Monday 17 February 2020

After mortal life: Maybe justice is that Like will be with Like?

...In this way we see the workings of perfect justice, for once we leave this physical world at 'death', we enter into those responsive realms where like will be with like absolutely, in a way which we are able to circumvent on earth. 

So it is there that what we are will catch up with us. 

We will find ourselves with surroundings and people who are of the same quality of nature as ourselves. 

For those who have troubled to be kindly and helpful to others, it is something to look forward to. For those who have caused misery to others, they will find themselves on the receiving end of their own unpleasant natures. 

Not only will they be surrounded with people of their own attitude, but the very environment will be alike to it as well. This is the hell made by man and not by God. 

But God allows it as the best means to making such people face up to themselves and know themselves for what they are. 

From God, the player friend - by William Arkle

This passage immediately reminded me of The Great Divorce by CS Lewis, where hell is described very much along these lines - although this rationale is not given.

But there hell is self-chosen, and the consequence is that its inhabitants dwell among the others who have made this choice. They are then, intermittently, given a chance to visit Heaven, to experience the contrast. Some learn from the experience, others do not - and choose to return to hell.

Although mortal life is primarily a time of learning, rather than of 'perfect justice' - there are temporary and imperfect instances where we can experience and learn-from the kind of 'law of attraction' that Arkle is talking about.

We live-in and observe groups of similar people, some better people and others worse - and we have a chance to recognise the consequences of such 'attraction'.

A small example I experienced from both sides was in science and academia - in my earlier work I lived among some groups of honest scientists and academics; and then later I also observed (and somewhat experienced) life among career and status-orientated researchers and scholars. The consequences were broadly in line with Arkle's description of justice.

Thus one aspect of divine justice is allowing the consequences of Men's choices: the tendency of virtue and sin to be (to some significant extent) self-rewarding and self-punishing. 


It is an operation of self-selection that is going on here, which naturally tends to create un-alike, unequal niches. Therefore it is significant that the post-1960s New Leftism has made self-selection more and more difficult (and indeed illegal) in one after another domain of society - by means of slander, subversion; and then inversion imposed by top-down bureaucratic takeover, monitoring and allocation of persons and transfer (by cross-subsidy and coercive extraction) of resources. This done under the fake-justification of the primacy of 'equality' - meaning sameness-of-outcome. The procedure can be seen as the active undoing of natural justice, and the deliberate removal of natural consequences from actions (good and bad) - and, on the flip-side, the active punishment of goodness and other forms of superiority, by removing their natural rewards.     

2 comments:

Andrew said...

Well, I must say that that quote by Arkle is quite daunting and not very encouraging. The last thing I'd want to experience in Heaven is more of myself. Of course, I don't really have the power to change myself, not fundamentally anyway. Too much genetic damage and too much soul damage from life and lineage. The Bible is pretty clear that it's God's power that changes us. And I probably wouldn't like being placed in the middle of a cloud of witnesses all with Christ-like character if I haven't been transformed first. There must be more room for God's grace to change us, to know us better than we know ourselves and to plan for it and to restore us from the choices we make out of free will from a drastically incomplete situation.

-Andrew E.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Andrew - I think you are looking at it wrongly - as least from my Arkle-influenced perspective. Mortal life is about learning (including repenting), not changing ourselves in the way you seem to be implying.

And, since we are all individuals, it would Not make sense for the after-life to be built on assumption that we were all interchangeable 'clones'.

On the other hand, the primary 'organisational unit' of Heaven seems to be the loving, extended, marriage-linked family - and I suspect that the Like with Like organisation may be mainly among those (perhaps a majority in The West) who have rejected family, and (substantially) rejected Love.