The Mask of Zorro
A look at the ugly face of fake righteousness and the irrational and unjust extents to which it can go if it becomes a systemic order with authoritative power.
On April Fool’s Day last week, Scotland enacted what many are decrying as “one of the broadest and most shameless crackdowns on free speech in the Western world.”
Under the captaincy of Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousef and the radicalized-left Scottish National Party, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into effect on April 1; which, as per the article at Gateway Pundit:
“consolidates existing legislation and introduces new offences for threatening or abusive behaviour which is intended to stir up hatred based on prejudice towards characteristics such as age, disability, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity.”
According to the provisions of the law, now any person against whom any complaint is registered for “acts of hatred,” faces arrest, being charged with a criminally prosecutable offence and sentenced to a maximum penalty of 7 years’ incarceration.
With “acts of hatred” being so loosely and nebulously defined—and on the irrationally hysterical, disingenuously unjust and unjustifiable bases and motivations those of us with our reason still intact and functioning know and understand all too well—millions of Scots now face the manufactured and legislatively imposed reality of having to restrain themselves from publicly expressing opinions about the criminally lawless, the politically and ideologically misanthropic and the sexually depraved minorities among us who, nevertheless, hold a disproportionately significant amount of practically uncontestable political, economic and social power over all the rest of us.
Or get unceremoniously and mercilessly thrown in the slammer for 7 years.
As readers of this Substack are already aware, this isn’t a unique or isolated phenomenon in the rapidly disintegrating Western world. Yousef’s Scotland just happens to be the first to cross the finish line into actualization with it.
Because as we recently learned in “My Canada Includes Christians,” practically identical legislation is currently before the Canadian parliament and is most likely to be passed (without much effective debate or contest) by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s minority Liberal Party government, supported by the New Democrat Party with whom it’s formed a coalition by which to prevent the Conservative Party of Canada from effectively forwarding the legislative interests of the overwhelming majority of Canadians whom it represents.
The declared aim of these kinds of measures—which are, in essence and effect, undeniably draconian, intolerant, blatantly hypocritical and mercilessly punitive in proportion to the “offences” they claim to be aimed at relieving “us all” from having to suffer—is ostensibly to curb the rampant, vitriolic hatefulness with which so much of our current, public social intercourse is plagued, and the violence it so often instigates.
Their real, covert intent—again, as those of us with our reason still intact and functioning know and understand all too well—is to put a coercive muzzle on anybody who has anything in any slightest way (even if it’s only perceived) critical to say about the criminally lawless, the politically and ideologically misanthropic and the sexually depraved minorities among us who, nevertheless, hold a disproportionately significant amount of practically uncontestable political, economic and social power over all the rest of us.
Which is, in all truthfulness and candor, flabbergastingly ironic; because a significant majority of the vitriolic, violent hatefulness being zealously thrown out in public pronouncements and social media posts (from top-to-bottom of the political, economic and social hierarchy ladders), that we can all see and hear with our own eyes and ears, is coming from the very criminally lawless, the politically and ideologically misanthropic and the sexually depraved minorities among us, who claim the “revered” and unassailable status of “victims of oppression;” and who in all seriousness also insist on the mind-numbingly hysterical claim that any expressions—real or even perceived, and even if only mildly or tangentially—critical about them, are the “actual” “acts of violence and hatred” that can’t be “tolerated” and must be completely eradicated from our social being.
Along with all the people who make them.
And it’s all presented to us as a campaign rooted in the self-defined “morally superior righteousness” of the people presenting it all to us.
(Deep breath) Sigh...
So, how did what was once what now ironically appears to have been called “The Free World,” get to the brink of falling into the abyss of becoming an hysterically irrational-based, authoritarian police state?
There are, of course, myriad political, ideological, economic and religious explanations. But because this is Kentucky Fried Christian and not Kentucky Fried Geosociopolitical Analysis, what concerns us most as Christian believers is the interpretation of the phenomenon according to the truth contained in God’s holy, eternal and universal word, and what it has to tell us about it from his perspective.
