"R2D2 loves Anacott Steel."

A few weeks ago millions of moviegoers began swarming to see The Hunger Games, an extraordinarily popular book turned into a major motion picture now famously known as the melding of American Idol and the classic short story "The Lottery."

A few days ago an edition of the renowned PBS journalistic television series Frontline premiered with much less of an audience, but I'd say quite a few still got a good dose of more reasons to be enraged at Wall Street.

A couple months ago, far fewer paid any attention to the news report about the summary displacement of 200,000 people in the African nation of Mali for the purpose of yet another summary implementation of shariah law.

Right now I'd venture to say that the fewest of all are reading this home page piece, a place where the critical truth about what all this means is elucidated. I humbly confess I'm no genius—this isn't very revelatory, really; that truth is not mine, it's just there. You could easily figure it out yourself by reading the Bible in light of even the most widely disseminated current events. It's just that the work of the authoritative operatives from the World System is so effective in keeping people deep in the darkness they so gruesomely embrace.

For some years I've been writing about this quintessential truth, one which is rarely ever seen for what it is because so many are habitually immersed in socially acceptable murder and deceit that it is virtually impossible for them to see their behavior for what it is. No wonder. They're not only in it, they must do it by necessity.

That truth is nothing other than the pandemic execution of fully stratified contemporary human sacrifice.

This isn't any new thing at all. Since Cain started doing it millennia ago, it's been practiced in hundreds of different forms, enabled by all World operatives through the ages for the benefit of the hundreds of millions of World inhabitants they manage in virulently myriad ways.

Here's a new one.

Two British teenagers were caught snatching up over a million dollars in fees from people wanting to get the boys' stock-picking robot to help them add to their retirement funds. Observers chuckled, dupes blushed, but only the most perceptive saw this as another instance of large numbers of people seeking to commit rank value extraction against others.

You'd have seen it all arrayed in its most luminous glory on the Frontline episode "Money, Power, and Wall Street." A conga line of experts—business managers and executives and financial analysts and journalists appeared and either candidly detailed the brazen iniquity of standard extractive practices or sheepishly pled nolo contendere to it all. Most did both.

The title could've just been "The Futile But Rabidly Ongoing Attempt To Invent Riskless Credit." It was all about how everyone from Ivory Tower to Sewage Drain were working like crazy to figure out what to do with systemic risk. The grail of financial innovation is quite elusive because they don't really get that systemic risk is simply the toxic sinfulness rife in each of our souls. They all look so aggravated about it, but I actually think they like it because it keeps everyone clamoring for those who can appear most like rescue heroes.

It's fun to sneer at that nebulous entity "Wall Street" for being so loutish, but everyone still drops gobs of cash in the hands of those heroes to keep on extracting. Think the stock-picking robot is a hoot? New investment firm start-ups boast about employing the latest I.T. and promising their robot will do everything just right. Brett Arends' goofy quote at the beginning of the piece pulled the best from the films Star Wars and Wall Street to poke great fun at it.

The insane thing is that there is Wall Street, and there is what is happening in much of the rest of the ravaged world. The Mali incident was just a brief story on the margins of news coverage. The world shrugs, ehh... not worth much attention... happens all the time in Africa... why should we care... it is so far away...

Just FYI, from what I gather, these people in Mali have been used as weapons by militant rebel groups for the cause of advancing rule by shariah law. There's a reality for you—people with guns, numbers, a cause, and a name (Ansar Eddine is the latest version there in Mali) behold the awful things that people around them do to one another, and rush maniacally into the only way they know to solve it: shove awful law enforcement down their throats. I simply can't get into the whole shariah law debate right now, but I will point out that Muslims consider the word shariah to mean, literally, "the divinely-sanctioned path to salvation." Many others passionately revile it. Neither of them have to do much to have their sentiments broadcast widely to the masses of their persuasion—how splendidly harrowing is that culture war battle.

