – Abraham Lincoln, 1862
“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a clergy-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.” – Thomas Jefferson