In an early Substack titled “Virtue Signaling and the New Morality,” we examined the process by which fake virtue, feigned moral supremacism and over-the-top, hysterical righteous indignation have developed into the systemic expressions we see them to be in today’s world, culminating in the kinds of actions being taken by governments of all levels, with the proclivities that reflect the misanthropic irrationality that allows for that degree of un-self-aware, tone-deaf, irony-oblivious injustice.
In the recent “No Righteousness, No Peace” podcast, we put the lie to the type of feigned righteousness and its associated indignations demonstrated by those who express it, by examining how God’s word teaches, demonstrates with empirical evidence and thereby proves, that human-imagined righteousness is nothing but the impotent, empty, manufactured fantasy it is; because the only true righteousness there is comes from the only truly holy and righteous God of Heaven and Earth, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Father of the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah; who bestows his righteousness and holiness as a gift only on his faithful and obedient followers according to his holy, purely spiritual will.
If you haven’t read or listened to them (or if you have and need a reminder), I’d suggest them as invaluable companion pieces to this one, that together provide a comprehensive exploration of the issue.
Through the first effort, we examined and learned what fake righteousness is. Through the second, we learned why it is what it really is and why it isn’t—and can never be—what it says it is and pretends to be.
Today—in a commentative equivalent of not being able to take our eyes off a fatal traffic accident we crawl by on a jammed highway—we’re going to take a good gander at what it looks like.
The “righteousness”—upon which we’re told the hysterically incontinent, hateful, violent expressions and behavior we see associated with it by those who practice it, is both based and, therefore, in their twisted perceptions, wholly just and justified—that’s vainly imagined in the minds of the criminally lawless, the politically and ideologically misanthropic and the sexually depraved among us; and manufactured into the presumed and assumed “moral superiority” with which they claim they’re entitled to regulate the behavior of all the rest of us, over whom they’ve defined and designated themselves as “morally superior.”
That it’s vainly imagined and manufactured, is borne out by the truth that the very same people claiming to be righteous and morally superior to the rest of us (who, by definitive default, would therefore be, in comparison, the evil in the world they say needs to be eradicated), are also the same people who are behind emptying prisons and unleashing millions of murders, rapists, terrorists, thieves, child molesters and any other imaginable criminals, on society at large (or allowing them to flood illegally into our countries by the millions over unsecured and unregulated borders).
And when they inevitably commit the horrors they do and are committing with alarmingly increasing frequency, their “righteous and morally superior” proponents and supporters have systematized their impunity by measures like de-funding police services, eliminating bail requirements, refusing to charge for and prosecute crimes, or forbidding state and local authorities from arresting and deporting illegal aliens who commit serious criminal offences.
They’re also the same people—from their political podiums, cable news anchor desks, media conferences, social media accounts and through mass, violent, disruptive protests and other orchestrated acts of fabricated, indignant rage—express some of the most hateful, vitriolic sentiments and commit some of the most heinous and unjustified acts of violence any of us with memories long enough to know the score, could ever have imagined possible in an ostensibly civil society.
All that apparent “righteousness” is expressed in actually hateful misanthropy accompanied by hysterically incontinent rage and acts of violence, because—by nature and by enthusiastic choice devoid of any of the truthfulness and authenticity that can only be gained from the gift of God’s righteousness that isn’t our own—it’s fake righteousness to begin with.
Because righteousness is just the cover with which they’re disguising and disingenuously expressing their truly intended motivation: a visceral, incontinent hatred of anybody and anything that doesn’t conform with their own vainly imagined and conceived perceptions; as well as of anybody and anything that doesn’t validate and enthusiastically support the corrupt, unjust and perverted proclivities they seem to feel they’re entitled to express with impunity and without any judgment, consequence or accountability.