At about the same time all of this was transpiring, this editorial cartoon appeared in my Los Angeles Times. Kudos to John Cole of the Scranton Times-Tribune for his exquisitely succinct illustration of the truth about human sacrifice and the abjectly contemptible dismissal of that reality.

They are hard to find, but I happened upon a couple other places where human sacrifice in its actual manifestation is mentioned. I don't know if this web piece from something called the Costa Rica Times was a generally distributed piece or it was written specifically for the webzine, but after the appalling murder of French children by a politically zealous Islamicist, Martin LeFevre laid it all out there, "Human sacrifice is not a thing of the past."

Catholic priest Robert Barron added his say about how much things are gravitating toward human sacrifice, addressing its more notoriously unsavory moments and intimating that it may be winding its way toward us.

The problem with both is that they are insidiously manipulative, products of the System that keep World inhabitants in the dark despite these expositions. LeFevre doesn't say much other than "There's really nasty evil right there!" —foolishly dismissing the crucial supernatural element that provides the only reason the murders could meaningfully be considered human sacrifice. Barron is simply an industrious Roman minion doing his duty in a partial hangout, defined as a media-showcased coming-clean from some ostentatiously portrayed bad thing for the purpose of keeping a much worse thing hidden. In his piece he only hints at the possibility of human sacrifice, subtly insisting that as long as he and other valiant knights of Catholicist goodness are around it will never get that way.

This leads us to The Hunger Games, which Barron himself says initiated his remarks. It is clear, however, that Barron is sworn to avoid sharing the deepest meaning within the brutal metaphor that is this film, to insist this silly thing human sacrifice only swirls annoyingly in our imaginations.

One reason has to do with the definition of tribute. Tribute as portrayed in The Hunger Games was the sacrifice of those young contestants, but it is exactly the same thing in real life. The federal government demands taxes, the Roman ecclesia insist on tithes, and the banking system requires interest, all payments consisting of individual value tendered to the powerful racketeers who are asked to regulate the wickedness of their constituents. This is all perfectly legitimate, even divinely ordained. But accurately identifying and carelessly broadcasting today's standard for tribute as today's institutionalized human sacrifice only serves to gunk up the gravy train.

I told each of my classes of 17 year-old students that I'd seen the film and considered it a unimaginative predictable bore. Some objected, but some agreed. We discussed it a bit, but in my last class of the day I asked a very simple question. Before I share it with you, a brief preface for those not familiar with the story.

The "Hunger Games" take place in a distant dystopian future when randomly selected teenagers—24 "gladiators" in all—are picked to fight to the death until one is left standing. They come from each of twelve districts, which interestingly mirrors the arrangement of the Federal Reserve banking system. Just before the actual contest begins, they stand on pedestals in a circle facing a large cornucopia-looking storage unit with lots of weapons and supplies. Once the countdown ends, they're off to start taking out opponents. It is all televised for a rapt audience.

Now, the question I asked my class was, "What would happen if a contestant simply stated well before the games, 'I won't hurt or kill anyone, I won't aid anyone in doing so, and I will do my best to care for the well-being of anyone who needs it'"?

One very intelligent young lady eagerly responded with a couple of thoughts. First, she'd said if I'd read the book it would all make more sense. But then she rattled off a number of qualifications that would make it hard to do that. My thoughts are added after each.

One, "They've all lived in this post-apocalyptic world for their entire lives. It has been done like this for so long—it is just the way it is. Everyone accepts this."

And why have they accepted this? Who has had so much sway over them that they've allowed this barbaric practice to continue? And if they decide to reject it, is violent revolution the only answer? (I'm told this occurs in a subsequent book of the Hunger Games trilogy.)

Submission, revolution, or alternating convulsions of the two are the only things people trudging through the darkness of the World know. Any semblance of democracy will always be a pithy marketing tool to further nourish the autocratic elite administering the World System.

Two, "There is no religion at all in this environment."

Does religion equal God? Why do so many presume that? And what god would they believe on? The one the highly-paid propagandists promote for at least some effective control of the populace? Or would it be One who insists on genuine self-sacrifice out of gripping, authentic love for another?

