The evil men do

It’s all based on lies

As humanity moves steadily, if slowly, toward overcoming limitations of time and space; as we learn to defeat the deceptions of physical pain and pleasure with spiritual dominion; as we move closer to understanding how truth can never be hidden because God is Truth; still there are those who work against progress by materializing the idea of life, as if financial riches is the gold medal of existence, as if greed, hate, lust and other degeneracies are the engines of power, as if the war of good versus evil is to be fought on battlefields of policy and politics, threats and promises, without realizing that the real battle must be fought in our own thought, where it must finally end in proof of the infinite power of good and the absolute powerlessness of evil.

That proof is where we are headed now. Men (yes, largely men) and their governments have launched and lead aggressive attempts to prove matter and evil to be the supreme powers of the universe, ignoring the cries of their fellow beings while amassing more power and wealth for themselves. Yet, we keep rising. As former broadcast journalist and now political commentator Terry Moran put it a few days ago:

It’s Easter Sunday, the most joyful day in the Christian calendar.

And it’s springtime, for real. After a hard winter here in the Mid-Atlantic, spring has burst into a special glory.

In the faith of countless millions, and in the natural world given to all, this is a time of renewal, rebirth, and the return of life after darkness.

It doesn’t feel like it much, maybe. These days. There are shadows looming over our time—the shadow of war, the shadows of lies, of mindless rage, of authoritarianism extending over many lands.

And all of this creeping, oppressive pall can seem overwhelming. It is hard for a lot of people to find the joy in this season, or on any given day. It’s hard for many of us to escape the feeling that we live in a time of darkness.

And yet.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Last week I wrote about letting events sort themselves out as the aggressions of certain governments continue. We now have some kind of cease-fire between Iran and the United States. No matter what the underlying terms of the agreement show – whether the threat of war is over or just paused, whether the world is worse or better off – the challenge we are dealing with is not of governments or militaries. The challenge is mental, and it needs to be seen as such in order for us to emerge safely from these times.

Journalist Claire Berlinski calls it “the war for our minds.”

Hostile states, and state-adjacent actors, are attacking our cognition. They are waging war on our social trust, our attention, the legitimacy of our political systems, our perception, our understanding of narrative and fact, and ultimately, our decision-making. And they’re winning.

Moscow and its governing elites, emerging from the KGB-trained elites of the Soviet Union, are engaged in a multi-front war of mental manipulation against nations far and near. As Bianka Banova, a Bulgarian-born analyst, puts it in her perceptive Substack, Waronomics:

Russia measures influence operations in generations, not election cycles. It’s something that our cyclical democratic societies simply cannot comprehend. A narrative planted today may not be harvested for twenty years. A cultural shift engineered in a university system this decade produces political leaders two decades from now. This is patient, industrial-scale psychological engineering with long-term planning horizons.

And this war of mental manipulation can lead to actual war, which is where you and I come in. One of the most astute commentators on war and peace, Janessa Gans Wilder, founder of The Euphrates Institute, sees clearly that the primary responsibility for combating the lies behind war falls on us. As she said in a recent video:

Every war is based on a lie. This is what I remember...learning during my 21 months as a CIA officer. And the lie is separation, that we have to believe that there is an us and a them, that some lives are more important than others.... We keep getting pulled into this myth of separation, of division and fear and othering. And so today let’s just stay alert to when that lie of separation takes hold in our minds before it starts to take shape in our relationships, in our politics, in our communities, in our institutions. Because separation is the lie, not the truth.

There are many people of goodwill in the world, people who understand that their purpose in life is to live truly and love fervently. There are also people, including some world leaders, who use lies as weapons to fight evil with greater evil. We cannot be hesitant about which side we are on. What is happening with war and the threat of war is terrible, but the real problem is the lies behind it all. Lying is the animating force not only of wars but of all evil. In fact, to carry this to its logical conclusion, evil itself is a lie – the lie that there is another power besides God, infinite good. Christ Jesus, who proved by overcoming death that he understood life better than anyone in history, called evil “a liar” with “no truth in him.” He also called evil a “murderer from the beginning.”¹

National leaders who depend on lying to attain and retain power are murderers of humanity’s goodness. They do not deserve our respect, no matter what titles and weapons and off-ramps from war they give themselves. The evil they do has no real power, and our job is to prove it wherever we can.

Be not afraid.

1. John 8:44