One great thing about a nation which champions freedom of speech is that everyone has a chance to give their opinion. Paradoxically, one drawback of free speech is that everyone has a chance to give their opinion.
In a perfect world freedom of speech would be a great blessing. It would enrich a nation. It would inform, enlighten and encourage. It would be an expression of universal love and care. However, unless you’re a determined-no-matter-what-the-evidence-is kind of humanist, you know our world is far from perfect. In fact, it’s fallen so far from light and love that God’s diagnosis of it is accurate to anyone with open eyes: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9 KJV).
In a fractured world unity is impossible – that’s my view and I’m not ashamed to say it. Unity can only be achieved when everyone thinks the same way – either by brainwashing or coercion – neither of which involve true freedom. Refer to my post on Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”. Once someone’s view is forced on us all, perhaps in the form of extreme wokeness, minds and words are being crushed and books burned. Banning freedom of speech or having the government control it would be as bad as or worse than allowing it free reign. There’s really no good solution to the problem, besides individual self-control and the application of God-given conscience in reference to the word of God, but these things are discouraged in the twenty-first century West.
From an early age most of us have to learn to keep our mouths shut at certain times. We have thoughts we shouldn’t have and were we to just let them out in words our mothers or our teachers or the police would roast us on the spot. Families, mothers and teachers are-or were- the guardians of propriety and sanity. Dads were also once involved in the process. They convicted, sanitized and directed. They applied conscience in an organized, predictable way, and they instructed and controlled to ensure a reasonable world for us all to live in. Unfortunately, some of the guardrails of sanity have been dismantled over recent decades, so that in the world of politics, where we all live whether we like it or not, propriety and sanity are being thrown on the garbage heap.
Politeness, respect and honor were once safeguards against misrepresentation and vilification. In humanity’s better times the mouth was kept in check. The times and places where these safeguards failed in the past saw horrific consequences: Nazi Germany;, Bolshevik Russia, Pol Pott’s “killing fields” and the Islamic Guard’s Iran are just a few examples of the many. Human nature tends towards intense, almost unbounded evil, unless the tongue is controlled and the mind is bridled and educated to care for others.
Yesterday a favorite Youtuber of mine shared a clip of a well-known female political commentator venting her dark mind to vast numbers of followers. Not content with blaming tiny Israel and so Jewry for all the ills of the world, she was suggesting – seriously – that the wife of Charlie Kirk may be a cyborg. When someone abandons respect, logic and self-control he or she is capable of inflicting almost any level of insult or even atrocity just by the power of his mouth – along with anyone who pays attention to him. In the world of politics, whatever your leaning you can’t help seeing that the spokesmen and women who helped Trump and MAGA get elected are now intentionally attacking MAGA’s foundations and threatening to destroy the very movement they were a part of just a couple of years ago. How can any civilization prosper with such incontinence?
Stepping back a little, what the lucid observer of our world sees is division and the destruction of sanity. logic and truth, and if we ask ourselves who could successfully attack and even destroy the United States besides God the only answer is, “Americans”.
Standing back a little farther, we can easily match those destructive tendencies with the enemy of our souls. Jesus himself told us that Satan has come to rob, kill and destroy, and what we see, on both sides of the political spectrum, is a large number of people working to rob, kill and destroy. The devil’s major tactic – his modus operandi – is deception. Deception destroys, either by division or failing that, by herding everyone in one direction like the proverbial lemming over a cliff edge. I see both taking place in the Western world.
The evil proceeding from the mouths of certain spokesmen and politicians seems illogical if we attribute it to human thought only. Israel rules the world including the United States? Really? Where have we heard such impossible nonsense before, besides the rantings of men like Adolph Hitler, who subsequently set out to annihilate an entire race of people?
Revelation speaks of earth-shaking change in which the controls which keep us in relative safety are removed, and here we see that the originating source of hatred and destruction is the devil himself. I’m not saying that any podcaster or commentator is consciously in league with Satan, but that Satan is the great deceiver of our time, leading all those who are not consciously driven by the word of God:
Fuel for Faith, Food for Thought 