Darrow Miller and Friends

Our Strange New World of Foolishness

  1. Humans Reject the Truth
  2. God Put the Invisible in Plain Sight
  3. Moral Creator, Moral Creation: Why Atheists Deny God
  4. To Reject God is to Dismiss Your Humanity
  5. Our Strange New World of Foolishness
  6. Worship God or Creation: The Great Exchange
  7. Life Brings Its Own Rewards
  8. Pagan Beliefs Produce Pagan Behaviors
  9. All Sexual Behavior Has Consequences
  10. The Defiance of Evil: Human Behavior Hits Bottom

In a famous quote, G.K. Chesterton defined foolishness: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.”

That is, “anything” as in “any thing, without discrimination.” The ability to discriminate is an acquired skill. An infant cannot distinguish himself from his mother. By age 2, the child has that figured out, but cannot discern between virtue and vice. Now, it looks like a whole segment of society cannot seem to recognize real differences between the sexes.

Just a few months ago, almost everyone understood that males use the men’s room, females the women’s. Now, confusion about this matter is all the rage. The media is pushing an agenda, individuals and companies are lobbying, and governments are creating laws permitting biological males to enter bathrooms, dressing rooms, and showers with women and little girls. Some legislatures are writing laws preventing businesses, schools, and other public venues from restricting opposite-sex use of their bathroom facilities.

The crown of the wise is their wealthThis is insanity, folly, and shame.

And yet … as foolish as this is, it’s not the root problem. The deeper issue is the nature of reality. What is real? Is there an objective world, or only the world of our imagination?

Today, facts are no longer important; narrative is all the rage. Subjective narrative replaces the hard truth of reality. At one time, the society was able to recognize truth. Today, we are blind to truth. God continues to reveal it, but we are insensible to that revelation. As Paul has argued, people suppress the truth.

We are no longer defined by our Creator, by the facts of our birth and biology. In this postmodern world we no longer identify ourselves in terms of sexuality – a biological term that defines reality, but in terms of gender – a word that is sociologically defined. We determine our own gender and we inscribe and sculpt our bodies to manifest that gender preference. (For more on this see my book Nurturing the Nations.)

A postmodern mantra is, “I do me and you do you!” In this hypertolerant society, you do not judge me and I will not judge you. I will be whoever I want to be and the same for you.

We have created a new world, a world free of facts and morals. And a curse be on anyone who is intolerant of this new world of ours.

As people suppress the truth of God’s existence, they also reject the hard facts of the reality He has created.

The foolishness is on full display thanks to a recent project produced by the Family Policy Institute of Washington. Click the video to see street interviews of postmodern students at the University of Washington straining to respond to a 5’9” Anglo male claiming to be a 6’5” Chinese female.

 
https://youtu.be/xfO1veFs6Ho&rel=0

Maricopa County banker Richard Hernandez has taken things even further. Hernandez, AKA Eva Baphomet Medusa the Dragon Lady, first changed into a transgendered “woman” and is now mutating into a “female dragon.”

dragon ladyI am the Dragon Lady, a pre-op M2F transgender in the process of morphing into a human dragon, becoming a reptoid as I shed my human skin and my physical appearance and my life as a whole leaving my humanness behind and embracing my most natural self awareness as a mythical beast. As for pronouns I prefer to be called “it” and not be referred to as a she or a her.

WELCOME TO OBLIVION!

HernandezIn this picture, taken before he declared himself a woman, Hernandez appears on the right with his son. Now he identifies himself as a female dragon.

Maybe the transgender movement will become passé. Maybe the new trend will be transspecies.

This is the staggering utopian world of our illusions. Beware, reader, of the temptation to laugh. Or snort. The matter is not trivial. Weep for Hernandez and his family. Tremble for the culture.

What will happen as the world loses its moorings and descends into chaos? What will be the cost in human suffering?

As we continue to unpack Romans 1, we come to verse 22, “Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”

Thinking themselves wise (the Greek sophos meaning wisdom, cultivated), they have become fools (the Greek mōrainō: become foolish, turn into inert substance, cause to become nonsense). In our post-Christian world, the words wisdom and foolishness are virtually gone from our vocabulary. When did you last hear anyone speak of wisdom? How often do you hear someone spoken of as foolish?

Wisdom is the moral application of truth. Folly is the suppression of truth for wicked purposes. These are discreet, real categories in a moral universe.

In recent history, intelligence has been valued over character. “He’s the smartest person in the room” is high praise indeed. It takes intellect to get into a modern elite university; character isn’t required.

We’ve all met smart people who are foolish. And those with little schooling who are, nevertheless, very wise.

In today’s postmodern and neo-pagan world, imagination is no longer moored to reality. Witness the tragic example of Richard Hernandez becoming Eva Baphomet Medusa the Dragon Lady.

Ours is a world without reason or morals, a world of nonsense and irrationality.

