God Has No Use For Us
I wrote a little poem today,
my friend says “what’s it play?”
Just wind it up, I say,
and watch it dance away.
Wide Balances
Strict is good, but not out of balance. A parent can only be as strict as he is affectionate. In fact, the stricter he is the more the affection has meaning; the more affectionate he is the more the strictness has meaning. By “meaning”, I mean the child understands the thing for what it is: he understands strictness as a reflection of the importance of the underlying law and not as personal coldness. And he understands affection as flowing from a person who values some things and rejects other things, but embraces him — no cheap affection, in other words.
Children are praised far too little, get far too little affection (even in our affirmation-obsessed culture), and at the same time move in a desultory world of low standards. All together.
- In the wider culture, we are losing the ability to discipline children and the ability to love them.
Temptation and Death
The Father allows temptation into the Edenic bubble. The purpose of temptation is to allow the son to choose the father. The purpose of the Prohibition is to let the son choose the Father. The purpose of Absence is to let the son choose the Father. Choice is all; there is no friendship when the two have not yet chosen each other.
If there is no choice there is no person. It is not possible to create a person and not endow him with choice. ”Person” and “chooser” are nearly tautologous.
The fallen substitute for choice is manipulation. When all you have known is manipulation — when you have never been loved — choice feels false to you, or perhaps cold, in contrast to the too-warm webs of emotional blackmail which read, after a lifetime, as normal.
There is no choice without distance. There must be a vacuam, with the real possibility of filling it with multiple results. If it is not possible to imagine and then create a result other than the friendship with the father, then there is no choice.
Distance, in the context of persons, means absence. So there is no personhood and no friendship without traversed distance.
So not all the absence of God is a result of the Fall. Some is, but He withdrew a distance from us as soon as He made us. Existence as we expereince it is an ambiguous mixture of pre-lapsarian distance and post-lapsarian distance. The one we should embrace as the freedom of creation, the other we should hate as alienation. But one of the many tragedies of our lives is these two distances are tangled.
The confused tangle of distance as gift and distance as bitter exile is used by the devil to throw a pall of resentment over the human mind toward God in all His distance, so that the soul tends to hate God for the very core of His goodness. Hating God because of His goodness is the uniquely Satanic sentiment in our culture.
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You cannot have the gifts and reject the Giver — not because the Giver won’t let you, but because you CANNOT. The gifts won’t function forever in the absence of the Giver. But the Gift must LOOK like you can have it and reject the Giver, or the choice is not free.
Satan is commonly, in the folk imagination, depicted as a spinner of fantasies. But this is a vulgarization. No, what Eve sees, as he points the tree of knowledge out to her, is really there.
The devil’s nuclear weapon is emphasis and proportion. He seldom makes stuff up; he actually just emphasizes his own facts. He is a spin-meister, in the sense of the modern political guru.
Temptation is the ability to see facts differently than the Father sees them. To see different is to be tempted; to not hide your eyes is to eventually sin and die. Facts are formally false when they are used to draw false conclusions or paint distorted pictures. They are still facts, but they are not true.
Death
“Their eyes were opened…”
If you choose to see differently than the Father, your eyes sclerose and then it is over. Death is simply a continuation of the process of temptation.
Of course this all flies in the face of the modern dogma that all potentialities are good and to be expressed, which actually is a continuation of what Arthur Lovejoy called the Principle of Plenitude.
Notice that no-one actually ever believes this nonsense about anyone else, they just believe it about themselves. I have a deep dissatisfaction within me that my potential as a human being is wasted, and so I must follow my heart and run off with my secretary. But no-one ever responds to that argument with anything other than a snort and a slap when they are the victim. Our instincts are true; self-actualization is an ethical justification for exactly nothing. We are willing to apply the truth, we just don’t want to live by the truth.
Innocence
Look at Adam and Eve in the garden, in the infancy of our race. Note that even though they were without sin, they could not see the harvest in the seed.
Innocence is ripe for deception precisely because it does not look to consequences. It does not look to consequences because it has not experienced any bad consequences, and so cannot imagine disaster.
Innocence is not wisdom, it is simply innocence. You must pass from innocence to become wise, but this is not to imply you must sin in order to be wise. One of the demonic parodies of spiritual truth is the commonplace that experience makes you wise. It does not.
Deception is not itself sin. Deception is possible for the innocent, and probable for the corrupt, but for different reasons.
Work (outline)
Two questions are often confused.
1. Why do we work? Because it is good — it was good before the Fall.
2. Why do we work in the world? Because we fell, we work to eat, and to have something to share.
Do Hard Things
The Rebelution: A Lesson From The Vikings: Do Hard Things™
“Do Hard Things.” I love it. This is my new motto for this week. And this, from “teenagers”? I’m embarassed for how I spent my teens. Outstanding work, gentlemen!
Jacques Ellul on the Frankenstein Phenomenon
Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.
Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. In the end, technique has only one principle, efficient ordering.
– Probably from The Technological Society
go here if you need an intro to Ellul… there is amazingly little about him on the web. His books also are strangely valued: his best is “The Ethics of Freedom”, which nobody seems to notice. It would be among the 10 books I’d want on a desert island.
