03| You're Spiritually Sick, Not Mentally Ill.
From Woodstock to war zones. And why the Devil doesn't need bombs to snatch souls.
In this third essay we look at matters related to disobeying the First Commandment: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ … to help establish why things go the way they do when they don’t go our way — when life turns against us — in super-fact, when we exit celestial boundaries and end up crushed, barely hanging on, and not sure we can or want to.
As for light within the letter’s folds: Trust in God, and take Him at His word.
Seriously.
Third in a series on spiritual victory over Mental Illness.
'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.' Exodus 20:2–3
WE LEARN FROM the Sixties in all its sparkling anti-glory that separating ourselves from God by chasing sinful pleasures and remaking the world in our own image is a fool’s errand, and recipe for disaster.
It’s impossible not to draw that conclusion, even from the scant data available at the time (I’m pretty sure no one prepared in advance to study the hippie uprising), or the Thanos finger-snap that followed. Only now do we have enough distance to see things not just as they were but as they are.
If ever evidence were needed to assert the dangers of free-will-run-riot versus Biblical mandates and explicit warnings (especially the charred remains of the era) then the 60s and 70s are your Exhibit A.
And what started there wouldn’t end there.
To stay new, evil hides by constantly evolving
THE SAME SHOCKTAIL of rebellion and dissolution (all part of the rapid normalization of sin) would continue to spread and evolve/mutate, unlike the poor souls who ignored the warnings and surrounding carnage (as I did), to play by whatever rules moved them passionately over the yellow line and into the red zone.
Life would go on. Styles changed. Music changed. Drugs changed. Sexual promiscuity would continue to permeate the culture. The 70s/80s/90s would introduce the world to bigger hair, and a less communal more selfish version of the Summer of Love1 — one boiling with AIDS and STDs, a steady torrent of shattered lives, more aborted babies, and new mountains of heaped-up sin — minus the summer, and the love.
The takeaway? No one learned a thing.
Let me correct that. I should say that those burned by their choices certainly would have learned their lesson, but by then it was too late for most of them. And anyway the lessons of that time were all but ignored as busloads of new recruits arrived and immediately defaulted to the belief that they were immune to the same famished beasts that devoured their predecessors, and so on.
By the late-70s, lifestyles previously and tenuously committed to sex, drugs, and social change devolved into bonfires of raucous nihilism2 (The Ramones, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols) — brimming with angry energy stripped of all utopianism.
Sentiments and fashions changed. The kill factors remained exactly the same.
Most tragedies are avoidable
LIVES GET WRECKED, now as then, not because of some mashup of bad joss falling randomly on the unsuspecting.
From what I’ve seen, most preventable tragedies usually happen when people wander — drunk, high, listless, stubborn, or reckless (all or part) — into harm’s way. That is, people put themselves in situational jeopardy, which in turn becomes a kind of wind-tunnel powered by malignant forces that steer the rudderless toward the rocks.
Whether bad things come of it or not, the odds of ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time stack higher the longer you stay in the tunnel, and the more often you visit there, which most would avoid were they in their right minds to begin with.
Tempting fate
The classic example of this are drunk teens leaving a party who get into a fatal accident on the way home. Or the girl who goes to a campus kegger with friends, and stays behind to pursue a crush only to wake up the next day sexually violated with no memory of what happened. The best/worst examples of this are murdered prostitutes and death-by-mis-adventurists (free climbers?) who put it all on the line repeatedly for thrill, money, fame … only to eventually lose the bet and pay the ultimate price.3
But there’s more to it.
Not every carload of wasted kids crashes on the way home. Not every girl interested in a guy ends up a trashed amnesiac in a frat house basement. However, we can all agree that the possibility for something bad happening increases exponentially whenever we choose to lay down in traffic.
The reality is, risky behavior of the type that pulls us inside the near occasion of sin moves us out from under the safety of Eagle’s wings and into thorny wilds: home to dangerous spirits who feed and train our proclivities and the desires we present to them, leading us from a day in the park into night inside the haunted forest.
It’s business — not personal
EVIL HAS HAD millennia to infiltrate humanity and blur the Commandments and moral guides delineated by practical and spiritual necessity, to dull our minds and dampen our spirit, arouse and inflame wayward wants, and posit excitement and rewards for sin4.
The nature of secular society apart from Catholic teaching is to climb, keep climbing, keep reaching, keep taking, horde it all to yourself, and never look down. We are trained to believe that getting to the top is all that matters in this world, regardless of the thing desired.
With centuries to co-opt human interaction and reshape entire societies around greed, ambition, risk & reward, and endless back-channeling, our Enemy made sure that living a properly ordered life — especially for the Christian — would come at a steep opportunity cost.
So it goes, when almost everyone agrees on the same formula for success, personal intention can be easily turned into something darker. Under such skies, the end justifies the means5 and we find ourselves — by conditioning, predisposition, and repetition — following in the footsteps of celebrated deviants who redrew the river’s flow to irrigate their own fields, boost their own crops, and satisfy and validate their own vanity and hunger.
