Smart as the Devil
A reader with the rotational but secure name of Lugnut asks, “Slightly strange question: Can the Devil get smarter with time? It sometimes appears that way, as the 20th century was the worst on record for number of deaths and the 21st isn’t shaping up to be better…”
No professional theologian is foolish enough to address this question, so a professional fool such as myself must boldly answer: No, I believe the Devil gets stupider with time, because sin darkens the intellect.
The 20th Century was when the West turned its collective back on the Church, and God gave hell one hundred years to work its will on us.
Consider the wild promises of a scientific secular utopia. The Victorians fondly imagined a socialist economy run by experts, peopled by eugenically bred supermen, and a host of nudists and vegetarians, and serviced by women made temporarily sterile by contraception, so our maidens could act like the houri of the pornographic paradise imagined by the Mohammedans, and our wives shared in common.
When the daydream of socialist utopia fell in disfavor, and eugenics stained by the legacy of Nazism, a new daydream was proffered, one where iron laws and zealous thought-police, not God, makes all men brothers, and racism was eliminated. Ironically, the need for racists to defeat outstripped the supply, and so had to be invented. The movement for sexual liberation was, of course, liberation from chastity. It was liberation into the chains and cages of fornication, infidelity, rape-culture, me-too, and abortion. The curse of abortion requires the abandonment of reason (for reason condemns infanticide) and the abandonment of reason leads to logical absurdities as sodomy celebrated as a marital sacrament, civil rights used to crush Christian pastry cooks, and crossdressers and castrati competing in women’s athletics.
The Twentieth Century whored after other gods than God. As with the conquests by Babylon, Persia, Greek and Roman, the unfaithful in Israel reaped the whirlwind.
So it is now. It seems to me that we only see these events close at hand, touching our noses, so to speak, and do not realize the folly of sacrificing children to Moloch in high groves, or erecting whorehouses as Temples to Aphrodite or Ashtoreth, which the Sons of Israel did.
But the lies told by Moloch and Ashtoreth was that the spirit world was peopled by powerful gods willing to answer prayers and grant fertility in return for the sacrifice of precious things, children in the one case, virginity in the other. Since the spirit world is real, and sacrifice is real, and prayers being answered are real, the falsehood is actually rather subtle, and even a heart as wise as Solomon could be snared into idolatry.
But the lies told by the Moloch of Planned Parenthood include that human infants are not human infants. The lies told by the Ashtoreth of LBTQ& include that males are not male and female not female. Because these are blatant and obvious contradictions of the common sense and of the five senses, this is a special form of falsehood known as “gaslighting” which is the demand that the victim ignore his own knowledge and certainty, and instead place faith in a lie that is known to be a lie.
This is a far, far stupider lie than the promise that sleeping with a temple prostitute grants favors from devils. That seems like a rational transaction by way of contrast.
I do not think the Devil was any smarter when Vespasian burned Jerusalem or Nebuchadnezzar pulled down the First Temple than the Devil is now, when the Elite of West burned burned the US Constitution and pulled down the statues of our heroes.
But I do think the Twentieth Century fled further and ever further away from God in its vanity and pride, and ran so far into the darkness that all sense and sense of reason was lost.
So, no, Twentieth Century or no, the Devil is not smarter. We are stupider.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
