This page continues from a section lifted out of an entry titled » The Darkness Didnt Get It (19 June 2021).
It is a sad, depressing topic to address. Time and again scripture talks about evil forces who deceive the unwitting, who also deceive themselves.
It says a lot of things that would make me very uncomfortable if I were them. And I told them as much.
Scripture says, you know, that God sends a powerful delusion on those who reject the truth.
They repeatedly dismissed my concerns, so I feel as though I genuinely tried to help. I feel like I tried to warn them about perils spelled out so plainly in the scriptures for those on that path.
You know what they say about leading a horse to water.
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Unfortunately my concerns were all quickly dismissed in short order without a second thought. (I bet Paul knows what I am talking about.)
» You Clowns Should've Listened to Me Back in Crete and Taken My Advice When I Warned You that I Could See This Trip Would Get Ugly
Notice what Paul says later in this same chapter to these same people (paraphrase on):
"Your dumb-asses should've listened me when I warned you not to leave Crete .. when I told you that I could see that this trip would get ugly. Then you wouldnt find yourself in this life-threatening catastrophe that we find ourselves in right now."
My point here is to say that, in my reading of the scriptures, it quickly became clear to me that the believer wants to be on guard against deception of all kinds.
The basic function of the believer, as I see it, is to dig-for-the-truth like you are digging for buried treasure .. and to reject-the-lies like you would reject a bucket full of poisonous snakes from the devil himself.
No? (I feel like I am merely stating the obvious here.)
» This Sort of Hard-to-Believable Mass Delusion of Cult Followings is Far from Uncommon and has been Researched in Great Depth Many Times
In 2015, Alex Gibney produced an outstanding, Oscar-winning documentary on Scientology titled » Going Clear. Subtitled » The Prison of Belief.
The documentary interviews many people who mirror many of the very same patterns that you find in the thinking and in the mindset of the most ardent Q-Anon conspiracy theory devotees.
It's a horrible feeling because you feel incapable of helping someone see even the most self-evident of truths.
» The Masses have Never Thirsted After Truth
Here is a 20-min video titled » Mass Psychosis - How an Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill (3 Aug 2021) .. which talks about the exact same phenomena that I am describing here.
Gustav Le Bon knows what I am talking about.
» Dostoevsky's Novel Titled Demons is a Book About How People Become Possessed by the Bizarre Ideas of an Ideology
Dostoevsky's novel titled » Demons (1872, 733 pgs) is a startlingly accurate portrayal of possession by ideology. Its biting prose tears into the many 'isms' that haunt the modern world.
It employs the concept of Evil Ideas infecting the minds of the unwitting, and of Evil Intentions commandeeering the thought-processes of the weak-minded .. as being analogous to demonic possession.
The tile of this book is sometimes rendered » The Possessed. But either way, you can see where he is going with this.
Demons (1872) was Dostoevsky's last major work published in the Russian Messenger before he launched into his final work » The Brothers Karamazov (1880) ..
.. which has been touted as » One of the supreme achievements in world literarture .. by folks who are actually qualified to make such a statement.
In 2018, I wrote an entry titled » Escaping Self-Deception (14 Sept 2018). So the topic has long interested me.
» Post-Dating to the Cool Sequential 19-20-21
It probably means nothing to anybody but me, but I actually posted this page live on Tuesday, the 17th of August.
Even thought I post-dated this entry for the upcoming 19th, because of the cool, sequential date found there » 19 Aug 2021.
» And Here We Are
As you already know if you are reading this, the 19th has arrived. I knew it would.
Today has been an unusual day for me.
I wanted to come over here and write about (document) my explorations in this unusual thing that I found myself in today.
But first I had to do this other thing over at a page titled » The Apocalypse Arrives a Full Decade Ahead of Schedule Thanks to the Diligent Efforts of Climate Denialists (Friday-the-13th of August).
There is definitely something unusual going on. Something I have never felt before.
The thing I wrote on the other page was about how » the much-touted apocalypse is actually a grand revelation where all becomes clear to even the most willingly self-deluded of souls.
Before this writing excursion that I did over at the Apocalypse page, I was writing here about how » Dostoevsky's novel titled Demons (1872) is a book about how people become possessed by the bizarre ideas of an ideology.
This is the end of this page. ■
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