The demonic use of deceptive symbols

This blog is based on Jeremiah 6:13&14 and Jeremiah 7 where we discover the false prophets were geniuses at using religious symbols deceptively.

"From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit.  They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. 'Peace, peace, they say, when there is no peace.'"

At the time that Jeremiah wrote this, idolatry and oppression were wide spread.  They were the norm in society, but the false prophets kept repeating again and again everything was okay, this was a time of shalom.  A time of blessing and harmony, and Jeremiah says these false prophets were healing the wounds of Israel lightly, but the people believed the false prophets rather than the true prophets.
So good religious words or symbols can be coopted and used to cover wide spread social sins such as idolatry and oppression.

When we move into chapter 7, we find the same deception, only this time the false prophets were using the temple, a physical symbol deceitfully.  Read carefully Jeremiah 7 so you can understand how this system operated.  Jeremiah says the temple was a den of robbers, but by the clever appeal to the sanctity of the temple the false prophets prevailed.

So in Jeremiah then we find both the verbal religious symbols and a physical religious symbols were used to cover up idolatry and oppression.

In the New Testament the Pharisees did the same thing. They are described as lovers of money who misused the temple and turned it into a den of robbers.

Now let us apply this lesson from Jeremiah to American history.  My interpretation of American history would be that the Washington Monument, an almost sacred symbol in American history, is a physical symbol of deception in the American history that I learned as a young person and even in a Christian college, they never mentioned that George and Martha Washington owned three hundred slaves.  That George Washington was a very rich white male, slave holding founding father.  I don't think you can trust rich white male slave owning people, yet our history has been sanitized and all we hear is that he was a great general, a great leader, and our first president.

Have we abused any verbal symbols, words or phrases to justify Indian genocide and African enslavement?  I think that the way we use "American exceptionalism", "manifest destiny", "white Anglo-Saxon Protestant", and "democracy and freedom", we again sanitize the widespread ethnocentrism and oppression in American history.  When you combine deceptive words and deceptive physical symbols, that this combination cleverly legitimates social evil.

The same thing has happened with the St. Louis Arch.  For the typical white American the arch stands as a physical symbol of the westward expansion of Christian civilization; but for me it stands as an imperialistic, ethnocentric, oppressive expansion and exploitation.  As a result most Indian peoples and cultures west of the Mississippi were soon crushed and exploited.  So again we have used symbols, powerful symbols, deceptive symbols to sanitize the evil out of American history.