The judgment, consequence and accountability they convince themselves—and are desperately trying to convince the rest of us—is the “hatred” and “violence” that needs to be eradicated from the fabric of the society that’s being plunged into belligerent chaos by the very people acting in the very ways those same people claim we need to be eradicating.
While those they accuse of committing the “hateful” and “violent” acts that need to be eradicated, are for the most part just normal people minding their own business trying to live their lives, while being critical of the demonstrable and undeniable insanity being promoted, encouraged, committed and systematically imposed on society at large by the people claiming the moral high-ground over all the rest of us.
You really couldn’t make this up if you tried.
It’s pride-driven, hysterically incontinent childishness based on monumentally presumptive entitlement.
It’s the hurt feelings of people with sinfully proud perfection complexes, who become enraged at the slightest suggestion that there may be something objectively wrong with anything they may say, do or present themselves as being; coupled with the sociopathically narcissistic interpretation that anybody who dares make any such suggestion is expressing violent hatred that needs to be liquidated, along with its proponents.
It’s the unhinged belief—rooted in delusionally derived pride and juvenile immaturity—that the more hysterically and uncontrollably enraged one becomes about something, is empirical evidence of the seriousness and genuineness of their “moral superiority.”
It’s feigned righteousness that’s the disingenuous disguise for bald-faced hatred, intolerance and spiritual and social arrested development.
It’s the mental and emotional meltdown expressed by people with pride-induced, vain imaginations of themselves and their perceptions of the world, humanity and life, the universe and everything, when the reality that in no way conforms to their fantasies, slaps them in the brain with the cognitive dissonance between the fantasies they believe to be truth, and the reality that actually is, and that bears no resemblance to their fairy tale fabrications.
It’s Satan convincing millions of people their profane sinfulness is actually their virtuous superpower; that their permissiveness towards, encouragement and enthusiastic practice of sinfulness with impunity is a sign of their morally-superior open-mindedness and inclusivity; that their hysterical incontinence is actually their righteous indignation, and; that any suggestion to the contrary is merely the judgmental hatred of the “intolerantly hateful, violent and anti-social.”
All being expressed and trying to be imposed and applied as a social consciousness they hope will lead to the creation of a social order based upon it all.
All that fake righteousness—combined with the sociopathic pride that drives it, and the conscience in everybody that constantly reminds us all of the wrongness of some of the things we do, regardless of whether we care to admit it—naturally and inexorably leads to exactly the kind of irrational, hysterical, hypocritical and un-self-aware hatred that we all see on our TV screens, social media feeds and in real life all around us.
Because it’s not real in the first place. It’s fake. It’s assumed. It’s empty of any truth and filled with only the lies and delusions promoted by the vainly imagined “moral superiority” of humans with sinful natures that, unchecked by the regulating presence of God’s word and will in our lives, run rampant in virulent, hateful sinfulness while completely blinded to the truth, and to all the pain and suffering their proud posturing produces: on themselves, first; and on others even more tragically.
They convince themselves their incontinent anger is righteous. Yet they fail to realize it’s merely a manifestation of their own self-hatred, fueled by the dissonance between their fantasies and their consciences, and projected on targets wholly innocent of anything remotely associated with the “crimes” they claim are being committed against them.
They fail to realize the only real righteousness any of us can express isn’t our own, because our sinful natures nullify any true righteousness in anything we may do; and can only come in the gift we receive as the blessing any of us can get from the Lord when we declare our faith and trust in him, and get as a result of our faithfulness and obedience to his word and his will.
They fail to realize there’s no such thing as “hating for a good cause.” We can’t say we’re being righteous against evil while expressing that “righteousness” with what is demonstrable evil of our own.
In the first place, 1 John 2:9:
“Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. Anyone who loves their brother and sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble. But anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them.”
