In 1977 British journalist William Rees-Mogg saw that the West had lost its faith, and like a fish out of water or a drowning man was,
"...desperately thrashing around for lack of oxygen. Since the time of Christ there has been no period in which there has been the same feeling of...spiritual impoverishment." (Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg, p. 2)
Thirty-six years later, but for a faithful remnant, Christendom is dead and America's idolatrous, nihilistic post-Christian culture and narcissistic postmodern church are quickly following suit. While there are as yet many faithful churches, priests, evangelists, distinguished Christian laypeople and missionaries here in America and around the world proclaiming Christ crucified for the sins of all men and fulfilling their vocations with humility and integrity, the culturally-relevant church of "what's happening now," the contemporary Church consisting of trendy, disaffected Roman and Eastern Orthodox Catholics and 'new' Protestant evangelicals practice a spirituality that is Christian in name only, a spirituality that is trivial, irreverent, self-affirming, fun-loving, irrelevant, and permissive to the point of practicing abortion:
"…the practice of abortion by Christians is spiritual prostitution to an idol, defiles God's sanctuary and profanes His holy name. God alone is the Author of life and it is not the creature's prerogative to question the Creator's wisdom in bringing to life a fellow human being at conception. Whenever men disregard their Creator's wise judgment by destroying His innocent creation, they are serving another god. They are, in fact, spiritually prostituting themselves to the idolatrous self whom they believe is wiser in its value judgments." (Abortion and the Ancient Practice of Child Sacrifice, Andrew White, MD, 1/5/2012, Associates for Biblical Research)
What the faithful remnant have not forgotten but our narcissistic secular culture and culturally relevant church has, is that whoever keeps God's commandments loves God (John 14:21) while the reverse is true for those who do not:
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind: and thy neighbour as thyself." Luke 10:27
The end of the commandment is charity (love) from a pure heart, a good conscience and unfeigned faith. (1 Thess. 1:5) He that loves his neighbor fulfills the law for he does not lie, commit adultery or murder, nor does he steal, bear false witness (i.e., slander, gossip), and covet/envy.
Charity works no evil. It is not perversely puffed up with pride. It is not ambitious, does not serve ‘self,’ it thinks no evil, does not covet and neither rejoices in another man's misery nor derides truth and virtue as the envious do:
“When men are full of envy, they disparage everything, whether it be good or bad.” (Publius Cornelius Tacitus)
“Nothing sharpens sight like envy.” (Thomas Fuller, British clergyman and writer, 1608-1661)
“Pride is seldom delicate, it will please itself with very mean advantages; and envy feels not its own happiness, but when it may be compared with the misery of others.” (Samuel Johnson, British poet, critic, writer, 1709-1784)
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” (Winston Churchill, British orator, author and Prime Minister during World War II, 1874-1965)
"When I say that Marxism is based on envy, I mean that the glorious revolution of the proletariat...was really a promise to put a final end to all the conditions that make for envy." (Joseph Epstein, author and former editor of The American Scholar, from Truths about Socialism, Coral Ridge Ministries, p. 66)
Envy/covetousness is the principle of negation and rebellion in the fallen soul of every man and woman and has played a part in human dynamics ever since the envy-bitten Cain murdered his brother Abel.
Dorothy Sayers, who translated Dante's Inferno where pride and envy were punished in the lowest part of hell called envy 'the great leveler.' At its worst,
"...it is a destroyer---rather than have anyone happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together." (ibid, p. 66)
Dante described the lowest part of Hell as ice. Interestingly it was "clear cold fire" that Alice Baily saw as she came ever closer to the Hierarchy (spirit masters) by way of transcendental meditation. Baily preferred 'self' to God and other people and is one of the important contributors to the concepts and language of the New Age movement, a modern mixture of occultism, spiritism, eastern mysticism, subjectivism (everyone invents their own truth), philosophical monism (ultimate one substance), pantheism (everything is god) and self-centeredness.
Baily was an apostate Christian who negated the living supernatural triune God, heaven, hell and substitutionary atonement. She viewed other people as dehumanized 'vehicles,' taught that Christ's Kingdom is of this world, asserted her own divinity, embraced evolutionary conceptions, eugenics, abortion, revolutionary violence, communism and socialism.
As she approached the Hierarchy (or lowest part of Hell), she said,
"...darkness is pure spirit" and each "contact with the Initiator leads the initiate closer to the centre of pure darkness---a darkness which is the very antithesis of darkness...It is a centre or point of such intense brilliance that everything fades out and at the place of tension, and at that darkest point (we) see a point of cold clear fire." (False Dawn: The United Religious Initiative, Globalism, and the Quest for a One-World Religion, Lee Penn, p. 283)
The Decalogue shows that the beginning of envy is pride (preference for self over God and neighbor), since a proud man or elite group of men (i.e., Cain, Alice Baily, Karl Marx, Obama, global power complex) make idols out of themselves, thereby assuming they possess honor and rights. This is why pride leads to contempt for truth, law, wisdom, norms, authority, standards, rules, institutions and other people in combination with any or all of the following: lying, treachery, gluttony, greed, covetousness, lust, hate, cheating, promiscuity, sadism, sodomy, pederasty, pedophilia, adultery, theft and the dehumanization of other people resulting in psychological and physical slavery, population control schemes, abortion, brutality, terror, murder and even mass-murder or genocide.
In many respects, modern Americans and Western Europeans are the unwitting dupes and serfs of a coalition of monstrously envious/covetous elitist international bankers and corporatists, a global power complex that for over a century has been stealthily preparing its’ serfs to submit to a totalitarian socialistic world order that requires the liquidation of millions of people.
