If the things we have seen happen in the last few weeks, had happened 30 years ago, the entire country would have rallied together . Unfortunately, shock, rage, insanity, and the unthinkable have become so commonplace, there are people who have no idea that young children sitting in a church in a church in Minneapolis were attacked, injured, and shot dead by a young man who had once attended that very grade school. There are people who do not know that a 23-year-old woman was stabbed to death on a bus in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a 34-year-old man in what appears to be a totally random act of violence. There are people who do not know that there was another school shooting, this time in Evergreen, Colorado on the same day Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking with a large group of students on the campus of the Utah Valley University. There are many other horrible acts of unacceptable violence which have taken place in the last few weeks, of which I am unaware.

Yet we all live in a day and age where information is at our fingertips. If these things had happened 75 years ago, or 105 years ago, or longer, and someone knew about it, they would have wondered if the world was coming to an end. Today, we hear about these things far too frequently, and we also know that there are many more we don’t hear about.

What has happened to us? How can we exist in a society where innocent people are shot, stabbed, beaten to death, and terrorized on such a frequent basis? Is it because things like this have always been happening but we just didn’t know about it because the information age had not yet arrived? I don’t think anyone is foolish enough to claim that. I think that a lot of this is happening, and happening in increasing levels, because we have all been trained to pay attention to the evil in the world. Many of us focus on the evil. Many of us feel a need to hear and see the next tragedy almost like an addict needs their next hit of the drug to which they are addicted.

The four incidents I mentioned above have all occurred within a period of two weeks between August 27 and September 10. Within a matter of a few days, only a fraction of the people who know about one or more of these atrocities, will even think about them or recall them without someone or something reminding them. Well, the survivors and the family members and close friends of the victims will remember. And despite every effort to forget, the family members and those who felt close to the murderers will remember. However, even in our information-soaked world today, most of us will remember fewer and fewer details if we remember anything at all.

Satan revels in the short mindedness we live with today. When we forget the atrocities of the Holocaust, the Gulags, the “Great Leap Forward” of Mao Zedong, we can fail to recall the Black September terrorists and 1972 Olympic Massacre in Munich, Nicholas John Roske’s plans to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas which has now resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. Lest we forget that history repeats itself. This is especially true when we forgot the horrors from the last time around.

Satan also revels in distorted memories about these demonic attacks. He is the father of lies after all. For instance, there are people who deny that the Holocaust ever even occurred. On one brief occasion in 2019, the New York Times took to social media to praise Mao Zedong as one of history’s great revolutionary leaders. Zedong brought about the death of an estimated 65 million of his own countrymen, by starvation, while he was the leader of Communist China from 1949 to 1976.

And because of our poor memories, which are at the mercy of revisionist history, propaganda, and more than a few paid social media influencers, many Americans do not know who to believe, whose side they are on, or whether anyone can be trusted.

Pilate looked the savior of the world in the face and asked, “what is truth?” Was Pilate confused or was he in despair?

In this age of information, we seem to have more ignorance, confusion, mental illness, and despair than at any other time in human history.

Because of these things, there are many today who believe that Hamas was right, though possibly ill-advised, when they sent teams of terrorists to assault, rape, and murder mostly unarmed and defenseless civilians on October 7, 2023. There are people who wish the bullet which grazed Donald Trump would have been on target. There are people who think it is perfectly acceptable to murder Charlie Kirk because they disagree with the things he said.

I believe it is all deeply demonic. After all, sin makes humans stupid. How else could so many people argue for Socialism, pure Marxism, the extermination of an entire nation, or things such as the vandalism or all out destruction of pro-life women’s health clinics, churches, synagogues, or even mosques.

The recent insults regarding prayer are telling. What does Satan revel in more than our ignorance and confusion? He revels when we ignore God. In the midst of the horrors of Stalin’s gulags, a man named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saw the worst of it and lived to tell about it. When he accepted the Templeton Prize in 1983, he delivered a powerful speech regarding how such atrocities could still happen in what many consider modern and much more sophisticated times. If you read his speech, you will see the answer over and over again. “Men Have Forgotten God”.

And so it is today. Where we have not forgotten God, we are told, urged, or shamed into forgetting God. And in the face of all this suffering and unthinkable violence, despair can set in, and we can too easily forget reality, forget history, and forget God. We can even make ourselves into god, a god which pulls the trigger to assassinate someone because of something they said.

That is one of the reasons why Christ gave us the Church and taught us how to pray. When a celebrity, politician, or media talking head belittles those of us who still have the faith and the courage to pray, we must pray all the more. God never forgets even one of us, and we cannot forget God. Nor can we ever forget that we are not gods.