Cold Love, 6 – Enduring to the End

Those who endure to the end will be saved … –

Yeshua/Jesus of Nazareth

(Image credit – Pinterest)

As we navigate the uncharted cultural, social, economic, and political waters we are now in, it is harder than ever to find truth. Despite our lip-service to liberal democracy, there is little for public input at any level of government. Climate alarmism trumps policy, as we now see in living technicolor with the totally artificially generated energy crisis while an incredibly energy rich nation like Canada turns a deliberate blind eye and deaf ear, even to the interests of its own citizens. Misinformation, disinformation, deliberate obfuscation and falsification predominate in the public forum. The screamology of extremism drowns out reason and rational discussion of almost any subject of significance.

As mentioned in a previous post, ideology trumps fact in the name of saving the planet and even having a future for the human race. Actual reality versus virtual reality is more and more confused in people’s minds. Rumor and inuendo take the place of investigation and verification. Doctor Goebbels and Vladimir Lenin would have been thrilled to have had the means to mold the popular psyche now available. Foucault and the progenitors of postmodernism can be proud of their achievement in creating universal doubt in the possibility of knowing anything for sure. Accept, by faith, the chosen “truth” of your ideological dogma.

Ordinary folks do not, of course, consciously and constantly live with this awareness. Life interferes; the pressure of “getting through” blocks out most of the big questions most of the time. There is a gnawing, deep-seated sense of gloom and perhaps even dread that, perhaps, all our bickering, striving, and quarreling is futile in the long run. The best we can do is make the best life we can now and for our children and grandchildren in the near to mid-term. After that, all bets are off, especially if the various doom-scenarios which gather so much attention are correct. Choose your doom; there are plenty of candidates out there from climate catastrophe to nuclear holocaust, or even a meteoric extinction event as per the dinosaur era long ago. Fantasy and post-apocalyptic science-fiction sell big.

As in every era of history, the ultra-privileged classes at the top, live in the illusion of their safety while the rest can all suffer so they can keep their privileges and their hold on the leavers of power. They cannot fathom that the increasingly alienated and desperate under-classes may just be being driven to a level of desperation that will actually hold them to account and overthrow them. If this is no longer possible within a rigged system, history teaches that violence will be the last resort.

Most of us struggle to find hope. We don’t often say it out loud, but the question of hope is constant beneath and behind much of what we do, especially as life moves us from adolescence to young adulthood and to the inevitable “mid-life crisis”. I meet more and more couples who have chosen or are choosing not to have children – many more than the occasional ones I met 40-50 years ago. (I betray my age.)

As for you, what do you hope in? and why?

Do you hope for some sort of life after death? Or is your hope solely aimed at something for this world’s sojourn for what remains of it for yourself, and, if you have any, your descendants?

These are not, of course, new questions. As long as humans have consciously considered their own existence, most have hoped that death is not the end. But most of the scenarios for something beyond the grave were not attractive as something to be desired, unless it was just as a hope to escape total oblivion.

For we moderns and post-moderns with our scientific approach to almost every problem, there is no way to validate any such hope. The best that can be said about any and every answer to the big questions that science cannot and will never be able to answer is that it boils down to faith. And faith, in its simplest terms, is a matter of trust. Thus, as you ponder your own answer to the ultimate nature of reality and your own existence, you must recognize that, whatever answer you choose, it is the one you have chosen because you trust it is the truest, based on some sort of evidence that you trust. What you believe reflects the nature of reality as you experience it and what you’ve been taught about its meaning. You interpret it according to that experience and that of other people whose input you find trustworthy.

Everyone who lives to the age of Reason and Accountability adopts basic beliefs based on trust, based on faith. There are no exceptions; the Noble Prize Winner and the humblest unknown labourer are on exactly the same footing in this. The politicians running your governments and the ultra-rich tycoons are the same as the factory workers and computer geeks.

Our faith convictions determine the kinds of choices we make, especially on the most important decisions, both individually, as in the choice of career and life-partner, having children or preferring a dog, and as social influencers and directors, as in the kinds of rules for society are to be set, and the limits to be placed on dissenting groups.

Underneath all of that, there is the issue of God. Everyone in all the categories we have mentioned and any others you care to consider sooner or later wonders whether the Cosmos came from nothing for no reason, or from the action of a Being, a Power who/which willed it into existence and imbued it with all the properties we have since been striving to understand.

When it comes to ultimate hope, there are really only two relevant answers: God made it, or it just happened somehow, sometime, we know not how or why. All protestations and appeals to the scientific arguments about the Big Bang and inevitable evolution aside, both positions are really and truly faith-based. The Big-Banger deftly dancing past and around the questions of WHY? and HOW? must know that their firm insistence that no Deity is necessary really means “No God is wanted or need apply. Some day we’ll find the magic bullet, the one original micro-particle that, somehow, jumped out of nothing and started everything.” Even such a particle appearing out of nothing just begs the question, “But what made it appear?”

To reconnect all this to the question of Hope versus Futility seems fairly obvious. If God did it, (S)He would have a reason. We, by extension as reasoning beings coming from His/Her creative hand, should be able to discover some part of that reason. And, even more hopefully, some of our kind and species have already made some progress on that front.

On the other hand, if no Creator is responsible, there is ultimately no reason, despite all the illusion of design and purpose. The only purpose in biological Evolution is survival. But if all is ultimately just heading for extinction after however many eons shall pass until entropy extinguishes it, or cosmic implosion annihilates it, then futility is your hopeless answer.

Where does that leave the Theists?

Christians recall what Jesus declares in our opening citation: “Those who endure to the end will be rescued/saved.” Hope is in His faithfulness, which is certified by His resurrection from the dead, and His followers are assured they will likewise rise transformed for life eternal.

For Muslims, hope in Allah’s mercy and your efforts to live by Muhammad’s revelations to get you admitted to Paradise.

For Jews, hope in Yahweh’s mercy and favour, and perhaps to some degree, your efforts will make the world a better place. Anything beyond that remains to be seen.

For Hindus, keep on trying as you go round the cycle of existence until you graduate to nirvana because your good karma has finally erased your bad karma. Buddhists have a similar view with slight nuances.

But for atheists, hope is an illusion, except, as we said above, to leave something positive for the future, as far as there may be one.

While science tends to negate “faith” as a religious notion, it holds fast to its own creed, with little beyond affirmation that its methodology will someday solve all the mysteries – even the ultimate ones. If that is not as great a religious faith as the Theist’s, I don’t know what is! But as to hope for something beyond the here and now, it will all be futile in the end.

Christianity offers the hard evidence of thousands of years of results in changing lives, making great advances in improving the human condition, and providing the hopeless with hope and comfort. The wrongs done by people using Jesus’ name does not and cannot cancel its legacy of making the present better for billions, and offering a brilliant future to all who apply to Jesus. As its foundation, it points to this Jesus, a man who lived and died in history and convinced thousands of people of his own time that he was not just a “mere” man, but the embodiment in flesh and blood of the eternal Creator Himself. To seal the deal, He came alive three days after his murder-execution in a renewed physical form which can no longer die. He thus confirmed that there is a real, living hope that the Creator loves the Creation and chooses to save it, to rescue it, from the futility of death and meaninglessness. And we humans, who can know this loving Creator, can enter into this eternal, deathless, and absolutely purposeful ultimate reality through Jesus.

Enduring to the end means two things: (1) the end of your sojourn on earth in this age, and (2) the chosen time of Jesus’ return to transform the mortal and time-limited Cosmos into a sublime, immortal one which Creator is preparing for us right now.

If you are a follower of Jesus, be of good hope; He will be true to His promise. If not, consider the source of your hope and whether it can endure to the end and rescue you from futility.

For, in the end, Cold Love will be annihilated in the light and flame of God’s all-consuming agape.

Cold Love, 5 – Ideology

ideology – science of ideas; visionary speculation; manner of thinking characteristic of a class or individual; ideas at the basis of some economic or political theory or system.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1964

(Photo credit – Time)

Ideology is a product of the mind, as our definitions above clearly indicate. Love is born in the heart, whatever form it takes. Very often, if not always, ideology and love are divided by a wide chasm – in practice if not in theory. Nevertheless, the two must coexist, and no mature human can function without having both present, however unconsciously and informally held.

We can intellectualize love, conceptualize love, analyze love, psychologize love, but we cannot create it by any exercise which originates primarily in the intellect. The heart may remain untouched despite all the most careful thought. The one emotion that ideology seems all too readily and too often to generate in abundance is hate. It may, however, also generate a pseudo-love, a counterfeit to stand in the place of what love, by its nature, is meant to be. Ideologically bred “love” is obsession, fanaticism, a sort of veneration of national, class, social, or economic identity. This pseudo-love is usually an amalgam of more than one of the above, and it absorbs the “lover’s” sense of self in the process.

Let us consider this paradox for a moment.

