CHAPTER THREE

Part 1

THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE

The Altar of Babylon

The veteran bully is not content to spout verbal diarrhea at you, or even punch your lights out.  His real aim is to enslave your mind with fear, to be the one who dominates what he considers to be his own turf.  He’s out to foist his own hang-ups on you, and deny you the right to be you! God wants to expose the devil’s labyrinth of lies.   You need to be aware of   the bully’s ingrained prejudices, so that the next time he ridicules you for falling short of his values, you’ll have the inner strength not to absorb his  derision into your sensitive soul.      If you hear a lie repeated often enough, chances are you’ll begin to believe it.  The devil takes advantage of this  flaw  of human nature.  He even counterfeits the things of God and makes you think the world’s perverse standards of success are GOD’S standards!

Romans 10:17 says:  Faith comes by hearing the Word of God.  By constantly feeding on God’s promises in His Word and meditating upon them, our faith grows and God shares His thoughts with us.  We develop a more godly perception of ourselves, of God, and the world.   Our prayers get results, and joy fills our hearts (John 16:24).  

Conversely, Satan has his own program of “religious training”.  In the Western world, materialism is the religion of the vast majority who are either lukewarm toward Christ or profess no religious belief at all.  Seeking adulation, they devote their entire lives to the acquisition of more and more luxury goods, or pay big bucks to attain to that “drop-dead gorgeous” look.  Millions have been brainwashed to serve the idol of self. Eagerly they lay their money on the Altar of Babylon.

In this book, Babylon is a symbolic name for the Big Money System which dominates this present world, doing its behind-the-scenes dirty work of manipulating the trends and mores of society.  Babylon’s sole motivation is to maximize its  already outlandish profits.  The super-rich multi-nationals who comprise Babylon are oblivious to the moral decay and heartbreak caused by the insidious indoctrination of movies, television, and other forms of mass marketing.

To put it succinctly: You, as a consumer, mean nothing to them, except as a means to an end!  In generations past, products were developed in response to genuine consumer needs.  Consumer demand usually precipitated product research and development.  Consumers themselves decided what was to be put on the market.

Today, manufacturing concerns have mutated into  multi-national corporations, expanding their tentacles around the globe and ruling it in all but name .  They decide what they want to produce, and simply persuade the consumer that he or she desperately needs their often environmentally deleterious, frivolous, or morally corrupt output.  We shall pick Babylon apart and examine it in great detail, to expose the shallowness of the standard people fearfully adhere to, lest they fall prey to bullying. We’ll examine some of the ways in which conformity to Babylon is enforced upon society (particularly young consumers vulnerable to peer pressure). One cultural obsession, which is probably the heaviest  yoke Western society lays upon the necks of  females, will be the focus of my  in-depth analysis:

Fat is an “F” Word

Obscene language is one tactic satan employs to degrade the human soul.  I felt the most bitter hatred a human can feel toward Mike Crane, for the devil had used him to hurl  a three-letter word at me which is every bit as nasty as the four-letter kind. Mike Crane contributed to a mild eating disorder I later developed. The enemy succeeded not only in wounding me, but getting me to shout the dirtiest insult I knew back at him. I got mad when he seemed not to have heard it, and ran off laughing.  But that isn’t God’s  way to fight the devil.  If God doesn’t enable you to battle against your unseen enemy His way, the devil will always win.

No worse insult can be fired against a modern girl than “fat”.  You could call her stupid, tacky, or even a slut; but still, that loathsome obscenity  “fat” withers her heart as no other word can. If a boy friend gets mad at his girl and wants to floor her without laying a finger on her, all he has to do is call her fat, even if she’s built like a rake.   Why do I consider the word “fat” one of the most vicious words  in the English language?

When you make a girl feel like a huge, ugly, clumsy monster, you destroy something precious within her soul, that part of her which cries out to be loved and cherished as a beautiful person.  Every little girl dreams of being the fair princess who is so graceful and angelic she floats away on a breeze of love as the dance music plays. She won’t share that fairyland fantasy with just anyone because it would only draw ridicule in the grey, gritty, dog-eat-dog world of reality.

Ridicule of a vulnerable, self-conscious, lonely girl is emotional rape, plain and simple.  A bully slashes his way through the tender tissue of that girl’s soul to loosen his load of venom.  Then, like the savage dog he is, he shreds her soul with his fangs and urinates on it to leave his mark, leaving her broken, bruised, bitter and shattered. It takes the power of Almighty God to cleanse the stink of the bully off her violated soul, wrap that girl up in His Love and say: “You’re worth so much to Me I died to save you and raise your crushed soul back to life.”

