# 278: The Forbidden Topic: America’s many gods

We are celebrating the beginning of the fifth year on the Internet this month. These last four years have changed my life for the better, probably as much if not more so than most bloggers. Let us praise the Lord God for such an accomplishment.

I have been inspired for the last several years to write on a certain topic, but I continually turned a deaf ear and made all types of excuses. Now the time has come to put my cards on the table--no more excuses.

Many will most likely not agree with this topic--it will most assuredly receive a negative reaction. In fact, it will be rejected as un-American. Some genuine Christians will accept it but may not have the intestinal fortitude to change their lives and remove the ungodly things and attitudes that we have become so accustomed to. Also, it will add to the list of people who hate me and/or hate what I write.

I mentioned the title of this post to a friend before I started to write it, and he said it will take more than one post to fit it all in. That may be true, but I will just touch on a few of our ungodly habits.

Webster’s dictionary has several meanings for the word “god.” One of them is this: “a person or thing deified or excessively honored and admired.” I would go one step further: Things or attitudes in our lives that we have or do that we wouldn’t do without at any cost. Okay, enough of the prelude.

It is a crying shame that we have the words “In God We Trust” printed on our money. That is a flat lie. The motto that we silently subscribe to is “In Greed We Trust.” Although some will deny being greedy, which may be true, the vast majority of us don’t call it greed but replace it with honored euphemisms like “living the good life,” “getting ahead in life,” or “living the American dream.”

I have said several times in this blog that God’s most formidable enemy is our desire for wealth in its many forms. As powerful as God is, He cannot compete with our worldly desire for the contentment, power and security that money gives. When wealth is desired, God is left out in the cold.

Our founding fathers’ philosophy was to give Americans the opportunity to live a good life without want, along with liberty and justice for all. Of course, they were educated and had some degree of wealth. They believed what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

When we read between the lines in our Constitution, we can detect that the writers wanted all Americans to be free to enjoy the good things in life like they did themselves. Then some may ask, “What is wrong with life being easy?” Answer: it seems like nothing at all. But if God is to be worshiped by obedience to the laws of love for God and our fellow man/woman, then seeking ‘the good life’ interferes with sincere worship to Jesus Christ, above and beyond words.

We, as disciples of Jesus Christ, were commanded to love others and consider them to be even better than ourselves. Godly love always wants the best for others. In its stead, we compete to be richer and better off than others. That is the American way. Therefore, the desire to be well off (greed) is the primary god that Americans unknowingly worship.

Philippians 2:3-5: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look out not only to your own interest, but also to the interest of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus.” Also, the second greatest commandment of all in Luke 10:27 is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” There are many other verses in the New Testament that describe what Godly love for your neighbor is.

How many people/Christians in America do you know who live according to the above Scriptures? Since love for neighbor is not mentioned or even implied in our Constitution, that omission silently says that from day one in 1776, we were destined to become an ungodly and pagan nation. They knew that humans couldn’t command other humans to love each other; only God has the ability to command us to love.

A country cannot call itself a Christian country, even if we have about 300,000 churches in America, if its people do not adhere to the code of ethics described in the New Testament. In fact, anyone who even utters the name of Jesus Christ while disobeying/omitting parts of the moral code in Holy Scripture is guilty of profanity. Don’t be surprised with this statement. Americans forbid themselves from thinking that way, let alone speaking that way; it is un-American, regardless of what the New Testament teaches. For that reason, many Americans are in a precarious situation.

The truth concerning true riches is this: when a person is blessed and actually enriched with the indwelling Spirit of God, she or he will not desire to be richer or better than others. The only thing they desire is to have enough of life’s essential necessities so they won’t be a burden to others while they continue to further the cause Jesus Christ started (love for God and neighbor). This statement is not true in our country.

Here is another aspect of the harm wealth of any amount does: when people can have anything and everything their hearts desire (and even more), there is little incentive to leave this world for a better one. They desire to go to heaven, but not just yet. They are having too dang much fun right here. To the contrary, when genuine Christians are having hard times in this world, be what it may, many can’t wait to leave this greedy, cruel and unfair world. When that day comes concerning their death, it is a day that will be full of joy. I am in that category. These words are coming straight from the horse’s mouth.