English and many other modern languages are not very supple in communicating the many shades and nuances of what real love entails. English is a poor vehicle in this respect, although eminently pliable in creating terminology and abundant expressions to convey technological and behavioural subtleties. Of the other modern languages of which I have some understanding, the same lack of nuance regarding love is true.

In contrast, the subtle ancient Greeks had four words for love to express nuance and context: eros indicated sexual love, erotic love; phileo – companionate or friendship love, sibling love, “brotherly” love; storge – parental, guardian, protective love; agape – self-denying, self-sacrificing, selfless love, characterized by God’s love for humanity in Jesus Christ. All of these are real forms of love, but the first three are incomplete without the last, which therefore governs them. For example, Jesus once said, “No one has greater love than this – laying down his life for a friend.” Phileo thus reaches its highest expression by giving oneself for the benefit of another without seeking a return. So too with eros and storge, as immediately becomes evident with a moment’s consideration. Parents know this instinctively in their love for their children, and mothers more readily than fathers, even if, these days, saying so is frowned upon as an old stereotype. Romantic love based on sexual attraction must develop beyond this if the relationship is to endure.

One of the greatest delusions of our arrogant claim to be a scientific society is to turn everything into ideology. For ideology, “love” must be captured, weaponized, and made into a commercial and economic commodity as a weapon in the arsenal of the social and cultural engineers claiming to know what we all need most.

Because of love’s universality in human experience, when directed by these careful social manipulators it automatically creates empathy and sympathy for whatever cause or target has been selected in the current program of “progress”. It is powerful in generating zeal on the one hand and shame, blame, and guilt on the other. It takes no prisoners, leaving all those confronted with its demands (whether reasonable or not) sensing their failure. This opens the path for the next demand for the latest newly discovered worthy recipients of official compassion – “rights”. Engineered, ideological “love” is the most potent marginalizing force we know, as well as the most pliable for manipulating well-disposed, fair-minded people to climb aboard the train to the destination the engineers have indicated is where all right-hearted people will want a just society to go. By nature it leaves those who don’t subscribe to its dictates out in the cold, literally and figuratively.

Canada is one of the most open societies on the planet. It has become a progressivist haven for much of the increasingly active and militant Woke agenda. With firmly ensconced ideologues presently in office, or acting as close advisers to those who are, the current government is more than slightly well-disposed to its claims. In addition, for many years the courts have consistently favoured the extension of basic human rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to redesign Canadian society in the image of Progressive Utopia.

One of the latest signs of this is in the allocation of resources to favoured groups by the National Government. The latest example is in special funding for the development and strengthening of 2SLGBTQI+ community and life.

Statistics Canada has recently released the first solid statistical data regarding population breakdown according to type of household based on gender affiliation and orientation as of 2021. “Rainbow” self-identified households make up less than 2% of the population (about 700 000 individuals). Presumably, the thinking is that the Rainbow elements of society are in danger of re-exclusion, which may be arguable, although recent cultural trends would place that notion in grave doubt. The intent is certainly to make it fully mainstream and accepted as normal.

It may be argued that the government is supporting a specific set of lifestyle choices and ideological values. But it has become almost impossible to engage in any such discussion because of the immediate challenge that basic rights are being threatened.

By contrast, Canada has a very large disabled population which includes people of all ages, genders, orientations, and ethnic origins. This is the same sort of situation raised in terms of gender and sexual orientation identity. In 2017, 22% of the population, 6.2 million, were identified as suffering from one or more significant disabilities. The measure of consistent government neglect, both Federal and Provincial, of this huge population segment has been monumental and perennial for decades.

In government policy, 20% of the population with special needs far more urgent and basic than strengthening their cohesiveness and cultural presence are virtually invisible. During COVID-19 and its variants, almost nothing has been offered to help the large number of these sufferers living on barely enough to eat and find shelter. Tens of millions of dollars have been wasted on bogus claims for support by healthy citizens who found themselves temporarily unemployed or simply able to pass through the flimsy screening process to receive benefits. In comparison, what pittances were offered to the disabled were obscure and hard-to-find and apply for, with the result that few even knew they were available. Those that found what was offered were given meager one-time only payments that amounted to 25% of what was given to other applicants for one month. Elitist ideology creates a hierarchy of worth that these people do not fit into. Instead, we change laws to offer “medically assisted death” for those whose suffering has become intolerable while we offer next to nothing to alleviate their suffering or improve their quality of life.

The intent of this story is not to provoke anger, although indignation is not out of order. Rather, it is a very real and current illustration of the role of ideology in one of the most “advanced and progressive” nations on earth. We clearly see how implemented ideology in power designates what is valued according to our socio-cultural elites. In this case, compassion, which is one form of the expression of love, is granted to a quite small preferred minority which primarily self-identifies and is granted status almost without question. They enjoy strong, positive, official cultural recognition with increasingly well-entrenched rights bolstered by very public celebrations of their diversity and cultural identity. The disabled remain invisible and are offered no encouragement to be valued for who they are.

We could easy find other illustrations of the current, divisive cultural ideology now largely entrenched throughout the West. History offers numerous examples of the rampages misguided ideological cold love generates. The 20th Century was full of them and documents all their worst features in their extreme nationalism, racism, and favoritism. Let us hope that we are not heading to a new variation of such horrors as we watch the growing disaffection and alienation of a large segment of the West’s less-favoured and less valued groups and classes beginning to seethe with anger over their new exclusion. While those rising may see the exclusion of formerly favoured (or seen to have been favoured) classes as only just, we can only warn that pendula always swing two ways. Breaking the law of backlash will not occur as long as those on the upside ram their values and status down the throat of those on the downside.

I am not advocating the withdrawal of rights and recognition to anyone. We must realize that ideology is a potent force too often prone to be abused and misused when it turns on the shame, guilt, and blame switches in people in order to manipulate them into compliance with a chosen agenda, shutting down any public discussion and dialogue.

Ideology cuts both ways. As Newton long ago observed, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In metaphysics the rule is parallel: “Karma always returns to bite you in the butt”, or, more refined, “You reap what you sow; if your sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind.” When it comes to legislating values and shaming opponents into submission, rather than leaving the avenue open to have a healthy discussion and debate in the appropriate forums for this, the resistance will not go away. If dialogue is suppressed, it will find its way out in uglier and angrier ways. These will not be any more open to change than the opposite which drove them underground in the first place.

Ideology is another manifestation of the rampant “cold love” plaguing the modern West and, by extension, the whole world. Its fruits betray it – anger, resentment, fanaticism, violent explosions, and, at worst when left to fester, war, revolt, and revolution.

No society yet devised by humans has yet proven immune to these evils.

The only way out of them is to rediscover agape. Whether we remain capable of that at a societal level we shall probably soon see.

For those who still profess Jesus Christ, agape must begin at home and within our own communities of family, faith, and local community. To rant and rave about its absence in the wide world is not helpful when it is not practiced right where we are with those who are right here with us – regardless of ideology, class, ethnicity, or gender identification.

NEXT TIME – COLD LOVE, 6 – CONCLUSION: ENDURING TO THE END

Cold Love, 4 – The Quality of Mercy

mercy – compassion or forbearance shown to a powerless person, especially an offender or one with no claim to kindness.

The Canadian Compact Oxford Dictionary, 2002.

The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the earth beneath.

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

(Image credit – Vectorstock)

Mercy. Every convicted criminal hopes for it. Every school child “sent to the Office” appeals for it.

Mercy – most death-bed patients earnestly pray for it before they cross the final frontier.

 For the 60-70% or so of Westerners (depending on the nation and even the region within a nation) still professing belief in some sort of God resembling the traditional Judeo-Christian idea of an infinite personal Being and Creator, the standard logic on the mercy of God goes something like this:

‘God is love. Therefore, He must be merciful, because really loving people are merciful and forgiving, right? A loving God will therefore not banish anyone to exile/hell or whatever other nasty place there might be. So when I die, I will automatically be accepted by God and live forever in a nice place filled with love. As to hell, God’s love would never have created such a thing in the first place. So mercy is automatic; all my nasty deeds and selfishness will be erased and forgotten, and, like in the Disney world, we all get to live happily ever after regardless of what we’ve done and how we’ve chosen to live here on earth.’

Many an atheist has been repulsed from the idea of God’s existence, let alone the religions that profess and uphold it, by the whole notion of judgment by a Maker who assesses our lives pronounces “Pass!” or “Fail!” Their revulsion is confirmed for them by every hell-fire and brimstone sermon they’ve (n)ever heard (mostly never in our current society), or even heard of, and by the record of God’s over-zealous human proselytizers condemning heretics and infidels to eternal damnation and temporal torture and repression. Too often, when it comes to how a “merciful God” is presented to doubters and sinners here in our flawed and suffering world, the “quality of mercy” has been strained indeed, in fact all but relegated to the back-room where only a select few seem to qualify to merit it.

No surprise that Jesus warned that, before his Second Coming, which his saying about cold love refers to, that “agape-love”, which demonstrates and embodies the unqualified mercy of God, would become a rare jewel even among those claiming to be his fervent followers.