A word is more than just a word. The context in which it is used is what makes it good, bad, or indifferent. Cruel words are lethal poison to sensitive souls. What connotations does today’s detestable culture attach to the insult “fat” ?  What is the bully really saying when he aims it at you?

1.  You are unworthy of love. Little girls are initiated into the glamor culture when they read fairy tale books.  The sweet, innocent heroine is always depicted as being a mere slip of a girl with large, luminous eyes, barely-there arms and perfect hair.  The wicked stepsisters have big noses, big-boned bodies  and wide feet, so they don’t bag the handsome prince.  In high school, the tiny waif gets rewarded for her dieting by snagging the powerful football hunk. Girls who don’t keep themselves gaunt are far more susceptible to bullying.

2.  You are ugly and ungainly.  Being small = being graceful. A foxy woman’s face must be fox-shaped. No ethnic variations  allowed. Period.  A round face offends the fashion police. Only a tiny, waiflike face with huge doe eyes makes it big in Hollywood. And if a woman’s schnozz is too big,  it’s time to downsize. Just drop by your friendly  plastic surgeon (through the back door, of course),and Dr. Buzzsaw will gladly sculpt a more socially acceptable mug (or beef up your war chest) for a song.

3.  You are unfeminine and subhuman.  I matured more quickly than most other girls in my class, although I was just average height. This made me appear wider than the others. I certainly didn’t look like a weak little girl. So I got called quite a few unflattering names by big-mouthed bigots.

4.  You are unworthy of basic human dignity.  Political correctness doesn’t object to size discrimination.  Only thin people have feelings.  Solidly built people are emotionless mountains of lard.  They’re thick-skinned, just like elephants, so  it’s OK to  point out   that they’ve put on weight over the holidays (as if they need reminding!) They’re jolly like  Santa Claus, they’ll just laugh along with you. But the bully  knows he’s hurting you when he ridicules your size or shape. He’d just as soon step on you as a cockroach.

5.  Any girl who isn’t built like a stop sign is a pile of garbage. Conform or die trying!

6.  You’d be tiny if you didn’t eat like a pig, so you must BE one! Self-explanatory.  A bully’s logic, and the justification for the last acceptable bastion of political incorrectness: size discrimination.

The Phallus Fixation

I was listening to Talk Radio one night, and the guest speaker was a “relationships expert” counseling people online.  One woman who called in said her husband had left her after 28 years of marriage, and remarried, but the woman was unable to move on with her life (go look for another lover).  Why had this lady’s marriage ended?  The couple had drifted apart, with each person immersed in their own activities.  She had been busy with the children, while he was busy with his business.

The counselor almost immediately brought up the subject of weight and how important it was to lose weight to be attractive to men.  Over the years, the woman had put on less than 30 pounds, but the relationships counselor, knowing nothing about the basic health of the woman or what her individual  nutritional requirements might be, immediately advised her to cut out all sweets, bread, potatoes, sugar and cheese. Anything, it seems, that had the capacity to satisfy hunger.  Little is left except low-cal foods that consist mostly of water, such as fruits or certain veggies. That’s a virtual fast! Eliminating whole food groups and severely restricting calories constitutes a crash diet,  but  that’s the fastest way to turn  your body into a man magnet. It’s perfectly okay to  suffer on a nutrient-starved, miserable diet, because sex is far more important than health.

Only when this lady reached her target goal did she “have the confidence”  to go out and find herself some brand new swinging stud. Why, she’d feel like a teenager again, picking up guys at bars and trying them on  like a new pair of shoes.

Your local magazine rack teaches you that a woman’s body is valuable only as a playground for male plumbing. A slender pencil case for his convenience.  And there’s endless smutty ads online and on magazine racks about how a man can keep on growing the only part of his body that gains him any respect in this perverse world.

On almost every woman’s magazine the main topic is diet, diet diet! A close second in importance is how to have ever more exciting sex.  Reduced to bare bones truth, the current dieting craze isn’t really about improving health, quality of life or longevity.  That’s just the devil’s smokescreen.  It’s primarily about preparing a woman’s body for sex, sex and more sex.  Women sweat their guts out in gyms to turn female curves into a “lean, mean machine”. Teenage girls and women of all ages are daily bombarded with this great glad news: Stay skinny or no one will want to - - - - you!

