Which God?

Sheeple are easily confused by incoming data. Whether you count yourself one of them isn’t the point, though. To some degree, we are all vulnerable to manipulation. It is my pastoral duty to remind my readers of things which are obvious, but so easily lost in this Western world.
Following Christ means rejecting the world, particularly the worldview of the West. The Western worldview assumes there is no God, at least in terms of whether it makes any difference in how we act. The whole question behind epistemology is not, “What can we know?” It’s “What can we know such that we can act on it?” In the West, human achievement is god. Any human achievement will do; we have a whole pantheon.
There is an often unspoken assumption that there is nothing in this universe man can’t work out eventually, in terms of what we can do about it. The vast majority of Western Christianity is a sucker for this line, such that we have a huge number of Christians insisting faith is, or can be, reasonable. That’s a lie of Satan, but try to get them to stop saying it. Faith is inherently unreasonable if you are working in the Western intellectual context. Faith makes the most preposterous demands on your behavior.
Let’s break this up into samples.
Economics: The fundamental assumption of all economics discussion is the unquestioned value of material prosperity. In biblical terms, Mammon is god. You simply cannot enter into a discussion of the subject unless you acknowledge this. With few exceptions, the entire range of academic and even polemical literature on the subject is all about the best way to gain material prosperity on various scales. The very moment you mention the idea there may be anything more important than material prosperity, you are lucky if all they do is dismiss you and marginalize your position. Morality is defined as more stuff.
Science: I realize it’s dangerous to characterize the whole field because there are way too many subjects under that word. Still, it’s pretty plain the underlying god is man’s intellect. Given enough time and data, there is no reason man cannot decide everything and anything in this universe. So, for example with genetic manipulation: There is no reason we can’t study this and figure out how to make the most of our opportunities with designing natural processes to suit our wishes. At least, so says the average commentary by those who promote boundless inquiry in science. Even in the field of pharmacology, there is no recognition of sane limits on manipulating humanity with chemical inputs. Kill all the sacred cows and dissect them. We have to buy the notion that there’s nothing wrong with giving someone the ultimate power over every process in this universe.
Meanwhile, all of this adds up to saying, in effect, you and I have don’t have permission to decide things for ourselves based on some other moral value system. Most of what you read in the mainstream press is carefully designed to manipulate, to negate your freewill choice. Not just take it away, but to characterize the very idea as evil. Virtually the entire range of political debate assumes you will want to side with one or the other, when both are specifically designed to render you powerless before someone else, someone who certainly doesn’t love Jesus. Even so-called factual debunking of Urban Mythology is often itself nothing more than manipulative propaganda, because it assumes the same basic premise behind the whole thing: You can’t possibly want certain things or you have to be labeled “evil.” For example, were you aware Snopes is most vehemently on the side of progressive-liberal politics?
So let’s restate the ultimate heresy of Western Civilization: There was a moral value system already in place before humans ever arose, and the entire universe operates from it. Worse, that moral system is alive, not static and objective. Worst of all, it’s more than any human can comprehend, and requires on-going dependence on the Creator who keeps the moral system alive. And finally, the unthinkable: This universe and our existence in it is not really all that important in the first place.
The hardest job I have as a pastor is helping people break the conditioning, the vast matrix of lies to which we all turn by reflex. Getting people to stop that, to turn on their moral sensitivity and start filtering things they read, is really a monumental task. Most people simply cannot break the ingrained patterns of thought, and that’s why we end up with a vast ocean of false Christianity — people keep reading the Bible through the lenses of Western assumptions about reality. Their mental reflexes are primed for distraction, so that they get wound around the spindle on political bullshit instead of thinking about what would bring Christ glory.
Virtually everything we’ve been taught to believe is a lie.