I’ve never been what anybody would call a “Bible Thumper.” Although I have read the Bible since I was very young, I generally respect other people’s religions to the point where I keep my opinions to myself. But I have studied comparative religion since my twenties, to the level where I could do a professional service out of it, so I am quite well aware of what other people believe and why. That includes the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Mahabharata, and many others. I don’t see religion, as many do, as the study of a way to arrive at the afterlife. Instead, I see all of them as an attempt to grapple with the here and now and the designation of good and evil. The Koran especially has many of the same characteristics as the Bible does, and the focus is on living a good life, and who could argue with that? Well, knowing a lot about these religions and what they intend to do for the person reading from their texts, then it’s quite obvious to understand what is happening when you see coaches and others getting in trouble in public settings for quoting the Bible. There have been several cases these past several weeks where high school coaches, or even NCAA coaches, have been punished for giving their players inspiration from the Bible, which reveals the real game that is in front of us, and why I have decided to talk more about the Bible and other religions as a direct result of this very social assault. We have a very real enemy in front of us presently who is clearly trying to destroy us, and they seek to replace the values people have with a new religion of government serving as the new God and to do so, they are using the excuse of separation of Church and State as the means to remove people from any sort of social values so that they can replace them with a reverence for big government.

Now, I have no intention of making peace with evil. I have always been interested in fighting evil wherever evil decides to show itself, which is why I enjoy religion so much. Not just Christianity but all of them. If I see people learning values in the fight between good and evil, I’m on board with whatever religion gets them there. I haven’t read a religious book yet that I can’t find some good with. It’s when government gets involved to attempt to pit them against each other for social controls they’d otherwise never get that you start to see the work of evil. For me, it’s not a matter of the truth of a religious text but whether it works for the mind. And I think there are a lot of Bible passages that are fantastic for people seeking intellect, such as Isaiah 57:3-5 “But draw near hither, ye sons of the sorceress, the seed of the adulterer and the whore. (4), Against whom do ye sport yourselves? Against who make ye a wide mouth and draw out the tongue? Are ye not children of transgression, a seed of falsehood,  (5) Enflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the clifts and the rocks?” I think that is absolutely wonderful, a beautifully written passage. Who in their right mind would have a problem with that? How could a coach, a teacher, or a business professional get in trouble for reciting something like that? 

It’s quite clear to me, and this is why I am talking about the Bible and religion more than usual because it’s my conclusion that these villains in our society now are easy to beat. They have more than shown themselves of late. In these post-Trump presidential years, the many interactions on social media, even the social media debate with the First Amendment at the heart of it, a battle strategy has been made clear to me. The Bible is the heart of it. I have never seen the Bible as a book of peace, which is one of the reasons I like it so much. It’s very judgmental about the nature of good and evil, which I greatly enjoy. I like the concept of making a footstool out of my enemies, as it is often referred to biblically. And I have seen it work on several cases over many years, most notably recently, in many local issues. It’s no longer just different opinions we are dealing with here, it’s a fight against the evil that is in front of us in our time, and it’s up to us to win that fight. And evil knows that if a society is a point of reference in judging what it wants to do, then they are particularly vulnerable. Evil only thrives if it can reside in the shadows and convince people that value judgments are wrong. That is why there is a push in the media, in Hollywood, and in all governments to remove biblical references such as these cases with high school coaches so that people will be left vulnerable intellectually without any foundation of goodness to stand on. Making people easy to destroy from the inside out is clearly evil’s objective. The same people who are telling us that transvestites are normal and perfectly OK, which is the position of the Biden administration, are the same losers telling us that quotes from the Bible are dangerous and must be separated as a matter of church and state. 

I see this all as an easy battle to win; mankind has won these battles before in different ways. But this current rise of evil in the world is, for the first time, a global push using mass media as the means of destruction. The good news is that their position is weak if people have a point of reference for goodness, such as that Isaiah 57:3 passage. The Bible isn’t for getting to heaven, just as none of the religious texts are necessary for such an objective. They are to live a good life as a good person and clearly define what good is. Most interpreters of religious text miss the point; they were taught wrong from the beginning, and that failure cascades into philosophy, generally. I find value in all religions, particularly when it is considered that government wants to become the new religion because there is power in controlling what people believe is the work of evil in the background. So I’m going to talk about these things more because they, for one, interest me. But for another, I see that evil is particularly vulnerable and can easily be defeated if the light of judgment is cast upon them. Religious texts could be works of fiction and still be the word of God. It’s the exploration of thought that matters. It’s not whether Joseph Smith found gold plates with the Mormon religion written upon them and was the direct word of God, that matters. What matters is exploring an idea that distinguishes good and evil in a social context and can free people from the bondage of authoritarian rule. This is why China does not like religion, and for those who want to copy the China model of using government to replace religion for a one-world government where the deity in charge of civilization is a worshiper of mother earth, then the best way to defeat that attempt is by having a relationship with religious work. The Bible is particularly good, as are other intentions from many religions. But once good and evil are distinguished, the work of evil is much easier to defeat. And as bad as things have been with evil showing itself with increasing audacity, it only succeeds when people lose their way, and by reading from books like the Bible, they can find their way to goodness rather quickly, which is the best way to defeat the intentions of evil, which is the most important task of our time. 

Rich Hoffman