The prophet Isaiah warns of this unleashing of folly on the world.

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight!” (Isaiah 5: 20-21)

Postmoderns are too clever by half. They are turning the world upside down, actively promoting evil as if it were good and condemning those who would call it evil. They are creating an illusionary world, one without boundaries, that will lead only to suffering and despair.

DostoevskyThe great Russian novelist Feodor Dostoevsky, captures the conclusion of such foolishness in The Brothers Karamazov.

If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.

“Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.”

Woe to the neo-pagan ideologues in our universities and the media who promulgate this vision and thus condemn the lives of a generation. They are drawing the youth of the West from the moral and metaphysical order of the universe into postmodern foolishness and slavery.

As Ambassador Alan Keyes has reminded us:

We are going to have to find the courage one of these days to tell people that freedom is not an easy discipline. Freedom is not a choice for those who are lazy in their hearts and in their respect for their own moral capacity. Freedom requires that at the end of the day you accept the constraint that it requires – the respect for the laws of nature and nature’s God.

In short, suppression of the truth does not lead to a glorious, humane new world. It leads to foolishness and ultimately the dehumanization of people.

There’s no further excuse for ambiguity in the public square. This is a day for courteous but forthright challenge. We need to lovingly resist this fatal “tolerance” if we would arrest the flood of foolishness.

  • Darrow Miller

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About 
Darrow is co-founder of the Disciple Nations Alliance and a featured author and teacher. For over 30 years, Darrow has been a popular conference speaker on topics that include Christianity and culture, apologetics, worldview, poverty, and the dignity of women. From 1981 to 2007 Darrow served with Food for the Hungry International (now FH association), and from 1994 as Vice President. Before joining FH, Darrow spent three years on staff at L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland where he was discipled by Francis Schaeffer. He also served as a student pastor at Northern Arizona University and two years as a pastor of Sherman Street Fellowship in urban Denver, CO. In addition to earning his Master’s degree in Adult Education from Arizona State University, Darrow pursued graduate studies in philosophy, theology, Christian apologetics, biblical studies, and missions in the United States, Israel, and Switzerland. Darrow has authored numerous studies, articles, Bible studies and books, including Discipling Nations: The Power of Truth to Transform Culture (YWAM Publishing, 1998), Nurturing the Nations: Reclaiming the Dignity of Women for Building Healthy Cultures (InterVarsity Press, 2008), LifeWork: A Biblical Theology for What You Do Every Day (YWAM, 2009), Rethinking Social Justice: Restoring Biblical Compassion (YWAM, 2015), and more. These resources along with links to free e-books, podcasts, online training programs and more can be found at Disciple Nations Alliance (https://disciplenations.org).

4 Comments

  1. Megan Burmester

    June 20, 2016 - 7:52 pm

    Thank you for this eye-opening post. I feel challenged to speak the truth in wisdom and love but I must admit, the “tolerance” agenda snuck up on me and this post woke me up to the fact that I need to speak the truth. Just how to do that is the challenge. I do often talk about Imago Dei and the dignity of man but you mentioned the aspect that this kind of folly (choosing what gender/species one will be) is dehumanizing. Would you use that as an argument against this kind of thing?

    Thank you again for your wisdom and insight.

    Megan Burmester
    YWAM LA

    • admin

      June 21, 2016 - 6:04 am

      Megan
      It is so good to hear from you. The PC culture has abandoned the search for truth. When you abandoned truth, all you have is power and intimidation. PC cannot handle reality, they want to deal with illusions. And they want you and I to accept their illusions as “real.”
      Megan, you are correct to begin with the imago Dei. This is true, beautiful and compelling. To this I would encourage you to make the distinction between Truth and narrative, objective and subjective perspective on reality. In this instance reality is marked by biology and genetics. We are born male and female. This is true. This is what is real. In the post-modern world, there is no truth, only social construction. If I feel that I am female than I am female even if I was born, biologically, a male.
      In short, in addition to speaking of the Image of God, deal in reality, not illusions.
      Thanks, again for writing. Hope you are well and thriving.

      • Megan

        June 21, 2016 - 6:58 am

        Thank you so much for responding! I appreciate your wisdom. It makes sense to keep to reality, and not deal in allusions. I really do Thank you for your guidance in this troubling/heartbreaking time.

        And thank you for realigning me to truth.

    • admin

      June 21, 2016 - 6:16 am

      Andrea
      Thanks for your note. I agree that the West needs to wake up to the threat we face from Radical Islamic terrorists. And the political correctness of the current ruling class is only leading to the demise of the West as we have known it. I unpack these things in detail in my book “Emancipating the World: A Christian Response to Radical Islam and Fundamentalist Atheism: https://www.amazon.com/Emancipating-World-Christian-Response-Fundamentalist-ebook/dp/B007ZSPCS0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466514880&sr=8-1&keywords=Darrow+Miller+Emancipating+the+World.

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