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CHAPTER FOUR

 THERE'S NOTHING TO IT!

Seeing through Nothing leads to the Source of Everything

and There is Something that Needs to be Done about it!

Whistling in the Dark,  when  the Dark isn't There ...

One day, before time was, nothing was sitting, though there was nowhere to sit and nothing has no capacities even for that, and thinking, though there was no scope for thought, for nothing cannot think, and watching the birds fly, though there was nothing of that kind to watch, but in its mind, though there was nothing in the way of mind about, it thought that it would be good, though there was nothing to conceive or to seek around, and nothing with which to seek, that it would be appealing to fly like that.

So it made matter with its forms,  formats and functions, laws, coherence and constancies, just as a sort of mind-settling (though there was no mind) placation of desire (though desire had no place, nor being, had there been one). It did all this for no reason (for reason was still nothing), but with great effect (though there was nothing to do with causation in existence).

Having done this, it was so satisfied that it decided that this could be adapted by having life, and putting this for example, into the flying part (some nothings might have been excited by other prospects, but there is nothing in that). So it created life (though nothing is not so good at creating).

Then it formed some birds each cell a marvel  (like a city in vast, interlocking complexities, formed, forged, with simultaneities, chronologies and energy and other sub-systems), of vast arrays of cell types;  and - to cut short a story with nothing much in it - the bird appeared. It was far too  clumsy, so it kept on killing birds, till out of nothing there came every type of streamlining and finesse touch of engineering splendour (though there was no engineering, and everything so far both came from and depended on nothing) till at last, it managed to contrive a brilliant mode of instinctive, composite, composed orders and programs enabling a bird which shows no rational capacity for conceptual analysis to fly with an astuteness and a skill, into wind, against it, around it, taking off and landing, in some cases having an  apparent joy in the sheer facilities of the flying function, masterful, staggering in adroit mastery. In this, nothing could not help but smirk, for the best mathematicians and engineers marvel at these facilities as they lumber with robots.

Eventually, because nothing could not resist it (having nothing in the way of resistance), it made man, having constructed out of pure nothing, his mind so that he could with it find the results of nothing to be equally rational as himself, but just put there for discovery and notation, this being most notable. Nothing also took heart (though it had nothing in the way of a heart, but this is all an exercise in nullity), and made man a spirit with which to imagine and create and negate and affirm and understand and soar in thought and vision just as the bird soared in space, which nothing had made as an afterthought, for it needed something like that for things to show that they were not nothing, though there was nothing to that either.

When man was made, coming from nothing, he thought he was quite something, so that this illusion being present, he tried to compete with nothing, which by this time was quite an accomplished performer, though nothing of that kind had been able to come, since from nothing as all there is, nothing as all there is is everything you can ever say about it or find in it.

With such a heritage, there was no stopping man and he insulted nothing by his something-that-really-matters ideas, and falling foul of his source, had nothing place an embargo on his felicity, which was not the original idea at all, although nothing had never been anything approaching clear on the point, since there was no point, a disappointment which nothing had found intolerable at the outset.

Nothing then decided man needed a redeemer through whom to purge his waywardness, since otherwise a complete impasse with nothing could prove disruptive for both, and then where would the confused pedants be ?

Hence he grabbed one from the same source as for everything else, which wasn't there, since nothing has nothing to offer,  like a hostess without food and table and home wishing, without a mind, to hold a party.

Then he decided that it would be good to indoctrinate the children of men with the whole point that nothing is the basis of all things, though it did allow for some to say that some things were just there, for no reason at all. It wanted worship. It was not for nothing that it had done all these things. So it disabled schools which taught otherwise because, being nothing, it was so very tolerant, and did not simply kill those in them: a point it often  stressed in helping nothing-piety, which it also promulgated at the same time. After all, when you can get all this out of nothing, it is felt, you might as well go the whole hog, and roast the pig and enjoy the meat.

