It is important for people to realize, to acknowledge, that the global leadership class of 2023 - especially those of The West - are affiliated to evil; i.e. are allied with Satan and against God and divine creation.
But making this acknowledgement is not sufficient to be Christian, because the Christian God is Good - and Good by (the best and highest) human standards of Good - as exemplified and taught by Jesus Christ.
In other words; to be Christian, we must also correctly understand how it is that God, the creator, who is wholly-Good - makes things, such that this world is ruled by evil Men who serve the agenda of Satan.
In other words; we need to understand enough about the nature and motivations of God to make sense of the current fact of things-now being substantially under evil leadership.
And there are (from a Christian perspective) right and wrong ways of understanding this.
As so often nowadays; this line of reflection almost immediately gets-down to fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of reality - especially the nature of God (in other words - to metaphysics).
And as so often nowadays; such reflections operate as a stress test on some of the historical incoherences of Christianity - in this instance, the dogma that the Christian God is an Omni-God (omnipotent, omniscient, and creating everything from nothing).
When the Omni-God concept is made primary - then there is no real Good or evil; because everything is of-God.
Our human ideas of Good and evil are then merely the delusions of Beings who have been made depraved and weak, and forced (for incomprehensible reasons) to dwell in the realm of an evil dictator - with the only goal the negative one of acknowledging our own depravity and that evil of our situation.
Somehow; this acknowledgement of evil is supposed to be the only path to our personal salvation. And yet this (we must believe) was the only and best way that we (who are supposed to be completely made by God, in complete accordance with God's designs, and having experiences completely dictated by God or God's servants) can escape eternal torment.
I have noticed that some of the Christians who pass the Litmus Tests of our time - and who therefore appear to be 'good Christians' - are doing so negatively rather than positively. In other words - such Christians recognize the evil of the Litmus Test issues - but only because they regard this whole world as essentially evil.
Such negative Christians regard Men as essentially depraved creatures who inhabit a world that God has given to the rulership of Satan; and which Satan - who is a sadistic, lying tyrant - operates as a prison of torment.
In other words; such negative Christians regard God as Good (in some ultimate and abstract sense) but one whose Goodness is morally-incomprehensible - because God (as an Omni-God, qualitatively utterly distinct from men) operates by values that are beyond human comprehension and empathy.
Because if a Man were to treat his children in this way, he would be regarded as a moral monster!
An analogy might be parents who deliberately choose to send their son to a boarding school whose headmaster is a sadistic tyrant, and who employs sadistic tyrants as teachers; and these teachers ensure that the most sadistic and tyrannical of the boys are praised and rewarded, and encouraged to torment the children at the school and expunge anything in them that is Good or joyful.
Even more extremely; since these parents are 'omnipotent and omniscient' - we must assume that they might not have sent their son to boarding school at all, but chose to. And they might instead have picked a better Headmaster who had some Good motivations and employed a better staff and encouraged Goodness in the boys...
But no! These parents chose to force their kid to inhabit torture-school...
And further - these parents must be regarded as having made their son such that he was by nature depraved, that he was corruptible by evil; he is set-up (by his creation-from-nothing) such that he cannot resist corruption.
Such choices are de facto imputed to the Omni-God - and belief in Omni-God is then made mandatory for Christians...
Negative Christians are driven to such extremes by their dogmatic adherence to the Omni-God.
In the past, it was possible, indeed not unusual, for Christians who believed in an Omni-God to operate in a way that was inconsistent with their belief - and which instead focused on the nature, example and teachings of Jesus.
But nowadays, because of the stresses of these times - the contradictions of mainstream, orthodox Christian theology have been brought to the surface, and confronted by a more evil world than ever before - a world in which the organized institutional 'Christian' churches have (almost-) all chosen to obey the totalitarian agenda of evil, and who actively-support many or most of the globalist-leftist Litmus Test issues.
Yet to regard this world and Men as essentially evil is to reject that which is specifically Christian, and to adopt a Judaic/ Old Testament/ Islamic - or even quasi-Gnostic - view of God; as incomprehensible or even apparently evil by even the best human standards.
(The Gnostics believed, in essence, that this world - and all 'matter' - was created and operated by 'the devil'; and was therefore wholly negative, operating only as a test to elicit a spiritual and other worldly desire. For the Gnostics, we Men could not learn anything positive from our experience in this world - we could only learn the negative lesson of its evil, and experience the desire to escape from matter into pure spirit. Meanwhile - for Gnostics - knowledge of God could only be negative ('negative theology') - we could say what God was not; but could state nothing positive and substantive about God. In other words; this is a double-negative theology - in which 'Good' is only the negation of evil. While there are no modern day Gnostics - it can be seen that this negative metaphysical attitude has been, and still is, a feature of many religions and spiritualities. This is also revealed by the commonly-expressed double-negative conception of salvation; which is so often described as as an escape from default-torment - e.g. "Jesus came to save Men from Hell".)
It seems obvious to me that Christians - i.e. those who follow Jesus Christ - cannot (and should not) follow this path of regarding this world as created by God as a prison ruled by a tormenter; and of God's nature as utterly unlike even the best aspects of the best of of Men.
