When I was a kid, there was a popular game for Nintendo called Mike Tyson's Punchout. In this game, you were a little man fighting a procession of boxers--some real, some made up--until you fought Mike Tyson.
Luckily for 80's kids, the graphics of the game were bad enough that no one had the illusion that their success in Punchout predicted how successful they would be in real fights with the real fighters portrayed there.Â
Imagine someone thinking that a scrawny little man could face and win against Mike Tyson in his prime. Imagine someone who thought that their game strategy and finger dexterity accurately predicted how they'd fare against Mike Tyson in the ring. Such a person would be so delusional in these things that you could rest assured that their entire lives would overflow with the same. You could accurately predict them to be a trainwreck in many facets of life.
Suppose that game became popular in a time when graphics were much better. Suppose it came out on a realistic VR platform. While the realism and immersion might be more persuasive, clearly any sane person would recognize the fact that they could only experience the simulation when putting on the equipment. They would know that something that must be turned on and can be turned off isn't real.
Now, consider the religious world. Here we have billions of people who regularly immerse themselves in a set of ideas they really believe is the real thing. They don't apply them throughout their lives--they must be turned on because they only seem to apply at church settings, and they can be turned off because life can be lived just fine (and maybe even better) without them. They completely disregard the fact that their beliefs have no power to explain, endure, or influence so much of reality. They wantonly ignore the many obvious contradictions to their beliefs that surround them every single day.
These people have extreme confidence in their foolishness, which has managed to fester on unabated in their lives until a special day arrives--the day they meet someone with the real thing. With a swift slice, the pieces of their belief that are founded on the rock are separated from the often majority portion that is built on the air. They are left in astonishment to choose whether to accept that most of their cherished beliefs and accumulated identity are lies or to proceed on in even greater blindness. Few choose to draw nearer to God.
They think little scrawny men can fight Mike Tyson in their prime. And when they come face to face with Iron Mike, they get punched out.
Selected Scriptures
47 Whosoever cometh to me, and heareth my sayings, and doeth them, I will shew you to whom he is like:
48 He is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock.
49 But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great. (Luke 6)
Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: (Ephesians 2:2)
If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father. (John 15:24)
17 This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind,
18 Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:
19 Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. (Ephesians 4)
For the time cometh, saith the Lamb of God, that I will work a great and a marvelous work among the children of men; a work which shall be everlasting, either on the one hand or on the other—either to the convincing of them unto peace and life eternal, or unto the deliverance of them to the hardness of their hearts and the blindness of their minds unto their being brought down into captivity, and also into destruction, both temporally and spiritually, according to the captivity of the devil, of which I have spoken. (1 Nephi 14:7)