Ideas have consequences - do you buy that?

Ideas have consequences. I never use to buy that. I didn't put it into context using the phrase "ideas have consequences" in my earlier days, but similar thoughts about ideas.

I'd think: "So, I'm suppose to believe that some philosopher gets an idea, and somehow it then influences whole populations of people in an entire era of history? I don't buy that (I would say in my youth).

I just couldn't see that. It didn't seem practical to me.

Yet as I've learned more about ideas and worldviews I can very well see how that all did happen over and over in history. Probably to more of a strange degree than even some today who always bought the notion would even believe.

I think I have the answer as to why I didn't buy it, and why it is so.

Ideas - especially bad ideas - have tremendous influence on people because that is how the Devil operates in this realm (and before I was regenerated by the word and the Spirit I couldn't see that). Part of Satan being the 'power of the air' is ability to influence the ideas that float around and infect people. And it happens to such an easy and deep degree because it is *supernatural,* i.e. an act of Satan himself. It's a big part of how Satan controls his realm.

So as I marvel that young college students seem to have no defense against the lunacy of post-modernism in all its Hydra-headed manifestations I now see that part of that phenomenon is due to the fact that those young college students have no defense against the Devil and his stratagems to begin with. It's a supernatural hold the Devil has over the benighted young students (and still has over their parents, no doubt).

So when you see ideas as one of the weapons - a big one - Satan has to capture and hold people within the bonds of his Kingdom; and you see their supernatural quality; you don't marvel anymore at the effectiveness of bad ideas to control people.

The solution, the defense, is as always: complete reading - downloading into our soul - of the living, quickening word of God. It gives the material for a defense in ways we can't know when we are in the act of reading it, so we just must read it diligently and like a child, while making the continual effort to get parts-in-relation-to-the-whole understanding of it.