Another love affair many in America are having is their infatuation with sports. I mean mostly spectator sports. That is cut and dried as ungodly as a person can be. They want their team or guy/gal to win and desire the opponent(s) to lose. And the same is true of those behind their opponent(s). I believe sports started in the pagan country of Greece. There can be no holiness behind wanting a certain team or person to get beaten. In the Christian world, we should desire everyone to be winners. In essence, sports is saying, “This is big business; winning is all that counts.” How can anyone have love in their heart for the team/person they want to lose? In ending, all sports are stark evidence of ungodly motives. They say, “Do what you want but don’t take our sports god away.” Their excuse is this: it is all-just for fun. The world will come to an end before these diehard aficionados give up their sports. There is little or no hope for these people, especially if they claim to be Christians.

Our founding fathers gave us liberty and justice for all, never again to be under any sort of tyranny. Well, that freedom gave us many rights, including the right to be immoral in many ways, if we so choose, with no repercussions. In fact, we got so immoral that sexual sins are not called sins any more, but instead are called freedom of choice. The moral code as it is presented in the Bible is explicit with no gray areas. Well, we completely abandoned that stiff-collared Godly attitude by giving ourselves the right to choose what we can and cannot do, without any consideration for God’s commands.

I believe two of the most ungodly actions Americans have accepted as okay are the freedom of young people to engage in premarital sex without any reprimands and our wholehearted acceptance of gays. The only thing we do to discourage premarital sex is to hand out condoms; the result is a large increase in unwed mothers--an increase of about 40% in one year alone. How are their children going to turn out? Along with that, our wholehearted acceptance of gays and all the rights they have bestowed onto themselves is disheartening. Many Americans wholeheartedly agree with them, especially concerning civil unions and gay marriage. The actions they engage in are detestable to God (Leviticus 18:22) and repulsive to any true Christian. Also, the New Testament has many verses condemning homosexuality. Doing our own thing as we see fit is now the law of the land. Sexual sin has become one of the many gods for the majority of Americans. And still we want to believe in the basic assumption that those who go to church on Sunday are Christians and therefore live in a Christian country. Believing we are Christians is not what counts; believing and living as Scripture dictates is all that matters.

The God of average folks is make-believe; I mean all the make-believe stories of every kind the human mind can think of on television, silver screen, books, etc. Is there no reality in their lives? Some are watched with the intensity as if those stories are real and true. Wasn’t it P.T. Barnum who said, “There is a sucker born every minute”? Well, that fits the description of a large portion of our population. See what would happen if anyone attempted to take this phony god away from them. Impossible! This reveals that even though many are educated, well off, active in many ways, etc., they are empty of anything that gives true and lasting meaning to their lives.

At times, most people love to listen to some sort of music. But the music that has been propagated in the last 40 or 50 years or so is potent enough, especially for the young, to send them to the crazy hospital. People are what they listen to. In fact, a composer once dogmatically stated, “ Let me control a person’s music and I will control his/her life.” Therefore, it could be said that people who are hooked on a certain type of filthy music in their minds and attempt to live accordingly have made music one of their most destructive gods.

There was a time in my youth when a person only went out to eat at a restaurant on a special occasion. Now that special occasion is just about every day. Never forget this: all restaurants make their meals as tasty as possible so that their customers will come back. And that is simply a good business maneuver. The only problem is that to make their food taste as good as or better than the others restaurants, they have to include ingredients that enhance the flavor of their meals (MSG, too much salt, plenty of different forms of fat and mucho calories) but are unhealthy for their customers. That could be the cause for many of the diseases we have never heard of before. We continually remake ourselves by what we eat.

Eat healthy and be healthy. Eat unnatural, refined and processed foods that taste great, and it is an unspoken guarantee that they will make us unhealthy. So by eating to satisfy our taste buds instead of satisfying the needs of our body, we are setting ourselves up for every disease and sickness known to man.

