What is the best way to respond if someone or a community deceives, betrays, belittles you, or lies about you, or aims to destroy you and your interests? Would you want to search for any possible way to dialogue with them?
"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD." (Isaiah 1:18, KJV)
It is amazing that the most powerful God who is superior in justice and everything else sees the solution in dialogue. This sentence from the Almighty God is full of grace,mercy and love. Otherwise, who will be able to reason with the holy and spotless God if God chooses to assess short-fallings with His absolute justice? This is because God’s judgement is His last option in His approach to those who betray Him or lie about Him. God puts His justice into practice only when people shut the door forever to their ability to reason. For this reason, He is commending and surrendering His whole being and the entirety of His Kingdom to dialogue before the Judgement Day arrives, so that people may be able to see that He is interested in reconciliation not condemnation.
This bilateral culture of reasoning from God started to manifest itself in remarkable wayssince the Protestant Movement in the West. It progressively flourished into every part of life and brought about astounding changes for good among western nations. This was the first broad welcome to God’s culture by many nations after over two thousand years from the time of the prophet Isaiah to the Protestant Reformation. Westerners started to discover that it would be their fundamental responsibility to give reason for what they had and also sought reason even from their top leaders since they were divinely ordained for two-sided reason. By pursuing this Judeo-Christian culture, western nations grew rapidly, qualified their family, community and organizational cultures and thereby became the most creative nations in the world. For this reason, the West became the most favorite place for many people to migrate to.
Now, there is little interest in Judeo-Christian culture in the West since authoritarian socialism started to make its roots stronger under the freedoms ushered in by postmodernism. Because of its centralized, evolutionary leadership, socialism intentionally targeted the hearts and minds of western politicians and academics with the intention of aligning their policies with the unfriendly approach to reasoning and freedom that is the true face of socialism.
In socialism only one group, the working class, is entitled to have a voice - not the business owners or the wardens of the free market economy. This is because socialism’s conviction is that a business owner shouldn’t be able to make more money than the salaries of his workers. To do so would be evidence that he had abused the workesr. A worker in a free market economy is therefore seen as a victim and his voice must be assisted so that he may dominate the owners of business. But business owners on the other hand must be made voiceless until their wealth disappears and society has become totally egalitarian. This is the definition of freedom in socialism; it is a one-way freedom – the freedom of the ‘victims’.
It is funny that the first socialists rose to find a better solution against the money cartel’s one-way freedom and exploitation in 19th and early 20th Century. But it is interesting to note that, by the late 20th century, they themselves had fallen into the same trap and ended up embracing the principles they once disliked. Interestingly though, Socialists of the 21st Century are still living with the 19th Century mindset (even though it is out-of-date according to their own evolutionary philosophy). Ideologically speaking, they are immeasurably confused, perverted and thereby unable to think deeply. They see that the conditions of workers in 20th and 21st Centuries changed for good. Western business owners solved their problems with workers by listening to their reasoning and ideas through Bench-Marking and Enterprise Agreements and other innovative initiatives. Workplaces became characterised by financial incentives for increased productivity. In many businesses workers were given representation on Boards and in management. To this day, the conditions of workers in western countries are way better than the conditions of workers in socialist countries. The old unjust ethics that had been evident in many organizations of the 19th century have given way to the work ethics that flow out of the the teachings of Jesus Christ. Industrial laws were no longer shaped by the principles of the bad old days of exploitation.
Sadly, it is now the socialists who aim to erase good functional western laws by spreading their socialist ideology and ethics. One is their primary tactics is the use of the “victimhood” ethos in order to claim for themselves the higher moral ground of being the superior thinkers. Socialists leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and many others slaughtered millions of their fellow citizens (many of them downtrodden workers) under a justification of socialist ideology. Yet they still claimed that the workers were ‘victims’ in order to emotionally justify their violence and secure their political dominance. They were always afraid to lose their moral high ground and therefore had no choice but to play the self-righteousness game using the ruse of victimhood. The truth is that this victimhood has always been accompanied by bluff and deceit. For both followers and defenders of socialism, the goal and effect of this strategy is the accumulation of more power and control.
So, the second powerful ethos in socialism is bluffing or lying. Almost a century of practice has made socialists expert in lying about their critics while cleverly attributing their own flaws and failures to others.
