Hell's Beautiful Lie

“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” John 1:10

We see hell’s lies everywhere we look. The lie of hell is present in all things. Hell is full of many of the best liars that the world has seen. These guys are big on PR and marketing, that’s why Hell looks so beautiful these days and heaven seems like such a boring place. It’s a big PR campaign instead of a war like we see on the news every day.

Hell has everything you are looking for. Hell has everything you need. You do not have to restrain yourself or do anything that you don’t want to do. Sex, drugs, parties, yep it has it all. Fame and fortune you can have that too. Remember to be a Christian you have to sacrifice all of that. Sex, yeah that’s the first thing you have to give up. Only for kids that’s it, just like the other animals. You like sex don’t you? Of course you do, why would you want to be a Christian then?

PR has even hit Christians enough to make them believe it. I know a lot of metal heads that will tell you that will tell you God loves to rock. Sex is a gift from God that we have been given to share with our spouse. But that’s not what Hell’s lie is. No their lie goes deeper than that.

You want to be successful? Well you got to be of the world to be successful and well you just can’t do that being Christian.  Hell will use God’s own works against the followers and believers. When I was a Satanist I read the bible quite a bit. Why would a Satanist use the bible? In the bible there is a lot of stuff that men do not understand without God showing them what it means.

Why would God ask anyone to give his son up as an offering? Better yet, and pagans love this one, why would God say to hold no other gods above him if there were no other gods? Without the understanding that anything that you put above god is an idol or another God their statement would hold water. So using the same words that Christians use against them puts a lot of Christians in a spot where they do not know what to say or do.

That is part of the point, doubt. If one of the lost see this moment of doubt, that is a point for the devil. But again, many times the beautiful lie is not targeting the soul and faith directly. Let’s just occupy you with things that you love. Idle hands are the devil’s plaything, not anymore. Let people become so busy they have no time to even consider God.

Both parents are now working, and can still only just make ends meet. If you are going to be successful, you have to dress the part. You want your kids to be successful, well they have to have a good balance of extracurricular activities and go to a good college. Well that costs more money so we have to work more. Busy, busy, busy…

But hey you got that McMansion. You are driving the latest and greatest SUV this one getting a whole 19 MPG. You’ve got the iEverything. You have it going on. You’ve got everything just like Hell promised. So why are you so unhappy that you find yourself finding a reason to drink, always arguing with your spouse and have no idea what your children actually like, so you buy them the lasts iThing.

You are feeding the machine, just like Hell asked you to do. That’s what you got to do to be successful right? Well you’ve come this far, next you are going to have to join a country club to network with more people. Yep we can make a few sacrifices so daddy can join up to make a little more.

Don’t forget that perfect lawn. What you have is a new law that you cannot fulfill. As Grace Life International would say, you have all these ways that you try to fill your buckets, but they have a whole in them. Hell has you. But you go to church, but do you have the love of God within you. But I always vote republican and fight abortion. Good for you, but you are missing the cause. Do you share love?

The world tells you things, and it doesn’t matter if you are Democrat, Republican, Socialists, Tea Party or Communist, if you take that walk without the Love of Christ you will fall short. If you are doing all these things to be successful, but do it without God you will fall short. You fill your time with bake sales, choir, and helping the homeless, great, but do you do it with the love of Christ in your heart or so people will love you.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We tried for a long time to live by the law and fell short, that’s why Grace was given to us. Hell’s beautiful lie does not hold water against the one truth of God. You like heavy metal, keep it, God still loves you. You like tattoos and piercings, keep them, God still loves you. You like to play Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, and Shadowrun, keep doing it, God still loves you. If any of these things inhibit your faith, discard it, but let God guide you in that, not man.

Hell’s lie is that the only way to have fun is to not be a Christian, their boring. Hell’s lie tells us that they are the only way to be successful. Hell’s lie is that if you are going to be a Christian you have to do all these things, keep up the law, never sin, be perfect, be a cookie cutter of those church kids that look so perfect. Hell’s lie tells you that’s the only way.

That’s exactly why it’s a lie. There is so many Christian Rock, rap or metal bands out there. Right now there is an organization that is taking up a fund to get oneof their pastors a tattoo, but it’s a 50/50 split between tattoo and supporting a homeless organization. God doesn’t want you to sacrifice fun for him. He wants you to bring him into your fun. If you focus on God and allow him to guide you, you will be successful in ways that you may have never through been possible.

Christians are meek and cannot fight, tell that to Fedor Emelianenko, Matt Hughs, Wanderlei Silva or Chris Weidman. The list is long for Christian MMA fighters, and then there are thousands of Christian men and women in the armed forces. I will quote Pastor Bob Beeman when asked a question of do I have to give up metal music to be Christian, “I think you will find that your love of music will only increase, I know mine sure has.” He also went on to say that the bands specificly that will be a personal conviction.

I know in my walk from Satanism to Christianity there were only a few bands that I stopped listening to and they were Cradle of Filth and Diocide. Later I have replaced them with bands like Demon Hunter, War of Ages and many other Rock groups. My taste in music did not change as much as the taste in what substance I was taking in.

Now I did cut out a lot of things that were not healthy when I converted to Christ, and still fight with cutting a few more things out. Let me let you know a little secret, none of us are perfect. The preacher on stage every Sunday, nope not even him. We are perfected through Grace alone. Through Jesus we have been perfected, not through any act of our own. Don’t believe Hell’s pretty lies, there are a lot of actors, PR guys and lawyers down there to help them out.

God loves you, let him celebrate with you and you will find that Christians can have quite a bit of fun, when they let themselves.

“There should be only one philosophy: Living by God’s commandments. Then people will treat everybody how they would want to be treated.” Fedor Emelianenko

GodForgives.Us

Dungeons and Dragons, a Gateway to Evil?