Another reason for eating out is that many families consist of two breadwinners (husband and wife) and they don’t have time to cook full-course meals every day. And most assuredly, by eating out, they can easily get hooked on the natural instinct of laziness. Nowadays, who wants to spend an hour or two in a kitchen cooking a healthy meal or two, every day of the week? It can be said that we are addicted to the pleasures of fast food and even gourmet meals. Thus, eating out of the home has become our very tasty god.

Here are a few health tips for those who are serious about their health, although I could write volumes on the subject. Two of the scarcest vitamins in our food chain are vitamin A and vitamin D. All milk processors must put both of these vitamins in our milk supply in synthetic forms. From my personal experience, they don’t do much good. What we need is the natural form that we get from our food and sunshine.

For a plentiful supply of vitamin A, eat a mini carrot every day and beets that are cooked and pickled. It will give everyone a plentiful supply of vitamin A. That is simple enough. Cook the sliced beets for 40 minutes, or until a fork can easily pierce the beets. Save the water/juice. Add vinegar, salt and sugar until tasty. Mix all the ingredients along with the juice. Save in the refrigerator.

For vitamin D, it is a completely different story: regardless of what you have heard about how bad the sunshine is, the only way to get enough vitamin D is from exposure to the sunshine along with some fish. Now here is the strange part: children somehow have a good supply of vitamin D without much sun. When a child is stressed, their vitamin D goes down. As we get older, our need for vitamin D increases. The older we get, the more we need. But usually the opposite is true. The older we get, the less sunshine we get. In order for the body to absorb calcium, especially in older people, much vitamin D is needed.

Here are two tests to tell if you have enough of both vitamins: for vitamin A, squeeze your hand into a fist as hard as you can for just a few seconds. When you release the squeeze, if you have enough vitamin A in your body, you will see some yellowish-orange color for a moment or two on the palm of your hand. If you see any other colors, you are in short supply of vitamin A.

For vitamin D, when your body fluids are alkaline (a pH of 7 or more), you are getting the right amount of sunshine and calcium. Most older people have their pH in the acidic range. If your pH is below 7, all your body fluids are acidic. That is harmful to one’s overall health. The majority of our population’s pH is acidic. It is believed that the high population of acidic pHs is one of the main reasons for disease in America and possibly the world, especially in the Scandinavian countries. Try to get as much calcium as possible from foods, though most people cannot get enough calcium from food alone. One essential nutritional food supplement is a natural (organic) form of calcium. One good source is coral calcium.

I read an authoritative book about thirty years ago on the lack of sunlight most people are getting. The name of it is simply “Sunlight”. It is very detailed. The punch line of the whole book can be summarized in two sentences. Here is the dilemma: if anyone is eating a basic American diet, stay out of the sun, because chances are good that you are prone to skin cancer (melanoma). If you are eating a super-healthy diet, get in the sun all you want and no cancer or diseases will get you, but start to get in the sun a little at a time, especially blondes. Also, avoid sunscreen products. Some of them can cause skin cancer more than the sun. I personally can’t get enough sunlight because I have been eating healthy for over 30 years.

Vitamin D plays the major role in keeping the pH alkaline. Here is how you can test your pH: buy some litmus strips. They are available at most drugstores. Wait at least 2 hours after a meal; take a strip and spit on it. The color of the strip will change according to your pH. You may have to wait a second or two depending on the instructions. There will be a chart of different colors on the package. Match your colored strip with the colors on the chart. Each color will have a different pH reading. Then you will know how acidic or alkaline your body fluids are.

Another instinct we have in common, without exception, is that we are all creatures of comfort and habit. Even though it seems like a plus in our lives, it can be a big handicap in our physical lives. How so? When comfort is a priority, we neglect many physical activities that make and keep us healthy. The bad part of desiring a comfortable life is that we almost automatically neglect many activities where exertion is required. In other words, we like to have life as easy as possible. When we come to that point, if we are not already there, we make comfort and ease a very desirable god.

As many of you know, healthcare in America with its escalating costs to Medicare and Medicaid will be in a crisis condition in the very near future; it will bankrupt our government if something is not done soon to lessen the skyrocketing costs. How did the richest country in the world get into this condition? I believe it started many years ago when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing.

