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Chapter 21 - Methods of Entanglement

In the fictional story, Gulliver's Travels, there is described a shipwrecked traveler (Gulliver) who awakens to find himself on a beach secured in place by thousands of small ropes by the people of Lilliput (each about six inches high).fearful of what such an unrestrained giant might do. This picture can serve to illustrate the many ways we have become bound to the world systems administered by Satan.

There are four main categories of worldly conformance that have a profound influence over what we accept as true.

1. How we are raised. Like an abused child or dog that does not know there is any other way to live, our early years forge a way of looking at life that does not easily change. Satan had to rely on the slow method of incrementally getting each generation to adopt his changes to shape the next generation. With public education, media, and disconnected parents, Satan can much more rapidly configure each generation to his values, beliefs, traditions, and habits.

2. What is popular. Once what is absolute and true is lost or diminished, the only other standard is what everyone else is doing. When one first enters an alien environment like the military, school, or a new job, one experiences the anxiety of not knowing what to do. The default tactic is to do what the person in front of you does. If it is wrong, at least there will be two of you in trouble. It is the rare individual that can escape public education without a deeply ingrained reflex to follow the herd.

3. What experts say. One of the primary reasons Satan had for instituting an educational system was so that he could have a source of people he could use to authenticate his alternative truths (lies). For example, if he wants to declare the bible is unreliable, all he has to do is have a 'scientist' declare that evolution is true or that there was no world wide flood. This sort of intellectual bullying has been successful to undermine the faith of many Christians as well as fuel the faith of those who follow his alternative religion of secularism.

4. The information in which we are immersed. Like the bars of a cage, the daily and constant bombardment of information from media, either directly or echoed through friends, builds a conceptual context for perceiving the world around us. This influence programs us to reflexive behavior to such an extent that we learn to avoid prohibited speech and to align ourselves with what is expected. We even parrot the attitudes that are presented as worthy and bully others with scorn and condemnation who fail to similarly conform.

It is difficult to fully appreciate how powerful the forces are to which we are continously exposed from our earliest days. A prominent man of the World War II generation once spoke condescendingly of his parents generation. He said that their siblings and cousins were their best friends. In contrast, he saw himself as a sort of 'citizen of the world' with many friends beyond what he saw as his parent provincial roots. It seemed to have never crossed his mind that his 'friends' were more a result of his being chairman of a major corporation than attracted to his charming personality.

One might see in history specific points at which the grip of Satan tightened on the world. The collectivization of the world has advanced to such a degree that all Satan has to do to get the desired result is flip a switch.

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