IMO the big lie begins with secularism. It is also closely tied to the mark of beast.
2 Corinthians 4:4 (NIV)
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
The question is HOW?
First, every human will have to have a religion without exception. A religion is to provide an explanation on what would happen after death.
In Genesis God hid the Tree of Life from the reach of humans. As a result, human cannot go beyond a physical death to see whether life will continue or not. They have to believe either of the following without exception. They have to pick one from two with faith without exception.
1) nothing serious would happen
2) something serious would happen, so you need to responsibly seek out what would possibly happen
If you choose 2) with faith, that becomes your religion explicitly. If you didn't choose 2 with consent, your subconsciousness made a decision for you by picking 1) with FAITH but without your own consent. It is now your religion but without your own awareness. This is how Satan plays his trick, he gave humans a religion but without those humans' own awareness. And in the end, 1) will turn out to be a lie.
Secular people choose 1) as their religion but without their own consent as a result of our secular education system. Our education system should remind us the 2 possibilities 1) and 2) listed above explicitly but it didn't. Under this secular education system, people's minds are blinded as Paul described. Our education system is thus the mark of the beast. In a modern society with modern education, everyone is given a mark in his forehead (his mind) and his right hand (his action) for them to be anti God or anti religion. They themselves have a religion but without their own awareness though.
An analogy of the situation is;
Some people sacrificed themselves in order to get the message out that there's a bomb in a mall. Theoretically people should leave that area as the warning is so serious that people died to bring this warning out. However, at the same time a delusion is given to the people in that area that they should sit down where they are to wait for the evidence. They are told that the message is not good enough, a serious claim must be supported by evidence.
In this case, 'evidence' is the delusion, and since it's a lie. The evidence will finally come along with a blast which will kill all those staying in the area waiting for the evidence.
That's the situation. In a nutshell, Satan has fooled humans through our own developed education system - the Tree of Knowledge we gain knowledge from to judge things, whether it is good or evil, right or wrong, true or false.
