(Just to recapitulate - my understanding is that evil is opposition to Good; and Good is God's will and divine creation. So evil is always negative and oppositional in nature. Evil is not an alternative form of the same kind of thing as Good; evil seeks the destruction of Good.)
The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that the global establishment is aiming at evil ends, its goals are evil.
This involves value-inversion; that is, the values positively endorsed by international and powerful national governments, the mass media, and all major social institutions (law, religions, health services, education, arts, police, military etc) all favour significant inversions of virtue and vice, beauty and repulsiveness, truth and lies.
Values are swapped-around - so the core positive values (which are actually negative oppositions) of the global establishment are actually evils - antiracism, birdemic-healthism, anti-climate-change, anti-normal-functional sex and sexuality etc.
The second evil is totalitarianism itself. This is the attempt to make the ruling ideology so pervasive and such a monopoly, that the masses become unable to do, think or believe anything that is officially proscribed.
Totalitarianism is intrinsically, necessarily, always evil - from a Christian perspective.
One cannot have 'totalitarianism in a Good cause' because that is a contradiction in terms.
And there cannot be a "Christian totalitarianism" - that is an oxymoron.
The reason is that Christianity requires each individual acknowledging his own ultimate responsibility for his own spiritual fate.
Free will/ agency is absolutely required in order to choose to follow Jesus Christ.
Anything which seeks to prevent the recognition or operation of individual agency is therefore evil.
In sum - the global establishment is evil because they are totalitarian in aspiration, and substantially in attainment - and totalitarianism is innately and always evil.
And the global establishment is also evil because that apparatus of totalitarianism is directed towards evil (value-inverted) ends.
Therefore, if there was any doubt before 2020 that these are the most evil, most sinful, times in the known history of this world - there is now no doubt.
This is our situation.
But God never leaves a single of his children bereft of the means for salvation. We can (in principle) all be saved, resurrected, follow Jesus Christ - if we wish it.
Even when our situation is severely suboptimal; all that we need will provided before the end - before the decision needs to be made.
Salvation if we wish it...
That is the big 'if' - it seems that here-and-now very few want what Jesus offers...
However, if Christians are to attain salvation in such a context, we need to know what we are up-against. Otherwise we will be seduced by totalitarianism, and follow the universal and pervasive 'authoritative guidance' into inverting evaluations, rejecting Heaven, and choosing (what will turn-out to be) Hell.
Dr. C:
ReplyDeleteI'm behind on your essays due to the demands of the week, but this caught my eye. Did you ever read Arendt's tome on totalitarianism?
You really simplify it.
One idea from her work that I found striking was the idea that totalitarianism always has to be on the move, expanding, getting ever more extreme.
What happens when it's taken over every nook and cranny? When there is nothing to expand to any longer? Perhaps that's End Times.
@Todd - I can't get much coherence from political conceptualizations of totalitarianism - I regard it as a post-religious phenomenon; therefore it could only exist from about the time of the French Revolution.
ReplyDeleteThe past few years have been eye-opening, to say the least. Before the scamdemic I was caught up in the Left vs. Right, Democrats vs. Republicans paradigm, like many people. The scamdemic made me very aware of the spiritual struggles going on sort of not exactly behind the scenes, but definitely under the radar, almost like a veil has concealed so much from so many. How else to explain that so many people who think of themselves as, and are, in fact, good people, are not able to see what is so obvious to me? I often think of a piece you wrote a few months ago. It was about this very thing, where people who are good, are actually serving evil because of their erroneous beliefs and desire to be part of the “accepting” dominant culture, which at heart is anti-truth, anti-reality, anti-good therefore anti-God. There are days when I think, why am I always swimming upstream? I often say to my husband, every day is Opposite Day. Just another way of recognizing value inversion.
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