Last month I wrote about American heroes, especially comic book heroes. I think these heroes inspired American youth with positive influences for good. I didn’t mention comic book villains though. But today, it seems, villains are more popular than the good guys.
The biggest star in Batman may not be Batman but the villainous Joker. It wasn’t always this way. The popularity of villains seems to have gradually increased while the beneficial effects of comic book heroes have declined as the years went by. It is easy to recognize why. Villains pursue their own interests without concern for the consequences, whereas heroes are always concerned about the correctness of their actions.
This sense of self-interest seems to appeal to modern American. I think this is due to the gradual change of the mindset of Americans as years have progressed. Villains do whatever they want and are unmoved by outside influences like morality. Today, people have become bored with the placid good nature of the heroes. They seem to be more interested in the excitement of the villains as they pursue the impulses of their own wills.
Heath Ledger stands out as a young actor who wonderfully depicted the vile character of the Joker. Ledger wound up dying (some say it was suicide) from taking a lethal combination of pain pills, anti-anxiety drugs, and sleeping pills. This leaves the impression that his acting career somehow left him vulnerable to the evil character of The Joker. To me, Heath Ledger stands out as a victim of our loss of faith in goodness, our tendency to chase our sinful desires and avoid the images of righteous men.
A Changing World
Our world is changing. Villainy is on the rise, while goodness, virtue, and morality seem to be on the decline. This villainous behavior is especially prevalent when it comes to human sexuality. Today people are trying to redefine our sexual makeup and beginning to speculate on how we are able to redesign what kind of human nature we have.
God created human beings as male and female. This is because He wanted all human beings to have a hand in creating other human beings of like kind. This is God’s work. How dare we human beings try to meddle in God’s design!
While there are exceptions, typically every male human being has most every cell in his body displaying the presence of a “y” chromosome. Most female cells have the presence of two “x chromosomes and no “y” chromosome. Being male or female is an attribute of the physical makeup of almost every cell in our bodies. Since it involves almost every cell in our bodies, how can we human beings change it?
Transgenderism and Transhumanism
Transgenderism is a fairly new way the devil is trying to trick us into refusing to abide by God’s will. Transhumanism, an attempt to harness evolution to allow the human race to evolve into a different species, like a superhuman, is another of devil’s tricks. But this cannot be done. Only God controls evolution, and evolution always leads towards what God wants.
Our modern world is already accepting both transgenderism and transhumanism.
Transgenderism is the false hope that humans can arbitrarily change their sexual nature into forms that give them more pleasure and have no connection with the actual formation of their bodies. As Wikipedia expresses it “A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.”
Transhumanism is the false hope that humans can influence the evolution of their bodies into more advanced humans. As Wikipedia puts it, it “is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition.”
There are so many weird and troublesome distortions of what God has revealed to the world today that I don’t know where to begin. Evolution is a false doctrine that attempts to get us to not believe that God created the world. Of course, God created the world, and something like evolution was the mechanism He used, but it is not the cause of evolutionary change, God’s will is the cause.
All physical life is divided into male and female individuals so that they can continue the process of creating more creatures like they are. Transgenderism and transhumanism are two spurious theories that enforce the presumption that God did not create humans or the world.
We Must Believe in God’s Revelation
I have a question for you: Do you believe God’s revelation? God believes it. In fact, God made your faith in His word a condition of your entry into heaven. That and the wiliness to obey God. If you hear the Gospel, you must believe it and obey God. After all, God’s word is good. It would be foolish to not believe it.
Jesus told his disciples to go and preach the Gospel to the whole world. “He instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick—no food, no sack, no money in their belts. They were, however, to wear sandals but not a second tunic. He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave from there” (Mark 6: 8-10). These verses are given as a testimony against those unbelievers, simply because they did not welcome the disciples.
Catholics hear God’s Gospel at Mass. It seems, however, not every Catholic truly believes it. But God refuses entry into His heavenly kingdom to those who refuse to welcome Him and believe Him. Presumably, the unbelievers may already be on their way into hell.
Everlasting Punishment
Hell is a terrible place to wind up in. It is unending pain and misery for refusing to acknowledge God.
Think about it. Hell is a place of everlasting punishment with flames that never cease. Hell is God’s chosen place of punishment, and it is characteristic of the way God is. The flames are everlasting, but they do not injure the soul in any way. Souls in hell are able to endure these flames forever without any damage to them. When humans punish each other, the end result is always death. There is no more death for the souls in hell, just everlasting agony.
The spiritual punishment in hell is agonizing. Someone who refuses to obey God offends Him very much. An unrepentant soul experiences everlasting remorse because the individual was wrong in defying God. Such a soul experiences remorse forever because since the person will never repent, God will never forgive him or her. Think about it! I’m not describing hell in any way that has not been described in the past all through church history.
I think it is very important to keep these thoughts in our minds.
Final Thoughts
There is another difficulty that I see today that was not present in my youth. There is such a negative view of everything I encounter. Even a list of movies available on Netflix has a majority of films about people of questionable character. Surely, that is not characteristic of the average American.
And that’s probably why Americans now criticize even our politicians, member of congress, and even the president. This presents a very poor opinion about our nation. Our politicians are not infallible in what they do; they could be wrong. But we are also wrong when we accuse all politicians of being guilty of bad faith and self-interest, and only seeking graft from people willing to pay for their services.
