Natural Beauty versus the Fakeness Epidemic Part 1

God created man and woman in His image in the Garden of Eden. The human body is both incredible, complex and beautiful just like all of God’s creation. However, as our innovations/technology/modern wealth and so forth has advanced, so has vanity. In turn people become tempted to change and manipulate their natural bodies to comply with whatever they want. It has literally opened Pandora’s box as the access to what we can now do to the human body has opened the floodgates to people doing anything and everything to have their fantasies realized.

In 2 Timothy 3:2 Paul speaks about the end times and says, “For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy,…” (NAS). In this context, it is the “lovers of self,” “ungrateful,” and “lovers of money” that stand out. When Paul talks about love of self, he is not referring to healthy self-esteem but unhealthy self-centeredness. Also, not being grateful for how God created them is at the core of this. Love for money reflects those who have made making a lot of money their highest goal even if it includes unethical means to get it. Money is an idol instead of it being the result of decent hard work and a means to live. If you get rich from honest work, that is not a bad thing. It is not about money per se but character and ethics in relation to money which can be a huge temptation for evil. There are plenty of passages in the Bible in both the New and Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures against employers mistreating employees. For instance, Jesus’ brother James (more correctly Jacob) wrote in his letter chapter five, verses one to five:

“Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries which are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments have become moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver have rusted; and their rust will be a witness against you and will consume your flesh like fire. It is in the last days that you have stored up your treasure! Behold, the pay of the laborers who mowed your fields, and which has been withheld by you, cries out against you; and the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. You have lived luxuriously on the earth and led a life of wanton pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.” (NAS)

Taking advantage of workers is a serious sin to God. But exploiting customers is likewise wrong. In this sense, love for money and love for self are tied together today because the move away from natural beauty is a multi-billion-dollar industry that is undoubtedly taking advantage of people’s insecurities and often encourage them.

I want to make it clear that I am not talking about things such as harmless treatments like massage, creams, oils or supplements, etc. to improve your natural body with natural means, or social movements like the punk rock era with multicolored hairstyles like a green mohawk, for example. Though haircoloring is not good the fashion in Punk rock did not come about due to vanity or the pretension to be something you are not. Nor does this topic apply to illnesses such as restorative/cosmetic surgery for cancer, burn victims, deformities, and such. For these situations help in this area can be a blessing. Even a modest amount of make-up is not in this category (even then you should seek out non-toxic make-up). And I say modest because many make themselves nearly unrecognizable now and are dependent on it like a drug which is neither flattering nor good. Plus, why, for example, do many women, in movies, wake up from sleeping with full make up on? So, we cannot be seen without make-up? Many women have less of a problem going nude om-screen before they take off their make-up. That is as oppressive as a burka in my opinion.

The fakeness epidemic I am talking about concerns physical alterations and/or physical fake add-ons to pretend to be something you are not. In other words, it is a form of lying.

Examples of this are: fake eyelashes, fake hair, fake hair color, fake breasts, fake buttocks, facelifts, lip fillers, Botox, fake nails, nose jobs, colored eye contacts and more. These are primarily done by women, but men do some of these things too and others such as taking steroids to gain a muscular physique that is naturally unattainable.

Is this fakeness-movement even making people more beautiful? I personally think that is a hard no and you can, for the most part, easily spot it. It looks phony and can never compete with natural beauty. I remember when the fake nails came on the scene, me and one of my best friends used to send them to each other and laugh so hard because it was so crazy, and we would have never guessed that it would be normalized. Also, why should one admire or compliment a feature that pretends to be part of the natural body but is artificial and paid for with money?

Whether women admit it or not, most of these beauty travails are to get the attention of men. It is ironic because most of these women also think they live in a “feminist/liberated” era. Plus, do men even want all the fake alterations? Or is it what they think men want combined with social pressures? The same goes for what men think women want, but it is just on such a far less scale. Most of all, if a woman must change her natural body to gain the interest and attraction of men, what does that tell you about those men? And why would you want someone who is attracted to an artificial component you bought?

In a time when there are so many messages on how you should love yourself, have confidence, be who you are and so on, it is highly paradoxical that this is exactly what so many do not want to be. Again, women, especially, are more willing than ever to comply with whatever the current beauty standards are. It also puts enormous pressure on young women and girls who are neither mature nor strong enough to know how to deal with social pressures that drive dangerous interventions. It encourages self-hatred.

Amid this we also have the body-positivity movement that pretends to be celebrating your natural body by promoting obesity. Again, unless an illness is involved, this is praising gluttony and bad food which is also dangerous and the direct result of abusing your body by overeating/eating unhealthily/not exercising, and is akin to using dangerous drugs.

The vanity sector in society is an industry that makes billions. The US is leading the way in nonsurgical cosmetic procedures and is number two in surgical cosmetic procedures and Brazil number one. Simultaneously, warnings about the dangers of these interventions to your healthy natural body are ignored, minimized and silenced. For instance, cancer is one of the potential side effects of breast implants and semi-permanent and permanent hair dyes, while Botox is a neurotoxin made from botulinum toxin type A that causes muscular paralysis. That is an extremely deadly poison if ingested and can leak from the injection point. Even though it is purified and diluted, why would you ever let that even near your body? All these artificial alterations and interventions to change yourself have some level of contaminants which is so contrary to the whole idea of beauty. It certainly illustrates the difference between natural and fake beauty. One is poisonous, the other one is not. Most of all, isn’t your life worth so much more than taking a chance with such things?

Because of the culture being so heavy now on unnatural beauty, one of the consequences is that many people’s perceptions of beauty have changed. This is particularly explicit in the porn industry.

