Spiritual warfare is real.
+Earlier this week a City Council meeting in Ottumwa, Iowa, a town of 25,000 people 85 miles from Des Moines, became a real-world epicenter of spiritual warfare when a resident began the proceedings with an invocation to Satan.Matt Dalbey, a former councilmember and member of the Satanic Temple of Iowa, stepped up to the mic as residents and councilmembers bowed their heads in prayer, and began, “Dear Dark Father”:
Let us stand now, unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds in darkened times. Let us embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat from the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old.
Let me pause here to put this theological ignorance to rest. First, the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden was not the tree of “knowledge” – a point atheists constantly get wrong – but of “the knowledge of good and evil,” of which Adam and Eve, in their sinless innocence, were unaware. What Dalbey calls the “Luciferian impulse” was not a craving for knowledge but the cunning scheme of the Deceiver to tempt Adam and Eve to eat of the tree’s fruit so that they would become as gods. This, not the mere acquisition of knowledge, led to the fall of mankind and ejection from Eden into a world of sin, disease, and death. The “Luciferian impulse,” as Dalbey so proudly called it, is what separated us from God and has led to the very “darkened times” he blames on Christian ignorance.
He went on to blather about rejecting “social norms” before ending with “Hail Satan,” which should have prompted every citizen there to seize Dalbey, tar and feather him, and dump him at the doorstep of the Satanic Temple before running its entire congregation out of town on the next rail. Instead, the City Councilmembers simply stood and perfunctorily recited the Pledge of Allegiance, including the line, “one nation under God.” If they truly believed in that pledge, no one there would have allowed a satanist to finish leading the invocation.
“Invocation,” by the way, literally means calling up the presence of whatever deity you’re addressing. Dalbey was opening a portal, right there in City Council chambers, for Satan to enter and share the space with everyone present. Only one person there raised an objection, after the fact. Pastor Rick Bick from Ottumwa’s New Life Center, violating protocol, requested that a prayer be said immediately to “reverse this curse that was put on our city,” adding, “’Hail Satan’ is not welcome here.” But he was overruled by the mayor, who simply called for a moment of silence “to reflect on whatever it is we need to reflect on at this time.”
What they needed to reflect on was the state of their immortal souls and the spiritual health of the community. But as City administrator Philip Rath later said during an interview on KBIZ’s Dialogue, “You have to be open to allow people to express their different beliefs.”
No, we don’t. This attitude is a coward’s complicity in evil. What we have to do is loudly and firmly confront that evil wherever it rears its ugly, soul-eating, civilization-destroying head. And the Satanic Temple qualifies.
I’ve written previously about Iowa’s Satanic Temple problem, as recently as less than two months ago when the Temple and the woke ACLU sued state officials for allegedly denying the group permission to have a “family-friendly” winter holiday event in the Iowa Capitol rotunda on the same basis as other religious and civic groups. (To be clear: Satan by definition is not “family-friendly,” and neither are his worshippers; the idea that they should be given space at the state Capitol to celebrate their family-corroding godlessness is one that deserves condemnation, not inclusion).
Prior to that, the Temple was at the center of a controversy in November 2023 when it received permission to erect a statue of the occult idol Baphomet near a Nativity display at the Iowa State Capitol building. Baphomet was surrounded by candles and holding a pentacle – an occult talisman containing the inverted pentagram associated with Satanism and that is the logo for the Temple.
Christian conservative and U.S. Navy flight instructor Michael Cassidy “saw this blasphemous statue and was outraged,” and so he took it upon himself to tear it down. Cassidy told reporters that he destroyed the shrine in order to “awaken Christians to the anti-Christian acts promoted by our government”:
The world may tell Christians to submissively accept the legitimization of Satan, but none of the founders would have considered government sanction of Satanic altars inside Capitol buildings as protected by the First Amendment. Anti-Christian values have steadily been mainstreamed more and more in recent decades, and Christians have largely acted like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot of water.
Correct. The Founders did not want the establishment of a state religion, but they would have found it incomprehensible that this wariness would result in government buildings hosting altars to Satan-worship. There can hardly be a starker example of the degree to which we have rejected God and embraced a masochistic, inverted morality than the fact that we topple or remove statues of Founding Fathers and other figures that the woke find intolerable, but we erect statues honoring Satan.
This is what comes from a suicidal degree of “tolerance” and “inclusion”: bad actors – ones with the word “Satan” right there in their name, for example – will exploit that tolerance in order to get a legal, political, and cultural foothold in a society in order to undermine and subvert that society’s traditions and values.
Regardless of what the anti-American, Christian-hating Left loudly claims to the contrary, America is a Christian nation. For the willfully stupid who need this explained to them: that means America was founded on Christian values and principles, and thrives best when we abide by them. It does not mean that everyone in America is, or is required to be, Christian. Freedom of religion, or no religion, exists here, as it should. But that freedom shouldn’t be a suicide pact; America has no obligation to coddle subversive forces – ones with the word “Satan” right there in their name, for example – whose intention is not to assimilate but to conquer. --->READ MORE HERE
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