The test of these times involves both accepting that this world is indeed ruled by evil men who serve Satan; and also understanding that God is Good - and Good by the best standards of the best of Men in this actual world.
This means that (in 2023) Christians are being compelled explicitly to reject the old error of the Omni-God in Christianity - failure to do so is pushing Christians towards a kind of double-negative pseudo-Christianity, in which God and the ultimates have more in common with the world-view of Judaism, Islam, or even the Gnostic...
In other words; we are called-upon explicitly to reject a type of 'Christianity' that demands (above all else) complete obedience to the incomprehensible and (to us ultimately depraved humans) apparently-immoral demands of all-powerful and abstractly inhuman deity.
Such a Christianity has no essential role for Jesus Christ as such - its theology and demands are wholly-derivable from God as-was before the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: Jesus has been wholly-absorbed-into the Omni-God (as must all of creation be absorbed into an Omni-God).
Such a pseudo-Christianity is an Old Testament religion (plus/ minus various Greek and Roman philosophical assumptions) - and such remains the case no matter what lip-service is paid to the importance of Jesus.
In one version; Jesus has been absorbed into an already-existing Old Testament project, without any qualitative break or inflexion; in another version Jesus is just treated as-if he was simply God the Creator.
To be a positive Christian in 2023 therefore entails more than just rejecting the temptations of the Litmus Tests on the basis that the world world is evil and God made it this way.
We cannot negative our way out of trouble!
Good comes from Good, not from a vast piling of evil upon evil. When Christians find themselves talking as if Good could come from evils, they ought to regard this as a reductio ad absurdum - and examine their assumptions that led to this non-sense!
Christians need to be led by Jesus Christ, not by a pre-Christian conception of an Omni-God.
A Christian in 2023 needs to detect and reject evil - yes!
But only as a means to the end of pursuing positive Good.
**
Note added: The reader may notice that I emphasized 2023 throughout. Negative Christianity often worked well in practice in earlier eras - and this is also useful to understand. Firstly, Men had a different and more group-ish (immersive, passive, un-conscious) form of consciousness in the pre-modern era; and this resulted in society-wide forms of religion. The positive aspects of even the most negative theologies were therefore sometimes ameliorated by positive social practices - particularly those handed-down by tradition. One example would be that of Eastern Orthodox Christianity as found in the Byzantine Empire, or Holy Russia. As well as an ascetic and meditative monasticism rooted in negative theology; there were all kinds of ritual and symbolic practices that were part of everyday life and provided a counterbalancing of warmth, aesthetic satisfaction, colour, energy - often the veneration of Mary, the Mother of God was a particular route for this. Something analogous can be seen in some Medieval Roman Catholic societies of Western Europe. But things have changed - modern Men's consciousness is more autonomous and individualistic and consciously aware of things once taken-for-granted so that we must choose much that was previously spontaneous; automatically absorbed from society. Now (2023) there are no Christian societies that provide that kind of communal and primarily-motivating religious life. Each Christian is, in an existential sense, "on his own". Therefore the long-standing flaws of mainstream Christian theology have been unmasked. Thus life in 2023 is always and everywhere a testing-time for Christians; in ways that 1223, 1523, or even 1823 - were not (or not always).
6 comments:
@Unknown/ KatM -
"If more and more people just say "no" to evil (or repent their consent to evil) that is a first step toward freedom from the slavery of evil."
Indeed. Especially repentance. We are all sinners (i.e. not fully aligned with God), and most of us are too weak to say no to all temptations or expediencies - yet anybody can repent at any time; if only sin is acknowledged.
The theology is somewhat different, but the distinction you're drawing here somewhat resembles certain Sanskrit terms. Nirguna-Brahman is God without qualities/distinctions, the formless absolute, the omni-being which cannot be described by terms suggesting an opposite. This is opposed to Saguna-Brahman, God with qualities/distinctions, which is the personality of God which, in the Vaishnava sects, consistently favors and assists the Devas (demigods; in Tolkien's terms: the good Ainur and the Valar) over the Asuras (often translated as demons, but in some cases that isn't quite appropriate).
@Michael - The theology is indeed "somewhat" different! In other words, the *aims* are almost completely different. But more fundamentally, the nature of God I am trying to express is not captured by this distinction except superficially, almost accidentally. I derive this mostly from Mormon theology, which arose from 1830 onward in the USA, and was something genuinely new in the world - in terms of its metaphysical structure and theology.
I have some vague awareness of basic Mormon theology, its notion of exaltation, and the emphasis on embodiment in heaven as you often talk about. I can see the uniqueness you point out in terms of the whole, coherent system of metaphysics and soteriology, but it's not enough to shake me from my view that Christianity, in all its forms, more or less has the same conception of salvation as the Vaishnavas wherein one gains eternal life in God's Kingdom due to His guidance and grace. Where you emphasize embodiment, they emphasize the difficulty of describing such a state, but they still speak of it as a physical-like paradise with animals, plants, birds, etc.
@Michael - It is probably pretty simple to discern.
You just need to ask yourself: Do you want to be resurrected to eternal life in Heaven after your death, to be achieved by following Jesus Christ? - Or, do you want something else?
Whatever our differences of opinion, thank you for your writings and your careful replies to my comments
Post a Comment