The mind says yes
I went to a movie this weekend with a ten-year-old—and was caught in a bit of culture shock. The film followed four human characters who were suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld: a bizarre, cubic wonderland thriving on imagination. To return home, they had to fight off evil beings like Piglins and Zombies.
I’ve been on a personal quest to demystify evil—or, as I like to call it, chaos. Watching that film made me realize that the younger generation is confronting chaos too—perhaps even more dramatically than we did.
So let’s look at what I call the second face of evil. It appears in the Garden of Eden almost simultaneously with the apple. The Serpent approaches Eve and tells her a lie:
“You will not certainly die.”
He entices Eve with the idea that they can do whatever they want - even eat the apple without facing judgment or consequences. It’s a flat-out, 100% major lie from Satan.
And when Eve believes him—when she eats of the apple ingesting the chaos—evil enters the world.
If we apply this to the fivefold paradigm I've used in organizing my forgiveness journey, this is the beginning of the corruption of the mind. The mind is guided by words—and fed by words. And this is the first moment in the biblical story where the words are lies.
I remember my first year in Cre-Com, learning that true journalism meant presenting both sides of a story and letting the reader decide. I recall interviewing both sides of a controversial issue and being stunned by the depth of misunderstanding and separation. It made me wonder: Would we ever really understand each other? Where is the truth? There were lies all over - even the middle was covered with deception.
Now, as we move into an era exploding with information, we are more than ever experiencing a battlefield of lies in the mind. And the mind, when saturated with lies, loses its appetite for truth.
“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.” Denis Diderot
I’ve been on a personal quest to demystify evil—or, as I like to call it, chaos. Watching that film made me realize that the younger generation is confronting chaos too—perhaps even more dramatically than we did.
So let’s look at what I call the second face of evil. It appears in the Garden of Eden almost simultaneously with the apple. The Serpent approaches Eve and tells her a lie:
“You will not certainly die.”
He entices Eve with the idea that they can do whatever they want - even eat the apple without facing judgment or consequences. It’s a flat-out, 100% major lie from Satan.
And when Eve believes him—when she eats of the apple ingesting the chaos—evil enters the world.
If we apply this to the fivefold paradigm I've used in organizing my forgiveness journey, this is the beginning of the corruption of the mind. The mind is guided by words—and fed by words. And this is the first moment in the biblical story where the words are lies.
I remember my first year in Cre-Com, learning that true journalism meant presenting both sides of a story and letting the reader decide. I recall interviewing both sides of a controversial issue and being stunned by the depth of misunderstanding and separation. It made me wonder: Would we ever really understand each other? Where is the truth? There were lies all over - even the middle was covered with deception.
Now, as we move into an era exploding with information, we are more than ever experiencing a battlefield of lies in the mind. And the mind, when saturated with lies, loses its appetite for truth.
“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.” Denis Diderot
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