Gone are the days when the wholesome girl next door went with a nice young man to the movies or a pizza parlor, and then said goodnight, and thank you for the wonderful evening.  The innocent, demure slenderella who waits for her charming prince to marry her and set up a home with her is a myth of the past.  Now, it’s strictly about getting laid as often as you can, and with as many hot hunks as you can. “Sweat and starve” is a tiny price to pay for snagging the best beefcake in town.

Deadly Doctrines of Today’s Dieting Culture

1.  Sex is the main purpose of life.

2.  Dieting is a woman’s basic training for fornication.

3.  Woman is nothing but a boy toy, a slender pencil case for male pleasure.

4.  Only skinny women are worthy of self-esteem.

5.  Only skinny women are worthy of love.

6.  Sex is the only satisfaction allowed a starving woman.

7. Getting and staying skinny is worth risking death for.

8. The skinniest girls snag the sexiest guys.

The Christian should not conform to the grungy mindset of a world alienated from God.  The body of the Christian believer is not to be for fornication, but to glorify the Lord, as the Temple of His Spirit (I Cor.6:13; I Cor.3:16; II Cor.6:16).    

The Vanishing Princess

The more the Vanishing Princess subtracts from herself, the more she adds to her prestige, and the less likely she is to be excommunicated from the Cult of Cool.  Food, the body’s most basic need, becomes her mortal enemy. Her skimpy intake is eaten in secret, away from the scrutiny of her peers. Western society’s war on female nutrition is harmful (and sometimes fatal) at any stage of life; but particularly so in teenage girls, whose bodies are still developing and require extra nutrients for maturation.

A recent study showed that one million people in Britain are anorexic.  That’s about one in every sixty.  And fifteen per cent of those anorexia cases lead to death.  That’s 150,000 dead people, the size of a small city, sacrificed to the Establishment’s perverted diet and fashion industries!  My anorectic brother hastened his own death by “taking food sparingly like medicine”.  The heady thrill of thinness costs only vitality and  health.  Is making others envy you and shower you with praise worth an early grave?

I read on the Internet about one ditsy  celebrity who found the perfect way to humiliate  women who weren’t anorectic. She sent out party invitations to all her female acquaintances.  Only the invitation specified that any gal over 100 pounds would not be admitted to her party.  A big scale would be waiting outside the door to weigh all her arriving guests!  Crazy isn’t it? I wonder if any of those gals took off their stilettos and furs before they got on the scale?  What did the refreshments at that party consist of, anyway?  Celery sticks and mineral water? What did all those skinny cats talk about?  What else would they discuss but life’s three weightiest issues: hair, clothes and weight?

“Poor thing, Brigitte gained four pounds since last year. Too bad she couldn’t make it tonight.”

“Yeah!” her friend giggles. “She’s up to 102 now, so how is she ever gonna get laid?”

There is such extreme pressure in modern Western society for all females to be skinny that many high school and college age girls ignore their need for nourishment.  Genuine hunger is artificially eliminated with chemical appetite suppressants (a billion-dollar-a year industry). Many willingly sacrifice their own health and stamina in order to conform to an illusive beauty ideal  promoted by Babylon via the mass media. Unlike men, women of all ages are under intense pressure to dress scantily, to put themselves on display to a competitive, sex-obsessed world.  I’ve seen many diet ads where the woman shows off her starving body to lure some macho male, like a hard-won trophy.   One commercial for a fat-free, plasticized treat shows a woman wearing a wide-open  blouse.  She wanted the whole wide world to know her food adds not one single calorie, and you can play the marimba on her rib cage. Some girls would literally die to get a  long, lean, hard, boyish bod, though many men admit they prefer curves on their women.

Why does a skinny chick feel obligated to bare her bony bod and toothpick arms?   Seems like it’s mostly women who show off all their wares at the meat market, much like slaves at Southern slave auctions would show “massa” their teeth and muscles. But men don’t have to show lots of flesh at parties! At the typical high society function you’ll notice a preponderance of plunging necklines, bare   female arms and shoulders, and sometimes backs.  But the men are trussed up to their necks in  black penguin suits. Ever wonder why there’s a double standard? Evidently the self-worth of women is all tied up in showing the world what lookers they are. Men are allowed to draw their inner security from what they do outside the bedroom. Their own self-esteem comes from many sources, not just their looks. In the action adventure film, it’s always the woman who strips her clothes off  for  the male hero  who saves Planet Earth from its date with doomsday.  What else is a woman good for?