The long history of people chasing spoils at others’ expense has produced a thick glossary of euphemisms and justifications — a manual for practical living, tailor-made by the evil one to replace the divine narrative entirely, despite the fact that this alternative6 stands in open defiance of Scripture.
Not surprisingly, the heroic posturing of these heretical disciplines does exactly what Christ came to undo: glorifying self, exalting material wealth and possessions, and shedding all personal culpability.
Life is a contest, after all (so the devil would have us believe), where achieving your dreams —not Heaven — is the ultimate goal.7
Everything-Is-Connected
ON THE SURFACE, A society moved suddenly from sunny prosperity in the post-WWII years into a hard rain of social chaos and instability by the Sixties — just because — makes zero sense.
Alas, beloved, everything has its root cause.
Yes, the postwar years gave visible form to the nation’s longing for renewal — a deep, collective yearning born from the exhaustion and sacrifice of WWII and Korea (with Vietnam soon to follow).
But — and this is a key distinction — the calendar end of global conflict wouldn’t bring closure or absolution for wartime crimes, casual infidelities, or atrocities committed over there (take the bombing of cities and civilians on both sides, for starters). Nor would it heal the wounds within wounds suffered by eye-witnesses, surviving victims, and combatants, any more than crossing an ocean allowed returning servicemen and women to leave all that baggage behind.
No — as we’ve discussed earlier with regards to personal ownership of sin apart from our Holy Redeemer — guilt and shame, unreconciled sins, and the trauma of war returned with them. And though everyone stood ready to flip the switch and board the rocket to a gleaming future, this was merely the latest advance in the American self-fulfillment fantasy built on the sand of wishful thinking and denial — not on supernatural fact.8
In today’s terms, what we might say is that everybody drunk on post-WWII prosperity and American exceptionalism (a temple in its own right) got busy manifesting a new reality for which the debt still hadn’t been paid on the old one. A fault line of human frailty so flimsy, in fact, that when JFK was killed — and Oswald right after him, both on live TV — it split those still-seeping wounds wide open. The dread fears of the war years came rushing back and spurting forth, and for perhaps the first time, many suspected to their horror that conspiracies and shadow monsters roamed amongst them.
The Age of Aquarius
WAS IT DESPERATION — the sudden collapse of innocence that powered that generational leap into the arms of wanton personal freedom, mad indulgence, and despair?
Consider:
JFK’s assassination traumatized the free world, but nothing delivered hopelessness as deeply and effectively quite like the back-to-back ‘coda killings’ of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in ’68. What is there to believe in or build on when the magi of hope are cut down in cold blood? What good was the Church and established order when a pre-eminent evil was running the show and calling the shots?
It was clear to those who were there in the 60s — and especially after 1968 — that no one was coming to save them.
Feeling by turns angry, helpless, distraught, and occasionally euphoric, the emerging counter-culture would opt to save themselves by whatever means were available to them at the time. Means that engulfed a generation in fire, leaving later generations to comb through the ashes to interpret what happened.
‘You shall have no other gods before me’
BAR NONE, EVERYONE who loses their soul does so by rejecting God in violation of His First Commandment.
‘You shall have no other gods before me’ isn’t just a warning against false religions — it applies to any situation where something, or someone, becomes the chief object of one’s desire to the exclusion of God.
And that centers around self-worship.
Not so much in the mirror sense of Narcissus (though there's plenty of that too, especially now). As used here, self-worship really means two things:
Repudiation of God as true God,9 and …
Dedication to sinful behaviors and practices — the vices and carnal obsessions — that rail against the Truth, and flout our obligation to our Heavenly Father.
The Way is wide (explained somewhat)
If I had to guess, I would say many of those perishing would not have possessed enough spiritual clarity to recognize the signs (or Pledge) of condemnation that speak to all caught up in living a life of sin — those early warnings divinely gifted to each of us that telegraph where our thoughts and actions are leading us, eternally speaking … so that we might stop, hear Christ, and come back to ourselves.10
At the same time, I’m also sure few would ever knowingly say, I’m going to do what I want even though it may cost me my salvation ...
Instead, battered by constant noise and clatter, conflicting signals, cultural declarations, a lack of faith or moral instruction (throw in some personal trauma, stupidity, and hubris), I imagine those of the world always find it easier to drop whatever doesn’t fit their attachment to the mainstream and go with the flow as the best way to get what they want along with the upper hand.11
Doing what they can to maximize wins and minimize losses, in other words.
And besides — everyone’s doing it.
Evil math
Moreover, the Enemy of every living soul knows that the odds of someone giving themselves over to evil wholesale are slim to almost none (some do, but few directly). He also knows that for any path to eternal separation from God to work — well, wide, and consistently — it must appear to be socially acceptable, emotionally viable (easily justifiable), and run humanistically parallel to the virtues12 without having anything to do with God.
