While Moses was atop Mt. Sinai collecting from God the Ten Commandments, the children of Israel were down below worshipping a fresh-molten golden calf, dancing around naked to loud, discordant music, undoubtedly engaging in open sex.

This was and is the surest sign that a civilization has gone pagan, giving itself fully over to “the god of this world.”

Hence, the national news headlines last month carried the story about how a respected megachurch evangelical preacher in Texas picked the week before Thanksgiving to challenge the husbands and wives among his flock of 20,000 to join him in “Seven Days of Sex.”

As the New York Times reported on the event, “Mr. Young, an author, a television host and the pastor of the evangelical Fellowship Church, issued his call for a week of ‘congregational copulation’ among married couples on Nov. 16, while pacing in front of a large bed. Sometimes he reclined on the paisley coverlet while flipping through a Bible, emphasizing his point that it is time for the church to put God back in the bed.

“ ‘Today we’re beginning this sexperiment, seven days of sex,’ ” he said, with his characteristic mix of humor, showmanship and Scripture. ‘How to move from whining about the economy to whoopee!’

The article went on to report that at a branch church in Grapevine, Tex., jumbo screens over a candlelit stage were used to show parishioners a prerecorded sermon from Young and His wife, who were lying in a bed.

“ ‘I know there’s been a lot of love going around this week, among the married couples,’ one of the church musicians said, strumming on a guitar before a crowd of about 3,000,” read the Times article. “Mrs. Young, dressed in knee-high black boots and jeans, said that after a week of having sex every day, or close to it, ‘some of us are smiling.’ ”

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In response to this news, cable news personality Tucker Carlson wrote in an online column, “Let’s concede right up front that you hate evangelicals. Most affluent, educated people do. Where I live, they're the most unpopular group there is. How do I know this? Because of the reaction to a story that ran in yesterday’s New York Times.

“Earlier this month, the Rev. Ed Young, a 47-year-old megachurch pastor in Texas, urged his married congregants to have sex as much as possible with their spouses; if possible, every day for a week. Sex improves marriage, Young argued. God wants you to have more of it. ‘If you've said, I do, do it,’ he told the Times.

“The piece quickly became the newspaper’s most emailed story of the day, sent mostly, I suspect, by readers in New York, Washington, and L.A. to their friends along with notes mocking Ed Young and his parishioners. That’s how I first saw the story. ‘This will be good for them,’ the email read. ‘It’s hard to spend too much time engaged in meth-fueled sodomy with your boyfriend when you've got a nightly copulation meeting with your wife.’ (A reference to Colorado pastor Ted Haggard, who confessed to such activity after being busted by a male prostitute.)”

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Satan’s gotta love it. He’s got all his rich, Ivy League-schooled Manhattan minions thinking they’re so on top of things because they see what a joke evangelical Christianity is while all the “idiots” who voted for George Bush proudly “keep the faith.”

Any nitwit marketer knows the ages-old rule that “sex sells,” and as the Apostle Paul even warns about publicity-scheming shysters like the Rev. Young (who, by the way, has authored two sex books for sale in Christian bookstores), “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

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Here’s a great explanatory passage from Jordan:

“It’s important that you get a grasp on this issue of ‘the rudiments of the world’ because Paul is making a reference to something very basic about the religious system.

“The rudiments of the world is the source of the traditions of men, which is the source of the vain deceit and the philosophy of men. A rudiment is a fundamental operating principle. It’s the basic operating elements of a thing.

“The rudiments of the world have to do with the basic operating principles of the world system in which we live. There’s a way that the world operates—in Galatians 1 Paul tells us it’s the will of the Father that He would ‘deliver us from this present evil world.’

“Well, if it’s an evil world system, that doesn’t sound like a good thing; it sounds like a bad thing. Must have a bad leader. As II Corinthian 4 says, ‘But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.’

“Who is ‘the god of this world’? You hear people talk about, ‘Well, if God would let this happen and let that happen . . .’ Well, ‘the god of this world’ has no problem with all the things happening in the world today. It’s his system! It’s the system designed to carry forward and express his program!

“Ephesians 2:2 says, ‘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.’

“Notice there’s a course that the world follows. When Paul talks about the rudiments of the world, he’s talking about the fundamental operating methodology of that ‘course of this world.’

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“When you start out thinking about this issue of the rudiments of the world, you really have to go back to Genesis 3 where all this stuff really begins to unfold.

“What you learn about life, and the way the world works, and the way you function in it—it’s fascinating to me, all these years of dealing with people and trying to take the Scripture and help people out, understanding how it works in their lives and that kind of thing, the more and more I realize that you don’t get very far from Genesis 3.

“Because there’s a pattern and a course that’s set up here in Genesis 3 that is really how ‘the course of this world’ goes. I think about it—God creates man, puts him on the earth and says, ‘Go out and subdue the earth, have dominion over it, replenish it,’ and Satan looks at this human and says, ‘Hmm, that’s the guy whose supposed to take this stuff away from me?! This guy?! He’s just made out of mud! He can’t fly; he can’t do all the wonderful things I can do! Is God off his rocker?!’

“But he’d never seen a mud man before. So when you’ve never seen anything before, and you don’t know exactly what it can do, you need to figure out how this stuff’s going to operate. And so when Satan comes to Eve, he’s developed a scheme in his mind about how to handle this new thing that God created—this man.

“When Satan begins to interact with them, you’re going to see Satan has this operating plan in his mind about how he’s going to do things. And what happens here is you begin to see the rudimentary way that sin and the world system are going to operate, and how sin’s going to attack, and how it’s going to defend itself, and how it’s going to seek to encompass others in it.”