Because spirit is primary: the material, the embodied, that which is perceived by the senses - is a kind of spirit.
Incarnation is indeed a developed form of the spirit - which is why the timeline of creation manifested as physical beings, such as ourselves.
And why the pre-mortal spirit of Jesus manifested as a mortal incarnated Man, and why Jesus resurrected as an eternal incarnated Man (rather than returning to the realm of immaterial spirits).
The spirit is therefore inescapable, especially when it is being most vehemently denied; because the exclusion of the reality of the spiritual is actually a malign form of spiritual manipulation.
The globalist-totalitarian overlords are engaged in a spiritual strategy aimed at inducing humans into spiritualizing the material.
The mainstream and dominating materialist agenda; vast projects such as "AI", climate, Birdemic-peck-type healthism, the sexual revolution and many others - are "sold" as material mechanisms for "making this world a better place" and for "saving" lives, the "environment" - even the planet; but this agenda is continually being spiritualized under another name.
My class of people - middle class "intelligentsia (the managers, professionals, artists, scientists, educators, lawyers etc) are deeply spiritualized now; believers in a complex and mutually-reinforcing ideology that they regard as ethically-imperative and factually-obvious.
Whether such people regard themselves as Christians, or members/ adherents of any other religion or spirituality, is ever-less relevant. The actuality is a spiritual materialism in which approved themes and plans are regarded as spiritually-good.
Their lives have an obvious public facet of adopting and advocating particular themes relating to carbon-climatism, the Fire Nation war, the Birdemic-Peck etc. But my point is that this now goes very deep, and has a primarily spiritual dimension.
There is far more to electric vehicles, as an apparently trivial instance, than the matter of subsidized virtue-signalling - which has been abundantly critiqued.
I mean the (to me) familiar phenomenon of a married couple with three cars - two internal combustion powered and the other an EV - is being superseded by a couple with a single (large, expensive) EV; whose wide-ranging (and strictly inessential) travel revolves around the location and timing of EV charging points.
The more inconvenience suffered, the more spiritual they feel - to the point of ceasing to feel, and therefore denying, the inconvenience.
Likewise; complicated and time-consuming rituals of "recycling" are not merely a pointless waste of time, not just a drag on the economy; nor merely a resource-consuming hypocrisy - nor are they strongly linked to a belief - or even the ideal - of their actions having any effect At All upon the environment...
The reality of the problem ("climate change"), and the effectiveness of their approved answer, has long-since ceased to be the point.
Just as we saw with the Birdemic; when people were indifferent to the actual effect of "face-coverings" on a supposed disease. The masking business rapidly took-on a spiritual dimension; in which the ritual humiliation and public abasement became a positive and personal spiritual action - akin to the simultaneous "taking-of-the-knee".
Electricity has itself become the material manifestation of a spiritual ideal.
These material-spiritual types love electricity to the point that it is the medium of enlightenment.
The colossal electricity consumption of "AI" centres is felt as a form of spiritual power - analogous to the building of large, expensive temples and cathedrals - Good In Itself.
Even internal combustion-engined vehicles have suddenly (in less than five years) become primarily and necessarily electrical in operation - such that for the only time in half a century, I cannot get into a car and drive it; but first must laboriously learn to serve the (continually changing) electric-computerized demon that has taken it over.
Furthermore that great fetish vehicle the bicycle, except for weekend leisure/ sports activities, has (in the space of a handful of years!) been all-but replaced by (de facto) electric motorcycles of multiple types: which EVs now use the vast network of "cycle tracks" - originally advertised as facilitating the replace internal combustion cars and buses.
In other words; because IRL bikes almost-never substituted for cars, but in practice replaced walking or were used by hobbyists; in practice now electricity-powered bikes have replaced leg-powered vehicles - or are used as motorbikes but with additional access to footpaths and cycle lanes.
Yet, in the eyes of their class-advocates; electricity-consuming bikes retain the spiritual mantle of the intrinsically-good bicyclist.