In the second place, 1 Peter 3:9-12:
“Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. For ‘Whoever would love life and see good days must keep their tongue from evil and their lips from deceitful speech. They must turn from evil and do good; they must seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.’”
In the third place, Mark 3:23-26:
“How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come.”
But, we also have to realize it’s the small minority of the wicked at the top of their food chain that dictates this to all the rest of their ignorant dupes, who fall for what they manipulate them into believing and expressing. As followers of the devil whose will they do in the world, the wicked appeal to the proud desire of the unaware for “moral superiority,” play on their sympathy and empathy while stoking their hatred; and that’s how they get millions of people to express the same kind of irrationally visceral hatred that’s driven every genocide in human history.
And—conveniently enough for them—it gives them every fabricated excuse they need to vent all that hatred on the people who disagree with anything about them; and especially on Christian believers, whose faithfulness and obedience to God and diligent calling out of sinfulness and hypocrisy, puts the lie to the fake righteousness of those who express it, and highlights with truth the real nature of what it is they’re really doing; which leads to even more of the hatred that drives the hysterical campaign of the wicked against them.
That creates a society comprising millions of living, ticking, schizophrenic time bombs with hair triggers, who can be detonated on command by the wicked elites mobilizing them into mass demonstrations against whatever target they happen to designate at any given time; in addition to their default setting of carefully cultivated and conditioned, hysterical incontinence.
So, given the dangers of this environment—and not only what it can do to us, but how it can influence us by drawing us into it with its powerfully hypnotic pull—what does the believer in the Lord, Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah, do? According to God’s holy righteousness and not man’s profane and perverted one?
Firstly, none of any of any of the above, that’s for sure.
Because Matthew 23 is an entire chapter in which the Lord Yeshua just roasts the Pharisees of his time for saying, doing and imposing as a system an equally fake righteousness to what we’ve described here, masquerading as proud, power-mad moral supremacism.
We’re told by the Lord himself in Revelation 22:11-12:
“Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy. Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done.”
Which essentially commands us to mind our own spiritual business and keep our own noses clean. While in Luke 6:27-28, the instructions are:
“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”
Because we’re the Lord’s servants, doing his will in the world, and God tells us in Ezekiel 33:11:
“As surely as I live, declares the Lord GOD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked should turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways!”
So he explains to us in verses :13-15:
“If I tell a righteous person that they will surely live, but then they trust in their righteousness and do evil, none of the righteous things that person has done will be remembered; they will die for the evil they have done. And if I say to a wicked person, ‘You will surely die,’ but they then turn away from their sin and do what is just and right—if they give back what they took in pledge for a loan, return what they have stolen, follow the decrees that give life, and do no evil—that person will surely live; they will not die.”
And by drawing them to God’s word and praying for them to repent, we increase the chances they will, thereby receiving the salvation from eternal damnation only the truly holy and righteous God’s love and grace can grant.
People playing at Holier Than Thou to satisfy their own proudly imagined illusions of themselves for clicks, likes and high-fives at the water cooler or out on the protest beat, are a disproportionately loud and ubiquitous presence, despite their minority actual numbers; we can see what the influence of their relentless, hysterically incontinent irrationality is turning this world and people into.
And one of the most important aspects of our mission as the Lord’s servants in the world, is to draw people to him, his light and life, and away from the darkness and death to which this kind of thought, feeling and behavior inexorably lead.
While not getting sucked into it ourselves.
Because fake righteous people these days are a dime a hypocritical, unsaved dozen, while Luke 15:7 assures us:
“...there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”
(Photo credits: amvenom via DiviantArt.com; joshtinpowers via Flickr; © 1940 20th Century Fox)
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Mark 3:23- strongly suggests exactly that Satan is *not* divided, and is running a pretty tight ship, everything considered. I refer to him as "the second best chess player in the universe". Not at all dumb, but not gonna win either.
(Revelation 12:12, AV) “...Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”
Buckle up, folks, and check your chin straps, if'n y'ain't already...