The World System quite deftly employs religious extravagance and its cunning machinations to enable other-sacrificers to thrive. Particularly diabolical is the frequent claim that adherence to no-religion excuses one from moral responsibility. World operatives labor to get gleeful commitments to the secular to keep them just as religious as anyone else.

Three, "Refuse to cooperate? They would do things to force you in, even subjecting your family members to the most ghastly tortures."

If any individual or organization tortured or murdered others because you refused to be manipulated to commit an evil act, whose fault is that? Who is committing the moral crime here? How would you respond to this command: "Go murder someone else's child in order to keep us from murdering your own"?

How many in the World would do this! And how many don't think for a second about it! I love my children like crazy, but this is much more about insightfully understanding the breadth of God's justice as well as His mercy.

Finally, a statement that did not come from the student but one that I believe would easily follow: "When faced with that choice in reality, you simply wouldn't really choose to stubbornly refuse to cooperate in something like the Hunger Games. You just wouldn't."

I would.

And I would for only one reason.

Jesus Christ already gave His life as the sacrifice for me, simply so I could live with Him for eternity because of His rich abiding love. By giving up trying so hard to keep this life by doing awful things to those I love—even those who'd run me through with some painfully sharp object—I gain His inheritance, His Kingdom, and Him.

It is utter folly to think that puttering around to try to kill others and avoid being killed will gain you anything of lasting value. Yet this is what World inhabitants do all the time without Christ. No, they don't regularly take the entire life of any given individual, but they do other-sacrifice merely by appropriating another's value in whatever way they do that. I've put together an entire page with some of those ways.

I should add briefly there would most likely be the presumption I would only be doing this to try to become some celebrated martyr. How worthless—it defeats the entire purpose and is itself quite the Catholicist thing to do. Indeed, if the authorities knew of my intentions, were convinced I'd make a poor contestant, and quietly made me disappear long before the event—then so be it.

Should I be allowed to participate after all, I must say I definitely would like to see others follow His lead. Can you imagine? 24 young people turning the tables on the exploiters—building a community together or, if necessary, boldly accepting whatever evil they may do to them—all 24 living or dying with the name of their Savior on their lips, gently accomplished with humility and grace not just toward one another but even toward the exploiters and their enablers.

I just wonder—however naively but still firmly, leaning on Scripture—what if we did that with hundreds? Thousands? Even millions?

Right now?

That Frontline episode featured a brief clip of John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley, during one of the delightfully entertaining but ultimately pointless Senate grillings of real-big-shot financial ne'er-do-wells. He said this:

"It is simple. The regulators and the industry need to look at the complexity."

Guh???

It is actually quite a profound statement. Frontline followed it immediately with another clip of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein spewing incomprehensible financialese that served the show's purpose: "See, we know you're doing it we just don't know what you're doing," is the idea.

But it is what World inhabitants want them to do.

So what of it?

Yes, look at the complexity.

The complexity is the lie.

And look carefully.

The human sacrifice is all in it.

Through-and-through.

Everywhere.

Not just in a whimsical albeit provocative film, but everywhere right now in every corner of every place that pushes away The Light.

This webzine is all about contrasts, as you see just below the title of the whole enterprise on page one. Here is the contrast, right here:

You will have either the murderous complexity of the World, or the beautiful simplicity of Christ. You are either incessantly grasping for the newest latest trendiest ways to get yours, or vibrantly sowing Christ, the Kingdom, and His provision into the lives of others. Either you are following the priests, scholars, financiers, and bureaucrats enabling your other-sacrifice, or you are following

The Self-Sacrificer.

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To best identify the characteristics of the church attached to the Catholicist Nation and to understand Christ's response to it, please read carefully both of Paul's letters to the Corinthians.

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The home page essay above was written by David Beck and was posted on this site April 28, 2012

The website The Catholicist Nation at  yourownjesus.net was originally uploaded by David Beck on August 3, 2004