Dub McClish
Topsy-turvy refers to anything that is upside down, wrong side up, inverted or reversed from the norm. The topsy-turvy phenomenon in morals and religion has been around almost as long as mankind. The prophet Isaiah wrote about it in the seventh century B.C., as some were reversing good and evil, darkness and light, and bitter and sweet (Isa. 5:20). The prophet’s list also implies the failure to distinguish between truth and error and right and wrong.
Many thus behave out of ignorance. Many others do so to justify their wrong choices, knowing they are wrong. Others have subscribed to an ideology that obscures all such distinctions for sake of power and/or political fortune. Topsy-turvyism is alive and well today.
In a 2010 book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power, British author, Melanie Phillips critically studies this phenomenon. She states in her Preface: “What I have concluded is that power has now hijacked truth and made it subservient to its own ends. The result is a world turned upside down.” Many factors in the modern world lend credence to her observation.
We may generally characterize the tumultuous, topsy-turvy times of the present as the elevation of fiction over facts, the abnormal over the normal, willful amnesia over history, fantasy over reality, subjectivity over objectivity, romanticism over reason—and man over God. Consider some symptoms:
• Abandonment of the concept of objective truth in favor of postmodernism, which allows each person to determine his own “truth” and to give all positions, however contradictory and farfetched, “moral equivalency.”
• Unprecedented hostility in the Western world toward the Bible and Christianity (rooted in history and supported by abundant evidence) in favor of New Ageism (with its homage to crystals, pyramids, et al.), occultism, witchcraft, paganism, and oriental mysticism.
• Equating homosexual behavior with heterosexual behavior and fornication with honorable marriage.
• Justifying the murder of millions of innocents in the womb in the name of “privacy” and “freedom of choice.”
• Political Correctness pressures from “powers that be” that protect from criticism or exposure, Islam, a religio-political system that seeks to enslave the world.
Isaiah prefaced his good/evil statement by pronouncing a woe upon those who turn things topsy-turvy.
