We live in an era when reality is being denied, when people no longer want to believe evidence and facts. Instead, people believe what makes them feel good, regardless of truth. The Bible predicted it would be this way:

The time will come when people will not listen to the true teaching but will find many more teachers who please them by saying the things they want to hear. They will stop listening to the truth and will begin to follow false stories (2 Timothy 4:3, 4 NCV).

This is the way of the liar, our ancient enemy who has used his method of deceit throughout human history to control and to destroy.

In the Dark Ages, the father of lies had his agencies in the church teach concepts that didn’t make sense, that were obviously contrary to how reality works:

• God is love—but if you don’t love Him, He will burn you in hell.
• You can save your loved one from suffering in purgatory if you give gold to the church—as if beings who live in some other sphere of reality are interested in the church getting more gold.
• It is a mortal sin to murder, but you can have your sins erased and receive eternal life if you go on a Crusade and kill people.

And then the enemies of love and truth used various coercive pressures to intimidate the masses to accept these falsehoods. If anyone stood up for truth and questioned the approved narrative, they were accused of heresy, ostracized, shunned, fined, removed from office, imprisoned, tortured, or killed.

And we are seeing these very same methods being employed in society today—falsehoods that deny reality being taught, that are contrary to evidence, contrary to how reality works, contrary to the truth. And if people dare to speak the truth, they are accused of “heresy” to the accepted narrative and are then ostracized and shunned on social media, deplatformed, censored, canceled, threatened, fined, fired from jobs, intimidated by mobs, arrested and imprisoned, and some even killed.

Isaiah wrote:

Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter (5:20 NIV84).

We are being inundated with messages that call evil good, that deny reality and promote a myriad of falsehoods as truth.

During the most recent Super Bowl, Logitech, a corporation best known for selling consumer electronics, ran a commercial that exalted as virtuous the denial of logic and the rejection of the evidence of history. Logitech isn’t the source of this destructive thinking; Logitech has merely crafted a commercial that appeals to the millions who already embrace this distorted thinking. Below is the text of that commercial:

We stand there in defiance; that’s right—we’re the makers, the groundbreakers; we’re the creators, the screamers, the dreamers; we defy expectations, perceptions, and misconceptions; we defy what logic says we should look like, sound like, be like; we defy genres, we defy algorithms and entire industries; see, we defy that little voice that says “Oh no we can’t” with a roar back that says “Oh yes we will,” because to create the future we must defy the logic of the past. WE MUST DEFY LOGIC (https://www.ign.com/videos/logitech-super-bowl-55-commercial-defy-logic).

What is the message? Logic isn’t helpful, and we can’t succeed unless we deny it. We can’t succeed in the future unless we defy the logic of the past. We must reject the logic of what history has to teach us; then we can become the makers and creators of logic and reality.

This is the way of those who hate truth, who don’t want to accept reality because all truth, all reality, exposes their views as false.

The God of truth, of history, of reality, instructs us to do just the opposite:

Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them (Deuteronomy 4:9 NIV84).

We are to remember history. Why? One of the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church said it beautifully:

We have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history (E.G. White, Christian Experience and Teachings, p. 204).

It is as we embrace truth, understand reality, and remember how God has delivered and led in the past that we can move forward without fear. The future doesn’t frighten those who love truth and trust God.

But what happens to our minds when we are disconnected from reality, from facts, from history, from logic? As fear goes up, love goes down. It is by denying truth, denying facts, and denying history that fear of the future increases—fear of economic collapse, climate change, global pandemics, overpopulation, etc. When we deny reality, when we let go the hand of God, the future is terrifying. And fear is the enemy of love!

Surely, we can see, just as Jesus predicted, that today the love of many grows cold (Matthew 24:12). Why? Because truth, history, and reality are being replaced with lies, which only incites greater fear.

God wants people to become mature, and such people are those who have developed by practice the ability to discern right from wrong (Hebrews 5:14). This means they have developed the ability to think for themselves, to differentiate facts from fiction—they understand how reality works.

But we live in the land of liars, whose leaders don’t want people to think, to discern; they want followers. They want people to believe mere claims, proclamations, declarations; they want people who can’t differentiate evidence and facts from fiction and fantasy.

Glen Greenwald, in a piece of journalistic excellence, exposed the myriad of lies promulgated by the media in the aftermath of the riot on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Two articles were published in the New York Times, followed by a non-stop media blitz on almost every news channel proclaiming that a U.S. Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick, was brutally murdered, beaten to death with a fire extinguisher, by pro-Trump demonstrators. This claim was touted by President Biden and used by the impeachment prosecutors who claimed Trump supporters killed law enforcement officers. Yet, none of this is true. The entire story of Mr. Sicknick being beaten to death by a mob with a fire extinguisher was fabricated, made up, false, untrue (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims).