When everything was thus based firmly on the rock of nothing, and it had nitwitted  all the noodles with this colossal deceit, for how CAN you worship nothing and its spawn, when it is all there is, so making of yourself an illusion! Still, people do the strangest things, and now democracy has become in many places in this world, a thing of totalitarian dictatorship over the souls of the children of men, and their young in the universities, so that having so firm a morality, based on nothing, they do anything, which some say is quite pleasant, since it gives outlet for nothing less than passion, and enables killing and spoiling of the atmosphere, physically, socially and politically, till the cauldron of man's mind and powers becomes an inferno. It might be pointed out that nothing could then be done about it, but since nothing had been so great, it was felt something would happen, better than nothing. At this, nothing became so miffed that there was a formal divorce of some of the cleverest and most able of mankind from all its ideas, but it set these at nought, and was very capable at doing that, understandable in a way.

The Poetry of Idle Blasphemy

While there are variants of the poem of blasphemy, this is its creed. It is not always put in this form, but that is because some are ashamed of nothing. Thus some like to have a non-nothing God from the first, who then lets everything go, having made some stuff, so that it builds itself up from nothing but the original stuff, and even that without programs; and they have others who have something not nothing at the start, and have this make things from nothing by having nothing but strife and wars and things surviving and getting on with things, for no particular reason readily assignable, when you look at it in the macro-version, as Stephen Gould of Harvard so passionately declared^*1. But not surviving becomes nothing less than the new nothing from which all the things have to come. It is so very creative with the rest.

Cruelties, massacres, horrors, self-centred maelstrom all come from this sort of something that was not nothing, some type of being, who is invented to ally itself with this nothing, even though there is nothing of the sort, and in company, this devilish monstrosity and nothing have made such a mess of things, that we have hi-tech immorality and advanced brutishness so wonderful that it is nothing less than devilry, leaving the brutes far behind.

What they call this strange type of being seems in some cases to be "God" hence making the acme of blasphemy, with the nadir of irrationality, so that unreason and irrationality can cavort together, nothing and horror a company, which some for some reason, though it is nothing too, want to relate such marvels of nullity and negativity in some way to the God and Father of Jesus Christ, who died to bring peace with the actual God who of course was always there despite these philosophic nostrums which seem to amuse or interest some people, thus showing very effective understanding, action and love. Conception and reality have nothing in common. It is a mix as good as that of good and evil, nothing and something, morality and immorality, and given that unreason is the method, this is merely part of the plan.

Walking in the Light, when the Light is There

So it goes. Actually, in the beginning there was eternally (since from nothing as all, there is no point at all in anything ever, or time for that matter), the God who can do all that is required for every level, and did. That is why the levels are there. When He composed man, man  did indeed get  carried away with himself and suffered what was to be expected in divorce in spirit from the source of life: in spirit ? yes and in mind also.

The race did indeed fall and fail and find that easy come (from man's point of view, but not in terms of the colossus of work that had to be done from cell to organ to mind to spirit, to systems within and without, to reason's thrust and man's conceptual anointing so that he could read the reasons in creation, with the mind of creation and tally the two up), is by no means easy go. The going has not been easy, and it is not the case that there is nothing to it. Sin is something, disalliance with the God who created, misalliance with anything else in His place, which has nothing to do with reality, and its causal products are numerous. They range from straight abuse, unintentional sometimes,  as of skin in the sun, leading to cancer, to deliberate carelessness with the same result, to ignorant pollution of the atmosphere and contempt for the earth's many systems, radioactive fouling up of the atmosphere, a thing that can spread as man continually is making new reactors, and cunning extravaganzas of death to the enemy, when the enemy has to be thought out from time to time so that there can be one, and maintained so that peace is never near while devastation if not far off.

God did indeed send the Redeemer, His precise exposition, His eternal word made into a man so that He as man could both show the way and be it, destroying judgment by taking it personally, with a passionate nobility which is as real as His magnificent creativity.

Just as eternity was in the beginning, that is there was never any beginning except for what is not eternal, such as we are, so eternity continues, time being a circumscribing creation with its laws like everything else, imposed from above. The Redeemer has certainly offered eternal life from this point onwards, far better than being something and worshipping various things he has made, such as one's own race or progress or any other wholly incapable thing.