The first country to legalize pornography was Denmark in 1969 as part of the sexual revolution. Since then, it has only grown and of course exploded with the internet and the easy access to it that this has delivered. Porn has become accepted in society in especially the west, despite the havoc it wreaks on society. It is not just even grown humans, but children, and animals who are grotesquely abused, tortured and killed via bestiality on the dark web. Its premise is that it separates love from sex, and it is profoundly anti-God. In fact, my guess is that the number one reason people today oppose Christianity is because Jesus and the Jewish religion he adhered to defined sex to be exclusive to marriage—reserved for one man and one woman, defined in the Garden of Eden. It is a union that welcomes the natural outcome of sex which is children. Today contraception and abortion have made the divorce between sex, love and reproduction far wider and it is not just normalized now but praised and encouraged as real life bad and sad consequences are mostly silenced.

Porn takes the separation of love and sex to the extreme. It is a Satanic perversion of it and is based on prostitution, exploitation, degradation and narcissism. It severely distorts views on sex, destroys marriages, literally changes people’s brains, and promotes sex trafficking that includes children/pedophilia in the underground porn market. Here the use of artificiality on every level has also increased. Cosmetic surgery is common among porn stars and those addicted to porn often get so mentally distorted in their view of men and women that they cannot enjoy the normalcy of a real relationship and real bodies. Instead, they push the boundaries more and more in search for temporary highs, just like a drug addict, which can, and often does, take them to sex with violence, children, bestiality and such horrors.

The separation of sex and love is the foundation of porn, and porn—which is a form of prostitution—is part of selling the lie that this is a good thing to the masses which we can now see the result of in a myriad of ways. For instance, it is socially acceptable today to have sex with plastic whether it is a sex-doll or sex-toy. That is as fake as it gets, and a perfect illustration of how low humans have sunk.

The fakeness trend has also crossed over to gender and all that the trans-ideology entails with phony genitalia, breasts, jawlines, pharmaceuticals to alter voice, hair growth and so on. This involves three lies. The first one is that one can know what it is like to be something they are not whether it is gender or species. Second: Noone can change gender. It is set at conception via chromosomes. The third lie is how the trans-ideology proponents minimize the extreme and dangerous mutilations done to a healthy body. They are not only alarmingly unsafe but irreversible alterations, and they make them dependent on pharmaceuticals for life. Side effects include infertility, sexual dysfunction, incontinence and more. Some men are also going so far as to take dangerous chemicals to lactate and breastfeed although this is dangerous for the baby. All women who take certain meds as well as artificial hormones can negatively affect babies in utero. Again, it is no coincidence that some sectors of society profit quite a bit from this extreme fakeness which is part of its promotion.

These man-made constructions are attempts to create a new “reality” according to a never-ending wish list of what people want with so far, no boundaries. It is even “normalized” now to artificially create humans that God intended to be the natural result of love between a man and a woman. It is done in the most unnatural ways possible. The manipulation of sperm and eggs in labs, IVF and via surrogacy have turned babies into money-making machines in an industry that is nothing short of human trafficking. Children’s rights to their own biological parents and natural conception are ignored in favor of adults’ desires. They also often deprive the kids of one or both biological parents while treating the womb as an incubator for rent. This is not just part of the fakeness epidemic but a clear-cut example of selfishness on steroids that is happening while there are millions of orphans across the world to adopt and over 70 million abortion each year worldwide.

All of this is counter to what the Bible teaches. Even if you do not believe in the Bible, it should be obvious to everyone that this is all both unnatural and unethical. We should aim for health regarding our natural bodies instead of trying to alter it, tone down selfishness and consider how our actions affect others, especially children and animals who cannot speak for themselves.

In the Bible, external natural beauty among humans is noted but never presented as a goal. Instead, there is an emphasis on personal characteristics. For instance, in Peter’s first letter 3:3-4 it says, “And let not your adornment be merely external– braiding the hair, and wearing gold jewelry, or putting on dresses; but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God.” (NAS).

When Samuel was looking for who to anoint as king, Jesse presented all his sons as candidates except the youngest—David—who was tending to the sheep. While Jesse was showing Samuel his son Eliab, he thought that this would be God’s anointed. But God instead told him to not consider looks and tall stature. Then He told Samuel that, “God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” (1 Sam. 16:7, NAS). This is what matters to God and why you must be real with Him. He knows each one of us better than we know ourselves. God is fake-proof.

The Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures tells us about God’s Law living in our hearts. Jesus said that what defiles us are sins that come out of our hearts (Matthew 15:19). This is where everything begins that leads us to either destruction/lie or to life/truth.

The God of the Bible is the God of life and the Designer of natural true beauty. Imitations cannot compete. The devil cannot create anything, he can only imitate, distort, pretend, manipulate, and destroy what God has created. He is the driver behind the fakeness movement because at the heart of all this is: the LIE—and he us the father of lies.

The Bible tells us to not worship creation, but the Creator. In Wisdom of Solomon, we read, “If through delight in the beauty of these things men assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them.” (RSV). This is the heart of the matter. Those who distort creation, also put it on a pedestal and worship not just beauty but what beauty can get them: adoration/admiration/sex/fame/money etc., to gain value in the marketplace of what people want. To put it short: they want to be wanted and/or gain power instead of serving the Creator of beauty and the only ultimate Power. It is a natural desire to be desired and be empowered, but that does not warrant what is a form of coveting which is part of the ten commandments. Instead of being your best natural self, you want to have some kind of feature that is not yours. Also, doctors now violate the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm” on a regular basis as all this is becoming legal.

It is far better to be your original self instead of displaying an artificial invention or exaggeration of something that is not your natural you. Doing the best with what God gave you is also a way to be grateful for what He has given you and that honors God. We should take care of our bodily temples just the way we are supposed to take care of this earth. Turn to God, not away from Him—that is the answer to everything. There you will find real and true lasting beauty.