I am not thinking of the modern Olympians that participate in either the winter or summer world games every four years, nor the ancient Olympians that competed at Olympia, Greece, in the Peloponnesus, the  location of the pan-Hellenic Olympic games (776 B.C. to 393 A.D.).  Rather, I am referring in this article to those Americans that see themselves as gods like the twelve gods of Mount Olympus.  The ancient gods were another type of Olympian. How do we describe the American Olympians?

The American Olympians are, first of all, the political, scientific, educational, cultural and financial elite that think of themselves as independent of the divine source that brought them and everything into existence.  No moral code independent of their own whims is worthy of their divine status. They are the masters of their environment and control much of our society.  They are not under God, because God does not exist for them.

These Olympians are under the illusion that they can build the perfect utopian (good place) society without God.  What they can build is a nightmarish society governed by people who use tactics of terror or some other sort of control.

Two dystopian (bad place) novels written in the 20th century, describe what it might be like living in such a society.  In 1984 George Orwell describes a society whose means of control are fear and brutality.  Room 101 is the place of torture by means of which people are rehabilitated to accept the society of Oceania.  Two other nations exist on earth, Eurasia and Eastasia.

Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley, describes a society where the means of control involve the promotion of  pleasure.  The drug soma is available along with immediate access to sex, separated from childbearing.  Babies are born in laboratories where conditions are controlled so that different classes of humans are produced. The results of this artificial means of manufacturing children is a stratified society with alphas at the top and epsilons at the bottom.

The modern Olympians are they who have the power to change society in the direction of a dystopia (bad place), even if they intend a utopia (good place).  They are the ones who have replaced God with gods of mortal flesh, themselves. They are the new Olympians.

The defender of and witness to the Christian faith calls people to believe the one God, Lord of heaven and earth.  We are called to announce the Kingdom of God that is brought about not by the Olympians but by the power of God.

 

Michael G. Tavella

July 20, 2020