In the original context of the words coming straight from Jesus, cold love refers to the fading away, the diminishing of agape in humankind. Besides relegating God to the last-ditch reserve bench in life, this includes how humankind behaves among themselves and towards the rest of creation. As we have noted before, agape is the highest form love takes: self-denying and sacrificial in its care and compassion, seeking no benefit from the object of the sacrificial caring. It rises above mere sentiment and mushy feelings of affection. In fact, it does not depend on them even being present, although if they are to some degree it helps make the giving and caring easier. Even the passion of sexual love cannot endure and overcome the tests and stresses that arise without agape to help the lovers get over the inevitable hurts and disappointments that come into every meaningful relationship.

The ultimate origin of agape is the Creator, who created all that exists purely out of His/Her own infinite agape. Creator did not have to make anything. Yahweh-Creator-God chose to create out of agape. God’s agape is His/Her desire to love and give love in infinite measure outside His/Her own self-sufficiency. At the height of the Creator’s creative activity, He/She created Humans to bear His/Her very image and likeness as a living, walking representative, a creating entity able to manifest the kind of nature the Creator has stamped within the very Cosmos itself, saturating it, putting the testimony of its origin everywhere.

Since the ancient rebellion of the first humans against the Creator’s intent, the presence of agape has often been lost, distorted, even forgotten. Hence, much of our energy has been wasted and twisted into destruction and misappropriation of the Creator’s good gifts. The rebellion was aimed at establishing human mastery over creation apart from serving the Creator. It has proven a tawdry substitute for the richness of enabling and enhancing the Creator’s goal to cause the Earth to flourish and reach its full potential to show the wonder and beauty of the Creator’s. (Glory means the full manifestation of the Creator’s intention brought into expression by the Creator’s commissioned stewards – us.) If God’s plan were adhered to, the humans would reach their own full potential as Creator’s appointed image-bearers, God’s living icons, so to speak.

Instead, in our self-proclaimed godhood, we have reaped destruction, decay, death, and alienation among ourselves, and have inflicted these same blights on the whole world.

The Christian Story says that the Creator-God did not sit back and shrug. Instead, speaking anthropomorphically, (S)He is deeply grieved, even distressed, and even angry. However, God’s ultimate response is mercy rather than wrath, although wrath has been allowed to fall. If we are willing to face our rebellion and defiance of God, we must see that, just as with human offenders in human society, there is an inevitable day when judgment finds the unrepentant transgressor. This is called “natural consequences”, and it applies in both the physical and metaphysical realm. It also comes as a legal requirement.

Without engaging in theological debate, history demonstrates that, with regard to respect for God and God’s creation, as well as for one another, we have justly deserved judgment more often than mercy. Most of the time, the Creator has just let us experience some more or less severe consequences of our actions. This can approximate Divine wrath in the hope that we may yet, even if only for a time, come mostly to our senses. But, if we are able to wrap our minds around it, we are also given Divine mercy even in the midst of what may well seem like wrath and judgment.

Consider how, all through our hegemony over this one and only Gem of a world we have been gifted with, we have chosen to rape and pillage it and slaughter one another to gain both group and personal ascendancy. Consider what this looks like from Creator’s perspective, especially when compared to what He/She made us for and intended us and all the rest of His/Her works here on Mother Earth to be. If any of us usurped our neighbour’s home and ransacked and destroyed all they had built, would we not cry out for redress, justice, and appropriate punishment? As politically and culturally incorrect the whole notion of “punishment” seems to have become in our burgeoning “Wokism”, punishment is sometimes the only recourse left.

As the one who made this wondrous world, the Creator planted us here in this “Garden” to “till and tend” it and make it flourish. Yahweh-I AM has every right to insist on justice – not only for what has been and is still being done to it all, but perhaps even more for what we have done and continue to do to one another.

The Christian Story says that, instead of just wiping us out, Yahweh the Creator sent Yeshua (Jesus), His/Her Son, the incarnation in human form of the Creator, to take the judgment on our behalf. That is why Yeshua commented that “mercy triumphs over justice”.

Thus, we have never yet been subjected to the full, terrible consequences of all the evil and wrong we have inflicted and continue to inflict upon one another and on our fellow creatures. It may not look like mercy at first glance, but imagine if God had never intervened to “cut those days short”, as Jesus once phrased it. We are told that “No flesh would have survived” if the Creator had not taken a hand to restrain the diabolical fury of humanity’s dark side run wild. That remains true.

Mercy triumphs over judgment. Imagine if the Nazis had won World War 2. “Impossible!”, you say. Not at all! It was a very near-run thing. Read Winston Churchill’ History of the Second World War sometime to get an inside picture. D-Day could very well have gone sidewise. Hitler’s armies came within a hair of taking down the Soviet Union in 1941. Etc. Tens of millions died, a toll so terrible that we forget that it could have been many millions more. It was Divine mercy that it was not. In 1940, Churchill publicly called it a “war to save Christian civilization” and he meant it. The Nazis intended to extinguish Christianity, as well as Judaism. It was not just Churchillian rhetorical flourish to rally the people.

Time and again this has been so. The Book of Genesis tells the stories of Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah as two examples. The Book of Exodus tells the same story of deliverance from rebellion and its consequences in the context of Israel, followed by the multiple episodes recounted in Judges.

The other side of this oft-repeated story is that, at some point, even the infinite Creator’s patience seems to run out. Thus, ancient Israel and Judah (the two Kingdoms set up by the Israelites following their liberations from Egypt and then from the numerous oppressors from neighbouring kingdoms – see the Book of Judges in the Bible) eventually must reap the final consequences and are wiped out by the neighbouring superpowers of Assyria and Babylon.

Mercy is always to be hoped for, but judgment will also fall on the day when mercy can no longer find a perch.

Paradoxically, agape demands it because agape is always married not only to mercy, but to justice. God’s agape is given freely, but it is granted at great cost.

TO BE CONTINUED

Cold Love, 3 – A Case Study

“All you need is love,

Love is all you need.”

– The Beatles, 1968

(Image credit – Pinterest)

The Counterrevolution of the 1960s captivated much of the West’s imagination for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I grew up during that time, and was myself drawn into it, like many of my contemporaries trying to find a new path to peace in the midst of a conflicted world teetering on the edge of annihilation. I tried the experiment of living with urban wannabe hippies, and, when that evaporated, living with a few “cool dudes” who, we hoped, could support one another in maintaining some separation from the Establishment grind of conforming to the system.

As the Sixties departed, the true Hippies retreated to their communes to let the system and its oppressive culture “go f— itself” amid the ugliness of race riots, horrible Indochina atrocities, the turmoil of Middle-East affairs, Superpower proxy wars in Africa, and nuclear war near-misses. The millions of Hippie-imitators and wannabes who had held onto the Counterculture coat-tails to enjoy its more hedonistic aspects began to face the truth that they had to actually begin to work for a living. That meant making a pretense of “conforming to the Man and his demands”.

Some, like myself, tried to hang onto the some of the threads of our old illusions, but found we were mostly deluding ourselves. Young as we were, this called for some serious reflection about who we really are and what we are here for on Planet Earth. It seemed that love is not all you need. It requires something strong to bolster it and keep it, and the hope it gives, alive.

This great social and cultural crisis thus dove-tailed with personal crisis for many of the somewhat more idealistic millions of young adults of the early boomer cohort. The resolution of this great identity search seems, to a great extent, to have depended on how we had been raised. Many reverted to the values and expectations, although usually not the religion, of their upbringing – go get a job, settle down, contribute a bit to society, and raise a family. Or: go get a good education, find a career, climb the ladder, get your share of the rewards, raise a family, contribute a bit to the community, then retire and enjoy what was beginning to be euphemistically called “The Golden Years”. Our views on love had become much more prosaic and less “heavenly”.

There is no doubt that we all need love. All through life we all need to be loved, and to love, to receive it and to give it. This transaction is the most validating part of life. This is what makes every human being “belong” and feel valued.

One of the earliest justifications for abortion, which had then become so “pregnant” an issue all across the West, was “every child a wanted [read loved] child”. We will not rehash the abortion debate in this space. Suffice it to say that the root cause of that still virulently corrosive issue that has driven such deep wedges in all nations across the world in the last fifty years is cold love – or no love.

Abortion has been selectively and somewhat surreptitiously practiced for thousands of years, but only in the last century has it become a world-wide ideological and metaphysical pandemic. Obviously, it is not a “pandemic” in the same sense as our latest exemplar, COVID-19 and its variants. But it is far more deadly if we want to be honest about running an actual body-count over the last fifty-odd years or so. If we were to do so, its only rival would be the Bubonic Plague, the “Black Death”, which has been guesstimated to have killed at least 100-million in the space of 10-15 years as it swept across Central Asia and into Europe in the mid-14th Century. But on a sheer numbers-basis, abortion dwarfs the Black Death.

