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My First Tattoo by Lisa

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Peace, Hope, Love, Live, Laugh, Joy, Dream, Cherish. These are the words that consitute the new secular dogma. And it seems well enough that these could be words to live by. Oh Peace is a desirable state of things. And Hope is always good. Love is, by far, a necessity. Laughter, of course, is a lovely experience. Who doesn’t want Joy in their lives? What would it be like not to Dream? And, by God, we should Cherish everything we have.

But these words are part of our language, they have always been ours, so why is it that we feel the need to go out and buy effigies of these words to hang on our living room walls to show that we believe in them? What idiocy is this?

The popularity of these “word products,” at first, seems like a rather benign fad. But as with all things that seem innocuous and completely without detriment, there is an unforeseen consequence.

People come to believe something profound in these words. They feel that they are paying homage to the word by acquiring actual effigies and placing them in their home. But words are representations, and by creating effigies of words we effectively separate them from any actual context. These words are extracted from context and given a level of inherent importance and value. The word is taken to represent something good, or goodness itself, which is also a term that means nothing if in and of itself.

Not only are these words no longer in context of actual situations, but they are not even in the context of other words. Hope what? Love who? Cherish what? Live how? Laugh when? Dream what? Peace why?

Words must represent something or at least be associated with something specific, because that is what they are–representations. But these idolized words come to represent nothing, but another representation–the general idea of goodness. They are tied to nothing, and therefore they don’t actually mean a thing. Hanging a word like Hope on your wall is akin to the idolatry that the Bible teaches against.* “See, they are all false! Their deeds amount to nothing; their images are but wind and confusion” (Isaiah 41:29 NIV). These words are hallow like the idols of ancient Israel.

So how can something that doesn’t mean anything end up being harmful or misleading? Well, you can smack the word “Hope” on anything, like a presidential campaign or a business operation or diesel truck for that matter, and though it means nothing at all, it seems to mean that whatever the word is associated with is part of that assumed goodness. While it retains no actual meaning, some people ignorantly believe that any message which utilizes one of these word must be a message of goodness, and so they don’t bother to look at the dirty details.

These words almost seem to be invoked as commandments of the secular dogma, but they can mean very terrible things as well. What is a commandment for Peace, when you must fight for your own freedoms? What’s to stop someone from Hoping their neighbor will suffer ill-fortune? What’s to keep a man from Loving a women who is not his wife? Who’s to say that a hospitalized person in a vegetable state wants to Live? There are certainly times when Laughter can be terribly cruel. Dreams are not without nightmares. Why shouldn’t we enjoy sorrow, when we have lost our Joy? And if we are to Cherish some people, then we must also hold others out of favor.

So these meaningless effigies and these word slogans that people throw about with this noble air can just as easily mean something good or bad. Out of context, the words still mean absolutely nothing, yet by some faint and meaning which people give these words, they are easily lead to believe that something meaningful and positive is being said.

It is this belief in representations and images instead of the actual objects they represent, that has led man astray for ages. And it exists in many more forms of representation than words, but this trend of emblazoning words on walls and pictures, and products, is just a sign of a world very disconnected from reality–very disconnected from context. And the way in which consumers have bought into this worship of words so whole-heatedly is a chilling sign that our society is descending further from the truth into an age of falsity.

*I reference the Bible to support my case in this article. Of course, it is quite ironic, however, that dogmatic Christians who praise the “word” of God are guilty of the same form of idol worship that their holy text condemns.