When people ask you, why do you believe in an ancient God, or accuse you of being anachronistic for a religiously held belief, it is best to flip the question onto them. The short answer to this question is that if it is true, it is timeless, but you need not start with that as the question presupposes the authority questioner's worldview. Most who ask this question in this way are so-called “Progressives”. These folks are living a Neo-Paganistic lifestyle without even realizing it. As the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, there is nothing new under the sun.
What do we mean by that? Well, let's look at some of the old gods from the Old Testament and how pagans explained reality back then. Monotheism often would devolve into rationalism and then pantheistic paganism. I'll make the argument here that Jonathan Cahn got it right when he wrote the book “Return of the Gods”: modern secularists are turning into modern pagans after rejecting God. Let's look at some of the agendas of the modern progressive left.
To do this, we'll go review some of the material we've covered this last year.
Climate change:
The ancients used to put to death people like Elijah to honor Ba'al and his ilk for rain. How is modern adherence to climate hysteria any different?
Josh: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, makes no reference to billions of deaths, or any other claim of imminent crisis. In fact, the IPCC and other organizations data actually point in the opposite direction of total destruction:
Mr. Steve: Claims of mass displacement and migration: IPCC found “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide, but limited evidence that climate change or sea level rise is the direct cause” and “The majority of resultant Population movements tend to occur within the borders of affected countries.”
JA: Claims of climate change causing wars/conflicts: Researchers published in Nature magazine found that “climate has affected organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic status development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31189956/
Josh: Claims of billions of lives lost: Actually, the number of deaths from natural disasters have declined by 99.7% - “In 1931, 3.7 million people died from natural disasters. in 2018, just 11,000. And that decline occurred over a period when the global population quadrupled.” https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters
Mr. Steve: Even if you broaden the scope beyond just disasters and look at all climate related deaths, the number remains astoundingly positive. When “adjusted for population, we went from 255.3 deaths per million in 1920 to 1.9 per million in 2020, a 99.25 percent decrease.” In other words, “between 1920 and 2020, the world has become 13,260 percent safer from climate-related death” https://www.humanprogress.org/the-collapse-of-climate-related-deaths-2/”
-Jennifer Duffy
List of Climate claims that never came true:
1. 1967 Dire Famine Forecast By 1975
2. 1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989 (1969)
3. 1970: Ice Age By 2000
4. 1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980
5. 1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030
6. 1972: New Ice Age By 2070
7. 1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast
8. 1974: Another Ice Age?
9. 1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life (data and graph)
10. 1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent
11. 1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes (additional link)
12. 1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend (additional link)
13. 1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s
14. 1988: Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs
15. 1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018 (they're not)
16. 1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000
17. 1989: New York City's West Side Highway Underwater by 2019 (it's not)
18. 2000: Children Won't Know what Snow Is
19. 2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don't Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy
20. 2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024
21. 2008: Arctic will Be Ice Free by 2018
22. 2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013
23. 2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
24. 2009: UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to ‘Save The Planet From Catastrophe'
25. 2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of Ice-Free Arctic to 2014
26. 2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015 (additional link)
27. 2014: Only 500 Days Before ‘Climate Chaos'
28. 1968: Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide
29. 1970: World Will Use Up All its Natural Resources
30. 1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years
31. 1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years
32. 1977: Department of Energy Says Oil will Peak in 1990s
33. 1980: Peak Oil In 2000
34. 1996: Peak Oil in 2020
35. 2002: Peak Oil in 2010
36. 2006: Super Hurricanes!
37. 2005 : Manhattan Underwater by 2015
38. 1970: Urban Citizens Will Require Gas Masks by 1985
39. 1970: Nitrogen buildup Will Make All Land Unusable
40. 1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish
41. 1970s: Killer Bees!
None of these happened, yet the priests of the “rational” scientism are never to be discredited… lest you deny the god of science.
How about the issue of sexuality and gender?
JA: Some insight into the goddess Ishtar can be gleaned from “Gender and Aging in Mesopotamia: The Gilgamesh Epic and Other Ancient Literature” by Rivkah Harris (2000).