It is a measure of our collective shame and guilt that many nations (of which Canada, my homeland, is one) are no longer honestly reporting or even collecting accurate abortion statistics. Canada has become the only nation on Earth without any law on the books governing abortion. In 1988 the Supreme Court struck down the existing law and told Parliament to make a new one that conformed to its evolving interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The politicians attempted this over the next several years and, failing to find a consensus, then failed in moral courage, all the while blaming one another. However, lest we blame them too much, they merely reflected the state of agonized public division and wishing the whole thing would somehow just go away. Nevertheless, reputable statistical extrapolations can be and have been done to approximate both the local and global impact of abortion on population.

Once more, we can use Canada as our exemplar in the question of statistical impact on society. Canada has had legal abortion since 1969. For thirty plus years, statistics were kept and collected from the Provinces by the Federal Government. In the last 10 years when they (we) still kept track of these “procedures”, the annual number of documented abortions in both public and private hospitals and clinics was between 90,000-110,000. We also knew that reported statistics were probably not complete, so the numbers were probably a little higher, meaning we should probably add another 5,000 or so.

If we assign a conservative average of 80,000 over the 53 years of legalized abortion in Canada, we arrive at a reasonable estimate of 4,240,000 abortions. If we allow a “fudge factor” of 10% for under-reporting, which we know has been the case, we arrive at almost five million future contributing citizens having been eliminated.

All we need is love? Where was the love for five million human beings not allowed to be born and live a normal life-span because they were “not a wanted (loved) child”? This makes an utter mockery of this maudlin cliché that “every child should be a wanted child”.

The purpose of this reality-check is not to assign blame. It is not to make the women who felt/feel compelled or desperate enough to choose abortion feel ashamed and guilty and terrible. Let us be frank that many of them did and do not really have true liberty to choose (so much for freedom of choice!) when surrounded by insistent and indignant parents, bullying male partners, and well-meaning peers and friends, all the while fighting their own internal maternal instinct. What options were/are given them besides, “If you have the baby and keep it, you will be ruining your (and my/our) life?”

Who was/is there for them to offer them another road, amid the often unsympathetic and vehemently righteous pro-life/anti-abortion advocates and the carping, oppressing, bullying unsupportive significant others, not to speak of the frequently strident ideological and uncompassionate militancy of the pro-choicers?

Love was/is desperately needed, but has gone into the deep freeze on both ideological sides, and, sadly, at the personal level where these forlorn women live. The pregnant and vulnerable woman is still pretty much left alone and abandoned, the victim of cold love, even while protests of “We’re only telling you this because we love you,” are drummed into her ears.

Let us also be clear that governments, churches, and other charitable organizations were/are not disinterested bystanders during all this. Almost the whole old-fashioned support system of orphanages and homes for single mothers has been defunded and gutted, whether by design or neglect.  Much cheaper to erase the problem than fund assistance to a young woman trying to raise a child and still have a life for ten-to-twenty years, or whatever time it may take for her to find a husband/partner who will help support her and her child. And the religious institutions who used to do most of this sort of thing are largely in disgrace for reported scandals of abuse of various kinds. “Shut ‘em down!” runs the Greek tragedy chorale.

This is but one flaming example of the utter failure or our society to demonstrate real love to so many segments of the population who have been marginalized, ostracized, victimized, vilified, etc. For more examples, we can look at how we neglect and shove the disabled and mentally ill out of the way. We can consider how we warehouse our inconvenient seniors because we can’t, or won’t, provide funded assistance to the many who could still live at home if we bothered to pay care-givers a living wage. This would be far cheaper and, for many, far more compassionate than funding long-term beds at $40-70,000 per annum in impersonal institutions.

Consider how we still cheat the indigenous of what they are entitled to after 200 years of racism. The parallels with the abortion issue in all these cases is striking. In similar fashion, all the old-fashioned but at least partially effective institutions have been defunded and gutted, leaving these underclasses isolated, unsupported, and driven to the brink of despair.

Agape where are you? Where have you gone?

Agape is the highest form of love which God exampled in Jesus. He commissioned a community of followers which became known as the Church, to continue to spread it and bring it into every part of human life and society. It is sad to watch and lamentable to admit that cold love has all too often and too much crept into the Churches of the West, not to speak of the secular, godless ideologies which have supplanted them here in the rich and comfortable First World.

TO BE CONTINUED

Cold Love, 2

You have heard it that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: love your enemies! Pray for people who persecute you! That way, you’ll be children of your faither in heaven! After all, he makes his sun to rise on bad and good alike, and sends rain upon both the upright and on the unjust.

Yeshua/Jesus of Nazareth, ca 30 CE in Galilee, northern Israel, cited in The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, verses 43-45 as translated in The Kingdom New Testament, trans. by N.T. Wright.

(Slide credit – Etsy)

In the statement above, Yeshua/Jesus transforms the normal human understanding of relating to friends and enemies. In another teaching in The Gospel of Luke chapter 10, he explains whom he means by “neighbor”; he declares that everyone becomes my “neighbor” in times of crisis and need, not just those I am related to by blood, affinity, and proximity. (See The Gospel of Luke, chapter 10 in the parable of Good Samaritan.)

In a teaching parallel to the one cited in our opening quote Yeshua pushes the “pray for people who persecute you” command even further:

“… love your enemies! Do good to people who hate you! Bless people who curse you! Pray for those who treat you badly! If someone hits you on the cheek—offer him the other one! If someone takes away your coat—don’t stop him taking your shirt! Give to everyone who asks you, and don’t ask for things back when people have taken them. Whatever you want people to do to you, do that to them. If you love [only] those who love you, what credit is that to you? Think about it, even sinners love people who love them. Or again, if you do good only to people who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Sinners do that too.”

Luke 6:27b-33

These are among the best known but most difficult of Jesus’ sayings to put into practice. Even great “saints” find them very hard and sometimes fail to do them, let alone hot zealots who revel in fulminating about God’s doom hanging over sinners to strike down those who mock God and despise Christ, Christians, and Christianity. After all, loving and blessing (which implies demonstrating what you say) an enemy or opponent is much harder than damning them to perdition and walking away from them.

Hot zeal for God’s judgment to fall on sinners can be a shield protecting the zealot from actually having to practice the harder things such as agape-love (agape being the Greek word used for love in all of these citations) which Jesus is talking about. As pointed out in Cold Love, 1, Jesus is talking about the highest form of love (agape) which governs all others. It is this kind of love which we need to live by, and this can only happen in constant relationship with its giver – Yahweh-Adonai, the Creator and Author of all that is.

Let us recall that Yeshua said that it was precisely this kind of love which would become increasingly scarcer as the times grow darker and we approach the Great Finale. It is one of the sure signs of what is called in the New Testament Greek text the Parousia, loosely translated as “the Royal Appearing” – the “Second Coming” in modern-day popular theological jargon.

The Parousia was a term used in the First Century Roman World to refer to the arrival of the Emperor, or perhaps a King, being heralded as a Savior, a Redeemer. There was a protocol for this as the Ruler approached the city he was coming to grace with his august (as in Caesar Augustus, First Emperor of Rome) presence. There was a great procession modelled after the Roman Triumph – the great and magnificent Victory Parade awarded to Rome’s greatest commanders and heroes after a major campaign had been completed with resounding success. Hundreds of thousands would turn out in their best robes, and the whole thing was carefully choreographed to display the full splendor and glory of the Victor. All the spoils of this latest enemy-obliterating campaign would be on display, with treasures aplenty, plundered statues of the new conquest’s gods, goddesses, and great rulers to show that Rome’s gods were greater, and the general or Emperor (who might also be the general – the Latin word for Emperor is “Imperator”, which, until Augustus had meant “Supreme Commander”, a military title) splendidly robed in a golden chariot – hordes of newly-minted war-captives-cum-slaves, the victorious legions, or at least one of them as representative, and, at the end, the most distinguished captives, who would be ceremonially executed by strangulation before the Emperor and Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Supreme Roman Deity, whose son the Emperor was tacitly proclaimed to be.

The Christian idea of Christ’s final triumph bears some relationship to this picture, just as does the Apostle Paul’s statement that only the Holy Spirit could bring someone to declare “Jesus is Lord”. To say this in any public way in such a culture could well mean death. That statement meant that Caesar, whose Parousia all must acclaim whenever he went on tour in each great center he visited, was ultimately not Lord (Dominus in Latin). With Jesus, there was one higher than any earthly ruler.

But the Kingdom of Jesus was “not of this world” – it was a Kingdom built on agape, and its citizens were/are all equal, regardless of sex, race or ethnicity, and social class or status. In that alternative Kingdom, an Emperor/Empress is no higher than a slave, a man is not higher than a woman, black-, brown-, yellow-, red-hued, and white humans are all equal. This was not intended to be mere pious rhetorical flourish, but reality in practice and effect. But the only way this could and can ever be a reality is by, through, and within the living presence of agape in each of the Kingdom citizens’ hearts and minds, and practiced day by day.

It is no wonder that, for the Roman state, this movement, which began to grow with alarming rapidity in the eastern half of the empire and then found its insidious way west across North Africa and into Europe, became more and more the target of suspicion, then growing concern, and finally outright persecution.