There were no limits on immigration to America. Foreigners came here by the groves from Europe and elsewhere to get in on the good times and big money. Along with that, many Americans were moving from country life to the big cities where work and money were plentiful. In the 1800s, work conditions were horrible.

The cost for those deplorable work conditions was the ill health of the workers. Disease and sickness, which were previously unheard of, were becoming common. Many times the medicine used to treat these illnesses was nothing but snake oil. Most everyone was at a loss as to how to correctly treat them. At that time, “healthcare” was an unknown word.

After a few generations, some of these illnesses would mutate one’s genetic makeup (their off spring became prone to the diseases of their fathers and mothers). Along with unsanitary conditions and abnormal lifestyles, genetic mutations caused sickness to start taking its toll.

Then, when the 20th century came of age, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. were widely used to increase profit. DDT, the most powerful pesticide of its time, was doing great harm to animals and humans in addition to killing insects. Since then, it has been banned in most civilized countries. It was so potent that after some 30 years or so since it was restricted, it still shows up in the breast milk of many mothers. Well, that was the start of sickness and disease in exacerbated proportions. Then, after World War II, we started to enjoy devitalized processed and refined foods and amenities that were not available previously. These were the foods that were foreign to our bodies, even though they tasted great.

Then came the stress factor. As we became more sophisticated in our lifestyles, stress became its bed partner. Of course, not knowing its debilitating effects on the body, stress (or many of its euphemisms which were used) started to take its toll.

Then, at the later part of the 20th century, many new medicines came along to remove the side effects of our sicknesses, but only a very few were able to cure the illnesses. The remainder of the pills only covered or masked the effects of the disease. That was the start of big medicine, and the beginning of the greedy pharmaceutical conglomerates.

When pills did not help much, the hospitals were the only other alternatives. That was when health care costs started the upward spiral and our healthcare dilemma began.

If American people had half a brain, instead of attempting to cure every sort of disease and sickness imaginable, the correct path to health would have been the prevention of sickness and disease. But that never happened to a degree that was apparent. The reason it never happened and is still not happening is because it takes too much time and effort to eat healthy home-cooked foods, to have employment that requires physical exercise, and to live lifestyles that are relatively stress-free. To sum it up: correct diet, plenty of exercise and a fairly stress-free life could have been the cure to our health-care problems. The correct way of living would allow most everyone to live pain-free, healthy, and vibrant lives well into and past their golden years. I personally am a testimony to that form of lifestyle.

In ending, because of the ignorance and laziness of the American people, 1) we now desire medicine to alleviate every type of pain; 2) doctors want our money; and 3) hospitals drive many to bankruptcy. These are the gods we unknowingly worship and rely on.

There is a big problem in America that will never go away: the drinking of alcohol. As a young man of about 30, on weekends my wife and I drank with other couples; we mostly went to each other’s homes (house parties) and occasionally we went to a bar and danced to live music.

At this time, I am attempting to capture the memories of why I drank. As far as I can recall, I worked hard all week long building houses, and looked forward to enjoying my company. I think the alcohol allowed me to act in a way that I couldn’t act otherwise. I remember one New Year’s Eve party at my new palatial home that I just built, of which I was extremely proud. I wanted to show it off. There must have been six to eight couples (if not more) enjoying the loud music and goodies we served that night. By midnight, I was out cold. The party went on without me.

As I can recall, my marriage must have been unsatisfying, and I must have been empty of anything of real and lasting value, and the drinks were supposed to make up for it. I had money, so that was not the motive. Shortly after that, a year or so later, I got interested in religion. Even though I knew little concerning God’s plan of salvation, my life was starting to change.

I now believe the major reason people drink is an attempt to fill the emptiness that exists without Jesus Christ living inside of them. We were meant for Christ and Christ was meant for us. I bet you my bottom dollar that most drinkers would not accept that sort of thinking.