A third deceptive ethic of socialism is its overt support for any group that has the potential to claim victimhood - even if they have little knowledge of or sympathy for socialism. According to socialism, victims should have more rights than others in everything, even to the point of destroying the rights and freedoms of others.
For this reason, socialists, and all their allied leftists love to create or champion victims in any way they can since ‘the End Justifies Means’. Victims must always remain victims so that socialism is able to survive in western democratic societies characterised by Judeo-Christian principles and values which have nurtured a culture where there is reasoning between both sides. Socialists know that, if they lose the leverage of ‘the victim mindset’, it will be the end of their ideology. Even if they avail themselves of the countless opportunities for bilateral reasoning in conversation with non-socialists, they will lose their ascendency. This was what happened between Regan, a defender of the free market economy, and the socialist Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s openness to dialogue and reasoning brought socialism to an end in Russia. Genuine dialogue changes the landscape for socialists.
Most socialists of our time are slaves to their old ideological principles. They therefore have zero tolerance for creative mutual conversation. By drawing the media into their service, they have had remarkable success in reshaping the minds of many westerners. They have skilfully used journalists to spread the victim mindset and, in so doing, have largely silenced the Christian voice in community dialogue.
Socialists and all their quasi-socialist sympathizers know that ‘victim’ propaganda is a most effective tool in winning people’s minds and enlisting their advocacy for socialist causes. Socialist leaders rejoice in being ‘stage-managers’ rather than ‘lead players’ in the socialist march that is sweeping through western nations. Interestingly, one of the victim groups that they champion is fundamentalist Islamic activists.
Actually, the union between the socialists and Islamists in the West is largely because of Islam’s identification with a victim mindset. Muslim communities all over the world have taken up the persona of being victims at the hands of non-Muslims. Their thinking is that this victimhood will not end until Muslims occupy the entire world and release the world from non-Islamic values. Victimhood is the life-long destiny of each Muslim shaped by Muhammad and it will never come to an end unless all other beliefs disappear. That’s why ISIS has risen. This victim mindset has always been there throughout the history of Islam. Muhammad rose because an angel forced him to follow Allah against other religions that were opposed to him (Ibn Hisham, Sirat Rasul Allah, P.106-107); Sunnis rose because Shiites were at odds with them over the right to the caliphate; Shiites rose because of Sunni oppression; The Sunni Muslim Brotherhood rose because of colonialist oppression: Shiite, Ayatollah Khomeini rose because of Israel’s and America’s oppression; Palestinian fundamentalism - Hezbollah, Hamas - rose because of the creation of Israel which is an offense to Islam; and our contemporary terrorists have risen because of Islam’s core excuse - they see themselves as victims.
We can see how the tyrannical gamesmanship of ‘victimhood’ dominated thinking in the West. It produces pressure to repeal existing legislation. It is used to shame and humiliate anyone who dares to disagree with it. Socialists use the gamemanship of 'victimhood' as a principle to belittle their oppositions, discriminate against them, call them haters or cause them to lose their jobs once their opposition has crossed the line and revealed the evil plans of socialists.
Christians are now forced to leave their Christian beliefs in their homes or their churches and bow down to the leftist credo almost everywhere you go. Wherever they go, they will find themselves face to face with a legion of victims who will target them with accusations of bullying, insult, victimization, humiliation or racism.
Isn’t it shocking and heart-breaking that leftists have become the dire enemies of Christianity which originally gave them space and respected their rights to express themselves freely!? Such a wicked pay back to our beautiful Christian values.
How should we respond to such wickedness? How about the response of Jesus Christ:
"Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do." (Luke 23:24, MKJV)
We forgive them because they do not know. However, this appeal put forward by Christ for forgiveness does not mean we should ignore those who seek to manipulate our society in this way. Indeed, if this were to be the outcome, His church wouldn’t be established and His manifold wisdom wouldn’t be revealed by His Church (Ephesians 3:10).
Secondly, our forgiveness becomes sweeter and more meaningful if we stand to enlighten the minds and hearts of those who belittle us or want to get rid of us. That’s why God is pleading with his enemies to give their reasons and to hear our reasons:
“Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” (Isaiah 1:18, ESV)
Reasoning through dialogue helps.