How attractive and compelling such a faith quickly became to the downtrodden and oppressed! It was, and is, a complete alternative worldview and lifestyle to that of that ancient world, and indeed to our own culture and society, if truly lived. Eventually, numbers of the jaded and sated ruling classes and wielders of power and influence could not help but begin to wonder and look at this powerful spiritual and metaphysical force themselves, and some of their own number began giving themselves to this alternate “Lord” named Jesus.

It was said of those first generations of Christian disciples that it was their agape that was “turning the world upside down”. It was said of them that they blessed their persecutors, and prayed for the rulers who sought to destroy them. It was said that they knew how to die even as well as they knew how to live. It was said that inexplicable wonders sometimes accompanied the declaration of their euangelion – Good News – another word borrowed from the Roman Imperium with its message of the beneficent rule of the “Imperatores” – Emperors.

Cold love was not the hallmark of that age within the people then called Christians.

Let us bear that in mind as, next time, we examine what Jesus therefore meant when he said cold love would be a sure mark of the nearing of his Parousia.

TO BE CONTINUED

Cold Love, 1

“Because of the increase of lawless wickedness most people’s love will grow cold…”

The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, verse 12, in the New Testament, my rendering.

(Photo credit: Outreach Magazines)

In the blistering, record-shattering summer of 2022 in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, few (? no?) rational people would say that we are heading towards a new Ice Age. On every side, from Academia to government agencies and para-government prognosticators, we hear the alarm bells of climate change and see the effects of global warming. For example, here in Canada we are witnessing a large increase in the severity of summer storm and tornado activity in the east and center.

In the region where I live, we experienced what, so far, has been a once-in-a-lifetime event called a derecho, a sort of straight-line tornado without the twisting funnels touching down, but with straight-line winds recorded at speeds up to 212 kph (130mph). It cut a wide swath (up to 100 kilometers in breadth and about 1000 km in length) through southern, central and eastern Ontario and western Quebec, leaving huge devastation in its path, and power outages from a natural cause on a scale never seen before in Ontario. The national capital area of Ottawa-Gatineau, with 1.43 million people Canada’s fourth largest urban area, was worst hit, with some areas out of power for almost two weeks as Hydro workers struggled to replace thousands of destroyed power poles and towers, transformers, and sub-stations. Overall insurable damage was $720 million, but add to that materials and labor costs to rebuild the infrastructure, and this does not speak to the devastation wrought on business, farming, industry, and commerce.

How much of climate change is due to human action over the last two hundred or so years may still be debated, but there seems little doubt that human pollution of the air and sea, and pillage of the land, particularly of the forests and sensitive ecosystems all over the world, have played and continue to play a significant role.

One of the premises of the West’s modern-postmodern culture and society is that we should keep our personal religious and spiritual convictions out of the public forum. This seems a fine ideal if we can live up to it and all are willing to participate in it equally. For people in power it is a very tough temptation to overcome, and disguising one’s metaphysical convictions as rational and scientific is a common ploy when effectuating change to the social fabric. For some decades, many Western nations seem to have made a real effort to be somewhat non-partisan in religion and metaphysical influences. However, one may be excused for suspecting that the veneer of civility and sincerity in not using power for the furtherance of favored values and morals with little regard for those of the mass of conscientious citizens has become threadbare.

In the West’s history over the last 1500 years or so since the demise of the Western Roman Empire, religion has too often been an instrument, a motivation, and a justification for some of the most terrible events in recorded history. Some of history’s most horrific and inhumane things done by humans to one another have been done in the name of Jesus Christ, to whom the perpetrators paid lip-service as the Prince of Peace and the ultimate manifestation of God’s boundless love for humanity and His creation. These failures and excesses by individual Christians holding positions of power, and by institutions claiming to act under Christ and according to His principles have provided great fodder for the secularization of the West.

Over the last hundred years, ideology has stepped into the moral vacuum, and continues to do so. The dismal record of the twentieth century amply illustrates that ideology is just secularized metaphysics with all the religious zeal and much of the sacramentalism of religion dressed up in other names. Without God, humanity creates its own form of religion and creates the kinds of laws, principles, and institutions the latest power-clique deems suited to anchor itself in place and manipulate the underclasses who must adhere to their orthodoxy or suffer the penalties for not doing so. Such penalties may be as mild as social pariah-ship and isolation, or as severe as death and mass extermination.

It is an education to consider the perception and role of love across the annals of recorded history. It would be a long and perhaps wearying tale to undertake it in detail. Books about love in all its aspects abound across the millennia and in numerous cultural expressions. We cannot do them justice here, and it is not my intent to try.

But we may consider what Jesus was talking about in the quote at the top of this post and see where it takes us.

When Jesus said that as things move towards the ultimate climax of human history (whenever that might be), “most people’s love will grow cold”, the word for “love” in the original Greek (which was actually already a translation of the Aramaic word “hooba” which Jesus would have used when talking to His disciples) was agape. This kind of love is different from sexual love (eros), parental love (storge), or friendship and sibling love (philia). It is the highest form of love, selfless, giving without expecting any return, reflecting God’s love for humanity and His creation.

Jesus was not saying that people would stop falling in love, stop having sex, or stop caring about family and friends. However, if those other kinds of love are to truly reach their highest potential, they must be ruled by something yet higher – agape. That is what Jesus was predicting would “grow cold” for most people.

What consequences ensue from the decline of selfless, giving love-commitment which does not impose some sort of controlling agenda or conditions in return? Surely it is not wrong to hope for and expect some reciprocation in relationships with one’s most significant others? Certainly not! And I am sure Jesus would concur. But when it fades away, when the beloved turn away and reject you, then what?

That is where agape emerges, if it is present and has been nurtured already.

What Jesus is saying is that in the “end-times” we will see (and it appears already that we are entering them, or are already well along the path towards them) is the strength of underlying and over-arching agape as the root strength of all love fading out of view.

The consequences of that are “the increase of lawless wickedness”, which is also one of the causes of the moral and ethical glaciation unto death of western (and world) culture and society. It is both cause and effect, like the snowdrift high on the mountainside that breaks loose and, when it catapults down the slope, brings a tremendous avalanche of devastation.

TO BE CONTINUED

Psalm 73 – A Parable for Our Time, 3 – Strange Time, This Time

(Photo credit -Quotefancy)

This short series on “A Parable for Our Time” based on Psalm 73 of the Hebrew Scriptures will conclude in unorthodox fashion with a rather lengthy original poem. Although using poetry to convey complexity and perplexity may be a bit of a hurdle, I hope this will not put off the reader.

Given the maelstrom of complex issues and influences swirling around humanity and our role and place on Planet Earth, and the parallel perplexity many of us are experiencing in our souls about it all, perhaps poetry can be a more effective way in reflecting all this than the regular sort of narrative composition blog.

At any rate, should you choose to peruse this venture in poetic license, thank you for you indulgence and patience.

I leave readers to formulate their own interpretations. Each one will hopefully find soul-food somewhere along the way.

Shalom!

Strange time, this time

© V.J. Marquis, July 2022

Strange time, this time

we sojourn in

strange time, this time

of endless din

and silent noise

of ether sky

consumed with waves

particles fly

uncaptured ghosts

shooting through me

swirling ‘round me

photonic beams

in endless streams

screaming voices

I cannot hear

unless I use

the proper gear.

Strange times, these times

restless masses

seething classes

seen through glasses

darkened lenses

barely capture

fleeting senses

what might be seen

what might be heard

sublime, absurd

folly, wisdom

panic, boredom

everything from

wonders to slime

beauty to crime

chaotic brew

one may construe

just as you please

as lonely truth

goes to its knees.

Strange time, this time

rumors of war

lurk at the door

dire projections

dark shadows loom

rage breath of doom

heartless, soulless

glitzy nabobs

shun starving mobs

no qualms or guilt

can stick to them

rake it in now

choked with splendor

“let them eat cake”

we remember

a great queen said

then lost her head.

Strange time, this time

though not the first

there was Noah

of long ago

the story goes

that in his time

imaginations

of multitudes

teemed with evil

all the day long

to hell with good

just bring it on

power, pleasure

makes us all strong

just do as we like

no God to see

no God to hear

no God to care

or make us fear

robbers, killers

and all the rest

top of the heap

short-term bit-king

live by the sword

die by the sword

God may be slow

yet all will see

his dreadful wrath

bring them to dust.

Strange time, this time

hypocrisy reigns

mocking disdain

for any to claim

to yet sustain

moral virtues

old-time values

perhaps abstain

from urgent lusts

consider e’er

you put your trust

in brand-new fads

stranger theories

fresh-concocted

to ease the road

into unproved

notions of who

and what we are

why wait for proof

just go and do

and ridicule

the dinosaurs

who will not see

just shout them down.