He has offered eternal life freely, since nothing ever really invented itself, and only creativity creates, and as to that, at its own level, which for man does not include eternity, he being a temporal thing in time. No work could attain to it from this side of things, let only when it is so polluted in mind, body and spirit. Nothing that could be invented at that, would ever have from such a source as man, the purity of heaven in order to inherit by sheer worth. God grants eternal life accordingly ONLY as a gift (Romans 6:23), and as in Romans 1-5,  ONLY as a free gift (Romans 3:23ff., Ephesians 2), since being unmeritable, and sin having an unmeetable demand on life, to destroy it, that is the only realistic way.

God has also offered wrath, the deep dwelling of judgment over what with nothing in the way of a reason sustainable, insists that it WILL not take mercy, and would rather die than be liable to anyone for anything, despite having been born in the first place. Some insist that things are so bad that only a bad god could have made them, conveniently ignoring sin from first to last, and the whole concept of consequence and cause, and using this in every other part of thought in order to be rational or valid. IF they are so bad, then not so bad is the way out of them; and IF you have pneumonia, there is little point in being so upset at the infernal cheek of the infection, that you omit its cure; and IF the cure is free, not only is its refusal irrational, if you want life and not simply to contribute to more disease by your self-important pathology, but it is mortal (John 3:36).

In fact, there is nothing like the zeal and ardour of God, not only in little things, like atoms and cells and the mind of man, but in vast things, like salvation and redemption and sacrifice and kindness and the love of mercy. Instead of the morbid listlessness of a Zits era, or the enslaving persecutions of abrasively armed religionists, or the incandescent zest for militancy against the minds of the young, as in South Australian educational fields in creation, for example, and in other places with other passions, there is a passion for lovingkindness, for truth, for what has made man more than devil, beauty more than passing and goodness exceedingly lovable. It is the timidity of acquiescence no less than the exuberance of fantasy which is undoing man, as he finds no rest for his restlessness outside God, and largely refuses God, since He is so limiting for the appetite  to  be whatever one feels like, without limit, and to do what one wants,  without direction or correction.

Morbidity where passion dwells, however, makes of wonder a wickedness, of provisions a pollutant and of eternal life, a distant scene.

NOTE

*1

Gould, in his Wonderful Life, p. 239, notes the following:

We do not know for sure that the Burgess decimation was a lottery.
But we have no evidence that the winners enjoyed adaptive superiority,
or that a contemporary handicapper could have designed the survivors.
All that we have learned from the finest and most detailed monographs
in twentieth-century paleontology portrays the Burgess losers
as adequately specialized and eminently capable.

As to the 'decimation', in the same volume Gould notes that what he deems some 90% of the original designs, related to the Cambrian era conceived for the Burgess deposits in Canada, which he investigated, died out (cf. p.227). We are not witnesses, he claims, of expanding creative designs, but declining designs of major character, and this to the point of some 90% loss from  an earlier period. He found it thus strange that we are endeavouring by gradualism to account for advance in design, when it is loss that is found.

Much ado about nothing is the way with naturalism. You cannot get out of what is made what is capable of making itself, except in pro-creation and parallels, which are built in provisions. If you could, it would be great to see...

What we do see is  the breadth of that uncontradicted Second Law of Thermodynamics, this being as much as an exercise in the obvious as in scientific discipline. It is always in the end, the same. What is not there at the level of rational thought and logical capacity for logical results, is not there, invested in creation, except at its last membership. Even this, introducing to you mankind, is not good at making life, having failed so far even with MIND at an advanced level to do so. If your drive never works in golf, an idea might be to change it. The LOGOS is original, both in eternity and in capacity, and it is He who visited His creation with remedy, which being likewise not found in itself, is a still further introduction to reality, so that absorption with nothing has to be left behind, like a morning mist. Some people may pride themselves that they can take anything; but unless you take this, you are taken up with what has nothing at all to do with the actualities of life.

See The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy

which shows THE NECESSITY OF THE LOCATION OF THE DIVINE REMEDY FOR MAN.