IF We Were Intelligent

By Barry G. Eaves

Our country and our society are in trouble, and we are in danger of losing our most precious freedoms. This is so because as the Bible says, “A people without understanding shall come to ruin” (Hosea 4:14). We have lost our understanding of what brought us these freedoms and what is required to maintain them. This book is an attempt to restore that understanding and turn America off its current path to destruction and back to the ways that made it a great nation in the first place.

But time is running out. The United States is standing at a crossroads, and it will either lead the rest of the world into living righteously and peacefully or into the Apocalypse described in the book of Revelation. Read this book and heed its warning, or expect to live through the latter. It’s your choice!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638858041

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Real Nature of Humanity

It’s 1970, I’m fifteen years old, and I’ve only had my driver’s license for a few months. I can’t comprehend why there are so many people on the road that seem to have even less experience than me! What is wrong with these people? I would ask myself. Surely there can’t be that many people who only began driving just this week! What the devil is going on? How can this be? This doesn’t make sense!

From an early age, I began to wonder what makes human beings do the things they do. Why are things the way they are? Why do people think the things they think? Why do some people drive well while others are downright dangerous? Why are some people good and some bad? Why are some smart and some stupid? Why are there conservatives and liberals or Republicans and Democrats? Why are there so many different religions? What, really, is the true nature of human beings? What makes us tick?

I had contemplated these questions most of my young life when it occurred to me that I live with myself every day and don’t understand why I do the things that I do any better than I understand why other people do what they do. I wondered, How can we live with ourselves and other people day in and day out and not know ourselves any better than we do? Why is an accurate understanding of our own nature such a mystery?

I first tried to find the answers from the knowledgeable ones, the educated—the ones with the impressive degrees from expensive schools, people who have authored books on the subject, and the so-called experts in human behavior. I discovered that they didn’t know either! Alas, I thought I would never know. Maybe it’s just too complicated for anybody to figure out, I began to think. But maybe I was looking too hard or looking right at it and just couldn’t see it (typical of most men) because eventually, the circumstances of life and the wisdom of years revealed to me that the mysteries of human nature are actually very simple and easy to understand; they are just difficult to accept! We prefer to ignore or deny the truth about human nature because no one wants to face the truth about themselves. It is not flattering, maybe even a bit ugly.

Without doing a lot of research, I think that it’s safe to say that most people have a pretty good opinion of themselves. We typically believe that we are reasonably intelligent, rational, peace-loving, and fair individuals. Evidently, we have too high of an opinion of ourselves to be able to see, or at least admit, the truth about what we really are.

When you look at the world, you see that it is filled with strife and social conflicts that range from road rage all the way up to wars and terrorism. In fact, aside from natural disasters and some diseases, humans cause all of their own problems, small and great. No one is prodding and provoking us to kill, maim, rape, steal, cheat, defraud, or slander other people. We are freewill beings. We choose to do those things ourselves. Nowadays, the entire planet is running amok and well-nigh falling apart in spite of everyone seeming interested in solving these problems. The reality, though, is that instead of diminishing our dilemmas, they just keep growing and multiplying.

Obviously, we are not nearly as smart, good, honest, and peace loving as we think. The simple truth about human nature, as I’ve come to realize, is that we have only three driving characteristics that explain why we do all of the things we do: (1) all of us are religious, (2) all of us are evil, and (3) all of us are stupid! That’s it! That’s the sum total of human nature. That’s what all the experts with degrees have never quite figured out. That is why we do the things we do. That is why we have all the problems that we have. And that is why we keep multiplying those problems instead of solving them. We have wrong beliefs, are maliciously motivated, and are too stupid to recognize these facts so that we might override them and do what’s right in spite of ourselves.

Of course, right off the bat, not many people will agree with my assessment (the third characteristic would predict that), so let me explain what I mean by each one.

We Are All Religious

Every one of us is necessarily religious to some degree. By that, I’m not saying that we all attend worship services on Sundays, bow down before wooden images, or perform some particular ritual on a regular basis. What I mean is simply that we must all believe something. We must all have a starting point—a set of fundamental beliefs along with their foundational assumptions that form the perspective from which we view and interpret everything within our experience—and act according to those beliefs. Even the atheist must have an operating paradigm that determines his viewpoint of the world and guides the way that he lives and the decisions he makes. The fact that we are creatures of intelligence, and free will make this necessarily so.