Strange time, this time

the great divide

a chasm wide

from left to right

so far apart

with seething rage

a deadly stew

can it be true

conspiracy

that other side

no eyes to see

no ears to hear

no willingness

to listen or

to move aside

receive a word

let it be heard

that comes across

from those people

your truth, my truth

just what is truth

Pilate-Jesus

once exchanged

all truth, no truth

just yours or mine

with no God there

just who’s to say

all truths can change

from day to day.

Strange time, this time

no certainty

it has been said

except we all

will end up dead

“gotta serve somebody”

as we all know

deep in our gut

some rights and wrongs

some truths and lies

fake excuses

for ourselves

lay the blame game

the other guy

made me do it

but underneath

the still small voice

whispers “you know!”

you had a choice

persistent cuss

that little voice

leave me in peace

and if it won’t

I can kill it

I can still it

ignoring it

neglecting it

till I grow deaf

or it goes dead.

Strange time, this time

the deaf and blind

have taken charge

a rumor comes

and panic reigns

a storm streaks by

the ship is blown

now right now left

the course unknown.

Strange time, this time

the sages sitting

upon the heights

of their wisdom

can tell us all

we need to do

to claim our rights

to save ourselves

to practice what

has been approved

how next to move

to reach the goal

justice for all

a few freedoms

checked, withdrawn

more right for some

than other ones

trust us we know

we balance fair

flexible law

in swivel chair.

Strange times, these times

poor blessed ones

meek heirs of earth

pure-heart seekers

given small worth

grieving mourners

shoved to the side

collateral costs

of progress y’all

mercy is mocked

in victims’ case

villains pitied

while families weep

peacemakers called

God’s own blood kin

run to and fro

seeking that one

mucho peace-talk

running here, there

no reality

found anywhere

not in one heart

nor multitude

a rare jewel

so hard to find

sell all to get

no one knows how

it’s really found

hunger and thirst

for God abound

no one dares name

what’s really sought

no one dares kneel

dares breathe the Name.

Strange time, this time

beginning, end

the great trial

to weigh the soul

mene-tekel

moment-finger

Babylon-feast

orgy-garden

drunken stupor

steaming cauldron

drink it down dregs

consequences

consequences

always come home

all know deep down

all debts come due.

Psalm 73 – A Parable for Our Time, 2

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

Bob Dylan, 1964

Bob Dylan – The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Official Audio) https://www.youtube.com › watch

As much as it did in the day of King David and its author, Asaf, a worship leader in ancient Israel 3000 years ago, Psalm 73 speaks to how masses of ordinary folk see the world in this age. As such, it is true prophecy with a timeless message, as well as a poignant warning to all the arrogant who think they will never have to pay for their crimes against the poor, the downtrodden, the abused, and the oppressed of every kind and degree.

As Asaf observes, it seems as if the rich and evil just get richer and compound their evil depredations at the expense of people who just want to live a quiet normal life with a modicum of comfort and perhaps a measure of social recognition for themselves and their family. While the elites devise more and more methods of extracting everything they can take from them and their toil, the “folks” want reasonable security for their families and opportunities for their children to enjoy the good things they have worked for.

More and more regular citizens become aware that much of their work does not contribute to their own modest hopes and aspirations but is siphoned off by unscrupulous oligarchs, aristocrats, plutocrats, and downright criminals scheming to exploit every means possible to maximize profits and gain more wealth for themselves and their coterie. The plutocrats are seen as manipulating and even controlling the political oligarchs by giving them both a financial cut of the loot and a path to continued future power and influence once they have played out their political credit.

In our day in almost every state, the horrendous actions of the criminal sector are becoming more and more brazen and bold in directly challenging the “legitimate” sector for direct control of whole regions and sectors of the economy and society. They are often so deeply intertwined with the political authorities that their actions are almost indistinguishable. When the populace awakens to this reality, it becomes a mere matter of time until the exploited become so enraged and angry that they begin to rebel.  

What Psalm 73 and other Psalms and prophetic parts of the Bible, both Jewish and Christian, declare is, whatever may appear to be happening, the Creator is always aware and keeping tabs on all of this. Sooner or later, everything is paid for. Evil always reaps its own destruction if it is not ended by “repentance” – a true and sincere turning away from it with restoration and restitution.

“Those who live by the sword die by the sword.” When you drive people into the last corner where no hope is left, the courage of despair rises up with rage and fury to attack the oppressors, even if it seems hopeless. “Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.” “Be sure that your sins will find you out.” “God cannot be mocked [with impunity].”

These are hopeful, sobering sayings, but the difficulty for the victims of the accumulating mountain of injustices and oppressions is in not readily seeing anything being done right now to put an end to them. Ordinary folks still want and hope for that quiet life for themselves and their children and grandchildren. Sometimes it takes generations for the oppression to become so unbearable that the explosion of wrath can no longer by prevented.

History has shown that what may happen is the emergence of someone even more subtle and ruthless than the brutal and callous coteries who have ensconced themselves in the castles with their garrisons of men-at-arms – the “forces of order. The castles of the 21st Century are the bastions of the socio-political-economic Powers of our day.

When the people’s apparent “great hope” emerges, they will usually be seen as “a man [woman if you prefer] of the long-suffering people”, “one of us”, with the power to articulate the spoken and half-understood grievances and outrage of those who have been, or see themselves as having been, disentitled, disenfranchised, used, fobbed off with hollow promises and empty rhetoric, etc.

There is no shortage of examples from history to demonstrate this phenomenon and what can happen when the oratorical, inspirational, motivational, and organizational genius emerges to give voice to and stimulate action from within “the masses”. Here are a few: Alcibiades in ancient Athens; the Gracchi brothers, Spartacus, and Julius Caesar in ancient Rome; “Jacques” and the Jacquerie in Medieval France, Watt Tyler in Medieval England, William Wallace in Medieval Scotland, Thomas Muntzer in Reformation Germany, The Jacobins (Murat and Robespierre, et. al.) in Revolutionary France, Lenin and the Soviets in Russia, the Taipei and Mao in China, Mussolini and Fascism in Italy, and, perhaps the “greatest” populist revolutionary exemplar, Hitler. There have been many smaller-scale models of this phenomenon as well.

As we survey human societies around the world in the 21st Century, we cannot avoid the question, “How close are we to such uprisings?” If such were to break out in this day, can they take on the scale of one of the massive events listed above?

Perhaps of some comfort to the entrenched powers of 21st Century society, most of the outbreaks of popular rage in history have failed in their ultimate aim of overthrowing the oligarchs, plutocrats, aristocratic oppressors, etc. The “forces of order” are often too strong for the poorly armed, amateurishly-led populace to uproot the “Establishment” without some inside help, perhaps some opportunistic or idealistic and repentant person or group from the ruling set who can swing some of his own sort, or at least some part of the military and police forces, to assist the rebels. We see this at the Fall of the Bastille in Paris in 1789, and in St. Petersburg in 1917 with the sailors’ revolt.

If we consider all of this from the perspective of Asaf, the ancient Israelite poet-prophet (in ancient societies poets often had the role of “prophet”), he does not seem to condone bloody revolution as a good solution to the massive injustices suffered by the underclasses. Instead, he seems to advise patience and trust in God, who sees and will, in his Providence, bring retribution upon the oppressors and exploiters.

From the perspective of an ordinary citizen of any age, this is a hard pill to swallow. Asaf is very aware of that. Read (again?) a good translation of the actual Biblical text or, if preferred, refer to my paraphrase in the post previous to this. Perhaps this “counsel of patience in the face of injustice and adversity” just seems too unrealistic to practice, especially to Westerners of the 21st Century CE. It is much more satisfying to take action, even violent action if things get too desperate. What can Asaf be thinking as he tells us to wait for God to settle with our abusers and oppressors?

“They wear their pride brazenly and move along openly using violence and intimidation when it suits them. They grow fat with ease in their rich lifestyle, while their minds always devise new evil which infests their hearts and oozes out into their actions. They speak with malice and scoffing while they spew out threats. They even mock God and heaven while they strut and swagger boastfully here on earth.

“Many people are taken in by them and their “success” and turn to them, swallowing their “how-to-get-rich” story whole and acting like them. Those arrogant swaggerers sneer, “I don’t see any evidence that there’s a God watching! Does he even exist?”

“There they are, those evil scourges of humanity, always at ease, getting rich, swelled with self-importance and power. It seems to me these days as if I’ve remained good and innocent of wrongdoing for nothing. I know nothing but trouble every day, as if I’m being punished the minute I get up in the morning.”

Psalm 73 paraphrase

How can I/you/we find the patience to go on enduring the burdens they heap on us so callously? What about the crushed, much-worse-off victims in so many other afflicted states in Africa, Asia, Latin America? Is it at all reasonable to suggest, “If you just wait patiently, God will give those despicable evil people their just desserts in due time?” How can that be seen as any kind of solution for people watching their children die and their humble hopes crushed as so much dung under the boots of ruthless semi-human killers?

The very earth calls out for redress and for just consequences for the very worst of these beings who look like humans but act like incarnate devils.