Yet how many millions have accepted these false reports without ever questioning whether they were true or not? What happens to minds when they operate in this way? Why would millions of people believe a lie so quickly and easily? How is it that so many accept mere claims as evidence, accusations as truth, proclamations as facts? Because they have been conditioned to deny reality, to accept falsehoods, and to believe what someone in a position of authority says—just as they did in the Dark Ages.

This conditioning of our minds to accept lies as truth, to surrender our thinking to some authority or expert, has been going on for decades. Here and in part two, we will explore several examples of how we are being conditioned to stop thinking for ourselves.

Godless Evolution

Generations have now been taught the lie that life originated on its own without any intelligent input, without God. They are taught that it is scientific to believe this, that it is mature thinking, that to believe life spontaneously arose without an intelligent Creator is evidence of an advanced mind and a sign of wisdom. Young people are taught that to believe in God is evidence of a primitive mind—only the foolish, ignorant, or uneducated believe in God, they are told. They are taught that science has proven that life evolved on its own—it is a scientific certainty, they are assured. Yet the entire theory is false! A godless origin for life has been incontrovertibly proven to be false by irrefutable evidence, and it can be believed only by denying indisputable facts that reveal it to be a lie.

Life, in any form that we recognize as life, requires three elements: physical matter, energy, and coded information found in DNA or RNA. Godless views of the origins of life present theories as to how physical matter and energy might have arisen on their own and then, somehow by astronomical chance, formed into the various building blocks of life, such as DNA molecules. But it is impossible for such DNA molecules to arrange themselves, on their own, into the complex coded information necessary for life. Intelligent input is required.

Even if we were to grant the supposition that the DNA molecules did somehow form all on their own, which no science has ever demonstrated, it is a scientific certainty that the letters of this life-alphabet could never randomly arrange themselves into what is the equivalent of the Library of Congress. In other words, the coded information in the DNA of every living organism is proof positive of an intelligence that programmed and built life as we know it. And every scientist who is presented with this evidence knows it.

Yet all public schools, from elementary through university, all government research centers, all research funding programs, all peer-review journals—the entire scientific community—denies this evidence and continues to promote and teach the lie of a godless worldview.

And if an honest-of-heart scientist attempts to bring forth evidence that refutes godless evolution and supports an intelligent designer view—regardless of the pedigree of their education and the contributions they’ve made in their field—they are immediately branded as a “heretic,” ostracized, shunned, defunded, deplatformed, terminated from their position, have their research funding revoked, and are blackballed from any position in the future. In effect, their professional career is killed, and their character assassinated with mocking and ridicule.

The very same methods used by the Dark Ages church are used by those in “scientific authority” today on any persons who have the courage to present the truth of creation.

And what happens to the minds of people when they are taught to believe philosophies and theories that contradict the actual evidence and facts? It is not simply that they believe a lie about life’s origins; it is that their minds are conditioned to deny evidence—they become quick to believe claims and falsehoods coming from those in authority. Why? Because of the fear of retaliation. Under such threats, the mind becomes condition to avoid honest pursuit and understanding of the evidence and, instead, will embrace the false narrative in order to protect self, in order to feel secure. The critical reasoning powers that are meant to be exercised and developed become warped and trained to deny evidences that don’t fit the authorized view. Rather than becoming thinkers, people are conditioned to look to the powers in charge, the “authorities,” the professors, the experts, to tell them what to think. They shape and write their papers to fit the accepted orthodoxy, which further damages their ability to differentiate fact from fiction.

But such “experts,” having rejected the truth, the actual evidence and facts, have also damaged their own ability to discern and understand reality. They are blind guides leading the blind. And the minds of those who follow, rather than becoming mature thinkers, rather than developing their own discernment skills and gaining the ability to differentiate the right from the wrong, become less capable of thinking and more dependent on others to tell them what to think. This is exactly the same method of the Dark Ages church—deny evidence, reject truth, teach ideas that contradict the reality, and then ostracize, fine, and punish all who question the orthodox narrative.

But God doesn’t want your mind damaged. He wants to heal your mind, but this requires that you reject the methods of this world and embrace the methods of our Creator. If you want to become a mature Christian, then you must develop by practice the ability to discern the right from the wrong. This means that you must exercise your God-given abilities to think, reason, and then choose for yourself what you believe to be true.

It is only when we love truth, embrace reality, accept history, integrate scientific facts with inspired revelation and the experiences of life—how reality works—and think things through, choosing what we are convinced is right, that our minds grow, advance, and develop. This is how we become thinkers and not mere reflectors of other people’s thoughts. This is God’s vision for each one of us!

So, even though we live in the land of liars, I encourage you to become a lover of truth, to think for yourself, to apply God’s methods in your life, and exercise your own reasoning ability to examine the evidences and facts and come to your own conclusions.

Next, in part two, we will present three more modern-day issues for you to examine, discern the popular lies, and choose what to believe for yourself.