Because what we believe affects all that we do, is it not logical that it should be of utmost importance that what we believe be true? It should be obvious that if we start off with wrong information and with the wrong set of beliefs and assumptions, we are going to find ourselves traveling down the road of life in the wrong direction! That’s why our problems keep multiplying instead of diminishing. There are too many people operating from wrong paradigms. What we believe matters a great deal, for there can be terrible consequences connected to some beliefs. Hitler’s belief in evolution, for instance, lead him to attempt to exterminate the inferior races and promote what he believed to be the superior ones. Ultimately, he believed he was benefiting mankind! Al-Qaeda’s and ISIS’s belief that God has commanded them to kill everyone who will not convert to Islam has led to the terrorism that has spread around the world. The Hindu’s belief in reincarnation and their caste system have led to hundreds of millions of people being condemned to a life of extreme poverty, discrimination, and persecution, without help and without hope. Certainly, there are serious consequences to following a belief system not based in truth.

And if we could all agree on the correct starting point, would that not go a long way toward solving a lot of humanity’s problems? Of course, it would, but it will never happen. It is human characteristic number 3 (stupidity) that keeps us from recognizing how important that is or how to get there and characteristic number 2 (evil) that makes us not even want to try. We much prefer to do things our own way! Our stupidity keeps us from figuring out which paradigm works best, and our evil nature causes us to rebel against it even if we would begin to understand the truth about our existence.

We Are All Evil

Evil is a concept that is not easily accepted by many. To some, it conjures up images of Satan and demons, and they refuse to believe that such beings could exist. They prefer to think that some people just do bad things and some do not. To them, evil does not exist. It is simply a matter of making good choices or bad ones. Others would say that not all people are evil because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves are evil. Only those who do evil things are evil in their eyes, and they cannot allow themselves to be grouped in the same category with cruel people, thieves, rapists, murders, etc.

It has been debated for a long while as to whether we are born good and subsequently learn evil from a corrupt society or whether we are born evil and have to be taught to be good. For the life of me, I can’t comprehend why that would be such a difficult question to answer. Is it not obvious that we all spend our entire formative years being taught, disciplined, and trained to be good and do what is right? No one has to be trained to do what is wrong; it comes quite naturally. Our jails are filled with people who were not properly trained or whose training did not take.

As I was once reading an article about the Boxer Rebellion in China at the turn of the twentieth century, George Lynch, an English journalist covering the war, made a comment I found to be revealing about the evil that is our nature. He said, There are things that I must not write, and that may not be printed in England, which would seem to show that this Western civilization of ours is merely a veneer over savagery.¹

In another article I found, a female reporter for the Chicago Times who had gone undercover to report on the secret life of the upper class in the late nineteenth century wrote, Tonight as I write this, I am sick of the whole business. I did not suppose there was so much rascality among the ‘reputable people.’²

Note that these incidences took place in a time in history when people expected everything to be done in a quite proper manner. But our evil has been there throughout the ages. It reveals itself at every opportunity. Wars have always been accompanied by unspeakable cruelties, and the upper class has never been above debauchery. Our nature is quite obviously evil.

In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, there is a story that is very instructive as to what our nature is like and what our consequent responsibilities are toward it. It is found in chapter 4, and it is the story of the very first two brothers of the human race. The older one, Cain, grew jealous of his younger brother, Abel. God, knowing where this jealousy would lead, warned Cain, saying, If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it (verse 7). Unfortunately, Cain did not heed the warning. He did not use his intellect to rule over his selfish and impulsive desires, and he rose up and murdered his brother. He was consequently expelled from the presence of the Lord.

One of the most damaging things that we have ever done to our society was removing God from our classrooms back in the 1960s. Now crime rates are up, our jails are overflowing, drug addiction is rampant, and our society is decaying at a rapid pace. We haven’t been teaching our children right from wrong or giving them a good moral foundation for over fifty years, and we’re now reaping the consequences of those stupid and reckless decisions! Our nature is evil, and we must recognize it as such. It must be restrained by force of knowledge and discipline. That is the very purpose of government: to restrain the evil of human nature. If humanity was not evil, we would not even need government! But as it is, we need a force that is strong enough to protect ourselves from ourselves! Without the restraining force of government, anarchy and lawlessness would soon result, and evil would rule.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint. (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist, 15, December 1, 1787)

So what then exactly is evil? Though it may be considered generally true that bad people do bad things and good people do good things, both are evil! Doing bad things is not what makes people evil. Rather, it is evil that makes people do bad things. Doing bad things is what evil does, but it is not what evil is.

