The devil is a one-trick pony. Everything he does to mankind is simply an echo of his original temptation to Eve, “you shall be like God.” Throughout history he has dragged many souls into hell by coming up with creative ways in which he could coax men into usurping the role of God. I say creative not in the sense that the devil can create anything. He can only twist and distort what God creates by breathing lies into creation. Only God truly creates while the devil fabricates, a fact that I want to spend some time focusing on.
God creates by simply speaking something into being. He creates through His Word (c.f. Col 1:16). Reality came into being not through some evolutionary process, but through God’s “let there be…”. Mind you I am not saying that things don’t come into existence naturally, only that the different kinds of things (what we might call the different natures) and reality as a whole were spoken into being during the first six days of Creation. It should not be a surprise that this foundational truth, the same truth we profess in the Creed that “through Him all things were made” is under attack. And because it ultimately has its cause in the diabolical, it is so subtle that we might not even realize what is going on.
Lies and Reality
Human words are meant to describe reality, even if they inevitably short-change it. The words themselves are said to be true only to the extent that the ideas they convey conform to reality. To say “oranges are orange” conveys the truth about the color of oranges, but it does not fully describe what an orange is. On the other hand, to say that “oranges are blue” is a falsehood because it does not describe the reality that is an orange in any intelligible way.
Now, admittedly the orange example isn’t real (as far as I know). But it is illustrative of a larger, one might say, diabolical problem. There are two possibilities at play here. A person may be ignorant of the color of oranges or he may want oranges to be other than they are. The first man is a fool and the second is a liar. The folly of the fool can be remedied with the truth. The liar is another story.
All lies are attempts to use words to change reality simply by declaring it so. It is a poor man’s “let there be…”. I say poor man, but it is really diabolical having its roots Satan who is the “Father of lies”. He is always trying to upend Creation and make it appear to be something that it is not. It is an attempt to “be like God” and make reality whatever you want it to be. It is, to quote the diabolical Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood vs Casey, the freedom “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood vs Casey, 1991).
The Father of Lies in Our Times
I said at the open that the devil was always seeking to institutionalize his plan and develops unique strategies for particular ages. He has been particularly successful in our age because we have failed to recognize the mechanism by which he is shaping the spirit of the world. For most of us, Political Correctness is a minor annoyance that we do our best to avoid. But for the devil it is the tool by which he blinds men to reality.
Notice how the term itself, Political Correctness, creates the aura of an alternate reality. It creates a realm where words are correct, but not true. It does this by politicizing, that is, making public, that which is personal and private. It is made political because it must have the “power” to make other people conform to the alternate reality.
There are many other examples, but the renaming of “Mother” to “Birthing Person” comes to mind because it is relatively new. We laugh at the absurdity, but we fail to see the danger because we have grown so accustomed to it. It is simply an attempt, albeit by employing the law of gradualism, to divorce motherhood from femininity and femininity from biological sex. It is a (not-so) subtle attempt to overthrow reality by lying. We intuitively grasp this, but instead of fighting back we laugh at the absurdity. It is no longer funny.
Have you ever won an argument with a liar? Of course not. When someone is lying you do not use arguments to refute them. You simply insist on the truth. Yet many of us repeatedly resort to arguments to counter Political Correctness. They are too adept at changing meanings of words to give any room for logic. Can you deny that a mother is a “birthing person”? Instead we must insist on the truth through precision and clarity. Simply refuse to adopt any of the Politically Correct language. We must have the courage not to play the game and simply tell the truth regardless of the consequences. Words not only convey reality, but they form our ideas about it. Only the truth can set us free to roam throughout reality. If we do not stop the abuse of language that abuses reality, then we risk the eternal abuse of many souls. People end up in hell for bad ideas too, especially because it changes what they become through their actions.