reply to post by XXXN3O
You've presented a good basic operating basis for any person or group that decides it needs to "protect itself from outsiders" by going secret.
Most of us are familiar with this operating basis.
But as far as I can tell, what your post is really about is that you have finally come to the conclusion that this is the work of Satan, plain and
simple. It seems that for you this simplifies the situation and perhaps indicates the best course of action to take.
However, some of us need to go farther than this.
I wasn't raised with a religious teaching, so the idea of "Satan" is kind of new to me. But I take it that what the concept amounts to is this:
On a grand scale, life is a struggle between God (or The Lord) and Satan. And there's nothing people can really do about that. Life has always been
that way, and always will be. All you can do is choose which side you want to be on. If you choose the Lord, you might make it to Heaven. If you
choose Satan, you're going to Hell.
These ultimate spiritual truths, as important as they might be, present a problem. What if Satan gets the upper hand? Then I would no longer have a
choice, except death. If I chose to live, and Satan had taken over, then my only choice would be to live with Satan. I don't want that to be my only
choice! I'd like to think (or believe) that I could do something to tip the game in the other direction, and push Satan a good bit out of the
picture.
People like me think that this could be accomplished by defining an ideal scene for the game in terms of some sort of secular (non-religious, or
non-factional) guidelines. One example of such a set of secular guidelines is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
www.un.org...
It's just an example, but it's a good one.
From a religious point of view, these guidelines attempt to create a secular analogy to choosing between God and Satan. If you live within these
guidelines, you're being "good." If you violate them all the time you're being "bad" or "evil."
From there we run into the same problems that religions run into: how do you make more people choose to be "good?"
The usual (and I think naive) idea of how to do this is to make these guidelines a part of secular law (many of them already are) and then enforce
them similar to how we enforce any other laws.
But we see our current legal systems breaking down under the mass of criminal activity that seems to be going on in our times. Legal solutions just
aren't working.
The other idea some have had is that you could go out and educate people about these guidelines, as many do not even know they exist. Then these
educated people would stand up for their rights and be less wiling to go along with the criminal elements. This is having some success. If you look at
this, this is kind of like secular missionary work. If you were religious you'd say you were serving God. If you are non-religious you would say you
are working for "human rights" or a "better future" or some other secular ideal.
This type of education has been successfully done even with people who have been used as child soldiers. It is a good beginning, and it is grass
roots. It takes a lot of work to educate a whole planet this way, and sometimes a good deal of courage. But the people who are working on this are
very committed. If you want to do something to help people choose to do right, without getting into religious arguments, I highly recommend teaching
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or a similar secular code of conduct.