Evil is not a person or spirit or entity. Evil is simply, and nothing more than, the desire to rule in God’s place. According to the Bible, Satan was the father of evil. It became his desire to rule in God’s place, and that gave birth to evil. Evil is the rebellion in everyone’s heart that does not want to acknowledge that God created us and thus has every right to rule over us. It is the desire to rule over your own life—to have whatever you want whenever you want it. It is the desire to do everything your own way with no regard for God’s way. That is evil!

The desire to rule is the root cause of all the ills of the world that have anything to do with human decision-making. We almost always choose our way over God’s way even when it is obvious that our way will be problematic.

We want what we want when we want it, and we don’t want anything to get in our way. It’s as simple as that. We will lie, cheat, slander, deceive, steal, harm, and even murder in order to get what we want or have things our way. We will do whatever it takes to protect our egos, even if it is something as absurd as denying the existence of gravity, to keep from admitting that we are wrong.

Greed and lust for power, which are both part of the desire to have what we want and have things our own way, always lead to disastrous consequences in the long run. But we never seem to learn that. We just don’t care. Today’s politicians have gained a reputation for being willing to sell their mothers’ souls into hell if necessary to get reelected. They certainly have no problem selling our children’s future for their benefit in the present by recklessly increasing the national debt every year. That’s a catastrophe guaranteed to happen if it is not corrected immediately, but we all know they will not do it for fear of losing votes. They are much more willing to take down the entire country in the future than lose their positions of control today. That is wrong. It is irresponsible. It is deliberately choosing destruction over prudence, and that is where our problems come from. It is pure evil, and evil always destroys!

Humans, being evil, neglect our Maker’s instructions about how best to conduct our lives. We are so stupid and shortsighted as to think that we can do things better our own way. Arrogance and ignorance blind us to the consequences of our poor decisions. We usually get it wrong but can’t understand why it went wrong, so we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over. We try to correct something but create more problems in the process. We do not have the intelligence, understanding, or foresight to figure out the best ways of doing things, and our evil nature is relentlessly enticing us in the wrong direction. Yet we continue to refuse to acknowledge God or that his ways are better than ours. So we just keep on marching toward the edge. Sooner or later, we’re going to get there.

Ultimately, it is our false religious beliefs, our evil nature, and our stupidity that are behind all the woes of mankind. The history of the human race has been nothing but war ever since there were enough people on the earth to fight one another, which, by the way, only required the two brothers mentioned before. These are also the hindrances to our recognition of the solutions to our problems. So long as this is the case, I suppose that we will never wise up. Our society will keep on deteriorating and pressing toward destruction just like all before us.

Evil always destroys eventually. The question is whether you as an individual are going to live your life on the side that leads to destruction or on the side that makes things better, edifies, and builds up. If society is ever to recognize its mistakes and have a chance to turn things around, it will have to be done one person at a time. Our greatest threats are not the obvious ones, such as the national debt, nuclear proliferation, or groups like ISIS. Our greatest threat comes from ourselves out of our own nature. Only when enough people are willing to admit their mistakes and turn from their evil ways will our country and our society be able to avert disaster and be healed.

It is my hope that this book will convince at least a few to do so.

We Are All Stupid

Intelligence, by my definition, is the ability to take something complicated and make it simple. Intelligence also involves some degree of foresight—the ability to foresee problems with a design or an idea before it is implemented. The greater the intelligence the greater the foresight, and the lesser the intelligence the shorter the foresight. Stupidity, on the other hand, is the irresistible tendency to take something simple and make it complicated. Stupidity can’t resist getting involved but can’t help messing things up when it does. With stupidity, there is no foresight, so the end result will always be different than what is desired or predicted. This is due to a lack of understanding of how things work. Just because a person desires something to have a particular outcome does not mean that it will happen. Just because a person thinks something works a certain way does not mean that it will. Along with stupidity seems to always come the inability to admit when one is wrong. Sometimes this is because the person is just too stupid to understand that they are wrong. Other times, it is sheer pride caused by their evil nature.

We are all idiots. We all do stupid things. (That’s what led me to write this book!) We cannot keep ourselves from it no matter how hard we try. Secretly, we all know this is true, but only a small number are willing to admit it. I do not have to meet everyone on the planet to know that we are all idiots for the simple reason that if there were a truly intelligent person among us, they would stand out like a full, waxed moon on a clear, starry night. They would be more famous than Albert Einstein (who himself did not understand human nature very well). I believe, therefore, that I am safe in saying there are none. Besides, even the Scriptures agree: Every man is stupid and without knowledge… (Jeremiah 10:14).

Still, few can tolerate the stupid or idiot labels. We tend to think more highly of ourselves than that and are desperate to believe that we are more than we are. If you ask anyone how they think their own intelligence