Here in Canada, perhaps more than in any other Western nation, we move as in a dream far removed from most of the turmoil. We are deceived, just as our leaders seem to be. They but reflect the somnolence of the people as we imagine that we shall escape what is happening far offshore. Our mighty southern neighbour is deep in internal turmoil, and its waves are lapping at our doorstep, even spilling over, although so far we have felt but ripples.

The point is that, far and wide, the world stage is set for some great emergence, some sort of great upheaval in human order and society. Nature itself seems to mirror this.

To borrow more Biblical imagery, we might say the “the whole earth is groaning in distress felt right in the gut [the old translations say “travail”] as it awaits the glorious revelation of the sons (children) of the Creator.” (St. Paul in Romans, chapter 8.)

It seems an appropriate time to be describing where things have come to in apocalyptic language. Read again the opening citation from Bob Dylan who might, with considerable justice, be called the “poet laureate” and greatest minstrel of this time in human history. For those who miss the allusions in the last verse of that great classic song of almost 60 years ago, they are firmly anchored in the teachings of Yeshua/Jesus who was referring to the elite of the society he was living in two thousand years ago.

“The times they are a-changin'” but, “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”!

TO BE CONTINUED

Psalm 73 – A Parable for Our Time, 1

(Photo credit – wikipedia – shofar)

(The following is my rather liberal paraphrase of a literary gem from the Hebrew Bible. It is based on David Stern’s translation in The Complete Jewish Bible.I have eliminated the verse separations to facilitate the flow of this shockingly relevant 3000-year-old discourse on the nature of human society in the eyes of a citizen who also happens to still believe in God and His ultimate justice.)

God is very good to Israel, to those whose hearts are pure before Him.

But I lost my balance and my feet almost slipped away when I became jealous of arrogant rich and powerful people and saw how much evildoers prosper. For when their death comes it’s painless, and they stay healthy all their lives, never having the troubles of ordinary people and cruising along untouched by sickness and pain.

They wear their pride brazenly and move along openly using violence and intimidation when it suits them. They grow fat with ease in their rich lifestyle, while their minds always devise new evil which infests their hearts and oozes out into their actions. They speak with malice and scoffing while they spew out threats. They even mock God and heaven while they strut and swagger boastfully here on earth.

Many people are taken in by them and their “success” and turn to them, swallowing their “how-to-get-rich” story whole and acting like them. Those arrogant swaggerers sneer, “I don’t see any evidence that there’s a God watching! Does he even exist?”

There they are, those evil scourges of humanity, always at ease, getting rich, swelled with self-importance and power. It seems to me these days as if I’ve remained good and innocent of wrongdoing for nothing. I know nothing but trouble every day, as if I’m being punished the minute I get up in the morning.

But when I talk like this, I’m betraying my children and grandchildren. Nevertheless, it’s very troubling to think about.

Then, as I come before God to worship and stay in His presence, I see the truth about their fate. You, God, have put them on a slippery slope sliding straight into the pit of destruction. In an instant they are destroyed and swept away by sudden terrors. There is nothing left of them but dream-mist when an aroused God shows how He despises the way they live.

For a while I was angry and bitter and deeply wounded. In my anguish, I became an utterly ignorant fool myself, like one of the brute beasts you’ve made. But you did not leave me or forget me. You took me aside by the right hand and counseled and guided me. You showed me that when I die, you will receive me into your glorious realm.

So, Lord, whom do I have in heaven but you? And as to here on earth, when all is said and done, I want nothing else but you.

My body will fail and my heart may give out, but God is my real strength and my eternal home.

Those who have already gone too far and those who are even now heading far away from you will perish; the unfaithful to you are as good as destroyed already.

As for me, the nearness of God is my true good and is all that is truly desirable and good. I am making Yahweh-Adonai my refuge so that I can tell everyone who will listen of all your works.

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Lately, I feel as if I really connect to Psalm 73. Previously I have experienced trouble with this and other Psalms of similar sentiment because of what seems like God’s harsh attitude in categorically rejecting those who have gone astray from Him. I sometimes find the language of the Psalms towards rebels against God brutal and vengeful in my 21st Century years.

But there is a real dilemma for anyone who gets caught up in that semantic trap – for that is what it is, a semantic trap. It springs from our post-modern, enlightened, progressivist reinterpretation of what God should be like according to us rather than the reality of who God really is. We have remade God to suit our touchy-feely ideas.

Here is the internal dialogue we postmoderns typically recite along that route: “I want everyone who claims to be good to be nice and sensitive and forgiving of everything I do. Hmm – but that means we all need to be forgiving and non-judgmental of whatever anyone does. If I want that for me from everyone else, I guess I should be that way too. (But there are limits of course, especially when people mistreat me!)

“So, if God really exists, he/she/it/they would automatically have to be all-forgiving, no matter what!. (S)he would not harshly and brutally condemn people to hell, even if they do horrible things. In fact, hell shouldn’t exist at all – so let’s just declare it can’t, it doesn’t. If God is love, and hell is full of hate, well it just can’t be real! But heaven is a great place, or would be if we didn’t have to just do everything God says all the time. I mean, how much fun would that be? So, let’s just say that “heaven” will be perfectly adaptable, according to everyone’s idea of what it should be like to be heaven for them.”

The most economical postmodern solution to this disturbing dilemma of people actually doing for-real terrible deeds while we try to make sense of them in a universe that still has a God sitting above it, is to deny there is a God. Then we don’t have to deal with the moral conundrum the inconvenient Deity creates for us poor mortals living in a painfully unjust world. Without the Supreme Being, morality is just a social construct and not a real problem – unless, of course, you happen to be on the receiving end of the injustice. Then, it’s very hard to remember as you suffer that injustice doesn’t have a true reality, just the appearance and feel of it for the recipients. The random-chance universe of inanimate evolution is just a cruel, brutal place, so cruelty and brutality are just human attributions put on something that is not personal. But, oops! All that right and wrong talk still smacks of judgment and morality! So just where does that SO inconvenient apparently innate sense of justice and morality come from anyway if the universe is devoid of it. How moral are atoms and molecules?

This is the kind of semantic game philosophers who deny there is a God or say that God is irrelevant must play to escape the trap they’ve created for themselves and everyone else who ignores or excludes God, especially a Personal God, from their understanding of life and the Cosmos. Therefore, the denial of God, and of real (in)justice and actual good and evil in the Cosmos as it is, is nothing more or less than a semantic trap. It has no exit. Only God provides an exit, but we can no longer admit that exit into public discourse and polite society. As Stephen Hawking said about the best resolution for the enigmas of how evolution could ever have happened, and time come into being, “The simplest and most elegant solution is God. But we do not have need of that hypothesis.”

Hawking was of course dead wrong; we desperately need not only the “God-hypothesis” but the actual living, Personal God, Yahweh-Adonai, the One who identifies as “I AM WHO I AM: I WILL BE WHOM I WILL BE,” “The God Who Is There!” as Francis Schaeffer put it in a book of the same title.

In ancient times, the polytheists understood this when they began to consider the nature of the gods they had fallen into worshipping and appeasing. They realized that the way they attributed frivolous human moral ambivalence and pettiness to them simply would not do. Gods who could whimsically be benevolent one day and downright malicious the next could not be worthy of worship, except out of fear. But no amount of appeasement seemed to make them any more or less benevolent. So why bother?

But few ancients were willing to say that no such thing as morality and justice really existed. They needed to make the gods more just in order to hang onto truth, so gradually they did. There were a few open atheists, like the Roman Lucretius. But he was considered rather blasphemous and certainly impious by his contemporaries. To the chagrin of his great Medieval admirer, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, often considered the greatest ancient philosopher, if not the greatest of all time, was ambivalent about the God question. He rejected the Greek pantheon as unworthy of esteem, but, unlike his mentor Plato, was agnostic about there being a single Supreme Being. Plato concluded there must be such a Being.

In the ancient world, most everyone innately understood and accepted that there truly is good and evil at work, and that right and wrong are everyday choices to be made even in the most banal and certainly in the most significant issues in life. If we scratch enough below the surface of the regular John and Jane in the 21st-Century, I suspect the situation is little changed from our ancient progenitors. Such stubborn persistence of moral absolutism related to a belief in God may be the despair of the radical progressive set. They would dearly love to make morality as plastic and redefinable as possible in order to keep everyone moving towards full acceptance of the next crusade’s new value on the ever-morphing WOKE agenda. They can’t understand how, after setting the educational agenda for decades now in the West, ordinary folks still hold onto the “God-hypothesis” as the only logical answer to that most basic of all childhood questions, “WHY?”

This “stubborn persistence” is closely aligned to the deep malaise at work among hundreds of millions of unhappy regular citizens whose anger about fundamental inequalities and moral follies being ignored and even sanctioned as “good” is approaching boil-over temperature. John and Jane Doe see endless demands to stretch their lifestyles and values while removing their hope of economic betterment in order to suit the latest enlightenment revelations about “truth”. Outrage, we are discovering, is a two-way street. In the early 2000s, the left seemed to be the righteous outraged faction. Now the right has their own version of righteous anger. Neither faction likes it when the other takes to the streets and the barricades in wrathful outpourings. Shades of Germany in the early 1930s!

