Confused? You will be...

God has a super-special deal on confusion - buy one, get two extra free!

It works like this: in God's created world, God's creatures need to put God their Creator first in their thinking. If they rebel and refuse to do so, they are deliberately choosing confusion. And then confusion is what they get - by the barrel-load.

The world is very busy trying to ignore God's revealed moral law. In the West, for example, the laws against sexual immorality or dishonouring your parents and other authorities are so far from being observed that a very high number of people think that things like valuing chastity (ooh, what an old word!) or honouring authority are very close to being signs of mental illnesses.

But however much we ignore the moral law, we remain moral creatures, crafted by God. If our sense of morality is attacked and supresseed, yet still it cannot be obliterated.

Result? Moral confusion. It cannot be wiped out - so it has to be distorted and perverted instead. Here's an outstanding example from last week: "Great-grandmother given an electronic tag and curfew for selling a goldfish to a 14 year-old". Normally when I see a newspaper headline like that I think, "yes, but if you read the story there'll be more to it than that...". In this case there was - a slightly poorly cockatiel, a gerbil that wasn't well looked after by a disabled girl, a £1,000 fine for all this overflow of iniquity, and a self-righteous council spokesman dealing out sound-bite slogans to justify this punishment upon the 66-year old dear as exactly the right thing, which "sends out a message", blah blah blah. When Manchester and the result of the UK is full of adultery, abortion, drugs, prostitution, knife crime, pornography, disrespect to authorities, and so on, it's amazing that he can work up such an overflow of righteous indignation about the poor twee goldfish's potential mistreatment (though it does say something else about the British schools if by the age of 14 it can safely be assumed that you're not yet competent to look after one...). It's amazing - until you join up the dots and realise that the excess of perverted righteousness in such a case of this is simply the result of a excessive lack of concern for righteousness in the other: they're not independent ases.

The solution to this isn't a return to "common sense" or "old-fashioned values" or caning in schools etc. These things were consequences and concomitants, not causes. The root cause is godless thinking. When God hands over a nation to intellectual and moral confusion, it's because that nation has already wilfully chosen intellectual and moral confusion. They shut the door on God and after his long patience, God says "let me lock that for you". Buy one, get two free. The only way back is repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. With godly repentance, the grip of moral confusion is broken and that's when the re-building can begin - not until.