Let’s not forget (and this is as good a place as any to say it) that while Satan works overtime seducing souls through our weak flesh and illicit appetites — luring and lulling us into a downward spiral of moral decay built on the lie that if it feels good, tastes good, or pays good, it’s all good — make no mistake:
Our Enemy loves the extreme consequences of sin: War. Fire. Genocide. The annihilation of creation. And the bigger, the bloodier, and uglier, the better.
And yet …
… despite his bloodlust, the Devil is acutely aware that for all of its visceral value — apocalypse isn’t where the best ROI is — not if we count diverting souls from Christ and Heaven as his principal preoccupation.
Consider if you will that all of the merchants of death combined13 (those top to bottom who are damned for doing the bidding of evil under the shingle of war) typically amount to a fraction of the total number of people killed in modern wars by comparison. And we can be sure many of those caught in the crosshairs cry out to God and are heard. Even so — cry or no — their victimization/murder/martyrdom bring them into the presence of a just and loving God whose mercy triumphs over judgement.14
Meaning: Global wars are about shock and awe, fireworks and gore, BUT NOT for the massive plundering of souls.
In fact, I believe the real harvest occurs right under our noses, and more with a whisper than a bang —
… during peacetime and periods of prosperity, where those with freedom to spend choose according to the temptations filling the world around them.
In summary, I would aver that most souls condemned to Hell don’t arrive screaming amid bombs and bullets. They stroll in of their own free will, chuffed with themselves, money in pocket and wrapped in earthly comfort.
A LOT HAS been said. In the final analysis, failing the First Commandment test is fatal. Apart from Christ, the Enemy’s assault is constant, personalized, multi-pronged, and lethal in both the short and long term.
Next up, we’ll explore what some of that looks like.
In Him,
JMDA
Feast of the Ascension, 2025
.30.
The Summer of Love
refers to the summer of 1967, when over 100,000 young people — mostly hippies, artists, dropouts, and spiritual seekers — converged on the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in what was intended to be a cultural and spiritual awakening rooted in peace, love, and personal liberation.
But what began as a romantic ideal of peace and unity quickly deteriorated:
Overcrowding, disease, drug overdoses, sexual exploitation, and homelessness plagued Haight-Ashbury.
Predators preyed on naive runaways.
By fall, the movement had largely burned out. Organizers staged a symbolic “Death of the Hippie” funeral in October 1967.
What followed wasn’t revolution, but deterioration.
Disillusioned prophets gave way to pierced punks and leather-clad outlaws with nothing left to believe in and even less worth preserving. If the hippie dream died of overdose and heartbreak, punk was the sound of its burial — loud, fast, and furious, with no illusions about peace, love, or harmony.
The message wasn’t we can build a better world anymore. It was — burn it down before it kills us.
Sin of presumption
The sin of presumption occurs when someone tests God by placing themselves in unnecessary or foolish danger, expecting divine protection, or ignoring plausible risk, even though their actions contradict prudence, reason, or God’s will.
Rewards for sin
Boiled down to the nub, all rewards for sin mean ill-gotten gains and greater opportunities to sin. That and the loss of your soul if you persist.
The Catholic Church explicitly rejects the idea that “the end justifies the means.”
This principle is addressed clearly in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC):
“A good intention (for example, helping one’s neighbor) does not make behavior that is intrinsically disordered, such as lying or calumny, good or just. The end does not justify the means.”
— CCC 1759
This teaching is rooted in natural law and affirms that morally evil acts cannot be made good simply because they aim at a desirable outcome. Even a noble goal does not excuse the use of immoral methods.
We’ll learn more about the Enemy’s use of counter-offers coming up.
All worldly desires are curated or amplified by prevailing cultural commands, and rules of success and failure as reflected in their mirror.
Our spiritual debts don’t disappear because we change our mind or location. They stay with us, until such time as Christ pays their debt and sets us free.
Gospel of John 17:1–3 (RSV-CE)
1 When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son that the Son may glorify thee,
2 since thou hast given him power over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom thou hast given him.
3 And this is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”
Gospel of Luke 15:17 (RSV-CE)
“But when he came [back] to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger!’”
… That was me back in the day.
The Theological Virtues
Given directly by God, these virtues dispose us to live in relationship with the Holy Trinity:
Faith – belief in God and in all that He has revealed (CCC 1814–1816)
Hope – trust in God’s promises and the desire for Heaven (CCC 1817–1821)
Charity (Love) – the highest virtue; love of God above all things and love of neighbor for God’s sake (CCC 1822–1829)
“So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” — 1 Corinthians 13:13
The Cardinal Virtues
These are human virtues, pivotal for moral living, and are the foundation of a virtuous life (CCC 1805–1809):
Prudence – right reason in action; choosing the true good in every situation
Justice – giving to each their due; respecting the rights of others
Fortitude – courage to do good and resist evil, even in the face of danger or suffering
Temperance – self-control and moderation in pursuit of pleasures
… and presumed damned for this statement, although only God knows the hearts of men.
James 2:13, RSV-CE
"For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy; yet mercy triumphs over judgment."