Psalm 73 is actually remarkably close to what we are discussing here, yet it was composed (as a song!) 3000 or so years ago by an Israelite worship leader named Asaf. As King Shlomo (Solomon) (an Israelite ruler close to Asaf in time) observed, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Before we close this episode, and to prepare for our next one, let us briefly set up the discussion Asaf is embarking on in his 3000-year-old “protest” song (shades of Barry Maguire, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Neil Young!). He wasn’t a hard-swearing rapper, but he is scathing nonetheless!

Asaph, our ancient Protester (Protestant?) is talking about the conscienceless ultra-rich and powerful oppressors of the underclasses of his time. He asks all the sorts of question which any person with a still functioning conscience and sense of justice and right and wrong would ask today. He might even have been looking at the oppressive rule of Israelite Kings as he wrote this, or at least at some of his oppressive officials who, like the bloatedly opulent Kings, were using their high offices and trade and business connections to grow richer and richer while oppressing, over-taxing, and gouging the poor farmers and laborers.

Sounds like the obscene plutocratic system we see in this age, eh?

TO BE CONTINUED

Outliers, 8– Profile of the Ultimate Outlier, 2

Even if someone [meaning himself] were to rise from the dead, still they would not believe. –

Jesus/Yeshua, in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in the afterlife. – ca 32 CE

There is no God but Allah, and I am the Prophet of Allah.

Muhammad to the Meccans in 610 CE.

The Buddha is not to be worshipped, nor is he himself the way; the Buddha is but the one who shows the way.

Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) to the Sanghya (the order of monks who followed him), ca. 500 BCE

Last time, we concluded that only three persons in human history qualify for the designation “Ultimate Outlier” or “Super-Outlier”: in chronological order, they are Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama – 563-483 BCE), Yeshua ben-Yosef of Nazareth in Israel (Jesus – 4 BCE-33 CE), and Muhammad of Mecca (570 CE – 632 CE). There have been almost innumerable other prominent outliers in human history down through the last five recorded millennia, but previously we rather conclusively demonstrated that none of them approach the caliber of the three named above.

Furthermore, these three are all well-established, documentable historical persons, not vague legendary individuals of whose real lives we know very little or next to nothing. As we found previously, the legacies of these three are so gigantic and durable that they bear no comparison with any other famous personage in any field of achievement we could name. They surpass any temporal empire based on conquest and national ambition, as well as any other great achievements in any category of historical renown.

When considering the issue “Who is the greatest person who has ever lived?” Western materialists are inevitably prone to reduce it to some sort of quantifiable criteria. As tempting as this may be, it simply will not do for these three. What sort of quantifiers could be used? Numbers of followers over time and in the present? A mugs game at best. How about numbers of ethnicities or nations whose populace by-and-large today name each of them as their religious icon or Messiah? Once more, there are so many variables as to render such a comparison mute. Using such crude indices will render no meaningful result.

When answering the burning question, “Who is the greatest of all?” Mohammed Ali (Cassius Clay), the world heavyweight boxing legend, brazenly and unabashedly replied, “I AM THE GREATEST!” Similarly, the adherents of one or the other of the three great faiths named above would doubtless nominate their own founder to the title.

No human, living or dead, is capable of objectively deciding who is THE Ultimate Outlier in human history. I will not pretend to be objective either. For any regular reader of this blog, you will already know that I am an affirmed Christian, so my answer is obvious. Yeshua ben-Yosef/Jesus, son of Joseph, of Nazareth IS THAT ONE.

That does not mean that I cannot admire the other nominees, at least to some degree. For example, Buddha’s teachings are among the most sublime on record, and those who practice them consistently may well succeed in living harmonious lives and doing far less harm to others, their world, and themselves than those who do not. “Good” Buddhists are among the least offensive and aggressive people on Earth.

Muhammad faced and overcame great adversity. He was ready to die for his mission and message and was a great teacher, inspirer of men, organizer, recruiter, and unifier of previously hostile tribes. But the harshness of parts of his message, once he had gained power in Yatrib (Medina), and the thrust of his revelations underwent a profound change. Its application by both himself and subsequent Caliphs towards those who did (and do) not voluntarily accept it has led to enormous injustice against those named “infidels” for their refusal, including wholesale massacres and mass forced conversions. The justification for this kind of “evangelism” counterbalances subsequent attempts to create more equitable conditions. Too often these have failed and continue to fail in the face of stubborn insistence on holding fast to Medieval cruelties and inequalities in the name of “preserving the faith”. For example, by and large in Islamic societies, women are still kept in abject suppression to men at every stage of their lives.

Neither can the reprehensible behavior of people claiming to be sincere followers and adherents of Jesus be excused, either in the past or in the present. Horrors committed on millions in the name of Jesus and “Christian civilization” are an inexcusable blot on the legacy of the Lord of lords and Prince of Peace. Those who condoned and continue to condone such blasphemies will have much to answer for standing before the Judgment Seat of the One they profess to serve. They also have much to answer for right now in the court of human esteem and justice itself.

Diametrically opposite to the above kind of behaviors, and like Buddha, Jesus taught and exampled peace, respect for all regardless of any sort of categorization extant in the prevalent society, forgiveness, and open acceptance of all, male and female, slave and free, regardless of race (there is only the human race, not several) and ethnicities. For him, all can come to him as equal inheritors of God’s offer of a new Kingdom here on earth and in “the age to come”. No evidence can be advanced from any legitimate historically vetted source to show that Jesus ever preached taking power by force, overthrowing established powers and societies by subversive revolution, or advancing the idea of any sort of racial or cultural mastery of one people, tribe, or nation over others. On the country, when on trial for his life before the Roman Superpower’s governor in his homeland of Israel, Jesus told Pontius Pilatus, “My Kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my followers would fight for me, and I could ask my Father [he claimed God as his Father] for ten legions of angels [60 000 angels!] and He would send them.”

Instead, he declared that he had come to bring an end to the dominion of sin on Earth, and that he would do this by voluntarily sacrificing his own life as the price to bring reconciliation between forlorn and lost humanity and our broken-hearted Creator. In turn, that would open the road to mutual reconciliation among the warring peoples of earth, among individuals, and even with the wider creation itself.

Instead of launching a violent revolutionary crusade to overthrow the military Superpowers of the world who crush and oppress the suffering masses, he would send a bunch of ordinary people to teach and live by example God’s message that the way out of the same-old millennial pattern of ambitious, unscrupulous, and downright wicked people taking over and ruling using a lot of helping soldiers and bureaucrats and accomplices who benefit from the system was to turn the value system and heart commitment upside down.

“You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, but I tell you love your enemies, forgive those who persecute you, do good to those who hate you, and you will be children of your heavenly Father.” Jesus said that real change could only happen when heart-and-soul inner change took place and enough people started living by a whole other set of criteria.

The usual response to this very hard message is that it is all very nice in theory, but can never work in practice in the dog-eat-dog, only-the-fittest-survive universe we have seen extant since human history has been recorded.

Ending war, mutual hatred, and group-to-group animosity and fear has long been recognized as the great quest for bringing peace on earth and true goodwill to all humans. All of us know that this must happen or we are doomed – and perhaps life on Earth itself is doomed if we fail.

But, despite all the understanding of the need for such a great utopian breakthrough, we continue to see that “the beat goes on” as it ever has. Every great Golden Age of every society and civilization has come crashing down in ruins as one kingdom has risen up against another and people beat their ploughshares into swords and their pruning-hooks into spears and shields, and once more the chariots of war rumble out.

Once more we live in a time of wars and rumors or wars. Once more we hear the trumpet blast to rally the armies for another time of slaughter. And we now also sea the seas being turned to wormwood, and the heavens becoming as brass, burning up the very ground. The very skies can now rain down fire and brimstone.

Buddha’s offer of peace is for personal extinction in nirvana. Muhammad’s offer is that everyone submit to Allah or the might of his wrath will smite all the infidels until all who are left bow to him or burn in hell forever. Jesus’ offer is, through confessing your need to God to be forgiven through the sacrifice of Jesus, to receive forgiveness for all your sins and then become an ambassador of peace and God’s love to any who will hear.

In simplified form, these are the three basic choices the three Ultimate Outliers of human history have left for us.

But there are four choices, not just three.

The fourth choice is to refuse all of them and keep hoping we humans can still find a way out of our deepening crisis for ourselves. That is the choice actually at work for a great many, if not most people in the West right now. It is also the choice at work in non-Western nations which have taken on a largely Western approach to living and dealing with socio-economic-political realities.

Making war to end war has never brought an end to war. Karma is as true now as it ever was. “If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword,” another one of those straight-to-the-heart Jesus sayings. Biblically speaking, “The wages of sin is [always] death” – and, “Those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind”.