A few are waking up and actually rebelling against Babylon’s ham-fisted hunger manifesto. A 200-pound girl won a singing contest on TV.  She confessed that she’d been bullied for her weight as a school kid.  What vindication she must have felt when millions of TV viewers voted for her!  I know such an honor is no match for the remedy Christ can provide a wounded soul,  but the fact she won showed that even unbelievers are getting sick of being pushed around by promoters of narcissism and anorexia; Babylon’s rich kingpins who rake in billions  by promoting  concentration camp chic.

The young teen fears that her brawny hunk will find a skinnier chick to go out with.  She fears that even a negligible weight gain will make her the butt of jokes.  Eating is, therefore, an act of shame which could result in rejection. Seems like the only  time it’s okay for a woman on TV to enjoy food is as part of sexual foreplay, i.e. seductively licking  whipped cream off Romeo’s bod to arouse him.  The woman’s body is viewed as nothing but a sex toy.  If you eat, you might get fat and Mr. Lean, Mean Machine won’t want to play with you. The world values the female body only as a vehicle of fornication, but the Christian woman should see her own body as a Temple of the Holy Spirit (I Cor. 6:13).

The college freshman fears that if she doesn’t look like a supermodel  she’ll be blackballed from getting into a prestigious sorority.  An aging female celebrity might starve herself down to a double-digit weight so  Romeo won’t stray. The career woman fears the possible subtraction of points from her interview score for appearance when she competes with skinnier bodies. It’s a woman’s body interviewers focus on, not her brain.  Even in our age of “equal opportunity”, youth and glamor often impress potential employers far more than experience and skill. After all, they want prospective patrons to associate glamor with their business.

Fear. The driving motivation behind conformity to the tyrannical edicts of Babylon.  This never-ending emphasis on  perpetual youth and emaciation generates untold billions  for Big Business. Mother wants to look like a kid again.  So she spends thousands of dollars on a complete plastic surgery rehaul.  Her teenage daughter scarfs down diet pills,  because she’s afraid she won’t get laid before she’s twenty.

      Men used to be under far less pressure to be thin, but I read that’s changing now.  The fashion and diet industries have made so much moolah from the thinness racket, they know there’s more to be made by also making males ashamed of their own bodies. My poor brother suffered from anorexia  long before anyone knew guys could get it too. He died of cancer, but your chances of survival are mighty slim when you’re as skinny as a gumstick.

Products, Not People

Before the 60’s, when television began to dictate the mores of society (and Twiggy emerged as the only beauty ideal), there wasn’t undue emphasis on dieting or thinness.  Only obviously obese people thought about it very much.  Young girls on TV tended to be slender, but curvy. Once upon a time a beautiful girl could fill out a sweater.

As years passed female actresses tended to look more like hawk-faced boys.   It’s their prerogative.  But the problem is the way so many people venerate the mass media. They think: If I saw it on TV, it’s just gotta  true! So everybody has just gotta get their eyebrows riddled with rings and their belly buttons perforated. The entertainment industry sets the standards all other females are expected by society to emulate, even pre-adolescent girls.

One example of TV’s power to mold the mind:  Recently I read about how a soap opera star was beaten to a pulp by some thugs who didn’t like what his character did on TV.  People of this generation have, as a rule, fed on countless thousands of hours of television violence.  To them TV is   the gospel truth. Some people are so dependent on televised propaganda  that if TV were taken from them, they would feel that they had lost their only spiritual compass.

Perhaps the driver of a certain car considered  Hollywood his spiritual compass.  His bumper sticker read: I DON’T BRAKE FOR FAT CHICKS!  Just what was it that had instilled such hostility in that deadhead?  Maybe his mom lost her latest partner (husbands are passe) when she stopped pumping iron and lost her  “washboard abs” and  her flat fanny got a little meat on it.  Maybe the driver’s old man  was a porn junkie.  Maybe he had been babysat by  TV skin flicks before he even he got out of diapers.

But TV had never taught him this fundamental law  of the universe: What goes around comes around.  The meanness you sow in life, you’ll reap after death.  Every human being, however humble, bears the logo of his Creator.  When you call God’s handiwork garbage, you don’t endear yourself to Him.  And if  you don’t brake for Jesus and turn, you’ll burn.  A bony body will get you into a modeling agency, but not into heaven.  The door to hell opens wide to an ugly, unsanctified soul.  But you never hear those truths on TV.