This is the tip of a very large iceberg that is sweeping through Western civilization, which is itself becoming Western civilization - not merely in practice, but as a spiritual goal.
It is inside people's head, it is in their thoughts, it is the subject of their day-dreams.
Something is afoot that is larger than the conventional modes of analysis and explanation. I feel that I am dwelling in a far less human, far more alien and abstract, world than anything experienced in human history thus far.
For them, for its millions of enthusiastic and fanatical adherents; this is all of-a-piece; and none of the institutions, none of the churches, have even begun to understand - let alone resist! - what is going on. On the contrary they are all a part of it - even or especially when they pick on some tiny aspect for discussion or even resistance.
More than ever those who desire the salvation of Jesus Christ need to be not of the world, even though we cannot escape living in the world.
Which entails seeing the world as it is: that its very materialism is spiritual. That we ourselves and our neighbours are complicit - and some of them are not just consenting, nor merely willingly complicit - but are deeply affirming of an alien, un-biological, anti-life "techno-spirituality".
It entails understanding that the spirituality of this world has already become inhuman/ antihuman and anti-Christian to an unprecedented degree; and in the most profound way.
A really strong post, worth saving and sharing, as it condenses in a few paragraphs a lot of thought-points that I agreed with but which were sometimes hard (for me) to present to others. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI feel that it's quite possible, even easy, to get others to see the quasi-spiritual attributes of various kinds of materialist activism. Instances/examples of paradox and hypocrisy to illustrate the point were never hard to come up with, and now we have a fresh one: a continued anti-carbon obsession cult, with all the religious penance of the various inconveniences and purification rituals you describe, whilst simultaneously demanding that we consume whatever surplus energy there is (and indeed generate more!) on data centres, under threat of of "losing the technology race" or something.
Many people will see this quite readily, however they'll still regard this spiritualisation as simply an analogy, a metaphor, a figure of speech.
But (and for me the penny dropped when I realised this) it is in fact in the actual sense of the word.
@dwhpl - I'm pleased this post managed to communicate with you, and seemingly in the same terms it was written - As I was writing it, I was wondering whether it would make any sense to other people!
ReplyDeleteYes. We ultimately need to spiritualise the material, not the other way around.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think about flossing, Bruce, is it another apparently virtuous but colossal waste of time along the lines of recycling? My own practice apart from brushing is to take Vitamin K2 which seems to strengthen the enamel or at least make it smoother.
@Ron - What a strange question! My Father was a (very good!) dentist, and he believed that flossing was more important than brushing - if he had to choose; he felt that you could clean the tooth surfaces with your tongue, but not in between.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that the need for (some) people to floss is a consequence of the long-term shrinkage in jaw size (and tooth overcrowding), plus the nature of modern foods - especially sugar.
Concentrated sweetness was probably absent from ancient diets (only the rare treat of honey), except during the brief fruit season - and even then wild fruits were probably less abundant, smaller, and less sweet than our agricultural types.
An important post. It’s a regular observation on the right that the Climate crowd are “Gaia worshippers” and essentially a religious cult, but that is only used to further cripple people spiritually because the heart of the critique is that intelligent sensible people know better, know that *nothing* is spiritual. Sounds like that gambit has passed to a new phase.
ReplyDeleteIt seems related to me- I made on off-hand comment about a spiritual attack that happened on the shortest day of the year to someone from my old Fundamentalist Church. Members of this church absolutely believe in such things, but my tying it to celestial happenings was highly objectionable to her. I don’t know what she thinks it means to be made “for signs and for seasons” or what day she imagines it was if it was “always winter and never Christmas” but anyway, it struck me as another “controlled opposition” type “approved” spiritual outlet. The same people go to great lengths to “save” local children from Halloween but simultaneously deny there is anything magical about that time of year.
Sorry if that isn’t really on topic. But the car thing- is insane! Our cars are all from around 2000. Last year we bought one just 1 year later than our latest car and the electronics made it nigh unusable- actually they did literally break the car! I’m going to have to rent a car in a few weeks and I’m dreading it. They are evil demons indeed, but the worst part is no one knows what I mean when I say that! They don’t even recognize inconvenience or annoyance! These are professional class people but with allegedly varied views that I’m talking about. This demands an explanation at least along the lines of what you propose.
