Put aside such notions as the collapse of civilisation, civil war, mass invasion; put aside mass death by famine, plague and violence...
All those might happen yet we could still have won the culture war.
A global totalitarian society, an all pervasive leftist bureaucracy, a
society of omni-surveillance and dictated behaviour are all merely
mechanisms to advance us towards the real goal of the culture war...
If we truly lose the culture war, we will not be able directly to see the results - because losing the culture wars is about mass rejection of Christ's gift of life everlasting - it is about mass self-chosen damnation.
It is possible that really terrible things may happen to you and me and our world; yet, as a consequence, people may wake-up to the spiritual truth of our situation.
There is no sign of this (that I can discern) at present - but if the demonic forces that rule our planet make an error in their strategy of damnation, then all or some of the terrible things might bring people to clarity, and in that clarity they may directly perceive reality; and from that position then they may choose Good.
So, although the demons are indeed behind the policies and propaganda for global chaos, pervasive fear, group resentments, personal pride and the 'politicisation' (i.e. absorption to evil ideologies) of all human activities from morn to night and cradle to grave... some of these are means, and only one is the end.
Don't forget this - try to remember.
4 comments:
It may be pessimistic of me, but I think it is more useful to simply accept that the culture war has already been lost, and admit that the problem we have is not how to continue to wage the war but merely to provide for our own survival as refugees from the loss of our culture.
While I accept that mass damnation is the ultimate strategic objective of the true leadership of the other side in the culture war, that doesn't change the fact that the culture war, like any war, can be considered a total loss for one side even if it fails to achieve the purpose of the other side. The history of war gives ample examples of what have long been termed "Pyrrhic victories", outcomes so costly for the 'winners' as to foreclose any greater purpose waging the war was intended to achieve.
That may in some cases soften the sting of defeat for the losers, but it doesn't mean they didn't lose.
Nor am I able to regard mass damnation as unlikely at this point. Indeed, depending on how one defines 'damnation', it may be that few are completely damned, but it is clear enough that the majority are damned enough to make God weep.
In any case, what seems clear to me is that continuing to stake all in victory in the culture war, the campaign to salvage and restore Western Civilization to clear cultural dominance, is a distraction from the real task of preparing to survive and endure the overthrow of the culture.
God does weep for the damned, but the truth is that salvation has always been a personal issue, the outcome of a culture war is decided by the totaled sum of individual choices. But one does not obtain salvation merely as a means of being more effective in the culture war anymore than one achieves it by depending on the outcome of the culture war.
Individual salvation is and always was the point, wars were merely the symptom of some being damned instead. What we do should be because of moral reasons pertaining to the eternal destiny of our own soul, not out of obsession with the temporal outcome of a statistically aggregated view of demographic trends within our short mortal lifespan.
@CCL - From the general tenor (Good News) of the New Testament, it seems possible that damnation used to be a rare event: and odds were stacked against Satan et al. That is rather well argued by CS Lewis's Screwtape, when complaining about how difficult his task is. But that situation *seems* to have changed in the modern West; indeed we can see a change in Screwtape's attitude between the two stories that featured him in 1942 and 1959.
It may be that many people are currently sleepwalking their way to damnation and that some great event could walk them up. They are not actively choosing evil so much as passively allowing themselves to be swept along by it. Of course, the responsibility is still theirs. They could and should make the active choice for God. Our artificial and comfortable life style is no doubt a large factor. Remove that and people might begin to wake up.
When the expected outcome was 100% fatalities, anyone being saved at all is good news. The New Testament isn't discussing a shift from a minority being saved to a majority being saved, it's showing how anyone may be saved rather than no one.
But it is also important to recognize that there are grades and degrees of salvation and damnation. There are people who will reject God entirely, people who will only accept the lesser of God's blessings, people who will embrace only what the majority agree to be a blessing, and people who will embrace all that God offers.
Amongst those more categorical differences are distinctions, even for those who reject God utterly. We see this already in the divide between demons and almost demonic humans. It is apparent that 'utter' rejection of God is shaded with how many blessings one can pretend do not really originate from God. At the other end, accepting all God offers is shaded by what God has offered a given individual at a specific point in time and how long it takes to embrace it.
The mass damnation that is actually achievable by demonic influence is probably only a matter of degree rather than of category. What makes the categorical difference must be some element of choice inherent to the individual will, otherwise God could eventually save everyone and there would be no damnation except of degree. An eon or epoch one way or the other in how long it takes a person to accept a blessing from God is of little concern compared with whether they are fundamentally inclined to accept it at all.
Of course, I myself am 'troublesomely untroubled' about the categorical distinctions, as long as they arise from the individual's own will, why worry about them? I really don't understand. I only have practical concern about the degrees of damnation that can be affected by external circumstance...those are the only things that I or even God can affect anyway. Of course the categorical divisions are more important in the grand scheme of things, and one must understand them to deal with the degrees, but I cannot do other than accept them as they are.
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