I spent much of my life listening to American politicians brag about the miracle of American democracy. Today, I see the flaws in it. Democracies are people participating in a nontotalitarian government. But I sometimes think a better form of government is a constitutional monarchy, like England has. The royal family is still loved and revered while the country is ruled through elected individuals.
After the second coming, I’m sure the world will be ruled by the royal family of the Trinity, with the saints and angels administering all the governmental “services” to the people. The world will be like a family, with the government looking out for the welfare of all its citizens, like the parents of a family look out for the welfare of their children.
In fact, I think every government should operate more like a family instead of like an open society without borders.
6 thoughts on “Villainous Behavior is Everywhere Today”
Through our Baptism into Jesus the Christ in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit we all (Protestant & Catholic) have adopted into the Family God. Thus we can joyfully and confidently sing:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nsohAWX6GY
Second coming and Christ ruling a transformed world? This sounds like the Protestant doctrine of millenialism. Do Catholics really expect this, that Christ will come back to this earth and rule for a thousand years? I don’t think so.
The author said nothing about Christ ruling for 1,000 years. He did say what the Apostle’s Creed says — Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. As the CCC says, “1042 At the end of time, the Kingdom of God will come in its fullness. After the universal judgment, the righteous will reign for ever with Christ, glorified in body and soul. The universe itself will be renewed.”
The Lutherans state: It is also taught among us that our Lord Jesus Christ will return on the last day for judgment and will raise up all the dead, to give eternal life and everlasting joy to believers and the elect but to condemn ungodly men and the devil to hell and eternal punishment.
Rejected, therefore, are the Anabaptists who teach that the devil and condemned men will not suffer eternal pain and torment,
Rejected, too, are certain Jewish opinions which are even now making an appearance and which teach that, before the resurrection of the dead, saints and godly men will possess a worldly kingdom and annihilate all the godless.
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Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, ed. Dero A. Saunders and John H. Collins (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), from Section VI, Rule of the Sullan Restoration, pp. 232-235.
Let us review the events of the decade of the Sullan restoration. None of the external or internal developments during that period... necessarily constituted of itself a grave danger to the state; yet in all these struggles the nation had well-nigh fought for its very existence.The reason was that every task was left undone so long as it still might be done with ease. Neglect of the simplest precautions produced the most dreadful mischiefs and misfortunes, and transformed dependent classes and impotent kings into antagonists on a footing of equality.... It was no credit to Rome that in an eight-year struggle, marked by more defeats than victories, the government’s two most celebrated generals had filed to master the insurgent chief Sertorius and his Spanish guerrillas....
Little more than a century had elapsed since the Hannibalic war, and it must have brought a blush to the cheek of every honorable Roman when he reflected on the nation’s fearfully rapid decline since that great age.... Then every captain acted if need be like a general, and fought often unsuccessfully, but always honorably; now it was difficult to find even a tolerably efficient leader among all the officers of rank. Then the government preferred to take the last farmer from the plow rather than forego the acquisition of Spain and Greece; now it was on the verge of abandoning both these long-since-conquered regions merely to defend itself against runaway slaves at home....
The foreign wars had produced still less satisfactory results.... Once Rome, fully conscious of her irresistible power by land, had transferred her superiority also to the other element; now the mighty state was powerless at sea and apparently on the point of also losing its hegemony in Asia.
All the material benefits which a state exists to confer – security of frontiers, undisturbed peaceful intercourse, legal protection, and regulated administration – began to vanish for all the nations united in the Roman state. The gods of blessing seemed all to have mounted to Olympus, leaving the miserable earth at the mercy of official or volunteer plunderers and tormentors. Nor was this decay felt merely by those possessing political rights and public spirit. The... brigandage and piracy brought the sense of it home to the remotest valley and the humblest hut of Italy and constituted a personal calamity for every one who pursued trade and commerce or bought a bushel of wheat.
If the authors of this dreadful and unparalleled misery are sought, it is not difficult to share blame among many. The slaveowners whose hearts were in their moneybags, the insubordinate soldiers, the cowardly, incapable, or foolhardy generals, the demagogues running after shadows, all bore their share of the blame. Or, to speak more accurately, who did not share it? It was instinctively felt that this misery, this disgrace, this disorder were too colossal to be the work of any one man. As the greatness of the Roman commonwealth was th work not of prominent individuals, but rather of a soundly organized body of citizens, so the decay of this mighty structure was not the work of some destructive genius but the result of a general disorganization. The great majority of the citizens were good for nothing, and every rotten stone helped to bring about the ruin of the whole structure. The whole nation suffered for what was the whole nation’s fault.
It was unfair to hold the government, as the ultimate organ of the state, responsible for all the state’s curable and incurable diseases; but it was certainly true that the government deserved a liberal share of the general culpability. In the Asiatic war, for example, where no individual of the ruling group conspicuously failed,... it was all the more clear that the blame for the failure lay in the system and in the government as such....
Doubtless, therefore, the nation had good reason for blaming its failure primarily on the restoration government.... Yet never before had it shown at the same time such violence and such laxity, never before had it been so corrupt and so pernicious. When a government cannot govern it ceases to be legitimate; and whoever has the power has also the right to overthrow it.
It is no doubt unhappily true that an incapable government may long trample underfoot a nation’s welfare and honor, before men are found who who are able and willing to wield against that government its own formidable weapons, and to forge the justifiable revolution out of the moral revolt of the good and the distress of the many.