Ishtar, Harris explains, “is androgynous, marginal, ambiguous . . . She is betwixt and between . . . Central to the goddess as paradox is her well-attested psychological and physiological androgyny. Inanna-Ishtar is both female and male . . . [in one place stating] ‘Though I am a woman I am a noble young man'” (pp. 160, 163).
Mr. Steve She shattered all gender and socioeconomic distinctions—being both a royal queen and “the harlot of heaven . . . set out for the alehouse” (p. 166). And in all this she was the role model for her followers. Among her powers was this from a Sumerian poem: “To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna” (p. 160).
Josh: In the Descent of Ishtar we are told of some participants in her cult: “The male prostitutes comb their hair before her . . . They decorate the napes of their necks with colored bands . . . They gird themselves with the sword belt . . . Their right side they adorn with women's clothing . . . Their left side they cover with men's clothing . . .” (p. 170). The revel and competition ended in a bloody spectacle of self-cutting (compare 1 Kings 18:28).
JA: Harris states: “Their transvestitism simulated the androgyny of Inanna-Ishtar. It was perhaps the inversion of the male/female binary opposition that thereby neutralized this opposition. By emulating their goddess who was both female and male, they shattered the boundary between the sexes” (pp. 170-171). This was seen as a way of rising above the prison of the flesh.
JA: “The story of David Reimer should provide some insight into the modern gender theory and the reality of sexuality. But before we get to David's story, we should deal with the man behind David Reimer's suffering and Modern Gender Theory: John Money. You can find his praise filled bio at the Kinsey Institute's Website: (https://kinseyinstitute.org/about/profiles/john-money.php). Those who know that name know that Aflfred Kinsey was a sex “researcher” who collablorated with the ilk of Nazi officer Dr. Fritz von Balluseck who would rape his victims and record data. Fritz and other pedophiles and rapists were not only documented by Kinsey, but encouraged to continue their research. With this information Kinsey published ghoulish charts that documented the “Speed of Pre-Adolecent Orgasm” with numerous data points down to 5 month olds in Kinsey's book Sexual Behaviour and the Human Male. John Money was not only a colleague of Kinsey, but also a defender of pedophilia as seen in his work. “If I were to see the case of a boy aged ten or eleven who's intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual [...] then I would not call it pathological in any way.” Said John Money in a 1991 interview with the Journal of Paedophilia.
Reimer was one of the many victims of John Money and his idea that Gender was performative and constructed by societal expectations. David was one of two twins, born Bruce. Bruce as an infant was castrated by an experimental circumcision. His brother Brian remained whole. Mr. and Mrs. Reimer were directed to John Money for their injured son's treatment, unaware of Money's character or exploitative nature. Money recommended that Bruce be completely sex reassigned to female and treated as such. By two years old, the deed had been done and Bruce was renamed Brenda. Brenda loathed his life and all of the toys and affects of girlhood, longing to act as a boy. Also, John Money had recurring sessions with Brenda and Brian where Money forced the children to commit sex acts upon eachother, for Money's and his Colleage's benefit. In Brenda's teen years, he was on the verge of suicide when his parents finally broke down and told Brenda the truth of his biology. Brenda immediately opted to transition and become known as David. He went through reconstructive surgery, undergoing mastectomies and surgery to simulate what had been surgically removed as a child. Alas, all of the damage done to both Brian and David/Bruce was too much for them to handle and they both committed suicide within two years of each other. John Money's experiment, however, has had its impact as his theories had already become mainstream before they were proven so very wrong by the lives of these two innocent boys that he had destroyed.
https://slate.com/technology/2004/06/why-did-david-reimer-commit-suicide.html “
How is this any different than the ancient practices outlined by Harris? Note that these “modern” progressive views are little different than the ancient views of these gods.
Molech will have to be gotten to in the next episode, but euthanasia and abortion are representative of the practices of Molech.
Take heart though, through love and grace, behind the Truth, we can be the restraining influence on our culture. We only need to be equipped with the truth.
https://www.ucg.org/beyond-today/beyond-today-magazine/gender-blurring-in-pagan-worship
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Baal-ancient-deity