Even my old cars try to boss me around about the driver’s seatbelt. We periodically practice leaving it off in our rural neighborhood, trying to train ourselves and the kids to “resist the machine”. I have no idea if there’s real good there, but they certainly don’t jump to appease every beep and ding a machine makes (nor to obey signage post-Birdemic). What a world.
Even though I don't necessarily agree with some of the examples you use in the post (and perhaps I don't understand them) I can heartily affirm your call for Christians to become more otherworldly,and it's something I'm independently feeling myself-- for whatever that's worth!
ReplyDelete@Mia - Having traded in our clapped-out old banger for a 3yr old petrol engined car, my wife has spent literally hours reading manuals while sitting in the car, trying to make it work, stop it posting false messages, enforce wrong speed limits, prevent lane changing, warning about this and that etc - it has needed reprogramming and rebooting to stop it trying to redirect us to the previous owner's house, and destinations. And the job is still not finished.
ReplyDeleteIn the UK, all this is top-down mandated. And things are even worse in more recent cars, as we know from hiring them.
Yet upper middle class people are buying these things in droves, usually in EVs; with all appearance of happiness?
It has become obvious that in this age of value-inversion, people are only "happy" when they are deliberately being-made miserable!
So true! I wouldn’t have believed it possible had I not lived to see it with my own eyes. The new top-down mandate in the Us is facial scanning tech that will somehow or other stop your engine if you are deemed “distracted” in your driving. How this could possibly make driving safer has yet to be explained.
Delete@Mia - When seat belts in front seats were made compulsory, this was preceded by a good deal of research and public discussion, and I recall there was acknowledgement that the measure would save lives *overall* but that in rare accidents the seat belt would cause death.
DeleteFor the last thirty or so years, "safety" legislation is just pulled out of a hat - for example the 2020 global lockdowns were based on small number of recent papers based on theoretical modelling - and even then, several of these papers concluded that lockdowns would increase the overall death rate - even when they spread out the fatalities (i.e. that "flattening the curve" increased the area under the curve).
Plus, of course, that the first wave of "Pecks" were introduced with negligible testing and rolled out across the whole world on the basis of bare faced (because literally impossible) lying claims. Later "boosters" were not tested at all.
Another inversion that has been accepted is that public "health" and "safety" means nothing at best, but mandatory-enforced harm more often.
The spiritual consequences of being cool with this situation - as are most people, and almost everyone of my class - are an aspects of what I am talking about. Today's whims of totalitarianism are assumed necessarily and fundamentally good - the only real evil being to question or oppose this.
Seatbelts in US are a famous case in economics (one of my academic areas of study but one I'm not any good at really- but public policy issues like this were the one area where I was could actually contribute). What actually happened post-seatbelts was the number of accidents increased until the rate of death was unchanged. In economic terms, people have a "taste for" death and make their judgements of risk based on that outcome almost exclusively. So once you were less likely to die in a car crash, people crashed more until the likelihood went back to where it was pre-seatbelts. However, total car accident-related deaths are therefore higher because pedestrians are now more likely to be killed by cars! Nonetheless, my state just recently passed a mandatory seatbelt law...the madness continues apace.
DeleteIt's also notoriously difficult to talk about car safety issues sanely because of anti-racism: many "mysteries" of US car accident rates are easily and obviously explained by demographics that we aren't allowed to notice.
In the era before Greta Thunberg, it seemed to be a mass phenomenon to obsess about food and diets. My acquiantances were making fine dining pilgrimages and debated the correct way to prepare certain meals.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was an attempt to create a positive form spiritual materialism (aimed at enjoyment, at most), but maybe it wasn't motivating enough as dietary discussion was subordinated to veganism in the climate change panic of 2019, followed by other two minutes hate campaigns.
Thanks -- question was prompted by a trip to the dentist this morning.
ReplyDelete