Through TV (and the movies), Babylon has  orchestrated this societal trend (it didn’t just appear out of nowhere!) which pressures and shames women into knocking diet dope down their necks and nibbling fake diet food in order to compete with characters in Fantasy Land.  As the Establishment cuts women down to size, big bucks fill the coffers of the greedy fat cat Multi-nationals. Several methods are used to increase their market base (which is crucial to net profit margin):

The 5 P’s of Consumer Control

1.  Promote your lucrative ideology.  Indoctrinate women with feelings of  inadequacy via Hollywood stereotypes.  Make normal women and girl feel they’re NOT OK.

2.  Plant subtle fears via TV commercials.  Always associate diet products with sex.  Bring on a big stud to “reward” the woman who’s “been good” and lost weight with promise of sweets under the sheets.

 Its implication:   That salivating hot hunk won’t hook up with you if you DON’T swallow their rhetoric and buy their products.

3.  Pump up a person’s egotistical desire to own a status symbol (something which is costly or difficult to obtain or keep! ) That status symbol, for a media-indoctrinated woman, is a hairpin figure few others can flaunt.

4.  Propagate a new generation of consumers.  Brainwash little girls. How? (See no. 5).

5.  Push your product with big media hype. Advertise and market sexy  clothes, lingerie and makeup for 8-to-10-year-olds (the Tween-age look).

Presto! The beginning of a lifelong obsession with staying stick-thin! The skimpier the outfit, the less material used in its manufacture, and the fatter the profit margin for the fat cat Multi-national fashion industry. 

Remember, a size 2 (or was that size 00) sells for just as much as a size 8, and slaves in third-world countries who earn fifty cents a day can churn those teeny-weeny clothes out twice as fast!

A Man to DIET For

Bullies are brainwashed clones.  They help enforce the twisted standards of Babylon,  making other nameless, faceless entities wealthier in the process.  Full-figured females are among their favorite targets.  Pity the poor girl who blossoms out at age 11 or 12!

Fat bullying, ironically, sometimes occurs between supposed friends or lovers.  I remember one sweet girl who’d just had her first child.  She had not gained excessive weight during her pregnancy.  But instead of being thankful that mother and child were both doing well, her husband immediately began to carp about how her figure had not immediately sprung back to its former shape.  What a shabby way to treat someone who has just risked her life to bring a child into the world!  At a time in her life when she needed her man’s reassurance the most, he griped for weeks on end about her extra girth and about how she “just wasn’t the same”.  She was reduced to tears.

How selfish of him.  That’s the kind of “love” a woman can well do without.  Mr. Hunk means:  “If you really loved me, you’d stop eating for me.  And you’d still keep a decent chest measurement (the only area of a woman’s body permitted to have any meat on it).  He’s also saying between the lines:  A strong, mature woman makes me feel insecure.  I need a wispy waif hanging onto my arm for support, a tiny little girl who makes me feel big, and picks at her salad in order to appear feminine. I need a plastic doll to play with in bed.   Your full-fledged personhood makes me feel inadequate as  a man.  Why don’t you decrease so I can increase?”

That’s the core philosophy of abusive individuals, especially dominant bullies.  Flagrant intimidation is resorted to by the more forceful person in order to get what he wants.  If Romeo runs off, it’s ALWAYS the woman’s fault, and usually because she put on a couple of pounds.  She must diminish herself for him and forfeit the pleasure of eating, exchanging it for the hollowness of perpetual hunger. Society demands no corresponding sacrifice of the male.  A man scarfing down a huge “power lunch” with beer feels no guilt, but a  salad a day will go a long way for a career woman who must go home to her other job.   That’s just the way it is.   After all, a few greedy, uncharitable  men possess most of the power (and the money), so they call the shots, and make the rules of  the Establishment.   I honestly believe that one of the most perverse games people play is to find ways to deny others the legitimate enjoyments of life. It’s all about control, plain and simple.

Despotic rulers have always reserved the greatest pleasures for themselves, and gotten a rush from  suppressing the peasants’ enjoyment of life. The domineering  male is a control freak who wants the female to derive all  her pleasure strictly from him alone. Visions of Romeo’s disapproving frown is the most effective lock on a  woman’s refrigerator.

What a heady feeling power is. The school bully might not even need that lunch money he extorts from the other kid.  But he gloats over the discomfort caused when his victim must stop eating to stop the teasing.  The bully’s goal is to shrivel the soul of his victim, who is desperately trying to shrivel the size of her body.  The bully’s aim is to make him/her feel inferior.  The bully strips his victim of all dignity.  Thus the abuser compensates for subconscious feelings of inferiority.  He even succeeds in projecting himself as a god others are expected to fear and defer to.