Advertising frequently plays off our basest motives, using sex (She’ll want to sleep with you if you wear this cologne!), pride (Everyone will want to be you if you drive this car!), and greed (The Joneses have this; do you?)

When Babylon goes down, her economic leaders weep and gnash their teeth over her expired shopping list:

it is all too easy to find “Babylon” in our own national enemies—to picture ourselves as the heroic good guys and those outside as the epic villains.

Freeing our societies from God would appear to make us not less violent, but more.

Ancient civilizations used the gods to justify their violence; we use our ideologies.

Its opposing powers fought in the name of communism and capitalism, nationalism and free markets, “blood and soil” and the “will of the people,” the sovereignty of the state and the autonomy of the individual.

Israel was not fighting to impose her ideology on the surrounding empires. God was arising to protect a weak and vulnerable people from the political and socioeconomic powerhouses that sought to either exploit or destroy them. Nothing

Israel did not arise to protect faith in Yahweh, but Yahweh came on the scene to defend Israel.6

the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths (441,513) the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined.”3