What truly alarms me is the out-of-control binge drinking the young college crowd is engaged in. I live in a college town with over 20,000 students. On weekends, they gather in Old Town; that section of town has about thirty or forty bars. For seven years, I lived in a high-rise in Old Town and could see and hear what was going on. Their actions are too risqué (unbelievable) to print on this post. They are the people we will have to answer to in the future, as they will be in control of many facets of our lives in about 20 or 30 years. God forbid!

My drinking was the highlight of my life. Therefore, I could now say that drinking was my god and the god of all who are addicted to alcohol.

What bothers me is the illegal and dangerous drugs that are consumed by a large portion of our population. How did we as a great country get into a position where strong drugs were continually needed? For that reason, we are largely responsible for much of the killing and other horrible things that are going on in Mexico, since we are the main consumer of their drugs. Also, think about all the drugs in Afghanistan that are flooding the market. We are a large part of that market. In turn, these drug dealers supply anti-American mercenaries with the money they get from us to buy guns and other armaments, to use against Americans. Will it ever change? They worship an extremely addictive god. It can never change unless the supply dries up. Shame on us.

We are living in a fast country. Everything must be in a hurry. We want our food fast. We desire cars that go fast. We want to be served fast regardless of what we buy. We, by all means, drive fast, and faster than we should. What is the hurry? It is very easy to get caught-up in this insanely fast generation. Most Americans are on the fast track to nowhere but the grave. When we are in a hurry, stress accompanies it.

When I first got my driver’s license at the age of 16, the speed limit in New York State was 35 MPH on the main highway. That was before the interstate highways were built. I have to say that wanting everything fast must be another god that we could not live without.

There are many things in America that contribute to our poor health. Two of the most obvious are gas-powered vehicles and our 66% obesity rate. Both of them rob us of much-needed exercise.

Another activity among those of us who can afford it is to live for our annual or semi-annual vacations. Those vacations say only one thing: we need a break from the “horrible” lives (the every day grind) we are living. For those who live for vacations, they make them their annual god.

Life is to be enjoyed. Every day should be an adventure. When living exclusively for the advancement of Jesus Christ and all that He stands for, we are living for and enjoying the love affair with God through Jesus Christ. What I am saying is that when a person knows she or he is loved by God and reciprocates that love, life is complete. The intensity of that Divine love is what most of us unknowingly need. God’s love for us is that wonderful, regardless of what turmoil we may be going through. This may sound strange to some, but just think back to your first puppy love, and you will know what I am talking about. But to make God’s love affect us in that manner won’t happen until one’s heart and soul are consistently on Godly matters. Like that’s ever going to happen on its own. We must make it happen. Therefore, it can be said that Divine love is the God of all true Christians.

Many Americans are caught up in gambling. Why do they gamble? I don’t have a definitive answer, but my guess is their desire for money that just falls from the sky, as it were. Don’t they know that less than 1% ever come out winners? It could be said that all gamblers are losers. Gambling is in their blood; they can’t stop. Therefore, if anyone needs a god that is a sure loser, start gambling.

The most powerful god in America is our military might, which makes us the bully of the world. When a country doesn’t see eye-to-eye with us on democratic reform and human rights, we look for an excuse to make them walk the line. That doesn’t always work. We think democracy is the savior of the world. It is not, as long as cheaters and liars are elected to office. After 200-plus years, this country’s democracy is on a downhill slide that no politician or military will be able to reverse.

Democracy, money and military power represent the god that will be the downfall of a great country that thinks the good times will never end. The book of Revelation indicates, as I have already mentioned in previous posts, that this country is just about ripe for the harvest of almighty God (the grapes of wrath). Are you and I ready for the fury of God? There is no better time than now to get straight with God; it won’t be easy because of the many other gods we worship.

For people who believe there is no hell, it will not stop them from ending up there. For those who do believe there is a hell but don’t believe in living as the New Testament teaches, this is a solemn warning: stop catering to your blood-sucking gods; they will drag you to eternal damnation.

In conclusion, there are many more gods we worship that should be mentioned, but this post is getting too long. I think you get the idea of how we get sucked into many unnecessary things and attitudes, and once hooked on them, they become our ungodly gods.