In his opus, “Tragedy and Hope,” Dr. Carroll Quigley deliberately reveals the existence of this leviathan of political and economic power poised to seize control of the planet. Right from the start said Quigley, the complex has been controlling and manipulating Left-wing groups:
“…the power that….Left-wingers exercised was never their own power or communist power but…the power of the international financial coterie.” (Tragedy and Hope, p. 954)
Karen Hudes, a former insider at the World Bank affirms Quigley’s claim. She reports that a treacherous global financial system dominated by a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve dominate the pillars of America's government and control the media to cover up its crimes:
"What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group,” she explained, adding that the “corrupt power grabbers” have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.” (World Bank Insider Blows Whistle on Corruption, Federal Reserve, Alex Newman, New American, 22 May 2013)
Hudes, an attorney who spent some two decades working in the World Bank’s legal department, has observed the machinations of the criminal network up close:
“I realized we were now dealing with something known as state capture, which is where the institutions of government are co-opted by the group that’s corrupt... The pillars of the U.S. government — some of them — are dysfunctional because of state capture; this is a big story, this is a big cover up.” (ibid)
Like Karl Marx and Alice Bailey, the individual ‘power grabbers’ have made idols out of themselves and are fueled by envy/covetousness and thoughts of death on a global scale.
Like Karl Marx and Alice Bailey, the individual ‘power grabbers’ have made idols out of themselves and are fueled by envy/covetousness and thoughts of death on a global scale.
Envy/covetousness is a major theme in the Law, Psalms, Prophets and New Testament. Scripture combines envy with pride, covetousness and selfishness into a single manifestation of idolatry of self and belief that there isn't enough 'good' to go around, hence the idolater’s burning compulsion to destroy by way of gossip, slander, ridicule, scorn and destructive criticism the good name and spiritual virtues of people who are the objects of envy as well as to consolidate all goods (i.e., recognition, honor, status, privilege, wealth, natural resources) into the hands of one or a privileged few.
Envy/covetousness ultimately leads to abortion (child sacrifice) and other forms of murder including genocide. Among the self-serving social elite of Punic Carthage for example, the institution of child sacrifice may have assisted in the consolidation and maintenance of family wealth, of eliciting favors from the gods, and as a convenient way of disposing of unwanted and illegitimately conceived babies.
In 1921 the largest cemetery of sacrificed infants in the ancient Near East was discovered at Carthage. Hundreds of burial urns filled with the cremated bones of infants, mostly newborns but even some children up to six years of age were uncovered at Carthage. All of the victims had been burned to death on the altars of self-serving idolatrous men and women.
The actual rite of child sacrifice at Carthage has been graphically described by Diodorus Siculus:
"There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire." (Abortion and the Ancient Practice of Child Sacrifice, Andrew White, MD, 1/5/2012, Associates for Biblical Research)
Plutarch, a first and second century A.D. Greek author, adds to the description:
"...the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people." (ibid)
Church Father Tertullian condemns child sacrifice, saying that no matter how it is rationalized, it is still murder:
"....murder is once for all forbidden; so even the child in the womb, while yet the mother's blood is still being drawn on to form the human being, it is not lawful to destroy. To forbid birth is only quicker murder. It makes no difference whether one take away the life once born or destroy it as it comes to birth. He is a man, who is to be a man, the fruit is always present in the seed." (Tertullian, Apologeticus IX.- 6, 8)
Today our land is being filled with the blood of innocent babies, spilled not on the altars of Cronus, but in butcher shops run by men like Kermit Gosnell, the executioner who murdered the unwanted and illegitimately conceived babies of self-serving Americans.
The beginning of idolatry is pride (or self-esteem), which together with selfishness demonstrates preference for one's self instead of God and neighbor (and unwanted babies), and just as no violation of the Law can occur without one first being an idolater, envy/covetousness and murder are its' final results, for where ‘self’ is primary then ‘self’ deserves everything it can get, no matter the cost to other people.
Envy/covetousness will even drive men so far as to conceptualize the murder of God (theocide) as exemplified by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Teilhard de Chardin and Alice Baily.
In "Death by Envy," Fr. George R.A. Aquaro points out that Christ's earthly ministry centered on convicting the world of idolatry by provoking people (represented by the Pharisees) to envy and then murder. By becoming the scapegoat, Jesus Christ allows mankind to place their sins upon Him so that we might repent at the sight of His blood. (p. 101)
The tragedy of the fall is that man has lost his introspection. Judas had no hope of looking within himself and seeing his own personal envy which inevitably destroyed him. The Cross is thus a messenger of mankind's envy/covetousness and murderous intentions. Therefore we are obliged to search ourselves for envy and its root cause, idolatrous self-centeredness, and repent of them because,
“Look, I am coming soon! Says the Lord. My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.” (Rev. 22:12-16)
Everything that has been thought, said and done will be revealed. There is nothing "covered that shall not be revealed; nor hidden that shall not be known" (Luke 12:2) and just as it is "...appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment" (Heb. 9:27) so there will be eternal life in Paradise for those who love God and have kept His commandments but for those who have done evil, whose "hardness and impenitent heart” has treasured “up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God...for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger." (Rom. 2:5)
For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but delivered them, drawn down by infernal ropes to the "cold clear fire" of lower hell, unto torments, to be reserved unto judgment (2 Pet. 2:4) then He shall say to all idolaters that shall be on his left hand:
"Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels." Matthew 25:41
@Linda Kimball