“But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when fully grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved.” James 1:14-16

In a recent conversation I was asked about what influence Dungeons and Dragons had on my fall from Christianity to Satanism. Now for a lot of people this is simply an absurd question, but there are many people that remember the Satanic scare and the blame of Dungeons and Dragons in some murders and such. These things have taken hold in the mind of some Christians to the point that they can see D&D as a gateway drug to Occultism and Satanism.

For me, this was not the case. Yes I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading fantasy novels of swords and sorcery, but I don’t think that these things had that much impact in my life choices to follow the road to the Occult. There were a lot of reasons and influences in my fall from grace, if you will.

I was raised and taken to church by my mother up until I was five. We lived in Eastern Kentucky at that time and we moved to Tennessee at that time. When we moved my mother did not find a church so we stopped going to church until I was asked if I wanted to go to a Youth Group at a church when I was in 5^th grade. Mrs. Harris I thank you for that. Women English teachers have been some of the most influential people in my life.

I started going and by the time I was 11 I had been saved and baptized, but even by this time I had seen things that I didn’t talk about because people thought I was a weird enough kid as it were. I didn’t think that telling people that I have seen people walking around bridges and I knew they weren’t really there would not help my case for being normal, whatever that really means. When I was baptized things were not exactly as I had expected them to be.

I was attacked spiritually with waking visions, audible voices and typical schizophrenic activities. Of course when an 11 year old kid tried to explain this to my preacher, he thought I was telling stories or acting out for attention. Whatever the reason, I was not believed. If my preacher would not believe this spiritual thing that I was going through there is no way that my mom and friends would believe me.

So I felt isolated and alone and tried to deal with it on my own and eventually gave up. I thought at that time it was a Baptist thing. So I started researching on my own and learning what I could, but I was not going to church anymore. I was angry at God the situation and everything else about what I had gone through.  Eventually I just let go and gave up.

I would come back to it every few years but at that time I was seeking a higher understanding and enlightenment. I was changing and had a reputation for being an angry boy who would get into fights. I didn’t have too many friends and ended up reading more about Dungeons and Dragons than playing it.

My searches and studies had taken me to looking at the older religions. I was trying to find a truth among what people believed as long ago as I could find. I would look for themes and understanding and I found a few “truths” about the power that human beings have. A few of these are validated even in Christian thought. The biggest was that humans have dominion over spirits.

Humans have power of spirits. So spirits are real, and I can make them do what I want. I knew that spirits were real; I had seen them and felt them. By this time I was focused more on the power of the mind and not really concerned with fantasy stories. Then someone told me another truth that I knew but was looking for validation for. Magic is real.

This was not the sorcery magic from Fantasy novels. It was more akin to force of will and the ability to affect the world through your will. So I tested it, and it worked. I didn’t realize at that time I was already prey to demons and other energies that were leading me down the road to Satanism. The only thing that Role Playing games did for me was put me in touch with my wife.

I had studied magic and occult for a while and got involved with a few guys that practiced the darker arts, which showed me how to spot demons for the first time. Well these demons were just tormented spirits mostly, but I was still naïve. It would be years before I would be calling myself a Satanist.

What role did these games have in my fall? Not much of anything really, in fact that was the first thing to completely go when I converted to Satanism. The sinful man knows only toil. There is no rest for the wicked. All those saying are very true. I worked, lived and breathed sin. Rolling dice on Friday night and eating Cheetos did not condemn me. My actions and belief condemned me.

Video games did not corrupt my spirit. Rejection, judgment and condemnation corrupted what was supposed to be love. Isolation allowed me and the demons to do all the harm in the world to me. An abusive first marriage didn’t help things, and a lack of having time to play games and have fun certainly didn’t help. I had no release and was so obsessed with what I had become that I was blind to how stupid it all really was.

1^st Corinthians chapter 10 holds a truth I learned on that path as well. The deities that pagans worship are demons. I found that truth when I was a Satanist and it was an essential passage to help draw me back to Christ. That truth was very much needed for me at that point.

What got me on that road? Being isolated, judged, condemned, hated, outcast, different, and too smart for my own good without the wisdom to see how foolish I was. There is a whole list, but movies, video games and Dungeons and Dragons are not things on the list. Could it for someone? Yeah, but more times than not it is a collection of things.

I fully believe that it is not one thing that drives people from Christ and into any other direction they go. It is a collection of influences that draw us down into the darkness. For without the light of God we live in darkness. I am always nervous talking about my fall. I used Christian writing to learn more about demons many times. I know that temptation and curiosity can lead to further studies into the dark, and it’s dangerous.

In several movies, philosophies and stories there is a message that has led to the warning that I give now. Nietzsche I think says it best, “And if you gaze for long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Don’t go there… just don’t. Not for the sake of understanding. Don’t open those doors, leave them alone because each one you open lets something know who you are and gives you more you have to fight.

Spiritual Warfare is hard enough without a Smite Evil spell in our back pocket. No matter how long you play D&D you will not be able to throw fireballs. No matter how many times you read Harry Potter you will not produce the patronus charm. And if you think these things are evil, but approve of Narnia because the author was a great Christian Scholar I feel you may want to reconsider the prior. Stories, games and movies do not make people evil.

If you do not know love, you will replace it with hate. A bully will create more evil than every book that has been written. A bully can be more dangerous than the “Satanic Bible” by Anton LeVey. The story that the Satanic Bible preaches is one that we hear every day. We are in control of our lives and can do what we wish. We are an army of one.

We hold the true power, and thus our own little gods. But let me tell you friends, there is only one God, and his son died for us all. He came to tell us to love God and love others. You can try to drive the car all you want, but if you want to get where you’re going, you might want to give dad the wheel.

“D&D was a training ground for our imagination.” Vin Diesel